Harpers Weekly, 4/4/1903

For a week the active man of military service and the active man of business who had come back to smell powder and renew the martial spirit of his youth went into every detail of the maneuvers. They took a Krag Jorgensen rifle and had a private hit a tree more than a mile away. The Springfields of a dozen years ago couldn’t shoot more than 1500 yards or three quarters of the distance the Krags shoot. Then the general told of the new Springfields which have been adopted by the army to supplant the Krags, and his eyes snapped as he did so. Out in the Philippines and in China he told how scores of the men, as they warmed to their work and grew excited, were found “shooting air” instead of cartridges out of their guns. In the excitement they forgot to recharge the magazines. All that is gone now. The brand new Springfield is entirely encased in wood, and the soldier can handle it in comfort at all times. It is lighter than the Krag and weighs only seven and one half pounds. But most important of all, when the soldier has fired all of the cartridges in his clip, he is unable to go through the motions of shooting the weapon again-that is, he can’t shoot air-until he has recharged the gun. The barrel has also been shortened to the length of the carbine, and hereafter the infantry and cavalry will carry the same weapon. Whether the soldier is a mounted infantryman or a dismounted cavalryman, or just a plain infantryman or cavalryman, his gun will be the same and only one kind of ammunition needs to be supplied. Then, too, the private soldier of today, it was seen at a glance, is more than one hundred times as efficient as a shooter, when it is realized that he carries with him in his compact belt 150 cartridges where he used to carry only fifty. Right there is the secret of his ability to march farther and to go on long “hikes”, where his range of action formerly was limited to the necessity of keeping closer in touch with his ammunition supply.