Great find!!! This is an extremely hard to find reference (at least it was), but I have seen these plates before. Indeed this is a typology of these arms, but the notches not shown. Remember that it is my impression these were a field addition, not a regulation feature.
The examples depicted in Wagner were certainly anomalies, remember only five of all shown have these, and these were all weapons which had been in service collected in the museums noted. I thought perhaps these might have been artistic license, so I wrote to the museums cited by Wagner as I mentioned earlier. In each case, photographs of the actual weapons depicted in the drawings indeed had the notch! However, none of the officials had given this any notice, and had no idea what these were for.
Nice job in finding this reference!!! I always wanted one of those Austrian disc hilt M1769 since working on a history of the British M1796.
|