[ Quebec Home Guard Gewehr 71/84 ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're taking a look
at a rifle that looks like it has been badly sporterised.
In fact it has been rather substantially sporterised.
However, it was done by a formal official organisation,
and that means it's historic, and not just bubba.
Now our story here has a lot of twists and turns to it,
but it begins in the late 1860s, when the Vatican is
fighting against becoming unified with the rest of Italy.
The campaign to unify Italy is going on,
the future first king of Italy is intent on taking Rome and making it part of his kingdom.
And the forces defending the Papacy, defending the Vatican,
include a bunch of volunteers from other countries.
Specifically in the form of what are called Papal Zouave units.
They dress in the uniform of basically the French Zouave.
A lot of countries did that, we had some of that in the US Civil War.
At any rate, among all of these guys are seven contingents of Canadians,
primarily Canadians from Quebec, the French speaking and more Catholic part of Canada.
They group up, form some units, sail over.
Some of them get there in time to do some fighting, they lose.
Some of them don't get there in time, and turn around and come back home to Canada.
But they maintained their organisation in Canada as the Quebec Zouave Regiment.
... And the intent was to basically protect the Church, protect ... Roman Catholic values.
And their influence would wane over time,
but I believe they actually still exist as an organisation to this day.
Now if we switch gears a little bit, our story turns to Germany,
where we have this rifle being built.
This is a Mauser Model 71/84, it is basically a single-shot 11mm black-powder Mauser
that has been redesigned and updated to be a
Kropatschek-style, tube magazine-fed repeating rifle, that's the "84" part.
These were adopted by the German military but only lasted a few years
until they were replaced by Gewehr 88s, and then henceforth Mauser 98s.
So the Germans have a bunch of Gewehr 71/84s, and a lot of them get sold off as surplus.
Now this particular one did see military service,
we have a unit mark on the butt plate, which you'll see in a minute.
It gets sold off as surplus. Ultimately it winds up in the hands of Francis Bannerman,
who is a huge surplus dealer located in New York state.
He has built a giant concrete castle on an island in the Hudson River
to hold all of his tremendous amount of military surplus equipment,
and firearms, and ammunition, and you name it.
Now, fast forward a decade or two: World War One breaks out.
The Canadians are worried about defending Canada,
and there is an establishment of a number of home guards.
Now the Montreal Home Guard has some money, and they go down to the US to Savage,
and they order a whole batch of brand-new .303 Savage calibre
Savage Model 99 lever action rifles.
Very fancy, cutting edge, great rifles.
The Quebec Home Guard from Quebec city, they don't quite have so much money to work with.
So instead they go to Francis Bannerman and they say,
"What can we get with just a few of these Canadian dollars?"
And Francis Bannerman sells them 300 or 400 Mauser 71/84 rifles like this one.
Original configuration, full length, fully functional, just like this.
And these become the standard armament of the Quebec Home Guard during World War One.
They are in fact the only Mauser rifles, I believe,
ever to be formally issued by the Canadian government.
So World War One goes on for a couple of years.
The Germans never do successfully invade Quebec.
But the Quebec Home Guard, the Montreal Home Guard, those guys were there just in case.
And as soon as the war is over, the guns go into storage. Except for a batch of them
that are instead eventually transferred to the Quebec Papal Zouave ... Regiment.
So that is what we have here, let me show you what they did to it.
So this originally started out as a German military rifle.
And we have a German military unit mark and rack number right there on the butt plate,
which is how the Germans typically marked these things.
Then after being surplused it ended up at Bannerman, and then purchased by Quebec.
These were all marked with QHG (Quebec Home Guard) rack numbers.
And this is number 192, out of a total of about 300 or 400,
... I don't know of an exact number, but they were all marked this way.
At this point still as original configuration, fully functional 71/84 Mausers.
However, by the time that these got into the hands of the Quebec Zouaves,
that organisation had been relegated ... to an entirely ceremonial purpose.
And by that time, after World War One,
they were basically ceremonial guards in Church parades and that sort of thing.
So they took these rifles and cut them down.
For comparison here on the top is actually one of the
Quebec Home Guard guns that was not cut down, that didn't go to the Zouaves.
And here's what the Zouaves did to them.
So normally you had a magazine tube that was continuing in here,
and they went ahead and plugged that up. You can see the wood plug there.
They cut the end of the barrel down.
And my goodness, they did a really, really crude job of it, they just hacksawed those things off.
And they relocated, sort of, the front sight,
except that's not intended to be a front sight, it's just there for a bayonet.
Not an actual Mauser bayonet mind you,
but rather a British Snider bayonet that has been cut down to 10 inches long,
given a new point, and had its socket attachment equally crudely redone.
So this does in fact fit onto the cut down barrel there.
We can roll that over, lock it in place.
Now you see why they need that sort of vestigial front sight,
so that the bayonet gets locked in place.
You can't get a good view inside there, but they have also removed the magazine spring and follower.
And also removed the magazine cut off elements.
And these were used simply as single-shot, blank-firing rifles for ceremony and nothing else.
But they did go so far as to make new scabbards for the cut-down bayonets.
So, a triangular socket in there, that fits in nicely.
So they cut the [scabbard] down and then riveted on a brass tip to it.
The frog is actually also surplus still, from the Quebec Home Guard.
So this was the frog for number 200, these were made for the Quebec Home Guard in 1914,
along with belts for the guys, and we can see this is number 197.
So this isn't quite a matching set, we've got rifle 192, belt number 197,
and frog, or hanger, number 200.
But this is what the Quebec Home Guard were using for drill during World War One.
And that was just carried over to the Zouaves,
who took this gear and were happy to use it themselves.
Was that a winding enough story for you?
You know, most of the time if you were to run into a rifle like this,
that's had the magazine bits removed, the forend cut down,
the barrel cut off in such an incredibly crude way,
you'd look at that and go, "That is a worthless piece of junk."
But every once in a while it turns out that something like that was actually done
en masse by some organisation that had a particular reason for doing it,
not a guy in his garage with unfortunate notions of gunsmithing skills.
So I think it's really cool to, every once in a while, to see something like this
and be able to trace its history all the way back to the roots where it came from.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.