The Machine Gun and Skye's Band of Brothers

It was the invention that changed the war.

The invention that changed all wars.

Ingenious. Impersonal. Totally overwhelming.

This, the machine gun.

A weapon that could fire ten bullets per second.

Lethal at a distance of three kilometres.

A machine of mechanical annihilation.

The bullet's not making a smooth path through the body,

it's churning and spinning, and mincing the flesh.

Born from the fire and steel of the Industrial Revolution.

Forged by inspired, maverick inventors.

Men like Richard Gatling,

who proclaimed that his gun would save lives.

Or Hiram Maxim,

the American who built his gun in Britain,

then sold it to the Germans.

Their products were masterpieces of military design.

But for some in the British Army their products just weren't cricket.

There was a feeling that the machine gun was

an ungentlemanly weapon - that it killed in great droves

but it took away concepts like nobility, heroism, personal dash.

Yet, the machine gun became the great killer of the Great War.

In the final reckoning, only artillery shells killed more men.

One burst of fire could destroy a unit, a company, a community.

To really understand the impact of the machine gun,

you have to come to terms

with the sheer scale of the slaughter it unleashed.

Across Europe, across the world, entire communities were devastated.

From the farthest corners of Britain, young men,

their friends and brothers

lost their lives to this new, terrifying weapon.

This is a story that begins at its end.

A story that begins with the victims

of the bloodiest war the world had ever known.

These are the rolls of honour in the Scottish National War Memorial,

here in Edinburgh Castle.

These books are really just lists of name after name after name.

Husbands, sons, brothers.

The scale of it, it's heart-breaking to look at.

What you have throughout all the books

are repeated, localised clusters of deaths.

Now, if I look through here, for example...

..you have Arthur Cunningham from Hawick.

He died in the Dardanelles on 12th July 1915.

Directly below, there's Eli Cunningham.

Born in Hawick, died in the Dardanelles, 12th July 1915.

Just over the page, there is Scott Cuthill from Hawick.

Died in the Dardanelles, 12th July 1915.

This pattern of same place of birth

and same date and place of death

happens again and again and again.

To discover why, I'd arranged to meet Trevor Royle,

one of Scotland's leading military historians.

Two things come together in this particular memorial.

One is the monstrous killing power that was unleashed

during the First World War.

That's because of the introduction of artillery,

the introduction of aircraft

and, above all, the introduction of the machine gun

which, suddenly, could kill in huge swathes.

Now, this is going to happen in any war,

but what is particular about this war

is that all the regiments here are solidly territorial.

They recruited from communities.

So, when a German machine gunner opened up on a rifle company

from one of these attacking regiments,

the odds are that he wouldn't just kill the individual soldiers,

but he would also leave a lasting effect on the communities.

To understand just how these communities

had come to be devastated by the machine gun,

I needed to step back into the bloody history of firearms.

-She's now on full cock.

-OK.

-When you pull that trigger,

that flint will hit the frizzen and it will go off.

'I've come to an Army range near Bath

'to try out a muzzle-loading Brown Bess.'

There we go. Did I get him?

-You certainly did get him, yeah.

-Where did I get him?

I'd say it was centre of the target.

People have been shooting at each other since the 13th century.

The Brown Bess was used in the 1700s and 1800s.

British infantrymen would have fired it at Napoleon's armies.

Look at that!

It's so obvious where the impact comes from the musket ball, isn't it?

If you can imagine the size of these lead balls

that we've been firing there,

if one of those just clipped you,

or even clipped a bone as it went through the body,

your bone would shatter.

-Puts you down, doesn't it?

-It certainly would.

'A single musket ball could do serious damage.

'But this weapon had a serious flaw.

'The time it took to reload.

'Every single shot had to be primed,

'loaded with powder,

'then the ball...'

-Just drop down?

-Drop down.

'..and finally all rammed into place.'

Now, as you can imagine,

this drill would be performed

with French cavalry coming down on you,

French infantrymen, in some cases,

no more than 50 to 60 metres away from where you were.

So, you can imagine that the British infantrymen

had to be well drilled in all of these matters.

How fast would a good musketeer or a good musket man

be able to go through that drill I've just performed?

Generally around three to four rounds a minute

for the elite guard units.

In time, better weapons allowed riflemen to fire faster and faster.

But the biggest step forward came in 1862

at the height of the American Civil War.

