History of WWI Primer 02A*: French Berthier 1892 Documentary

when we think of France in the Great War the first rifle that comes to mind is the lapel however much like the US 1917 by the end of the conflict their primary shoulder arm would be their previous second standard [Music] hi I'm Matthias and this well this is a musketoon model 1892 and artillery Bertier at least for a little while but we'll get into that whole story after we get this guy in for a closer look in the white box with an overall length of 37 point 2 inches and weighing in at six point eight pounds this is a handy little darling and conveniently loads with the Mon liquor style and block clip however it only has a capacity of three rounds in all three of them are 8 by 50 labelled dear fans you are not suffering from deja vu you have seen the party a before long ago and honestly not our best piece of work because we've learned a lot more in the intervening years and so we are going to bring this guy back out and give it the proper history it deserves now the success story of the Bertier is inseparable from the failure of the Lebel and so i've made sure to have a lot of those right here we've already done a lovely updated episode on this the world's first smokeless powder door military repeating rifle one that sparked a global rearmament panic being revolutionary however it does not always mean being the best early adopters of new technology often find that they well they missed out in the rush to adopt the Lebel French officials had latched on to their current magazine repeater which was a hybrid of their existing Groth and the imported crow pad czech magazine system this was a fair choice at the time as the crop at czech tubular magazine was a proven military repeating system as a matter of fact let's quickly take a look at how this might work on the Lebel again we've seen this particular rifle before so I just want to talk a little bit about how weird the magazine can get so let's take a look inside I'm going up to pop this guy open and if we were working from blank let's say we're here we've got an elevator that we're going to need to depress and then ideally we would load up our eight rounds throw one on that elevator and then to feed the one from the elevator we would have to snap back and then push forward and then boom we're in business and the gun starts running like it should but I want to show you how easy it is to get out of index with this thing so let's start here for a moment and pretend we've expended our last round we've grabbed for a handful of ammo we dropped it on the ground uh-oh we've only got three rounds because I don't want this last an hour but we have less than the ideal number of rounds all right I had a habit what we're gonna do is we're gonna throw that elevator down and we're gonna throw in our first round we're gonna throw in our second round if I can get it to actually there we go we're gonna throw in our third round not remembering to leave it on that elevator so that's already a challenge we haven't put one on the elevator so then we're gonna go okay well I'm willing a little bit here so I'm a dry cycle this action in order to get one on to the elevator right that didn't do anything we must first run or ease the elevator by yanking backwards then we can dry cycle it forwards then come back and have picked up one on the elevator now we can feed it into the okay so you can see where I'm going with this this gun leaves you in a position where you may have to carry the one in the middle of a firefight and that is extremely distracting okay so it definitely gets the job done and again perfectly modern for the period but it didn't work so well on horseback which was important because France had a very strong emphasis on cavalry tactics and relied on a fast and aggressive strategy carried out by armed men on horses at the time of the LaBelle's adoption they were using a single-shot black-powder centerfire carbine which was really only slightly shorter than the infantry rifle and of course their usual swords so when the French start trying out a labelled carbine well they get into some trouble let's start with the good if you leave the magazine cut off the Lebel is just about the same as that previous Gras in terms of handling however a LaBelle cavalry carbine would be a fair bit heavier thanks to the larger all steel receiver and the steel magazine tube and spring and everything down the front of the gun all extending forward and throwing off the balance especially when loaded also we just saw the Lebel is a bit difficult to reload so there would be no great gain an overall fire rate for the cost of all that weight again just to point this out without a loading tool of some sort the fire rate of a rifleman with a magazine rifle could only be sped up over a limited time as singularly loading and firing eight rounds versus manually loading up eight rounds at once and then firing all of them is roughly the same amount of overall time which means taken and mas there is a very limited benefit to a magazine rifle without some sort of rapid loading device ordnance at the time may also have worried about chain detonation this is a concept that centerfire cartridges resting you know to primer in a tubular magazine may cause an out-of-battery detonation if jostled too hard now there is a lot of argument and debate out there on this matter but I'll point out three things here one the Marshall use of tubular magazines was still fairly new so people might worry about you know vague possibilities because they don't have the experience to see if it's really gonna happen or not to on extremely rare occasions we do see ordnance reports of these sorts of detonations so while statistically almost insignificant it did at least happen a couple of times in a handful of armies and three there is evidence the French were indeed worried about this possibility and it's written right on the eight millimeter labelled cartridge the original 1886 cartridge would quickly give way to the slightly improved ball em that I show here essentially the previous Gras black powder cartridge necked down awkwardly to eight millimeter named for its Mallik or jacket in turn named for the inventors mallow and ray this smokeless powder round sports a unique flat tipped bullet one I have been told was adopted out of the ever-so-slight worry about that chain detonation and if you're worried about that sort of thing you're probably more concerned when you put it on horseback bouncing along a bit more harshly than infantry on the March so weight balance maybe chain detonation well what else well the Lebel had just about the least cartridge feed control okay we're back to our labelled with one fake round in the chamber and let's talk about what other problems we can have so I go to kick this guy out I should have been a little more authoritative but these plastic snap caps are slowly degrading alright that's already a nice feed problem isn't it let's get out of there and pretend that he ejected cleanly now I want to feed my little yellow guy down there right when she comes up see there's a lot of waggle and the only thing really holding it in place are these two little lips back here which assumes that I'm holding the rifle but the butt