Though Richard Gatling’s ‘Gatling Gun’ is probably the early machine gun that most think of, it wasn’t until WWI that the full tactical and psychological impact of the machine gun was felt. In the brutal trench warfare that covered the European continent, weapons such as the British Vickers, German MG 08, and French Saint-Etienne put the power of an entire firing squad into one man’s trigger finger. Entire squadrons could be wiped out with one squeeze. It was the longbow revolution for the industrial age, and the end of soldiers marching to battle in formation. You only need to look at any modernist poetry at all, to realize the psychological impact this technology had on an entire generation.
