So imagine yourself for a moment to be a German soldier in the trenches of World War One.
It's 1915, or maybe 1916 or even 1917, and the fighting has stagnated.
You can't leave the trenches for fear of getting shot. Anyone sticks their head up above the parapet gets a bullet.
How do you fight the enemy? How do you even watch the enemy? What can you do when
your life is forfeit if you go above the level of that parapet?
Well, there are options. Creative people come up with creative interesting ideas.
And one of those ideas was the periscope rifle,
like this.
Thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten Weapons guys. I'm Ian,
I'm up here at the James Julia Auction House again.
And we're taking a look at some of the guns
and the accessories that ... are coming up
for sale in their October of 2015 auction.
So periscope rifles like this were developed and used
by pretty much every country in World War One.
The French, the British, the Germans, the Austrians, the Russians,
probably all of the smaller nations as well, in at least small numbers.
And the idea is pretty simple. It's a way to put a rifle up over the parapet of the trench
while you keep your own head safely down behind cover.
We have a mirror right here, and another mirror up here
So that your line of sight comes down here,
goes up inside, and then right down the sights.
And you can actually aim and fire.
Now this is one of the simplest versions.
It holds the rifle, we have this wire, which you'll see up close in a minute.
The trigger mechanism on this sort of setup is also pretty darn simple.
There is going to be a lever in here, so when you pull the trigger you are pulling this wire,
which runs from inside, comes up through the top of the wood stock,
up to a little roller here in the middle of the periscope.
And then it comes across, it's going to go through the sling swivel,
and then originally there would have been a little square metal bracket
that would loop around the outside of the trigger guard.
This one that's missing, so someone has simply tied the wire into a loop that hooks around the trigger.
And when you pull the trigger on the rifle,
you can see how that works, it's going to tighten up and fire the actual rifle.
However with ... a setup like this, you would have to after every shot pull the rifle down and cycle the bolt.
There were versions made that actually had articulated levers set up so that you could run the bolt
while still down behind cover. Obviously a little more complex.
This is sort of a mid-range version. It's fairly simple, it doesn't have a bolt actuator mechanism,
but it is factory produced. It's got a maker's mark back here.
And below this sort of grade you would also have some that would have been simply cobbled together in the field.
People building an articulated thing.
It's pretty easy to do, two 45 degree angles, mount a couple of mirrors and a wire for the trigger, and away you go.
They are very, very rare today.
You know, ... when you put this thing on the rifle, you don't ... necessarily realise it
until you've actually got it all assembled: that makes for a really big, clunky, obnoxious thing.
And it is not the sort of piece of hardware that would be likely to come back as a souvenir with someone.
If you ran into this and you're a doughboy in the US military,
you're probably going to get this thing gone and throw it away, and bring this nice Mauser rifle back instead.
Now in addition to this trench periscope mount,
there are also a couple of other really cool World War One modifications on this particular rifle.
The first and most obvious is the trench magazine.
This is a 20 round fixed magazine.
The Germans actually issued these in some number, they're not super-duper rare, they are out there.
And there are also reproductions of them if you would like to get a cheap one to add to any old rifle.
And the idea of this was simply to give you more ammunition at your disposal before you had to reload.
I've seen period pictures of sentries outfitted with these trench mags.
It's just less reloading means more shooting.
In addition we also have ... a very cool adaptation here of luminous sights.
Now the half-life on the radioactive compound that was in there is long, long ... over,
so these are completely dead at this point.
But this would have given you two horizontal luminous lines and a big ol' dot on your front sight.
And that gives you a way to actually aim in the dark.
It's the exact same sort of thing that is fairly typically found on defensive pistols today, or police pistols.
Make the sights glow in the dark, and it gets a lot easier to shoot at night.
So as best I can tell, the official German name for a setup like this would be "Spiegelkolben".
So it's easier to search for information by that name a little bit.
If you look for "periscope" you often find simple just periscopes,
which were also used in the trenches as a way to observe.
I ... was able to get a shot through the sights. Unfortunately the mirrors in this one,
they are original mirrors, and ... they're wearing, they've got some gunk on them.
So it's a little bit tricky to see the sight picture, but this actually lines up very well.
Now originally there would have been one more cross bolt, right here, to secure the rifle in place.
That's gone at this point unfortunately. ...
So if you were to fire this, the recoil would probably jar your sight picture off.
Well, thanks for watching guys. I hope you enjoyed the video.
I have seen a few of these around before, but this has been my first chance to really
get my hands on one, and they're really cool.
You know it's ... kind of a simple thing, some clever person I'm sure
came up with this, and I don't know which side on the war came up with it first.
Or if, more likely, a bunch of people all kind of came up with the same idea simultaneously.
But it's very rare to find an original one of these setups here in the United States.
They're rare even in Europe, where they all originally were and where they stayed.
If you'd like to own this one yourself it is for sale. This entire kit, and there is some other stuff.
In fact, there's one other cool piece of trench modification that comes with this, that wasn't installed.
So if you want to see that, as well as the description, and pictures, and
everything else that the Julia Auction House has on this rifle, take a look in the description text below.
There's a link there to their catalogue page on this lot, this rifle and its accessories.
So check it out, and place a bid on-line if you'd like it, or come up here to Maine and enjoy the auction in person.
Thanks for watching.
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