saw this buttstock slightly downwards keeping everything sort of behaving but if I'm a little bit forward like muzzle down because I'm doing what I'm shooting downwards I'm in a high position in whatever if this manages to rock a little bit forwards and then I'm not necessarily vertical well she certainly comes out nice and easy and if you're bouncing around on a horse not that you should really be firing from the horse's back but you know you're trying to feed the rifle from the horse up and down up and down all directions it'd be very easy to kick out around and then we're back to that system where we have to dry cycle the gun in order to get the next cartridge at which point maybe it goes flying off into ether because I'm holding it at the wrong angle cavalry are not going to be into this they have to be moving and fighting very aggressively in smaller numbers against larger forces very often they don't want to have to think about what their rightful is doing they want to just work the bolt and keep shooting basically the crow putt check magazine has fitted on the Lebel wasn't super great for cavalry interestingly a solution for all of this was being developed and adopted in nearby Austria at the same time as the French were working on this rifle here as seen on the Austrian 1886 rifle Ferdinand Mon liquors clip system allowed not only rapid loading but an overall increase in rate of fire unlike the single loading labelled am on liquor clip can be preloaded with multiple rounds and the whole package shoved into the gun at one time with a singular and movement that means the loading time is actually sped up and not only does the rate of fire increase but the downtime between loading the gun well--that's decreased luckily at least one french engineer noticed all of this andre Virgie look paul murray bare ta born in january of 1858 in le Cerf sin he would join the army in 1876 rising to the rank of sergeant in the second Slav and lieutenant in the 44th territorial infantry information is sparse but appears Barthe moved to the reserves his civilian career progressed as a railway engineer and was combined with a love of shooting as he's listed in the organizational registers of French shooting clubs and national competition organizers and I believe he had designed some sub-caliber conversions for military small arms when a French cavalry rifle committee under general D gala face started looking for a carbine weighing well less than this and also they named a number less than 3.6 kilograms well in 1887 the potato arsenal would put forward a design by arm Monsieur birth to a his initial gun was simply a modification of the Lebel now running from a four round clip like the mon liquor this was one directional with a top and bottom it's interesting to note that this was marketed not only as a carbine but as a conversion system for the existing infantry LaBelle's despite having just been adopted really ultimately the first labelled Bertier was too heavy for cavalry use and so Patou and Bertier would head back to the drawing board returning the next year with an improved model this was actually a five shot variation which still sports the Lebel style receiver but with a distended metal projection to provide enough room for the extra cartridges and provide reliable feeding that gun fared a lot better and saw some limited trials production along side a carbine from Nicole normal the tear who fielded a shorten labelled of their own weird sort and it proved a little heavier and harder to use and another carbine that was done by some fat the end although I'm actually unsure of its configuration because it seems to have failed to impress enough to really be as well document as the others so the Bertier gun became the focus of development and in a series of abusive tests sustained fire rusts and defective cartridges the stuff were used to one problem came to light which is that magazine extension was kind of a pain since the gun was being designed to be as compact as possible and to be carried on the backs of cavalrymen well you don't really want to have any distended metal sticking out although we do see this sort of thing on period Mon liquors German carbine irradiates and the italian Carcano carbine these metal projections would be vulnerable to damage possibly irritate a writer and less importantly but still annoying they tended to beat up on the uniforms well actually see the Dutch address this in a different way from in another episode so in order to keep a compact flush magazine putto and the cavalry committee opted for a three round clip to the cavalry at the time coming from a single shot gras this was a 300% increase in magazine capacity and overall provided a higher rate of fire than the standard infantry rifle honestly as much as we might laugh at the idea of a three round magazine it doesn't seem they really felt the pinch of it until the great war but we'll see that later so with a three shot clip and reverting to a gras like full stock the cavalry now had weld something a lot like this and extremely light carbine that they could put to work easily within their existing drilling tactics and so not quite this was adopted in 1890 but before we get into all the variations let's get a look at the mechanism that will be applied to all of the bertier's with one of our good old animations [Music] first we'll load our three-round in block clip which snags on a hook at the rear of the magwell keeping it from springing back out of the top this can be manually released at any time if desired thanks to a projection in the trigger guard note the clip has now become the feed lips for the carbine this means it's not only a loading device but a functional component of the magazine both the clip catch and the C are powered by the same singular v spring the bolt is the same design as the Lebel with a separate rotating head making for easier maintenance the same cock-on open cocking piece also comes over attached directly to the firing pin returning to the magazine note the follower assembly two arms powered by two flat springs these press the cartridges upwards and fit between the lips of the unblocked lip so that as the final round feeds the clip now falls free and out of the action with our last round let's look at the trigger with this double hump rear shape giving a two-stage pull all right back to the history lesson now I know it's a little bit unusual in this show for us to have shown the animated internals before the gun itself but this guy is just one of many designs and the differences are all in the fittings not in the internal so with that common base now understood let's count the differences starting of course with that cavalry model of 1890 more properly carribean dei cavalieri medela 1890 only thirty-seven point four inches in length and weighing just 6.6 pounds this is an extremely handy cavalry gun and because of their use of the saber this gun has no provision for a bayonet it does however have a full clearing rod which we'll discuss in just a moment initially this 1890 cavalry carbine was issued to the metropolitan light infantry who would soon find them somewhat annoying thanks to the sling of positions initially under sawing at the rear and with a ring on the left side of the