A TERRIBLE RIFLE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9130, 11 August 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

A TERRIBLE RIFLE.

According to all accounts (says the Paris correspondent of the Daily Telegraph), the new " Lebel Rifle" is a wondrous weapon, and is destined to do terrible things in the hands of French soldiers. The members of the Academy of Medicine, wishing to diagnose the physical consequences of wounds inflicted by the bullets of the gun, recently had experiments made on twenty corpses, probably those of paupers whom nobody owned, or those of ill-fated waifs picked up at the Morgue. The bodies were placed at the ordinary firing- distances, from two hundred yards up to a mile or so. The bullets whizzed through the bones and pierced them without fracturing them, as is done by the bullets of the " Gras Rifle." The wounds, if they may be called so, which were inflicted, were small in their punctures, and consequently very dangerous and difficult to heal. Injuries inflicted at short distances were so considerable that, in the opinion of the surgeons, they would be almost incurable. At the longest range'2ooo metres—a poplar tree was hit; but the bullet, which impelled a certain quantity of air before it, did not go through the tree. At I*2oo metres the tree was pierced through and through. The discharges of the rille are unaccompanied by smoke, and the reports are comparatively feeble.