ENTERTAINMENT

For more than two centuries of warfare, infantrymen fought with muskets: long, heavy, muzzle-loaded guns fired from the shoulder with jolting recoil and wild inaccuracy.

In the Peninsular War in Portugal and Spain (1807-14) a British officer calculated that a soldier of the line would fire his musket 459 times before hitting an enemy target. The musket worked just fine against game when hunters had time to aim and fire, but men in the heat and chaos of battle needed a weapon that would improve their efficiency in killing the enemy.

American Rifle, Alexander Rose's irresistible history, re-creates the evolution of a seemingly elementary idea: that a spinning projectile travels farther and with more accuracy than a non-spinning projectile.

This principle, as old as archery, in which arrows were discovered to fly faster and truer when they were "fletched" or feathered, was first applied to firearms by German gunsmiths. In the mid-15th century these artisans carved a helical pattern of grooves inside a gun barrel to impart a spin to the lead ball it fired. The guns were called riffeln (from the German "to cut or groove"), and thereafter the "rifle" revolutionized weaponry and warfare.

Following this account of the origin of rifling and the rifle Mr. Rose's spirited narrative is directed to the development of rifles in America, the first ones manufactured in Lancaster, Pa., in 1719, followed by the rise of the "Kentucky rifle," 4 feet or more long, issued in models of .45 or .50 caliber, made famous west of the Cumberland Mountains by Daniel Boone and other wilderness nimrods.

By the time of the Revolution, the rifle was replacing the smoothbore musket, a development not lost on such a shrewd observer as John Adams, who in 1775 wrote his wife, Abigail, of a "peculiar kind of musket, called a rifle" that he said "has grooves within the barrel, and carries a ball with great exactness to great distances."

The first battle proof of the superiority of the rifle was enacted at King's Mountain in South Carolina on Oct. 7, 1780, when 900 rifle-armed frontiersmen faced 1,125 British musket-armed infantrymen. The butcher's bill told the tale: over 400 Redcoats killed or wounded against 90 American casualties.

The history of the American rifle, now nearly 300 years in the making, has been one of a bewildering progression of improvements to the basic rifling concept: mass production, standardization, muzzle-loading to breech-loading, introductions of metallic cartridges, smokeless powder, lever and bolt-action, semi- and full-automatic weapons with ammunition fed by clip, belt, tube, magazine and canister.

A condensation of the progress of the American rifle is provided in the author's richly detailed account of how the U.S. armed forces arrived at today's standard infantry weapon, the .223 caliber air-cooled, gas-operated, magazine-fed semi-automatic United States Rifle II, the M16.

Mr. Rose concludes by stating that rifle development has reached "the beginning of the end of the road" and that "the likelihood is that for some years to come the rifle of the future will be the rifle of the past."

American Rifle, a biography of a revolutionary idea, is ingeniously conceived, deftly written and thoroughly engrossing.

Dale L. Walker of El Paso is author of many historical books.

American Rifle

A Biography

Alexander Rose

(Delacorte Press, $30)