barrel ban this proved uncomfortable for riders and so in 1895 production shifted to a left-side sling a bar and a fixed loop on the barrel band while only affecting new production years later nearly all would be updated to this pattern production would be taken up by the Arsenal's of Shotaro and sont at the end with the majority being completed in the first two years though some thought the end would have a trickle of supply through 1905 so roughly 200,000 in total also in 1905 the cavalry model would be approved for use by military supply transportation squadrons all right that covers most of the cavalry and I say most because France still had their own special heavy cavalry all the way into the Great War these were the QCA who had previously in French history had a unique heavily armoured cavalry role but thanks to the development in small arms technology these shiny caresses were no longer very effective in warfare but tradition and institutional momentum win their own battles in peacetime two issues arise with using a standard cavalry per ta when you are a qrc a first shouldering a metal but plate on a metal breastplate is not super secure especially with the harsh recoil of a carbine shooting a full-power eight millimeter Lebel cartridge also it might ruin the Polish secondly those helmets have really thick cheek straps which make getting your head behind the site just a little bit impossible which is why the carribean dossier modele 1890 looks like this with a hard leather but plate preventing slipping and scratching and no stock comb allowing a helmeted head to find the rear sight these of course saw very limited production with only 20,000 made by shot edirol which was fine because they were exclusively issued to the Metropolitan French heavy cavalry now the next units to need a carbine wouldn't exactly be in the army instead it's time to visit the Jean Marie a sort of national militarized police adopted in 1892 the carribean de john de maria is still a model 1890 while identical to cavalry model in nearly every way it has one clear distinction in that it does have a bayonet mount this was a labelled like cruciform fitted to a unique locking lug at the end of the stock production was again done it both shatter all and santhu thean with a combined total of just over 80,000 though there was some excess production which would be immediately converted into a new pattern for the artillery and that is actually the gun I have here today that musket owned artillery model 1892 field artillery at this point was in a weird place we see nations trying a variety of solutions and France was no exception usually a carbine would turn out to be the answer but as we have seen other nations would consider swords revolvers dedicated pistols most famously Germany would start on an artillery Luger just before the war but that's a good two decades ahead of our gun today French artillery needed a light portable carbine that they could keep around but largely out of their way until needed and so in August of 1892 this Bertier configuration was adopted the musketoons artillery model 1892 so let's get a closer look all right gang we got a dandy little carbine let's start at the front we've got front sight hey we've got our bayonet lug and forward barrel band and then if I flip her over you can see we have a clearing rod not a cleaning rod there's no hole in this this was because of the unreliability of early Metallica cartridge stuck cases were fairly frequent this also doesn't have you know the super cool Mauser extractor so you could use this to knock out a spent case if you really couldn't get a hold of it now if we work our way down we'll see our sling swivel in this case a big ol ring this would have been on the cavalry 1890 right from the beginning but the cavalry didn't like it they switched over to a solid bar at the rear again the early 1890s would have had this same lower sling swivel but the cavalry didn't like it and they went to a solid bar however all the other models 18 of not all the other models of 1890 and this 1892 kept this system so we can see what a cavalry would have looked like in that regard from there we have our rear sight with it which is a combination of tangent and ladder I'm actually going to show you more of that later on the episode so hold your breath there for a second if we come on back though we see we are dealing with a one-piece stock unlike the Lebel and we have two reinforces to help out with that we also have some extension of this receiver down into this area here we have a very flat looking trigger we have I'll show you that in a second let's get to the bolt this is the labelled bolt it's just been extended and turned down and this is an early one that has not been modified because as we can see we have two serrations here these are both the positions for the cocking piece because this particular gun again set up for well really more for bad ammo than for safety half-cocked safeties perfectly normal in the Americas but in the French system it was actually more for this we fire the gun we have a bit of a dud maybe the primer didn't get hit quite right or whatever we want to restrike it without opening up the gun so we're gonna manually recon this which is why we have this finger rest here to do so though we have to overcome a very strong spring and it's a fairly long distance and if we were to get tired half of multi percent of the way there and slip our thumb we might end up with a discharge that we were not expecting that is very dangerous so by putting that half [ __ ] there off you're on your way back to full [ __ ] and you goof up well now you're in this neutral position where even if it falls it's really not enough force to strike that primer and necessarily detonate the gun obviously as you saw it's not a safety because you can fire from the half [ __ ] the full [ __ ] is all the way back here oh there and if you can imagine if I had dropped that nine-tenths of the way and it had fallen all the way at the bottom we definitely would have had a cartridge going off negligent discharge so this is a good safety only in the regards of you manually cocking this and not dropping it all the way down it does not actually protect you from firing the gun this feature would actually be abandoned as ammo got better and so you'll see only one notch on later made ones or any guns that came in and had their cocking pieces replaced would have been replaced with a one notch cocking piece now oh all that said you should probably show you the loading system which is a three-shot lead adorable and block clip right obviously my plastic dummies again unlike the Lebel and I want to be clear about this the Lebel you load one round you fire one round or you load one round your load two round you load three round I'm not even counting three around four round five round every cartridge goes in singularly and then it's fired singularly so there's not a huge difference between you know firing one shot at a time or loading the whole magazine and shooting the whole magazine in this case though we've taken the action of loading and we've tripled it we're now getting three rounds so I do one action to stick this in here and push down which is actually faster than loading a single round