A Carolina doctor, Richard Gatling,

filed a revolutionary patent for a king-sized two-man-operated weapon

that could fire 200 times per minute.

This was a weapon with a unique aim -

to save lives.

He discovered that for every 100 troops sent to the battlefield,

60, 70 of them went down with diseases, trench foot,

all kinds of problems of logistics

of supplying them.

So, he said that if we had a gun that was so good

that two men could operate,

we could have a lot less soldiers in the field

and therefore a lot less injuries or losses because of disease.

First, I've got to explain

the reason that Gatling made this with ten barrels

is because to fire rapidly with a single barrel,

the barrel would get so hot that it could even melt the metal,

it can cause a lot of problems.

So, what Gatling came up with was the idea that you have ten barrels

with ten bolts, the whole thing rotating,

and only one barrel is firing at any one time.

So, that gives each barrel time to cool down

-before it's pressed into service again?

-Correct.

So, you have a hopper of cartridges which are fed down by gravity.

The weight has the rounds going down to the feed

and, as you crank, it picks one up and takes it in to the side.

As it's going round, it's pushing the cartridge in.

When it gets to the very bottom,

it's in position and fires.

And as it comes back round again, it throws out the empty case

-and gets ready to take the next one in.

-Wow.

So, the whole thing is very simple, very straightforward.

Do you think he would have had any concept

of how devastating and dreadful

would be the consequences of this machine?

I'm sure he knew exactly how dreadful,

being a medical doctor,

but I think he thought that it would be so horrible

that people would give up having wars.

So, it would become some kind of deterrent

rather than an inspiration for war?

Yeah. Such an awesome weapon that people would be horrified

and no-one would do any more.

-That never worked.

-It didn't work.

-Would you like to have a go?

-Yes. I would like to have a go.

And back.

And again.

-It's very stiff, isn't it?

-It is.

-OK, leave it there.

What a sense of power.

What a sense of domination you get from that.

The Gatling was notoriously unreliable...and cumbersome,

but it was the first gun that could maintain rapid fire.

It was truly revolutionary.

But it was no overnight success.

The story goes that General Custer decided

not to take his Gatling guns to the Little Big Horn,

cos they were a bit heavy.

Not his best decision, eh?

Gatling brought his invention to Europe in the summer of 1867,

to the Great Exhibition in Paris.

The British military were impressed

and secured a licence to build their own Gatling guns.

And in 1879, Lord Chelmsford took them into battle

against the South African Zulus.

At a place called Ulundi his men lined up in this formation,

the square, a very traditional and very British way

of fighting a fair and noble battle.

But then Chelmsford placed two Gatling guns

into the front face of his square.

At that precise moment,

the encounter ceased to be noble,

far less fair.

It was a massacre.

The Zulus came on and took the full force of the Gatling guns.

After the battle, a journalist from the London Standard

counted 473 dead Zulus within 500 yards of the guns.

This was an early and convincing demonstration

of the power of Dr Gatling's invention,

that it was the ideal weapon for dealing with colonial unrest,

a role it would make its own all across Her Majesty's Empire.

I got a call last night from Trevor Royle.

He's been wading through mounds of regimental records.

He's asked me to come up to Inverness

because he thinks he's getting close to identifying a small community

that felt the full impact of the machine gun.

In the aftermath of the 18th-century Jacobite risings,

the Highlands were occupied by British Government forces.

Fort George, here on the Moray Firth,

was a mighty British garrison.

Today it's home to the archives of the Highland regiments,

telling stories of the clansmen who switched allegiance

and fought for Britain's Empire.

In the Great War, the Highlands paid a heavy price.

Well, I always had the feeling

that we were going to find a cluster of casualties

from a Highland battalion.

The battle that's drawn me back and back

is the Battle of Festubert,

which was fought in May 1915

and in which a lot of Highland infantrymen first saw action.

And where are the clusters taking us, geographically speaking?

Well, to discover that,

I'm going through the list of Soldiers Died In The Great War

and here are the names of all Cameron Highlanders

who perished during the Great War.

Look at the typeface, look at the point size.

It's quite extraordinary, the names are given alphabetically,

but better still, they say where the man enlisted and where he came from.

So, it's possible to discover where casualties came from.

A number from Kingussie in Inverness-shire.

From Beauly, further north.

