Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Non-L&C FFQ: WWI guns and more

I'm trying to write a short fic for X-Men wherein the main character is fighting in WWI (this is Logan aka Wolverine, for those of you who know X-Men). Logan is Canadian, born in late 1893, and would have been called up with other Canadian troops to fight (he'd have been 20 when the war began). I've been poring over the Wikipedia articles on WWI and related battles, etc., but I'm having a hard time really grasping it all.

I'm trying to give a feel for what the battle was actually like as the soldiers are fighting--I'm assuming he'd likely be in a regiment with other Canadian soldiers, but would they be ones from his local area, or just from the general province/region? Note that he's Sir James Logan Howlett--what does that mean in terms of his being a soldier? Is he automatically an officer of some sort, or just an ordinary soldier? Does he get some sort of special privileges for it?

What would be the actions? Are they standing up, crouching, moving around? Would they be ducking periodically or do they stay down all the time? I know it was a trench war, but beyond that I don't really understand how it all worked.

What sorts of guns were they using and how did they work? What did they have to do to fire them? Reload? What did they sound like when fired?

And beyond that, what sort of slang would they have used in Canada then? I've done some searching, but mostly come up with either Australian or British. Granted, I suspect British and Canadian slang would have some commonalities back then, as before the war Canada was just part of the Dominion, but I still don't want to assume everything was and make my character a British guy who's supposed to be Canadian, lol. Basically, if I have him say "knock it off" or "shut up", am I introducing anachronisms?

Any help with any one of these questions (whether an answer or a recommended website to check out) would be greatly appreciated!

For X-Men fans:
See, I'm thinking of writing a series of "manifestation" fics wherein each main character in X-Men discovers their mutation. We only know a few of those events (Erik/Magneto's is shown first thing in the first X-Men movie, and Rogue's after that, but we never see anyone else's, much less hear about them). Although comic canon does describe a few, I think it would be interesting to write a fic for each of them, kind of bringing a background to life. I decided to start with the oldest mutant, who I've decided is definitely Logan.
Beyond this, I've been working on a long fic set post-X2, but that one's stalled until I can find an X-Men fan who knows canon really well so I can dialogue with them and figure out the politics and general world and all that.

Hi

How they're moving depends on where they're stationed.
Trench War on the West Front

I think nobility didn't do too much front duty in the trenches. Maybe Africa? Or a pilot?

Michael

My husband says they would have used Lee Enfield .303 bolt-action rifles. They are highly accurate to 1,000 yards, so the British and Canadians were trained to shoot up to that distance. They would have been loud.

He also says you should watch the movie All Quiet On the Western Front.

Logan would probably been an officer. He would have been trained to use a rifle but would not have carried one. He would have carried a pistol and a whistle (used for signals). The pistol would be a Webley .455 caliber. We think it is a 6-shot revolver, that hinges open for loading rather than having the cylinder flip to the side like an American pistol. Captain Jack in Torchwood carries one.

The ordinary infantryman would probably have carried a Lee Enfield rifle, a bolt-action weapon with a ten-round magazine and mountings for a bayonet. He would have loaded it by opening the bolt and pressing a "stripper clip" holding the rifle cartridges into the magazine; after loading the magazine, the clip itself (a small piece of metal holding the bases of the cartridges) would be discarded. When he closed the bolt, all he'd have to do would be to release the safety, aim, and pull the trigger, work the bolt, repeat until empty and reload. Depending on the action of the day (attack, defend), he would have carried thirty to fifty rounds of ammunition, and he could have scavenged more ammo from his fallen comrades.

British rifle fire was nearly always well-aimed, due to the typical Tommy's hours on the firing range with unlimited practice ammunition combined with excellent marksmanship training. When the German soldiers first advanced against British infantry in 1914, they thought they were attacking troops equipped with machine guns, so accurate and rapid was the rifle fire they faced.

The rifles made a "bang" sound, quite loud in the gunner's ears. Hearing loss was not uncommon for a soldier who survived multiple battles.

One note that Hollywood almost always seems to get wrong. When a person is shot, the impact of the bullet does not throw the person backwards. The bullet is designed to penetrate the body and injure the person internally, not slap them down. Rarely will a person suffering a fatal bullet wound throw up his or her hands or turn in circles while grabbing at the wound. He just falls down and bleeds.

Here\'s a site which might help you more with WWI info. Be sure and look up the artillery information. The Great War was the only major war in history where artillery caused more than half of the casualties suffered in battle.