in labelled anyway how in that one motion I have now put three rounds into the system we have sped up our loading and firing significantly I know it doesn't seem like a lot because we're used to five ten whatever but three was still way better than the previous existing system and it kept the gun nice and light and nice and reinforced where there's nothing to get banged or beat on okay so if we want to get this out without firing it we do have a button here we can give it a little depressed push the button she'll pop right on out if we had expended all of our ammo like we saw in our animation the clip is then unsupported and at which point here let's put one dummy in there there we go I'll do a partial load so once that one that last dummy feeds you can see this guy is already ready to come out and I haven't even let gravity do its job so once she's unsupported by cartridges falls out the bottom that same bottom becomes a bit of a vulnerability in the Great War though because lots of things can get in there ultimately aside from the name and the bayonet this gun is identical to the 1890s Jean tombery so you really get an easy two for one and this little guy right here will stand in for all of the three shot carbines as May takes it out to the range [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] yeah this is probably the loudest dang gun in the entire series the 1892 we have here was also a perfect gun to use for demonstration because it would be the most common pre-war French carbine by a country mile production was undertaken by federal and the sont at the end surprise surprise if we count all the 92 s made up until 1918 we get somewhere in the ballpark of seven hundred thirty thousand total guns dwarfing all other models I've listed so far this is because the 1892 became a general-purpose weapon eventually being issued to engineers drivers couriers and with the emergence of the machine gun well there was even more demand for this carbine also at this point I'm sure some of you are confused because this is named the musket own 1892 and I keep saying carbine well that's another point where tradition wins out again going back to the previous gras and this is the cavalry carbine with a twenty seven point six inch barrel and this is the artillery musketoon with a twenty point one inch barrel now looking at these you would think that a musketoon is always going to be shorter than a carbine but really in French Naumann klaich err of the time both were just shortened rifles and the difference is entirely in the habitual use of language in the French military again of that time a carabiner was for a soldier on horseback and a musket on went with a soldier on foot alright so the French have a card beam well multiple carbines and a musket um well now what well as with most early smokeless guns we're going to see various updates and one of the most unique will be undertaken with the introduction of a new cartridge in 1898 that would be ball a d some say it was named for its inventor captained SLO but evidence says that it was the fourth of five experimental cartridges and was alphabetized accordingly designed for aerodynamics this was an early Spitzer bullet with a boat tail rear and was milled from solid brass while majority brass alloy the ball D was much faster in flatter shooting and thus demanded a change in rifle sights now we've seen the rear sight changed out for a new ammunition before but the French were still sitting on a lot of ball em so they weren't eager to make their guns incompatible with their massive reserve of ammunition instead they'd work up a new rear sight that could shoot either cartridge correctly if you know what you're doing alright I promised you a closer look at this guy and we are here now so we have a tangent stack which means I can adjust this little leaf and then set her down and look we're sitting up a little prouder this gives us some range markings on up until I believe let me see what it says on this guy ooh a thousand meters of tangent possibilities and then if I flip her all the way over there you want to do this on this particular carbine but I can so I can show the camera we've got some markings these are our long-range markings as ladder so if I wanted to set this to something ludicrous high like I don't know 1800 meters then as the shooter you would leave it in the 90 degree position look at it this way and that be your volley fire now this particular setup works for both cartridges because these two tangent ladder well tangent stacks these stair steps there are actually slightly different heights it's very hard to see on camera but you can see it more easily in that this thing does indeed rest level so you can see our our actual ladder rests right up on this thing it's not canted in any way and yet if we look at the underside of our leaf I've got a solid bar here and a notch here and that notch is the difference in height between these two stair steps and there's a reason for that because currently this is set for using the lower stair steps to the right-hand side and therefore it is set for the faster-moving flatter shooting spitzer cartridge if i were to be issued the earlier you know wobba cartridge the one that has a little bit more arc to it needs these higher stair steps well then what I could do is I could flip this guy over and I could take a screwdriver and remove that screw pull this off flip it 180 degrees put it back on screw that back in and now would sit a little prouder on all my tangent settings and I would be correct for that earlier cartridge which is a great honestly fantastic way of making sure that you have some reverse compatibility while also being able to adopt a new cartridge that's the first I've seen of it in terms of military service now just for clarification I want to point out that pure baldie would not be the official cartridge for the Great War instead in 1912 we'll see another modification baldie am meaning a mirage modified modified priming baldie had introduced a ring around the primer to help further prevent chain detonation with that new pointy bullet well that wasn't perfectly executed and especially with machine gun loads some primers were failing during tiring so the ring was pushed out wider reinforcing the primer and providing the same safe space for the bullet that change did not however require modifying the sights in the meaningful way there were actually some other pre-war modifications of these guns but they came about because of the introduction of full-sized rifle variants of the Bertier and beyond that we will have to talk about the mid war upgrade to the entire Bertier family however those stories will have to wait until next episode but that doesn't mean that I can't tell you about two little updates that happened after war were declared and because of the war the Bertier would have a growing influence but we're only here for the three shot carbines right at this particular moment first off in July of 1915 orders would go out to convert any existing cavalry carbines into the artillery pattern that means fitting them with a bayonet log this makes original 1890s fairly rare though I'm unsure how many were actually converted under these orders the second change revolved around the kyo CA