Yesterday at the South African Museum in Delville Wood, we saw an excellent display case containing a Lewis Gun. The Lewis Gun is a machine gun that was often used by the Belgian, British, and South African armies during the Great War. As you can probably tell from the picture above, this machine gun was very well respected on the front lines due to its high rate of fire. As Reginald Roy explains in the book, The Journal Of Private Fraser, “the Lewis was a light machine-gun weighing 27 pounds. It was air-cooled, fitted with a 47-round drum magazine.”1 Indeed, the Lewis Gun was so light that it could be carried by a single soldier. Also, Agar Adamson, Captain of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, boasted about the gun in a letter on the 12th of October 1915 saying, “it has a disk like a phonograph and fires 300 shots in 30 seconds.”2 On the battlefield this gun saw action as both a dependable offensive and defensive weapon.
- Graeme Arkell End Notes
1. N. Christie, ed. “Letters Of Agar Adamson, 1914 to 1919,” letter October 12th 1915, (Nepean, Ontario: CEF Books, 1997): 87
2. 1. Reginald Roy, ed. “The Journal Of Private Fraser,” (Nepean, Ontario: CEF Books, 1998): 69
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