ETA: C-mom is correct about the pistol. The type is called a "top-break" because of the way it opens to be loaded. And a .455 cartridge is a large one, so it would make a distinctive sound and a large hole in its target. They were not accurate much beyond 100 yards, however, due to the short barrel length as compared to the rifle. And while the Lee-Enfield was an excellent weapon and deadly to those distances C-Mom mentioned, most armed infantry combat occurs in ranges of 300 yards or less because the soldiers can't see their targets well any farther away. Longer ranges are for snipers, who were well served by the Enfield.

Likely he would have enlisted (as a volumteer - conscription or the draft as Americans call it wasn't brought in until 1917 in Canada) with other boys and men form his home town. I'm puzzled by his title - that implies he's British rather than Canadian - but I'm sure you can find a way to explain this in your story (perhaps he was born to a member of the Britsh nobility who had been posted to Canada as a diplomat?)

No, he wouldn't automatically be an officer, unless he'd was a graduate of a military college. But your scenario suggests that he'd enlisted He'd be a private, in that case. But with that upper class British background he'd probably advance pretty quickly, sent for officer's training.

Much of the fighting in WWI was domintaed by trench warfare - both horribly boring and then mercilessly horrific. The use of chlorine gas at Ypres, for example. Apparently there was more rain than usual the first year of the war, and the trenches were often very wet - wounded soldiers got stuck in the mud in No Man's Land between the miles long line of trenches that strecthed from Belgium through France, and could not be rescued.

The men would spend most of their time in the trenches - they were often extensive complexes, that had bunks, a medical station, storage rooms. Sniping was pretty common. At times, they charged up and out of their trenches to fight.

If he was a Canadian, maybe he fought at Vimy, generally considered to be the major battle of the war for Canadians.

Planes weren't used with any signficance until the final year and a half of the war - part of the difficulty was the lack of weapons which were co-ordinated with the propellers.

Do you want to do any reading on the topic? The historian, Tim Cook is someone to check out. Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road is a novel (and a terrific read) that gives a really strong impression of the nature of the fighting - it's about two Crees who become snipers at the Front.

Good luck with your writing .

c.

Uh, forget the Sir bit. For some reason I thought for SURE that was part of it, but I did some searches again and discovered that my mind had made all that up. *sg* His family owned a large estate in Alberta, so they are definitely Canadian. I think part of why I thought it was Sir was they're wealthy and higher-class . . . and doing a search on "Sir James Howlett" turns up one of my very favorite fics which used that. The author may have added that bit or forgotten that it's not canon (she tends to stick close to comic canon when she can).

I'm borrowing bits and pieces of comic canon to fill in his history, but not using it literally, so I can play around with it. Marvel has it listed that he was fighting in Belgium in April 1915, so maybe I can work that into it.

Thanks for all the help with the guns and all--that'll give me something to absorb. I have a bit of reading to do in my spare time now.

Ultimately, the goal of this short piece is to show a battle where all his buddies die and he *should* have, except his healing mutation kicks in. My challenge is now to figure out how to set that up, what battle it should be, how he gets away (he realizes that they'll wonder why he lived when it would have been virtually impossible for anyone else to survive--why he doesn't have a scratch on him).

One quote from that author's fic, to give you an idea of how she worked out his background: "I fought in South Africa, then in the Great War. I was at Vimy Ridge, and at Flanders Fields later -- I took three bullets in the shoulder and chest, and held my best friend in my arms after he took more. Our Second Division lost over 2000 men, but I was in the 31st Battalion and we held the center. Only twenty guys from my corps walked away, and just me without a scratch."

She had him born in 1880-something, which is a bit more leeway than my 1889, and that he volunteered for the Second Boer War. Now, I don't want to borrow her character's history or anything. I'd like to keep it realistic, but not copy her. I already have a different way he takes off from WWI, now I just have to figure out what battle he's in, and write the thing.

Maybe Ypres, then? The town was almost completely flattened by the fighting that occured there. It works for your date too. There are many stories about men who were the 'only one to survive' when their buddies did not. If he did become an officer, and he were the only survivor I would think his problem would be more the stigma of 'having let his men down' then explaining how he made it.
btw, I think chlorine gas was used at Ypres in 1915 - chemical warfare.

c. (who is too lazy to check this stuff )

I'm not familiar with WWI weapons as I'm much more familiar with WWII, but I hope this helps

World War One Weapons

this provides some basic information I do have a book about it lying somewhere, but I'm not sure it contains anything about WWI.

I wish I could help more, but beyond what happened in Galipolli I'm really couldn't tell you much more than that.