who were still an active cavalry force at the start of World War one now I know what you're thinking heavy Napoleonic armor and horses wouldn't be the best idea in the sort of machine-gun Laden Great War and you would be absolutely right but it took the French a little bit to realize that initially they were fielded as was though they did get to put a cloth cover over those shiny crosses so that they weren't you know like a mere this proved out to be a bad idea curiously it seems the horses fell out of favor faster than the armor honestly this is probably because dismounted fighting was taking up more and more of their time as the fighting lands became more static so the first order to go out was just like the 1890 cavalry they would need a bayonet however instead of converting the few existing PRCA carbines these were just reissued to units that did not need a ban at all and were kind of unlikely needed a gun you know like drivers and the curiosity a would get the 1892 artillery carbines like pictured here which is all well and good until you have to put back on that Quiroz so they started to add the buttpad from the 1890 CA model to the 1892 s and at some point someone realized while they were at all this that they still had those helmets and they would need to fix the stocks which is when things finally came full circle and they realized we should have just put the bayonet lugs on the original curiosity carbines so they set him on doing that briefly because right after the cure RCA were kicked off their horses at which point they were fancy infantry and could just field a normal 1892 carbine we no modifications needed which is why most of the 1890 TRCA carbines would eventually be made into 1892 pattern artillery carbines making them the rarest of the Bertier variants and probably the dizziest okay I think we can rest here for a moment now and take some time to get Mays opinion on well the model 1892 specifically but overall the three-shot burkay as a concept alright once more I made room for May and we don't need a ton of room for this little guy so not really in that over thank you now the Bertier is it's an interesting rifle it is among some of the earlier designs that was still kicking around for World War one because if you think about it 1890 really because this is the T 92 version but 1890 that's when this thing was settled on so our very new clip technology at that time first is smokeless powder cartridges you know what I mean mm-hmm right behind the Lebel so this was the all tool of essentially right so this thing has a lot more in common with those crow Patrick era guns okay or like the Mon liquor straight pulls with the wedge lockers that we saw like the 1886 through the 1890 so it's much more in line with those than even just a few years later where we start to see you know malt liquor 1885 and especially as a century starts to turn we see things like Mon like our own hours and then we really see like the Mauser model 98 and that tends to be what people think is the bolt-action rifle okay so as much as we want to think of this as a World War one gun because it was a mainline World War one rifle carbine in this case it dates back much further than we think is one of those cases where somebody held on to one longer than the other people held on to it so in that mindset what do you feel when you pick this up what are the ergonomics like yeah I mean it does feel kind of dated but um let's work this from the ground up I really want to give this just a review from there so obviously very short and surprisingly it feels like it should be just by looking at it heavier than what it is but it's actually pretty light know the birch it looks dense and then your hand you realize how much of it is hollow I think it's just because of the bulkiness right here in the center with the receiver it just it feels like there should be a lot more weight here and there really just isn't which I mean not too bad at least organ amma CLE from the start how's that balance where's the weight at you know so that's what's interesting and i guess it does seem like it's kind of obvious it does have more weight to the rear so it almost feels like you want to put your hand yeah right there where the no yeah the magazine injection port down there is like it feels like that's the perfect spot for it but of course you're not gonna put your hand there but you know more weight to the rear not too bad it's still you can put it up against your shoulder and it hold it in tight that's not bad having it right over the magazine actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it from the French perspective where they were coming from the lapel and they had a shifting balance point depending on how loaded or unloaded that magazine tube was so if you have the balance point directly in line with the cartridges loaded or unloaded that carbine has exactly the same balance which that I'm okay with the lapel made that a little bit difficult as time went on the range but no yeah at least the balance on this one you really don't feel the change as you're losing rounds of course I only got three but we're gonna get more into that in just a moment okay yeah okay so obviously lighter carbine also no semi pistol grip stray tricky unfortunately but you know that's there's only so much you can do with that I suppose um getting more into the action turned down bolt here which the length on it I kind of like it's just too bad that it didn't have something like a dogleg or something to it because it deposits your hands so low here that I feel like if the trigger were right here just a little further forward or if the if the actual bolt handle swept back a little bit it deposits you closer to the trigger which would be really nice yeah um they did actually mill a little bit of metal out here too and the bolt handle I did notice that which was I thought pretty good and you still unfortunately you kind of just pinched your finger and you do kinda have to wet your hand in there so and they did some help there but just not enough so I probably maybe do a little bit of the wood take a little bit the wood out there unfortunately you spend a lot more time riding with something like this or in the artillery case like this one you're gonna spend a lot more time sort of humping it around somewhere what you mean for writing I can see how this would be a good thing like it's it's it's wet down here really right up against the guns so you're really not gonna snag it very easy it'd be pretty hard to accidentally get something up under there but I will say with that lengthen that 90 degree angle if you actually did get something under there by accident that's gonna grab oh yeah it's gonna real good yeah and these don't have any sort of yeah well but the Safety's always locked the breech mm-hm and so these don't have any of that so there's no even that half-cocked we're talking about yeah it's not a safety I mean it's a safety a sense of when you go to full [ __ ] you and you drop it it's not gonna set off around by accident but you can still pull the trigger like you saw but the interesting thing is other countries a lot of times especially with you know moving with the rifles so safeties lock the action shut so that you don't bonk it open