page 164

Musketry Workshops

Every month two hundred new targets are required at Trentham, while more than eight hundred have to be repapered. The workshop in which this work is done resembles partly a sawmill and partly the scenery workshop of a big theatrical firm. It occupies a long building near the eastern parade-ground, and in the yards adjoining are stacks of timber drying, for in target-making the timber must be seasoned. The cough of an oil engine comes from an engine-room at the rear of the building, the band-saw sings, and the planers buzz and moan as they make the chips fly. In these workshops the whole of the targets and nearly all the musketry appliances required in the Dominion are made. White pine is used chiefly in the work that is done in the ordnance workshop, though red pine of good quality is stored for use in camp furniture or other more durable work. It is on the targets and other musketry work, however, that the workshop is principally engaged, and white pine has the advantage of not splintering when pierced by bullets. No nails or metal of any kind are used. All joints are mortised and dowelled with wooden dowels, and the surface of the target is of paper, stretched on scrim. The weak points of the target, so far as rifle-fire is concerned, are its mortises. If a number of bullets chance to strike the same mortise the target is apt to collapse; but in the straight, soft wood the bullets simply bore through and come to rest in the earth beyond. Some idea of how the rifle-fire honeycombs the targets may be had by inspecting, for example, a landscape screen after it has been fired at for some time at a range of 25 yards.

This kind of target is a long, narrow one, and it is set up on its side. On the surface facing the rifles is a country scene, showing hills, roads, farms, cottages, and other rural objects, all drawn to a scale which, at 25 yards' range, gives the same effect as would the actual countryside at a page 165range of several hundred yards. Shooting at it seems easy, but soldiers will tell you how difficult it is to hit the object pointed out by the instructor. But, even so, the landscape screens are returned to the workshop simply riddled with bullets. In course of time their woodwork becomes so perforated that it has to be renewed.

The machine-gun targets are another much-injured section of the target community which spends a good deal of its time in the repair-shop. They leave the shop for the range at Papawai all spick and span in new paper and paint, and with realistic representations of lines of troops on their flat, smooth faces. The machine-guns are never more venomous than when they are faced with several of these targets, and the result is that when the targets are bundled back to be overhauled they are mere wrecks of their former selves, and frequently they have to be entirely rebuilt. There is another target connected with machine-guns, but in this case it is not exclusively a mark for the Lewis and Tickers and Maxims. The target represents the head and shoulders of the two men who are working a machine-gun—one is firing and the other feeding the gun with cartridges. Their fresh, ruddy complexions—all the work of the artists of the target factory—make them appear as easy marks for rifle and machine-gun. But they are anything but that; in fact, the many targets, made of wood and painted to represent men standing, kneeling, walking in long grass, sighting a rifle, peering over the edge of a trench—all these are hard marks to hit, and their renovation generally consists of the application of fresh paint.

The heaviest target casualties are sustained by the targets that wave their vanes, like the wings of white birds, as they are revolved in their trenches at the end of each gust of rifle-fire—the targets that face day after day the hail of hurtling metal. By hook or by crook these survive each day's ordeal, patches of paper covering the bullet-holes and their woodwork hanging together somehow. Then some of their places are taken by raw, new things that have never heard the bullet's song or the whacking ring of the distant rifles.