But there's one particular town

which keeps on occurring and reoccurring,

and that really does interest me.

Trevor's research took us west, across northern Scotland...

..over the sea to Skye...

..and the little harbour town of Portree.

And in the centre of Portree, on Somerled Square,

is the war memorial.

-Here are the names, here.

-Oh, right. Oh, dear.

Ross...

'104 names -

'the final reckoning from four years of industrialised war.'

Murdo MacLeod. William MacDonald.

Iain MacLeod.

When you imagine how many people were here in 1915,

what the population was, to lose on that scale...

-All local names.

-A lieutenant colonel, as well.

'Most of these men had grown up in the Portree of the early 1900s.

'A remote, Gaelic-speaking, God-fearing community

'of a thousand souls.'

The conditions on the crofts then

were difficult to imagine today.

They lived in squalor and poverty, to be quite frank about it.

And I think that is one of the reasons why things developed

in the way that they did in the early years of the Great War.

A special Highland blend of poverty and patriotism

had long brought Skye men to the British colours.

And in 1907, the Government announced plans for a new Army reserve -

the Territorials.

And the legendary swashbuckling Cameron Highlanders

would raise a battalion of Territorials,

with one company based in Portree.

Well, it was very much a community effort,

not just the village but also the surrounding area.

And it was here that the men would assemble,

it was where they trained, where they were equipped,

and it was what they considered to be their base.

They were the Portree company.

And the fact that they got paid for this

was a great inducement

for them to sign up.

And they got away for their fortnight's camp in the summertime

and this was, for them, like a holiday, away from home.

People who train together will go off to war together,

and they'll do it because they're in the company of friends.

That's a very great big factor in building up morale.

-A band of brothers.

-A band of brothers, yes.

In charge of the Portree company was the local lawyer Captain MacDonald,

the son of an evicted crofter, and a graduate of Glasgow University.

MacDonald's right-hand man was a 45-year-old veteran -

Company Sergeant Major Willie Ross.

The Portree postman, a Highland Games champion.

In 1909, MacDonald and Ross had travelled to Windsor Castle

to be presented with their new regimental colours

by King Edward VII.

Under their command, the part-time recruits were nicknamed

the "Saturday Night Soldiers".

And of 100 or so men in the company,

28 lived within a few hundred yards of the Portree harbour.

On a hill overlooking the bay,

the Portree Lodge was home to Lady MacDonald and her household staff.

The caretaker was Kate MacDonald.

She had five children and her eldest, William,

worked as a clerk in Captain MacDonald's estate office.

This is Mill Road, and here, at number 1,

lived 24-year-old Sergeant Donald MacLeod

with his mother Donaldina and three siblings.

He worked for Captain MacDonald as well, in his law firm.

Round the corner is Bosville Terrace.

Here, at number 3, lived William Turnbull, a plasterer.

In 1914, he was 29 years old.

His father was the chairman of the parish council.

On Stormy Hill lived a tailor called Donald Kemp.

He had three sons - William, Finley and Roddy -

and they all joined up.

There used to be houses down here,

and number 43, Back Wentworth Street was the home of John Grant,

a 22-year-old stable boy. He lived with his mum.

Down on Bayfield,

and from this house two brothers signed up,

John and Alex Kennedy.

John worked for MacBrayne's, the ferry company.

And just 100 yards along the road,

this was the family home of John Nicholson,

a 24-year-old fisherman.

Down here on the harbour

was the wartime home of the MacFarlane family.

Thomas MacFarlane was a stonemason,

his son, John, was underage when he joined up.

And finally, this was the home of Private Charles Sinclair,

he was a 21-year-old boatman,

and it was said that he could navigate by the stars.

In the early summer of 1914,

the Portree company and the rest of the battalion

camped at Kingussie.

They pitched tents on the golf course.

They drilled, trained and paraded.

A month later...

..Europe exploded into war.

Immediately, the young men of Portree -

the bank clerk, the fishermen, the plasterer, the stable boy -

were all mobilised and prepared to leave their island home.

The 28 Portree men were part of a 100-strong company

that marched along the quayside here, in their kilts,

towards their waiting ship.

The soldiers, and the villagers watching them march by,

spontaneously burst into song -

God Save The King.

They trusted their officers, they trusted their sergeants.

By that stage, they were pretty well-equipped

and they thought they could go across there

and beat the Germans before Christmas.