when you're riding or walking in this case you don't have that protection instead they've kept it low to the stock and put it down real long so it's really unlikely to get tipped at all so like the lack of a safety kind of makes me feel get back to that old-school kind of feeling about the older rifles where it's like they didn't really need the safety for this one and I kind of get it but it kind of makes me think on some of the older one shot rifles where it's like it's not 100% necessary yeah but even those tended to have some sort of walkout mechanism that's true which would provide the combination of being able to carry one in the chamber with a safety and again like I said keep you from open the bolt the French doctrine is entirely entirely different the French doctrine was you know you might keep the magazine loaded but you did not I keep around the chamber and in some ways it's tend to be how we think of things now it's actually almost an advanced concept because most people who do have modern concealed carry or something like that they keep alive around the chamber and they don't like manual safeties instead they prefer you know see your blocks in sort of mechanical safeties but ultimately if they go and pull on that trigger it's going to go boom and they want that they want no real thought about it mm-hmm you can kind of respect that now in hindsight however every other nation on the planet with a manual safety except for France so it's it makes the birthday truly unique along with the Lebel yeah other than that feature wise we're just looking at basically a clearing rod tucked off to the side I kind of like that they they took some of the wood out here and just stuck it off to the side it's not in my way in any way not too bad and the only thing I really notice we don't really get into the sling swivels but dang these rattling this one in particular is just rattling so much on range with the shots and everything that it really distracted the heck out of it's not stealth features no definitely not um I think that pretty much covers everything for the ergonomics though not too oh wait one last feature before I forget we've got an extra feature here at the bottom that allows me to so loading in block clip out is an entirely different thing so for those of you who haven't seen my liquor episodes you've loaded the entire clip at once and then you'd be able to cycle through your rounds from there if you want to release it early she has a button down there works pretty clear so which is which is an advantage the in block system is very unusual to me do you how do you feel about these so unfortunately I'm not super keen on them because for me it kind of needs to be very very I think the metal needs to be very strong like they need to be very resilient and I don't know about you man but every time we get one of these it just feels like they're so flimsy they're so susceptible to damage and then the problem is is that they stay in the guns and they're gonna be expunged out the bottom of this one in particular spilled expel thank you keep saying sponge today what is going on oh my gosh you're watching too much of the legal stuff going on probably no yeah that one pops out the bottom I just feel like it's just too susceptible to damage for it to be that reliable of a system you know the funny thing about it is I actually really love the unblocked system yes I find it to be faster loading the stripper clips as long as is really incredibly fast for loading y'all saw a poorly designed n block is a pain to load for a worn out one and I think that's what we're suffering from is a prejudice of age because these things have been around for a hundred years plus and we're using them over and over and over again but the way they were designed to be used it was to be completely disposable that's fair and this one in particular we did have some issues on range like it seemed to want to be loaded one certain way in one gun versus a lithium because it's probably gotten worn out right listen maybe you are correct maybe I have too much prejudice on that and I'm thinking too much on that and it's just worn and that's just the only issue this singular three shot clip is probably fired maybe a hundred rounds maybe more we don't know I mean we certainly put a few through it but mechanically it was designed to fire three sure in the end maybe gather a few reload him a couple times but yeah these were consumable well they're essentially meant to drop at the bottom and then you weren't really supposed to pick them up and reload oh no I mean unless you're doing some sort of training you know what I mean you might but then I don't think those would be reassured for fighting so the the problem is we have is particular prejudice in a modern era because we tend to think of disposable Max and I even hear people talking about guns into the 70s and 80s and being surprised that the doctrine at the time you know in very modern era was you would empty rifle pop mag put empty mag in your pouch pull new mag and load like this is British standard you know way into the modern era certain because detachable box magazines are expensive and difficult to make in a very large number and at some level you have to transport them back and forth and it's easier to transport raw ammo in those cases and so there's all sorts of logistics in terms of wind mags get loaded how mags get shipped right yeah when we're dealing with World War one technology in which you know all of that sort of that steel forming that would be required for disposable magazine think of the guns we've dealt with almost none of them have disposable magazines or detachable magazines at all when they do if you do it's like the VAR it has this very religion heavy magazine the clip the N ba clip gives you every single benefit of the modern detachable disposable magazine the kind where you just like you're in the middle of a firefight you don't care where it lands you don't have to worry about it afterwards and the logistics of it are you can do that over and over and over again and never exhaust your raw materials that's all here so this is so low on material consumption and time consumption that you can Canada you can discard millions of these in the middle of a fight and it's never going to really matter because it's faster to go ahead and load them and strip them out than it is to reload the little things so they're brilliant in that regard in terms of enabling a soldier to work a antique rifle like a modern one stripper clips are the same way you can just toss them aside that's true you are supposed to the only problem stripper clips for me personally is they are a bit more fiddly they can be and as much as I practice with one or the other and people get fast for stripper clips there's no argument there I mean I can't argue that that wasn't rapid no but if you get a stripper clip that has more tension or less tension or whatever else they bind sometimes there's some stripper clips that are friendly to you and some that aren't you have your favorites whatever these just go into the action and if they're a little tighter a little loose that doesn't matter because you're ramming the bolt forward or back the only issue comes as if they're damaged it just won't go