Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Organization of Machine Guns and Their Tactical Uses With Notes on Training The data collected and reproduced in this little book will be of value to all those interested in the development of machine guns. That they will play a vastly more important part in the wars of the future than they have done in the past is generally admitted, but the lines in which the development will take place and the principles of their tactical employment, have yet to be confirmed by the experience of war. The sustained rattle of a machine gun has an immense moral effect in proportion to the actual damage which it inflicts, and to make full use of this moral power it is desirable that it should come as a surprise when the success or failure of the combat hangs in the balance. Hence both in attack and defence it will probably be wise to reserve a proportion of the machine guns available, for use at close and decisive ranges where the terrain favours their being brought into action as a surprise. A point which the writer has touched on and upon which I should like to lay stress, is the fact that when massed in batteries they to some extent lose their moral effect. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.