The men and women of Skye understood the meaning of farewell.

For more than a century, they had watched

as folk had left from these shores bound for the New World.

Often, they had gone unwillingly.

So, the mothers, fathers and sisters who waved and cheered

as the soldiers went off to war

understood only too well

that the young men didn't always come back.

600 miles south of Skye, the Portree company found a new home,

the town of Bedford, headquarters of the Highland Division.

Here the Saturday Night Soldiers would be trained for the front line.

In London, I got back on the trail of the machine gun,

and a new, deadlier version

that the Portree men would soon come to know.

In the year 1881,

a 41-year-old American inventor

chose this building in Hatton Garden

to begin work on the machine gun that would take his name.

And his name was Hiram Maxim.

He was born in a very rural part of New England

in the United States, and he was a compulsive

but self-taught inventor.

By the 1880s, he had designed everything from a mousetrap

to gas appliances to the first light bulb.

How did he progress

from things as benign as light bulbs to machine guns?

He claims, in his biography, that he was told by a fellow American

that if you want to make some money,

invent something that will enable these Europeans

to cut each other's throats with greater facility.

He came to London and he took up premises

in that building over there, on the corner,

and in the basement of that building

he developed the world's first fully automatic gun.

The words "quantum leap" are used as a cliche,

but really this is what it was, it was a completely new technology.

I asked Paul to explain why Maxim's gun

was considered so much better than the Gatling

or anything that had gone before.

You press on the trigger

and a whole sequence of complex mechanical operations

happen inside the gun

which, to simplify, when the first round is fired,

the barrel recoils backwards,

and it's that movement that sets everything else in motion.

The backward movement unlocks the breech,

the breechblock moves backwards,

it draws out the spent, empty cartridge case,

and pushes it down a chute to drop out the bottom of the gun.

At the same time, it's pulling another one

out of the belt that's feeding the cartridges,

and that drops down into place,

and the whole thing is forced by springs

back into its firing position

and at the same time, putting the new cartridge

into the chamber of the gun

and, simultaneously, picking up a fresh one in the belt

ready for the next round. Now, all that is done in a split second.

One of Maxim's early guns amazed people

by firing 666 rounds in a single minute.

That's 11 times a second

that complex operation is happening inside the gun.

So, it's that level of automation

that's the quantum leap you were describing?

That's right. As long as you keep pulling the trigger

it keeps firing, as long as there are cartridges to fire.

This is what made it different. You didn't need any physical effort,

it's much easier than firing a rifle,

it's certainly much easier

than firing any of the automatic weapons that went before it.

It was an immediate sensation,

it was reported in the papers,

and the greatest and good in society came round to Hatton Garden

to have a look at the gun, and some of them even fired it,

including the Prince of Wales - later King Edward VII.

According to Maxim, it was Edward VII - Prince Edward -

who persuaded the Kaiser to go and have a look at the Maxim gun.

And what about military commanders,

are they quick to seize the opportunity presented by the gun?

Armies were not yet convinced that it would be of use to them.

One of the reasons was that at the time people used cartridges

which were propelled by gunpowder.

Gunpowder makes an awful lot of smoke.

So, if you were firing a Maxim gun

you'd make a lovely target on the battlefield

because of a huge plume of gunpowder smoke rising up from you.

The big change came when a French scientist

invented smokeless propellant for cartridges in the mid-1880s.

So, overnight, it made the Maxim gun ten times more effective

and interesting to armies than it previously had been.

It seems inconceivable to me that, plume of smoke or not,

a gun that fires 666 rounds a minute wouldn't just be lapped up.

It was to do with the mindset.

The British started showing how they could be used

because they used them in colonial campaigns,

used them against people who obviously weren't armed

with sophisticated modern weapons, but they were very effective.

But that also dissuaded armies in Europe from getting very excited,

because they thought, "This is a weapon for colonial wars.

"It's not a weapon for the European battlefield."

The man then called Britain's greatest living soldier

typified his country's inconsistency towards the machine gun.

In 1898, General Horatio Herbert Kitchener deployed Maxim guns

to devastating effect against Mahdist fundamentalists in Sudan.

16 years later, Kitchener became Secretary of State for War.

And despite what he'd seen in Africa,

the war Kitchener planned for Europe

was not a war of machine guns.

