Some of these men returned safely, but many others who sought the “white gold” … would die in the process.
When the ruthless King Leopold II of Belgium died on December 17,1909, so did the severe restrictions on hunting the King’s elephants in the Lado Enclave of the Congo Free State (now southeast Sudan and northwest Uganda).
King Leopold had ruled from an annexed throne and made the Lado Enclave his own personal domain to do with as he wished. After his death, the district became a no-man’s land until the Belgian and British Royals could decide who should control it.
This meant the area was open to hunters who could bag as much ivory as they could carry out. The only obstacle was the large number of loyal Belgian askaris who remained. They were a disorganized bunch of dangerous savages who did not hesitate to shoot on sight.
Soon the “ivory rush” was on and, despite the risks, hunters from all corners of British and German East Africa raced to take advantage of it.
Even Theodore Roosevelt made a point of going to the Enclave that December (1909) before completing his safari. Although the President went there for white rhino, not elephant, it was really to meet the poachers.
TR referred to the men who flocked there as “a hard-bit set,” but affectionately called them “a company of gentleman adventurers.” In reality, they were nothing more than poachers raiding an unadopted territory of its ivory resources before some authority could put a stop to it.
The situation in the Lado Enclave would last only about nine months, until the district became a province of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan with the southern half being controlled by the British Colony of Uganda.
In the meantime, some of the most prominnt
hunters of the time went to the Enclave in search of the big prize: huge herds of elephants, some containing as many as 500 animals, and bulls carrying ivory up to 200 pounds per side.
Some of these men returned safely, but many others who sought the “white gold,” particularly the lesser known and inexperienced, would die in the process. One such hunter was William Pickering, who literally lost his head doing it.
A well-known poacher and extremely good shot, Pickering was charged and killed by a bull elephant. It seems that he froze with his gun raised as the elephant bore down on him. The huge beast ripped off Pickering’s head and then stomped the man’s lifeless body into the ground.
For most hunters, however, their biggest challenge was outwitting the Belgians and getting themselves and their ivory safely out of the country. The British were sympathetic to the poachers, as it wasn’t “their” ivory, and they benefited from a 25 percent tax on any ivory brought into the British Protectorate from the Belgian side.
One ingenious deception was orchestrated by famed elephant hunter Bill Judd when trying to get across the Nile with a huge haul of ivory. Local natives told him that a Belgian patrol was hidden atop a hill watching the swamp he had to cross to reach the Nile. His only chance was to create a diversion.
He arranged to have some wooden poles whitewashed with the clay used on the inside of native huts and then divided his pagazi into two teams.
He went with the group carrying the white poles, which drew the patrol down the hill while the real ivory went ’round the other side of the hill and made it safely across the Nile. It’s ironic that it was an elephant that would end Judd’s life years later (see “Last Safari”).
Robert Foran hatched another ingenious ruse. This was the same Foran who acted as correspondent for the Associated Press, while unofficially covering the Roosevelt safari a year earlier (see “Codename ‘Rex’”).
The former policeman decided to sneak ivory over to the British side under the cover of a moonless night. He hid his heavily laden canoes along the bank on the British side, then at daybreak he and his men paddled the ivory, as though being chased, back to the Belgian side where they pretended it had been poached in the British territory.
Happy to get one over on the British, Belgian officials agreed to buy the ivory from Foran, who made a handsome profit on the deal, all tax-free.
There is no doubt the activities that took place during the Congo’s transition did much to enhance the frontier atmosphere of early East Africa and the legends it spawned.
Prior to the First World War, the nations of Europe made Hiram Maxim a very wealthy man. Maxim accomplished this with his machine gun, which was adopted by numerous nations in Europe and beyond. However, one of the major powers on the European continent wasn’t convinced — namely Austria-Hungary.
The reasoning isn’t fully clear, but one factor could be that the empire had a robust arms industry in Bohemia (the modern-day Czech Republic). Also, the fact that a member of the royal family, Archduke Karl Salvator, helped Colonel von Dormus of the Austro-Hungarian Army develop an early competitor to the Maxim Gun may have certainly played a role.
Salvator-Dormus M1893 Machine Gun
Patented in 1888, it has become known as the Model 1893 as that was when the weapon was first adopted by the Austro-Hungarian Navy (a year after Salvator’s death). It also came to be known as the Skoda machine gun by virtue of being manufactured at the Skoda Works.
With nearly a century and a half of hindsight in machine gun design looking back at it, the Salvator-Dormus 1893 machine gun is certainly an odd design — incorporating a mix of forward-looking elements with features that already seemed antiquated. It was chambered for the 8x50R smokeless cartridge and had an adjustable cyclic rate of fire, which could be set as low as 175 rpm or as high as 500 rpm.
It was fed from a unique fixed feed tower, which could be fed by an assistant gunner as the weapon was fired. The guns were reportedly reliable and could fire for upwards of nine minutes without stoppage. While it may have worked well as a naval gun, or in fixed positions, the Salvator-Dormus 1893 wasn’t considered ideal for infantry.
