As a result both the Krag and the Gatling gun won their respective contests with the SMLE and Vickers respectively when those should've been easy wins for the Brits had the operators been equal.
That would be the SMLE that was fast enough and accurate enough that the Germans thought it was machine gun fire?
The fast-operating Lee bolt-action and large magazine capacity enabled a well-trained rifleman to perform the "Mad minute" firing 20 to 30 aimed rounds in 60 seconds, making the Lee-Enfield the fastest military bolt-action rifle of the day. The current world record for aimed bolt-action fire was set in 1914 by a musketry instructor in the British Army—Sergeant Instructor Snoxall—who placed 38 rounds into a 12-inch-wide (300 mm) target at 300 yards (270 m) in one minute. Some straight-pull bolt-action rifles were thought faster, but lacked the simplicity, reliability, and generous magazine capacity of the Lee-Enfield. First World War accounts tell of British troops repelling German attackers who subsequently reported that they had encountered machine guns, when in fact it was simply a group of trained riflemen armed with SMLE Mk III rifles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Enfield
The Krag's complex design was outclassed by the Spanish Mauser during the Spanish American War, and proved ill-suited for use in tropical locales such as Cuba and the Philippines. Slower to load than Mauser-derived designs, American soldiers found themselves unable to match the volume of fire displayed by the Spanish 1893 Mauser rifle, whose high-velocity 7mm bullet was quickly dubbed the 'Spanish Hornet'. During the American assault on the strategic Cuban city of Santiago, a small force of 750 Spanish troops armed with Model 1893 Mauser rifles defended positions on San Juan and Kettle hills. The attacking force consisted of approximately 6,600 American soldiers, most of them regulars, armed with the then-new smokeless-powder Krag-Jorgensen rifle and supported by artillery and Gatling gun fire. Though the assault was successful, the Americans soon realized that they had suffered more than 1,400 casualties in the assault. A U.S board of investigation concluded that the casualties were primarily due to the superior firepower of the Spanish Model 1893 Mauser rifles. Consequently, the Krag has the dubious distinction of the shortest service life of any standard-issue firearm in US military history (1892–1903).
The Krag was completely phased out of service in the Regular Army by 1907, as M1903 Springfields became available
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_Model_1892-99