Nobody could have imagined

what the First World War was going to be like.

I mean, let's look back at the previous 20 or 30 years

of British military history before 1914.

Small colonial wars, wars fought against unequal native opposition.

Nobody understood the great industrial power

that would be unleashed on the Western Front after 1914.

Would it be fair to say

they couldn't imagine what the war was going to be like

because they were 19th-century soldiers

confronting a 20th-century war?

I think the central problem here

is that people like Kitchener and his subordinate field commanders

who took command of the armies in the field

still dreamed of a battlefield

where men showed individual dash,

heroism, courage, initiative,

and that they would lay the conditions on the front

for the use of this wonderful, wonderful piece of weaponry

which the British had.

Not the machine gun, no, but the cavalry, the "armes blanches".

The horse thundering into the enemy lines

and cutting apart the opposition -

that's got a much more heroic image

than firing lead bullets at serried ranks of men.

British politicians, in the main, shared Kitchener's view,

but the lack of British interest

didn't stop Maxim finding customers overseas.

He went off on tours around Europe

showing it to all the powers of Europe, basically.

He showed it to the Chinese and so on,

so he was showing it all over,

and would do demonstrations to show how effective a weapon it was.

When these countries decided to issue it to their armies,

they generally made arrangements with Maxim's company

to produce under licence.

So, a surprisingly sophisticated European arms industry,

many of whom licensed out their products

to their competitors and rivals.

And this is indeed what happened with the Maxim gun -

it was made under licence in Germany.

Maxim's gun had been created on these British streets,

but it was the German army

who would be the first to appreciate its value on the battlefield.

In the whole of 1914,

British factories produced fewer than 400 Maxim guns.

German factories produced 500...

every month.

This is an army that's thought deeply about it

and invested a lot of money.

They began the war with 5,500 of these weapons.

They reckoned that each gun was worth 80 riflemen

in terms of firepower.

Now, that can have a distinct effect on the battlefield.

And ready to face those German guns

were the men of the Portree company.

On 19th February 1915,

after six months of training in Bedford,

they began their journey to the front line.

More than two days after arriving on French soil,

their train finally ground to a halt right here,

at the little station of Merville.

They had travelled crammed into horse-cars, 34 men in each.

Portree's Saturday Night Soldiers had come to war.

The Territorials had arrived just a few miles from the front line.

A whole new and terrifying world...

..punctuated by the crash of artillery shells

and the rattle of the machine guns.

MACHINE GUNS RATTLE

Letters from the front were censored.

Private John MacFarlane, the stonemason's son,

painted a reassuring picture for his mother back in Portree.

"My dear Mother, we meet quite a number of soldiers

"who have been in the trenches,

"and they tell us they are not half so bad as people imagine.

"We are quite well and enjoying the fun immensely.

"Much love to all, Johnnie."

The Great War had begun in speed and movement.

The Germans had attacked Paris and had been beaten back.

The Allies had raced to secure the Channel ports,

but by the end of 1914 all movement had ended.

What remained was a tactical stalemate,

with the Germans dug in to reinforced positions,

defended by 5,000 machine guns.

For the Germans, the machine gun has suddenly become the key weapon.

It's central to their defensive system.

The machine gun is now the queen of the battlefield.

It gives them so many advantages in defending their positions.

I mean, look across the road to that bunker across there,

probably built in 1915.

It was there for a specific purpose, to defend this area.

This gives the Germans a priceless advantage

because, in the hands of a determined machine gun crew,

this position is pretty well impregnable.

'And this is a genuine German World War I Maxim gun.

'They called it a Spandau.

'A century old, extremely rare, and still absolutely deadly.

'This was the weapon that had changed everything.'

The German soldier and the British soldier

only had five- to ten-shot bolt-action rifles.

Now, you can imagine the amount of firepower

that can be brought about by those,

but times that by ten and you've got the Maxim gun.

-Can I have a go?

-Certainly.

-Safety on?

-The safety's on at the moment.

What I want you to do is, with your right hand gripping the pistol grip,

-then just bring it up into the shoulder.

-Yeah.

OK, and if you just see there's a little safety catch

-on the side of the pistol grip.

-Pull it back?

-Yeah.

If you now want to align this gun onto the target

and then have a couple of bursts.

SHORT BURST OF GUNFIRE

That's some awful difference from the Brown Bess, isn't it?

