British Infantry Officers Battle Swords in the 19th C...and up to 1914

[Will M]

I wonder was the intent for sword wounds to kill or put out of action. The later takes up much more resources of the enemy. A good dismembering cut would be as deadly as a thrust. Like any wound dependent on its location and quantity. It is more natural to cut then thrust, a cut moves faster unless you are mounted and moving.

[Radboud]

Originally Posted by Will M

It is more natural to cut then thrust, a cut moves faster unless you are mounted and moving.

It is more natural to cut, or more accurately describe it "swing" an object about, be it a sword or a club. But thrust is always faster than a cut.

The shortest distence between two points is always a straight line. With a cut you are drawing the blade back, even if slightly for a wrist cut, further for a stronger cut. For a thrust you are simply pushing it forward with the weight of your body for power.

[Peter Hudson]

Great replies... but hold on... ...
I have posed the question at post 1 in bold letters and now is the time face it... What was the problem? People were being trained were they not?

But were they being trained to Fence or Fight? This was the dilema ...

Trainers were teaching Fencing skills ..How could that fail?

And now I will place before you the situation... caused by the failure to teach fighting compounded by the wrong sort of sword ...often called a spike with I beams and hardly any cutting facility and the abject failure by the mainly two separate forms of Fencing and never the twain shall meet..and the infighting and disagreement ending in the whole thing being... The End of Swords...Fighting wins wars ...Fencing does not.

I turn to Matt Eastons brilliant paper and ask you all to read it to the end ...where you will see that the whole thing failed because ... we failed to teach Fighting and taught Fencing instead.
Please see https://www.google.com/books/edition...&kptab=getbook

Regards,
Peter Hudson.

[urbanspaceman]

A brilliant thread.
If you ignore the arrival of the rapier, which was of extremely questionable use on a battlefield and absolutely useless for cavalry, here in the UK during our civil war battles we had broadswords and backswords (generally with a variation on the 'basket' themed hilt). Cut by one or thrust by the other if exemplary performance was demanded. Previously we had the Arming sword which, to my inexperienced eye, appears to have both facilities in plenty. It had certainly proved its worth for a long time in a vast variety of campaigns. Why did we not retain it?
ps. It was realised that French wounded often survived being cut but British died of a thrust; this according to British surgeons.

[Will M]

Surgeons likely only saw the living, some would pass on. The idea that bayonets were not used much I believe is wrong. Bayonets deliver a thrust and likely several into the same soldier. They didn't see many bayonet wounds because most died of their wounds before they could be looked at. It was known that British sword blades tended to be dull and would likely create wounds less deep than sharpened blades. Had they been sharp and not getting dull rattling in steel scabbard, the cut would be more deadly.

[urbanspaceman]

This information came from British surgeons attending the wounded during the Peninsular wars and stated that penetrating punctures could rarely be fully repaired and the patients died, whereas cuts, ever dismembering cuts, could be far more successfully repaired.
The conclusion I came to was if greater attention was given to stabbing then greater death could be achieved.
I have absolutely no idea what sort of weapons we are dealing with here.
ps It was my understanding that bayonets were the main reason why swords became redundant. A Brown Bess with a 20inch bayonet is a formidable weapon, but it should have been backed up with a short cutting blade; unless you are Cavalry of course and I understand it is not sufficiently understood the degree that horses were used in WW1.

[toaster5sqn]

I'm going to have to take issue with Radbound's idea that a thrust is always quicker than a thrust.

For a smallsword or rapier held in a very point forward guard this may be true, but cut and thrust swords are usually held in a more upright guard and an effective cut is made by punching the hand forward and tightening the lower fingers while rotating the wrist to snap the sword blade onto the target. No it's not a massive cleave that will lop a limb off, but you don't want to make such an over committed cut that will leave you vulnerable if you miss anyway. The quick snap cut from the wrist often targets the forearm where any slice can be debilitating in a swordfight.

By comparison a thrust from the same starting position would involve rotating the hand to bring the point on line before punching the hand forward, this meaning the hand covers exactly the same distance for a cut or a thrust.

[toaster5sqn]

My finale point on the cut vs thrust is always the report of an encounter between a French cuirassier and a dragoon of the Scots greys at Waterloo.

They charged each other and the Frenchman gave point and ran the Scotsman through. The Scotsman realizing he had taken a mortal wound rose up in his stirrups and brought his sword down on the Frenchman's head with such violence that both helmet and skull where split asunder. And they both fell dead upon the field!

Here we see equally deadly results from both forms of attack, however if the cut had landed first the Frenchman would have had no reply. Equally the Frenchman was without defence since his attack had left his weapon stuck, if only briefly, in his opponent. And should the cut have landed upon the Frenchman's wrist before his point went home then the Frenchman would have been one of those survivors of the "less deadly" cut that made it to the hospital and lived. But the cut would have been a winning one by any measure of military effectiveness.

The only worthwhile answer to the debate is that cut and thrust both have their place in a swordfight and a swordsman who has recourse to both has more options than one who must rely only upon one or the other.

Robert

[Magey_McMage]

Originally Posted by toaster5sqn

I'm going to have to take issue with Radbound's idea that a thrust is always quicker than a thrust.

