The Mauser C96 “Broomhandle” automatic pistol– if anything I own is “iconic”, it is.
I have wanted one for many years. I will add Arthur Wilderson’s excellent short essay when he sends it, but it was the gun of Churchill at Omdurman and Lawrence of Arabia; Walter “Karamojo” Bell supposedly shot down a German fighter with one in WWI; the great Indian ornithologist Salim Ali, referred to affectionately by his friend Meinertzgagen as”you treasonous little Wog”, had one, as well as a 20 bore Jeffery shotgun bought by his wife, a Mannlicher Schoenauer carbine like mine, and various bolt- action Mausers (and, unusually, Winchesters!)
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Ali shooting swallow specimens in the 50’s with his Jefferey |
Various versions, including the shorter barreled “Bolo” (for Bolshevik), were used by both sides up and down the Trans- Siberian Railway in the Russian Civil War, and Chinese bandits and government troops both favored them in .45 ACP, to match their American Tommy guns, which led to the destruction of many in the Cultural Revolution of 1968, for possessing a “bourgeois caliber.” You can’t make it up..
They were also used by two favorite fictional protagonists, Charles Dennim in Geoffrey Household’s Watcher in the Shadows, and Jane Doe in Michael Gruber’s Tropic of Night.
I was in Ron Peterson’s guns for other business when I beheld a clean Broomhandle on the table in front of my friend Mel Merritt, the manager. I am afraid I behaved badly– I swooped down on the young customer, who was comparing one to a Luger, and said “THAT one is MINE!” Mel looked injured, saying only “I thought you already found one!”
Luckily the kid didn’t have any historical interest, and I ended up with it and all the bells & whistles– a holster/ shoulder stock made of walnut, a pigskin shoulder holster, a set of stripper clips– all for less than any I had seen on the Internet. It is a “Red Nine”, so called not because of any revolutionary associations but because of the big red “9” burned into its side to denote its caliber, the still- popular 9 mm Luger.
That is it on the right of course, beside my S & W .38 and my Hi-Standard target and rabbit .22.
Everyone has been worried by my absence. I had a tough few weeks with the implant, but it IS a learning process, and my latest setting is the best yet. Unfortunately, I felt so good today that I cleaned out two year’s worth of detritus from the yard, leaving me utterly exhausted. This is all for tonight; I won’t even add links til later. But later this week: new book reviews, a new coursing book, more Beebe, Microraptor, Phillott on falconry; more and worse…
And here is Arthur:
“The Mauser C 96 was not the first automatic pistol, but it was basically the first that worked well. Its predecessors were curiosities and toys. It emerged in the last days of the belle epoque; that last, glorious sunset of European civilization before the blood dimmed tide and mere anarchy were loosed. As such, it was the sidearm of choice for the roguish heroes and heroic rogues of the era; Winston Churchill, T.E. Lawrence, and Chinese warlords all favored the type. In that strange, bygone era officers were socially stratified gentry and bought their own weapons. Very few nations officially adopted the Mauser pistol, but many of their armys’ officers bought them on their own initiative.
“I have spoken to a number of gunsmiths, industry officials and machinists about making reproductions of these things. A century and change of advances in manufacturing, and these sorts of weapons would be thousands of dollars per piece. The entire structure of economics, and the price of skilled machinists at the time was incomprehensibly different.
“Men worked in satanic mills to make the steel billet that would be painstakingly whittled and hand-fitted to form these beautiful, utterly decadent weapons. A modern combat handgun is completely soulless and utilitarian by comparison. It is truly an artifact of Hesiod’s golden age. It’s like a pair of marching boots with gold trim. Putting that much personal effort, especially into a weapon as unimportant as a handgun, is unthinkable today.
“Our culture is a descendant of theirs, but in some ways it’s unrecognizable. Wittgenstein said that if a lion could talk, we could not understand him. Sometimes I think the same is true of the Edwardians. Their children roamed with incomprehensible freedom. They lived in cultures with incomprehensible levels of social stratification and thought it (generally) normal, just and natural. Our science would have few secrets with which to shock them; Einstein’s General Relativity is a hundred years old now! And yet their medicine barely worked…”