Chapter 184: Quantity vs Quality
Germany and its alliance were not the only nation preparing for war. In fact, the French had made substantial investments in machine guns over the years, especially since the Iron Division proved how effective they were in the trenches outside Saint Petersburg and Tsaritsyn.
And while the level of technological progression had increased ever so slightly on the global stage due to Bruno's interference in the timeline, some things had actually veered off into a less desirable path, at least for the French.
As previously mentioned, the French Army had a serious issue with machine guns leading up to the Great War in Bruno's past life.
Aside from the paltry sum of such destructive devices actually employed in their army, they also did not create a machine gun that was remotely reliable enough to chew through the mud and blood of the trenches until the fabled Hotchkiss was adopted in 1914 shortly before the outbreak of the infamous global conflict.
This meant that at the start of the Great War, France's limited machine gun arsenal still largely consisted of those two designs derived from the horrifically unreliable "Bang" gas system. However, this was a lesson they had also failed to understand in this life.
In Bruno's past life, France and many other powers had routinely refined their machine gun designs until creating something that was functional for the purposes of sustained fire during trench warfare. But that was not the case in this life.
Germany had, after all, as a result of Bruno's actions, begun mass-producing a variation of the Maxim machine gun much earlier than they had in their past life. The result of this was that after Saint Petersburg and the brutal domination the then Iron Brigade had over the significantly larger Red Army, there was a spur in demand across the world for similar weapons.
France, having never truly adopted the Maxim, instead began development of their own machine gun, resulting in the Puteaux Model 1905 machine gun. This meant that the demand for quantity of machine guns had overridden that of quality.
As a result, France had significantly more machine guns in their arsenal than they had in Bruno's previous life at the current moment. But these machine guns could barely get through five straight rounds before bogging down the crew operating them.
This meant that they were actually preventing three or more potential riflemen from providing sustained fire against an enemy charge for every machine gun employed on the battlefield. And France had built thousands of these machine guns in preparation for the war. Even now, as they were only just beginning to realize how flawed their machine guns were, they did not even think about changing production lines to the older Model 1900 Hotchkiss, of which the infamous 1914 machine gun of the same name was a variation and had even seen service in prior wars.