It certainly is, yeah.

And that would have been the last sound

heard by thousands upon thousands of men 100 years ago.

WHISTLE BLOWS

MACHINE GUNS RATTLE

'To demonstrate the full power of this vintage weapon,

'we employed some very modern technology.'

This is a block of ballistic gel.

It's a material designed to demonstrate what happens

when a bullet passes through human flesh.

And we're going to fire this bullet through it.

GEL THUMPS

'Slowed down by a specialist high-speed camera,

'the effect of one bullet on the gel, or the human body,

'is truly chilling.'

We've got the entry wound.

As you can see, the entry wound is very small,

and this replicates what it would be like on a human being.

Now, the main trauma that's happened to the body,

if we look to the front here,

can you see this massive cavity that we've got inside the gel?

This is where the round has entered the sealed unit of the body

and it's created this massive energy moving in there.

So, that's an open space, or it's churned-up flesh inside.

It certainly is. Inside a human being we've got bones, organs -

all of these could be ruptured, fractured

or even broken by that energy,

creating a massive trauma within the person.

-And that's a single bullet.

-That's a single bullet, yeah.

And we've been looking at a machine gun

that can fire hundreds of rounds a minute.

Right, here we go.

HE FIRES SHORT BURST

'We tried the experiment again to mimic repeated rapid fire.

'What we discovered was shocking.'

What do you notice about the two bullets that we've got there?

They are pointing back the way they came.

They certainly are. This is known as "tumbling".

This is basically where the round enters the body,

and then once it strikes matter within the body,

such as bones or soft flesh, it begins to tumble

and cut the area around which it's sort of passing through.

The bullet's not making a smooth path through the body.

It's churning and spinning, and mincing the flesh.

It certainly is.

'This destructive power, this gut-wrenching power

'was what the Portree men were set to face.'

Military maps called it the Moated Grange,

a farmhouse north-east of the village of Neuve-Chapelle.

It was here that the Portree Territorials

would face the German machine guns for the first time.

For two nights, 10th and 11th March 1915,

they had defended the farmhouse.

On the third night, and armed only with Lee Enfield rifles,

they were ordered towards the German machine guns.

The men were exhausted after two nights without sleep.

They marched across here in single file,

past wounded men crying out for water.

When they reached a point around here,

with the German trenches about 100 yards away in that direction,

they were ordered to stop and to lie down in a turnip field

and await orders.

They lay there in the mud with rifle fire, machine-gun fire,

and flares and artillery blazing away overhead.

But despite the noise and the flashes,

some of them still managed to get some sleep.

By dusk that night, they were ordered to withdraw.

But as they stood up and turned for home,

the Germans troops opened fire on them again

with machine gun and artillery.

Private John Kennedy, the man from Bayfield,

the man who worked for MacBrayne's ferries,

was fatally injured.

Three others were seriously wounded,

among them Sergeant Willie Ross's brother Angus,

and Roddy Kemp, the tailor's son.

The battle that had raged in these fields,

the battle of Neuve-Chapelle, was a strategic failure...

at a great cost.

Over 11,000 Allied troops killed, wounded or missing.

That's an unspent round.

Cartridge and bullet.

That's one that's been fired.

Some unidentifiable-to-me bit of kit.

It's quite exciting at first when you spot this stuff,

but then you remember what it's all about.

And it's this that these fields are sown with,

apart from any crop for people to eat,

it's steel and brass and lead from the First World War.

And it's stuff like this that was flying around their heads

and cutting them to bits.

Six days after the battle, John MacFarlane wrote home once again.

"My dear Mother,

"no doubt you will have seen in the papers

"John Kennedy was killed.

"Things like that you know must be.

"Now we are quite used to shot and shell.

"The only thing that pains me is you worrying so much about me.

"Your loving son, Johnnie."

After Neuve-Chapelle,

the Portree company were ordered back to the reserve lines.

Two months of relative calm,

a time of church parades, of route marches.

But then, on 11th May,

the company were dispatched to a new base,

in an orchard north of the village of Festubert.

Six days later, the Territorials would be ordered to attack

and would face all the terrible power of the German machine guns.

They had the misfortune to come up against a Jager Battalion,

the 11th Battalion from Marburg in Hessen,

who were regular troops.

They were elite,

they were above average in infantry skills, shooting,

and they also had their own machine-gun company,

so they had six guns.

