Now we have been told by lots and lots of people who were not there, and did not happen to have lived through it that the Ross rifle was a failure as a military arm, and that 1st Division was handicapped by being armed with it , and lots of men lost their lives through its jamming in critical places etc. and so on. Even men who did live through that fight, [St. Julien] but happened to hail from Merrie
England
will tell you solemnly it [the Ross Rifle] was no good and never was. I cannot see it that way at all. If even a small fraction of the attention, time and money and labor of experts, had been put on the Ross, that has been spent on the Enfield and Springfield, we would now have a rifle that
Canada might be proud of.
The 8th Durhams had short Lee Enfields and they got into the gassed area early enough to suffer a bit from rust and corrosion. Several of us tried to use Enfields in that defence, but you had to pry under the handle with the blade of a bayonet to turn the bolt each time and if you succeeded in turning the bolt up, it was then another task to drive it back and then ahead again and in most cases it could not be done for the bolt seized fast in its channel from corrosion and would not repeat even after being driven and forced a couple of times back and forward. Oil might have helped but there were no oil wells on our part of the front then. This record does not come from a base camp in England, neither does it hail from [the School of Musketry at] Hythe or [the N.R.A. ranges at] Bisley [Camp], nor yet from the lines of the motor transport back of [Mont] des Cats. Conan Doyle said St. Julien was the greatest (unsupported) infantry defense in military history, and he has an uncanny way of getting at the truth of things (the old Ross did it).
PM