into the action that's the issue so the these become the feed lips of the system but we suffer the same problem with modern magazines this is true unless it's very specifically a gun with its own integral feed so like a Tokarev pistol so so there are other examples of that and maybe you could design this to do the same thing but I think the ultimate problems with the moniker system really come down to its exposure to fouling which we see solved on the Coverity 805 and we see it solved again on the m1 garand later on so I think n blocks are to me their superior stripper clips in some ways and then obviously detachable magazine is superior to that but the cost is very high so I don't know I like these they're fast they're easy but you are correct they are fiddly is crap when they get to be a hundred years old I think my issue is is that I've just had so many fiddly ones in the past I mean we even had the RSC where it preferred one clip over the other it absolutely did it fed perfectly with one and just painted another I agree and I think but that again is well as times where we might need to sort of understand the number of years that have gone into it I agree do you agree I will accept your assessment so how do you feel about that well you know and let's hold on to the number of rounds for a second what's it like firing this gun alright so first things first I go to load my in block clip goes in just fine I bolt forward and I don't know about you but something about this action just feels it feels our cake if offense it did they like everything worked fine it's just it feels kind of clunky somehow and dated I just can't explain it but anyway um planning up my sights and it kind of feels like I'm looking at Buckhorn size it's interesting there's like a there's like a swoop and then it dips into a nice solid you not shine though that I line in with my front sight which is fine I'm used to those for the Buckhorn's but it's not quite a book or so it's like a little tiny board well it's we're somewhere between a military site in the Buckhorn and I didn't find it hard to read necessarily like I didn't have I didn't question where to line up I mean it just was different I guess than what I was expecting I could see it confusing novice though if they're not used to it yes sure yeah so the subset you notch to me when you're trying to line up a front sight and you always tell people think about telling people how to shoot a pistol you always want to say line up the top with the top decided to do that I could understand why that would be there's like two tops right there's a swoop that comes to sort of a soft edge yeah almost three tops in this situation where it's like okay so which of the which which what is the top in this situation in this case it more be like put it in the bucket almost yeah you when you know how to shoot you see it just fine if you're not as I can see being a little confused about how to communicate how this site looks yeah I I wouldn't disagree with that from there pulling the trigger it's not bad there's like no take-up it feels like there's just practically nothing there and then you hit a solid wall and the break was surprisingly clean for how dated this action felt I was surprised at how okay the trigger was it wasn't amazing it was just okay yes it also has a very unique flat shape trigger do you know is that when you're working it to be fair I don't really necessarily notice that off the bat when I'm shooting on the only thing that I tend to perceive as if there's something so special not just to it but I will say the trigger being a straight and just as flat as it is it does kind of feel dated as well when you just look at it and you feel it just off the bat it doesn't really feel like a normal trigger I feel polish it just feels like they stuck a piece of metal in there so the weird thing is to me I think the trigger feels too cheap right I love it because I have larger hands and I might want to get lower on the trigger or higher on the trigger depending that's true you can just kind of pick your place on this one there is a slight curve to it by the way it's not completely no no no but some of the more aggressively like cupping triggers we've seen especially in pistols I've hated them because they wrap around my finger and they pinch it it feels very odd like but I actually prefer weirdly this sort of labelled Bertier style flat trigger which is really what it is I mean essentially yeah so okay you've pulled the trigger Oh God I suppose this is where the magic happens yeah um recoil on this one so I if I if I'm just thinking like I just came off the Lebel let's say yeah sure eight millimeter labelled from the lapel got to terrible no is not too bad then you put it in a carbine that is actually a fairly light carbine at that and the weights to the rear oh boy oh my goodness that was pretty substantial when they did smokeless powder the French were like dump it all in there yeah is a screamer it is a massive cartridge it definitely rocks you a little bit in this guy I find it it's interesting up until you pull the trigger up until the bang I find other than the weird and blocking cartridge count thing I find this very comparable to some of the carbines we've really lumped on the show so like the sort of man was one of your favorites I can't argue with that because of the size and the weight right you like the guevara da actually this is very comparable to like the other carabiner 88 very comparable in carabiner rated E except for the magazine capacity and then that recoil god yes oh well mag capacity aside yeah three around that's never gonna work with a recoil God yeah no I I mean I I remember shooting it the first time around and I I guess I just kind of it's escaped me for what I was expecting when we were on range I wasn't gonna reminder I yeah it was pretty substantial and by the end of the day I was hurtin just a little bit but um yeah no I guess I'm glad there was only three rounds yeah the three rounds out of this feels like five rounds out of the gray radiates and maybe actually I could get six rounds I think very - yeah carabiner ad that keeps screwing up yeah it's very odd because they're right there with each other in terms of comparison but there's just something about the recoil and pulse this gun and the heft of that cartridge there's just so much kick to it yeah and to be fair also the carabiner 88 we shot with the older like Prius patrone cartridges that's true and on this one we shot a load much closer to World War one however that's what those sights are set up for this is like the Hotchkiss essentially no no they're not quite it's bad because there was a 1917 round I'm not really sure about the the feet per second on that okay but you gotta remember that has the updated site for ball M so that's what we went with in terms of the load and blah blah blah so there's there's more power coming out of that then our carabiner 88 to my knowledge off the top of my head but also structurally I feel like something about this gun is delivering recoil much more harshly via the way it's really climbing there I can't really put my finger on all of the pieces that probably add up that puzzle but you are correct so final difference between like those two guns