Long before the war had begun, German military scientists

had conducted experiments in how best to deploy this new weapon.

They tested all kinds of things -

the ballistics, the patterns that the bullets formed,

the way they flew through the air -

so that's quite important in overhead fire.

People assume that you blaze away at troops attacking to your front.

That is not how you used machine guns then or, indeed, today.

The key is to have them firing from a flank

with fire intersecting with another gun, or guns,

so you create a complete dense zone in front of the position -

known as the killing zone, because that's exactly what happens -

where you concentrate the fire of these weapons,

and you try and ensure that

nobody can pass through this curtain of fire.

So, if you don't hit one man,

you'll hit the man on his right or the one beyond him.

So, in the brutal science of killing zones,

it is a more efficient use of your fire.

So, rather than targeting individuals,

you're creating a force field of bullets in front of your position

that no-one can penetrate?

A skilled gunner with a number two putting the ammunition in

and keeping it going continuously

can hold the trigger and with his hand

can tap the gun steadily,

a little bit at a time, right out to one extremity of the traverse,

and then take the gun the other way.

This keeps a continuous stream of bullets

going through the air into this zone.

'This technique of firing from the flanks,

'known to the military as "enfilade",

'dated back to the time of bows and arrows.

'In the flat land around Festubert,

'enfilade fire from skilled machine gunners

'could devastate an attacking force.'

What exactly were the Skye men here at Festubert to do?

The Skye men were on the south of the British line,

and they had a specific objective.

It was to attack the German lines,

hold it and maintain their hold on it.

The classic task of infantrymen.

Can you orientate me on the field here?

Where would the opposing forces have been?

Well, for the 4th Camerons, this was their target.

We can see this line here,

that's all that remains of the trench system.

It was called a breastwork, because this is very flat country,

you can't dig down too deep without getting into water,

so it was built up here along this line of grass.

'This British military map, dated April 1915,

'has the German breastwork marked, hurriedly, in pencil.

'600 yards away, across a muddy field

'strewn with water-filled ditches was reference point L4,

'the very position where the Portree men would begin their attack.'

And what about machine guns?

Who had them? Where were they? How were they used?

In this particular line,

one position was there on the right flank,

probably three or four machine guns there,

and here, where we're standing, on the left flank,

was the other German machine-gun position.

And it becomes quite obvious why they've done it,

because the machine guns on either side of the German line

put up a field of fire

which makes a pretty well impossible opposition

for any attacking force.

'On 17th May, just hours before the attack,

'Company Sergeant Major Willie Ross, the Portree postman,

'wrote home to his 17-year-old daughter.'

"My dear Anna, I have just got your tobacco and matches

"and I am enjoying a smoke of the good old twist.

"Give my love to dearest Mama,

"and may God bless and watch over you all."

ARTILLERY THUNDERS

'In advance of the attack, the British artillery

'had launched a colossal 48-hour barrage on the German positions.'

It was standard infantry practice

in the British Army at that time in the war.

You lay artillery fire down on the enemy position

in the hope that you're going to destroy the breastwork,

so that the British infantry can then stream through it.

And at the same time, you hope that the artillery fire

is going to destroy barbed wire,

and is also going to destroy

the machine-gun positions at either side.

Unfortunately, that didn't happen,

with the result that by the time the Camerons reached the German line,

the defences were still pretty much intact.

And for an infantryman, that really is dispiriting.

'At 6.30pm the German Jager - or "hunter" - Battalion,

'were reinforced by two companies of Bavarian reservists.

'At exactly the same time, and 600 yards across the muddy field,

'the Portree and Kingussie companies lined up,

'joined on their right flank by two companies from the Bedford Regiment.'

Their attack was put together in a hurry,

so there was no time or opportunity to plan it properly.

They were going over ground that they had never seen.

They also had no idea of the strength of the enemy

and only a slight indication

of where there might be some machine guns.

At 7.30pm the order was given -

first line 4th Camerons, charge.

As soon as they stepped forward they were engaged by machine-gun fire,

firing in enfilade.

They were in a classic kill zone.

The commanding officer, Captain MacDonald, the Portree lawyer,

was shot through the throat.

His Company Sergeant Major, Willie Ross, ran to assist him.

Realising that MacDonald would be doing no more fighting,

Ross took command and led a bayonet charge towards the German trench.