At least one saw use in combat during the Boxer Rebellion as it fired from the Austro-Hungarian battlecruiser when the warship was deployed to Peking. The U.S. military was offered a chance to test the Salvator-Dormus 1893 machine gun in China after the Boxer Rebellion, but only 600 rounds of ammunition were provided. The U.S. assessment was that it was reliable, but not able to endure the rigors of field use.
Some sources suggest a limited number may have been employed during the First World War, but that cannot be confirmed. One of the few surviving examples is in the collection in the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum — Militärhistorisches Institute (the Museum of Military History — Military History Institute) in Vienna, Austria.
Enter the Schwarzlose M.07/12 Heavy Machine Gun
The Austro-Hungarian military was far from satisfied with the Salvator-Dormus 1893 machine gun, but instead of adopting the Maxim, it again sought to forge its own path with help from the Prussian-born arms designer Andreas Wilhelm Schwarzlose.
He began development of a new machine gun in 1902 that employed a toggle-delayed lock, using a concept he first developed for a toggle-delayed pistol concept. As Schwarzlose had primarily been a handgun designer, it took several years for his design to be finalized.
Unlike the Maxim, the water-cooled machine gun had a fixed barrel, few moving parts, and a breach that was at no time truly locked, while it had a straightforward blowback mechanism. When the weapon fired, the rearward thrust of the exploding gases started the action opening at the same instant as it caused the bullet to move down the barrel. As it employed a very short barrel and a combination of extremely heavy recoil parts and springs, the weapon could employ a rifle cartridge. It had a cyclic rate of 400 to 500 rounds per minute, and it fired from a 250-round fabric belt.
First introduced in 1907, it featured a lubricating pump to lubricate each cartridge for ease of extraction, but it was subsequently rebuilt and a time extraction issue was addressed. That removed the need for the pump, but the machine gun still relied on a heavy bolt and a very strong recoil spring. It was also determined that the short barrel would result in a significant muzzle flash that could blind the gunner at night, and a cone-shaped dedicated flash hider was introduced to suppress the flash.
Designated the Schwarzlose M.07/12, it was employed by the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War, and like most of the machine guns of the era, it was used with a mount that weighed more than the actual weapon. However, that helped stabilize the weapon.
The M.07/12 was typically operated by a crew of three that included an NCO, a gunner who carried the weapon, and a third soldier who served as the ammunition carrier and loader. In practice, a fourth soldier was also employed to carry the tripod.
At the start of the war, the Austro-Hungarian Army fielded more than 100 infantry regiments, and each company included four platoons and a complement of 267 soldiers. However, the M.07/12 was relatively scarce as machine gun detachments were organized at the battalion level.
Austro-Hungarian Aviation Troops (k.u.k. Luftfahrtruppen) were equipped with the modified M.07/12/R16, an air-cooled variant. Due to a time delay between the trigger movement and the moment the bullet leaves the barrel, the weapon presented challenges in synchronizing it for use with fighters — and while the issues were eventually overcome, it was subsequently phased out of service as more suitable aircraft weapons became available.
Used by Austria and Beyond
The Schwarzlose M.07/12 was produced by Österreichische Waffenfabriks-Gesellschaft (OeWG), Steyr, and from 1914 to 1918 FGGY in Budapest. During World War I, Austria-Hungary also exported the M.07/12 to its Bulgarian and Ottoman Empire allies.
After the First World War, The Schwarzlose saw use with the militaries of the newly independent Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland — as well as with the Austrian Army. The Netherlands and Sweden also acquired a number of the Austrian-designed machine guns, while a plethora of nations including Brazil, China, Colombia, Greece and Spain also adopted it in small numbers.
Beginning in 1924, the Czechoslovakian military converted the M.07/12 to 7.92x57mm and redesignated it the MG-7/24. Following the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, those weapons were subsequently employed by the German Wehrmacht and issued to the infantry divisions of the 5th and 6th Aufstellungswelle, which were mainly equipped with Czech weapons. At the end of the Second World War, the reserve stocks were issued to the Volksstrum (People’s Militia) forces. 
The M.07/12 remained in service beyond the Second World War and was used to equip the early Czechoslovakian Army in the early stages of the Cold War.
In 1931, the M.07/12s in service with Austria were modified to use the new 8x56R cartridge, which provided a significantly higher muzzle velocity (2,300 fps, instead of about 1,900-2,000 with the 8x50R). In addition, the Hungarian Army’s Schwarzlose machine guns were modified to use the 8x56mm 31.M “Hegyes” cartridge around the same time.
During the Second World War, the Schwarzlose M.07/12 was adopted by the same armies that it had been employed against during the First World War — namely Italy and Romania. The former adopted a number and used them in the campaign in North Africa.
The Romanian versions were converted to 7.62x54mmR — the same cartridge used by the Mosin-Nagant rifle. These also were fitted with a longer barrel and lengthened water jacket. However, those firearms appear to have seen little use in World War II — but according to some sources, the machine guns were used against German and Hungarian forces after the Kingdom of Romania left the Axis and joined the Allies as a co-belligerent. Thus some Romanian forces used an Austro-Hungarian machine gun against the Hungarians!
