Okay I'll have one more crack at this before I reluctantly cut the whole damn thing loose and watch it drift away.

If you have a look at the history (something I am want to do), the whole "mad minute" thing appears to be little more than an amalgam of fact and fiction that, over time, has morphed into a legend.

Essentially two roughly parallel strands have been merged to fabricate the legend. On the one hand we have pre-WW 1 British Army rifle training that incorporated what was known at the time (by the troops) as a 'mad minute' proficiency test. This required individual riflemen to shoot X number of aimed rounds in the space of one minute. However, success with the test wasn't judged on the number of recorded shots. To pass the proficiency test, those shots actually had to strike the designated target. So, in short what we have here is a rifle range test that cannot be duplicated during an attack on an actual battlefield. It can't be duplicated because, obviously enough, in such circumstances you can't actually verify the accuracy of the shooting. That's the first problem.

Secondly, at the Battle of Mons, in 1914, the Germans were said to have been stopped in their tracks by rifle fire from the BEF so rapid and withering in nature that the Germans believed it to be machine gun fire. This series of infantry actions has also come to be commonly referred to as "mad minute" rifle fire. Unfortunately, this story also has its problems. Firstly, the BEF didn't stop the Germans at Mons and secondly, German records of the action make no specific reference to withering British machine gun fire. The German reports make a clear distinction between rifle and machine gun fire during the battle. What is more, German casualty figures for the battle do not support the British contention that the Germans came on as a grey horde only to be shot down in droves by highly proficient British rifle fire. That's the second problem. The Battle of Mons, as it came to be portrayed in the British/commonwealth press, was largely a fiction.

So, to conclude, we have two major problems with the whole mad minute firing thing. To conduct a "mad minute" rifle fire test you need to be able to verify the accuracy of the shooting and to do that you need marked targets. What exactly some twat with a stopwatch would be measuring in a trench line on Gallipoli as the troops blazed away at the Turks would be anyone's guess. And what was this bloke to do if the guy he was timing got shot? Would he stop the test and move to the next guy down the line and start the test all over again? This is of course complete nonsense. And finally, the whole premise on which mad minute rifle fire is supposed to have taken place, the British action against the Germans at the Battle of Mons is, in all probability, largely propaganda.