They got into the trench.

Four German soldiers raised their hands as if to surrender,

but when Ross dropped his guard,

those same four turned on Ross and shot him dead.

This act, this cowardly act, unleashed Highland fury,

and those four, in fact all the Germans in the trench,

were shot and killed.

The Portree men had made it,

but already four of their comrades lay dead and dying in the mud.

Under deadly machine-gun fire,

the Bedford companies had been forced back.

Only the Portree men and their comrades from the Kingussie company

had made it to the German trenches.

700 miles from home, the Scotsmen had made it as far as this trench.

Taking it had been a nightmare,

holding onto it would be harder still.

The trench itself was shallow, so offered scant protection

from machine-gun fire and heavy artillery.

By the early hours of the morning, with no relief in sight,

the men were running out of options.

The commanding officer, Captain John Campbell of the Kingussie company,

ordered a retreat.

Minutes later, Campbell himself was shot and killed, pistol in hand,

while attempting to cover the escape.

The survivors crawled through the mud and ditches,

all the way back to the British lines.

The retreat would claim the lives of a further four Portree men.

A single night of battle,

and the power and positioning of the German guns

had devastated a faraway Highland community.

Back in Portree, it was Captain MacDonald's maidservant,

Maggie Matheson, who first heard the news.

Maggie cried out in a panic,

"They're all killed! All the boys are killed in the war!"

Official telegrams told of men dead, injured, or missing, presumed dead.

That morning, 13 telegrams arrived in Portree.

Here, at what was the Lodge,

Kate MacDonald read that her eldest son William was presumed dead.

Back in Mill Road, and here at Number 1,

Mrs MacLeod learned of the death of her eldest son, Donald.

Into Bosville Terrace.

Thomas Turnbull, the plasterer, is told that

his eldest son, William, is presumed dead.

Here, the family of Company Sergeant William Ross

are told of his death.

All three of Donald Kemp's sons fought at Festubert.

Remarkably, all three survived.

To Back Wentworth Street.

John Grant, the stable boy - presumed dead.

Back on Bayfield, John Nicholson, the fisherman - dead.

Down on the harbour, John MacFarlane, who'd written home so many times -

he was dead too.

And Private Charles Sinclair, the celestial navigator,

he was dead as well.

A few weeks later, his mum was sent his personal effects,

including a tiny shattered compass.

Their commanding officer, Captain MacDonald,

never recovered from his throat wound.

He died in France a year later.

28 Portree men had left from this harbour.

They had sung God Save The King.

One night at Festubert had claimed ten of them.

Only eight would survive the war.

Later that awful day, the horrors of Festubert

arrived at the doors of Portree's old village school.

The children would have been taken out of class individually,

their mother would have come to the school,

and they would have been told that their dad,

or maybe their big brother, was dead.

The great Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean

was himself a pupil at the school

a decade after the war,

and he would come to describe how the horrors of Festubert

were brought home to the children of Portree.

'S dairirich nan gunnachan beaga

Is dairirich nan gunnachan mora...

-TRANSLATION:

-Rattle of the little guns

And clangour of the big guns

Heavy doors being shut with the blast and crash of tempest

Whizz and whine of the shells

About Festubert of the mud and bloodshed

Big, heavy doors shutting on many a brave, strong young man

And the children going home

To weeping

Or to silence.

..Agus a chlann a-dol dhachaigh

Gu caoineadh neo gu tost.

The death of so many Portree men, the death of millions like them,

proved the grim value of the machine gun.

In 1914, Britain had produced fewer than 400 of these weapons.

In the last year of the war, she produced 41,000.

As machine guns came to be used in the British order of battle,

so, too, was it easier for commanders to direct a battle

without the terror of sending young men into the fight

with only their courage and their bare breast to protect them.

So, all this took time,

but it was a question, by the end of the war, of better late than never.

The weapon that had once been considered dishonourable, unethical

had been taken to the heart

of British and European military strategy.

For years to come, and all across the world,

mothers and fathers would pay the deadly price of

Mr Maxim's ingenious invention.

And in Portree, one particular father would raise a lasting tribute

to his fallen son.

The young letter writer, Private John MacFarlane,

his body was never found,

and it was his dad, Thomas, who built this memorial,

in tribute to the men of the village

and in memory of his son, lost for ever to the guns of Festubert.