The Romanian versions had been sold as parts kits in the early 2000s, and a number were offered for sale as deactivated “dummy” or display guns. Yet, even these non-firing examples have become extremely rare in recent years.
Schwarzlose Machine Gun in Popular Culture
The M.07/12 has only been seen in a handful of films over the years, first appearing in the 1931 French-German film Mountains of Fire, which chronicled the fighting in the Alps during the First World War. More recently, it is among the firearms seen in a weapons museum in John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum.
The Czech M.07/24 has also appeared in several movies, in some cases standing in for the M.07/12.
The M.07/12 remains an innovative firearm that saw use in the First World War and beyond.
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Walter Summerford
The Electrified Man
This is Walter Summerford. This poor schmuck got struck by lightning four times, once after he was already dead.
It’s an old wives’ tale that lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place. Lightning is completely random. In the US alone, there are an average of 40 million lightning strikes per year. The odds of being hit by lightning in America are about one in a million in a given year. However, those numbers are, curiously, not consistent around the globe.
In the UK, there are only around 300,000 lightning strikes per annum. The United Kingdom is markedly smaller than the US, but its weather is way crappier. As a result, the odds of getting struck over there are closer to 1-in-15,300.
Lightning is some seriously nasty stuff. It’s basically just a big honking spark. Electrostatic energy builds up in the atmosphere and can discharge either from cloud to cloud or from a cloud into the ground. A typical lightning bolt runs about 50,000 degrees F, or five times the temperature of the surface of the sun. They pack millions of joules of energy. That stuff is undeniably pretty to look upon. However, you really don’t want to get any of it on you.
Around the globe, there are roughly 6,000 lightning strikes each and every minute. Nearly a quarter million people are struck by lightning every year. Roughly ten percent of those are killed.
On a certain level, those seem like pretty decent odds. If only one in every million Americans gets struck by lightning every year and, of those, nine out of ten live to tell the tale, that doesn’t sound so bad.
Those are indeed reassuring numbers, unless you happen to be Walter Summerford. Walter Summerford has been described as the unluckiest man in the universe. He was struck by lightning four times. One of those strikes was actually after he was already dead.
Background
Walter Summerford served as a British officer in World War I. In 1918, Major Summerford was riding a horse through a Belgian field when he caught a bolt of lightning.
This massive electrical shock rendered the poor man paralyzed from the waist down. However, he gradually recovered. With the war over and his recovery nearly complete, Summerford was demobilized and sent to Vancouver for further rehabilitation.
Six years later, in 1924, Summerford was enjoying a little quiet time out fishing by a river. A storm came up, so the man took refuge underneath a nearby tree. A bolt of lightning struck the tree and tracked down his body and into the ground. The strike left Summerford almost completely paralyzed on his right side.
After two long years, Summerford finally regained the use of his legs. The man was an inveterate outdoorsman and loved wandering about the wilderness hiking, hunting, and fishing.
However, in 1930, whilst taking a stroll in a public park, he was struck by lightning a third time. This bolt rendered him completely paralyzed. It was also markedly worse than the previous two. Summerford was destined to spend the rest of his natural life in a hospital bed.
Summerford’s physicians were amazed the man had survived this third blow. He fought valiantly for another two years before finally succumbing to the cumulative effects of these three lightning strikes in 1932.
As to whether he enjoyed some kind of unique body chemistry or had somehow offended his Maker, no one will ever know. Regardless, it was undoubtedly the cumulative effect of these three lightning strikes that ultimately did Walter Summerford in.
Four years after he was buried in a public cemetery in Vancouver, Canada, Walther Summerford’s gravestone was itself struck by lightning and split into pieces.
I’m not much into conspiracy theories myself. However, it is tough not to believe that there was something supernatural and spooky going on with that unfortunate guy.
The truly curious bit was that Walther Summerford was struck every six years starting in 1918, just like clockwork. Even after he died, when his six years were up, that’s when lightning struck his tombstone. The cyclical nature of the thing strains credulity, but his tale is well-documented.
The brother of one of the soldiers with whom I served was actually struck three times. Once the poor guy was in the shower. I can only imagine what that might do to somebody’s emotional well-being, not to mention your perspective on general hygiene.
My colleague was from rural Texas. He said that every time it got a little bit stormy out, his brother would retreat to the living room away from the television and read a book. Who can blame him?
Walter Summerford got struck by lightning once after he was already dead. This is his shattered tombstone. Image: Public domain.
Ruminations
As kind of an amateur science guy myself, I always gravitated toward basic physics. I can get my head around the way things move. However, chemistry and electricity always kind of made me itch. I struggled to visualize these disciplines, so they held little fascination for me.
However, I have long appreciated that electricity is best appreciated at a distance. If Walter Summerford has taught me anything, it is that I’d really sooner not get struck by lightning.