though is this three shot capacity that we keep talking about gently how do you really feel about going into combat with exactly three shots before you have to reload yeah I'm not gonna lie I don't really have a lot of confidence with this because I mean it's three shots and granted so some of the pros for okay let me let me actually pro con this pro con Pro I can load it in it quickly and yeah it's three rounds so I can presumably stack a lot of these guys in my pockets like I could see it fitting these in a lot of spaces even in girl jeans let's see even go with that here in battling girl jeans yeah in battle and girl jeans I could stuff fit these and a lot of girl Jean pockets I want to point that out so plus one there and I can I can I'd you know it's great is it drops at the bottom I pop a new ones but the problem is I've still only got three rounds which means that's gonna take time to reload after my three which means I'm probably gonna want to make my three shots really Cal yeah it is kind of uncomfortable to think that you're gonna get three tries at something I guess it's three strikes you're out I mean pretty much just three tries at something onion you better eat dirt and reload which is I don't know maybe it can maybe encourages your shootin move maybe encourages me to take more time with my shots I'm not super confident about it I'd rather have at least I mean minimum I feel like five would be the upgrade for this one I know we're saying that because other guns had five we're gonna because other guns add five also it feels like you want to spend as little time as possible manipulating the firearm while not fighting this is true so any time you spend reloading and don't spend on sites you don't spend on trigger you don't spend on hitting the enemy yeah it's basically less time away from the actual battle itself it's less time defending less time attacking more time for me to get shot Wow being not ready right the ideal rifle would be one in which you can just pull the trigger and that's all you have to do your aim pull trigger and pull trigger and do nothing else because that means 100% of your attention is on the fighting the problem with that is you must come up with mechanisms that accomplish this the extra weight of carrying the ammunition on the rifle versus on the hip right so then you get into these things where is like the British had ten rounds but the Germans had five rounds but the Italians had six rounds and but they're smaller and so there's a lot of sort of debate on where that goes nowadays we carry around smaller cartridges and lots of them unless we have specially rolls bottom of it right so you know this is something that's been sort of eating debate for a very long time this feels like one extreme of the debate that I can't really agree with I agree I honestly it's it's not a preferred amount of rounds I'm gonna go with that it just it really does not inspire confidence in this gun for me so here comes the ultimate question and how comfortable are you taking something like this into the war so again don't get me wrong this performed well enough we really didn't have any issues with it on range as far as functionality accuracy was okay with it I can't really say it did anything that was automatic like DQ in my book as far as just it automatically was just not good enough but the problem comes with I know I've got better options out there I've only got three rounds and on top of that this guy's pretty susceptible to mud and muck down here at the bottom I'm just really mentioned on the top - yeah actually I do remember you talk you can see right through I mean what yeah I can actually oh wow really doesn't foul all that easily so it's not like it's interesting the dearth of features on that bolt mean there's not a lot of things that bolt has to do so it's fairly easy at shedding mud as much as it gains mud however the French did try to add a dust cover to this during the war which means they knew that they rally either was going to be or RT was a problem more than likely just something rhetoric stepheson oh i just gave away some of the cat but you know I have a hard time with this gun because I really feel more confidently in it it's so weird in terms of shot-for-shot and not necessarily exhausting myself I feel more confident in this then say futzing around with a Mosin because you have to kind of get lucky on which Mo's and you get this is true but Mosin is five shots yeah that's that five shot Mosin that doesn't even like even the most in carbines don't beat you up as much as this beats you up also true that recoil yeah and so but also I prefer him blocked over stripper clips so now I'm getting to a weird word so bit of a weird world with that but honestly I just I know there's better options realistically what it boils down to could I take it into battle sure do I want to do I want to not really yeah my morale would be pretty alone yeah I wouldn't be super excited be like oh boy well look at the Lebel and I'm like ah this comes with a panic because I only get three shots all right three strikes poke out especially like close up like in a trench work oh god that would be horrifying no no three three shots and then no I'm good I'll take two more please all right so we beat up on the birthday pretty well but this isn't the end of its service and World War one as a matter of fact we see it much greater expanded in our next episode and so you're gonna see us talking about this all over again in two weeks time so if you're one of those future people you can just click on the next video lucky all right have a good one guys [Music] all right gang I know I left here with a little bit of a cliffhanger there but don't have no fear there'll be another episode and you can always catch our behind-the-scenes podcast e things going on over at our patreon and our SUBSCRIBE star in this case I want to make very clear that I had two big helpers on this episode number one of course mr. Ian McCallum lent us not only some reading material but his images which was very very nice of him again those are all tagged out for chess po-2 FAMAS which is a beautiful book that i'm told you can't even buy anymore so good luck suckers now number two and very importantly for a while now I've been receiving emails and a lot of them having very wonderful attachments in original French documents back when we did the first Bertier episode we had someone contact us by the name of Ludovic Bertrand and I'm sorry if I'm messing up your name Ludovic but he got really curious about this whole Bertier disparity the the idea that Andre Bertier was two men or one men the whole argument around it so he ran down the documentation and put it together very nicely and it appears that yes it is actually one person which makes a lot more sense he got us the military records as best he could beautiful job so thank you again my friend for really clearing this up for everybody all right everybody have a good one leave a note of things for our good friends in the comments and stay safe out there

Channel: C&Rsenal

Views: 134,680

Keywords: firearms, guns, WWI, History, greatwar, worldwar1, documentary

Id: g7323jI8pLA

Length: 60min 33sec (3633 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 07 2020