For a smallsword or rapier held in a very point forward guard this may be true, but cut and thrust swords are usually held in a more upright guard and an effective cut is made by punching the hand forward and tightening the lower fingers while rotating the wrist to snap the sword blade onto the target. No it's not a massive cleave that will lop a limb off, but you don't want to make such an over committed cut that will leave you vulnerable if you miss anyway. The quick snap cut from the wrist often targets the forearm where any slice can be debilitating in a swordfight.

By comparison a thrust from the same starting position would involve rotating the hand to bring the point on line before punching the hand forward, this meaning the hand covers exactly the same distance for a cut or a thrust.

Apologies for coming in late on this, but this is actually a point (no pun intended) in the early modern/renaissance sword discussions. With the Italo-Iberian focus on geometry, the idea of a thrust needing a simple extension forward while a cut needed chambering backwards before forward momentum did lead to the belief a thrust was more direct and faster. I do not recall who actually proposed the following or if it is an oversimplification by my HEMA instructor but someone along the lines of Silver pointed out that you could simply hold your cutting sword above your head and now it would be automatically chambered the same way a thrusting oriented sword would be pre-loaded.

As to the other questions, changes in warfare and technology are largely to blame. I would say that cavalry was far from useless in WWI when it COULD be utilized in the proper way. I think the difference is that cavalry vs cavalry and cavalry as a breaking attack largely died. The speed in reloading is probably the biggest factor for the latter. While you can or could overrun a position with cavalry, the infantryman being able to fire off even 3 or 4 shots in the span of 40 seconds rapidly decreases the advantage the speed of horse provides. But cavalry as skirmishing and pursuing a rout/following up targets of opportunity was still a viable tactic. And for that, stabbing from horseback is much easier.

As far as the form of blade in the late 19th century through 1918, Britain was far from alone. The images attached are of the British 1912 sabre which I am sure you recognize, but also include others from the ~30 years prior up to 1914. In order:
-British 1912
-The French utilized the 1896 cavalry sabre, albeit unsuccessfully due to a weak blade.
-But alongside that was a very rare experimental model with a different grip. -Next, there is an exceedingly rare Prussian/German 1888 trials sword, with a rebated steel bowl guard, a canted grip with a thumb placement, and a straight blade.
-A Swedish 1893 cavalry pallasch and what I feel is the best sword in here. At ~1-1.1kg, it is far and away also the lightest and a rebated guard and even more robust blade with excess mass for rigidity would still make it quite light. As it is, it still has the most classic cut and thrust profile, of a form that goes back to 18th century Sweden and earlier
-The US 1913 Patton Sabre which is my least favorite (grip is too large and squared, the POB is too far forward to be an effective thruster but the blade is too narrow and too thick/canular to be an effective cutter as well) which rightly gets compared to a 1908/12 and a Swedish 1893 but I think a bit of credit must also be given to the French as Patton studied at Saumur cavalry school as well
-A screenshot of the 1895 series of Dutch cavalry sabres from the following article which I highly recommend: https://www.huzarenvanboreel.nl/wp-c...etherlands.pdf
-And a later Italian officer's sabre, although it should be noted the Radaelli/Del Frate type of officer-dueling so popular in Italy especially when Barbasetti proposed even more straight swords is likely more to do with Italian blade prefrence


I apologize if this appears to be off topic, but the point I am attempting to make is less that Britain alone decided to go from the 1896 Universal pattern of cavalry sword, of which I generally am a fan of depending on certain things (later grips were too straight and narrow and the guards tended to be thinner and less protective IMO). But moreover, that the late 19th century through the start of WWI saw almost all of the major powers gravitate towards a sword with the following characteristics:

-A larger, symmetrical or mostly symmetric bowl guard
-A grip that was optimized for a thumb-on-back grip (the italian 1888 for example has a cut in the guard and the grip ferrule has a flat piece that slots over the opening so when assembled it forms a protected slot for your thumb)
-A blade which is optimized for the thrust primarily


Not every country or model of sword followed this, the Swiss 1896/02 (my first combat sabre), the British mountain artillery, SOME German swords, and the Norwegian 1888 all have more classic compromise blades.

But if I may offer some sort of suggestion as to the mindset, or at least my interpretation, it is this: the change in sword in this period was not necessarily to make them ineffective in combat, but to redefine the mode of combat. Less for "fighting" and more for "killing." Which I admit sounds a bit edgy, but when you look at accounts of the Boer War and WWI examples in which cavalry did engage either on the Western Front, Mesopotamia, or other areas, there was relatively little hack-and-slash fighting but extremely abrupt bursts of high intensity movement. Anything else and you run the risk of getting shot from being stationary. As such, the optimized form of sword does favor something that can quickly stab through a chest, be withdrawn, and on the move.

As Matt Easton and others have said, it is paradoxical that it is easier to train men to go for a thrust, but when given no training, your first instinct is to use any item of length more for bludgeoning/cutting. I would posit some level of thinking along the lines of "cuts can be fatal, but proper edge alignment, sharpness, follow through all must occur, alongside the enemy having nothing on their body that can arrest the momentum of the cut such as webbing, bandoliers, or other things let alone deliberate protection makes cutting much less certain than seeing a piece of steel emerge 20cm out the other side of their body."

I think the comparison of these blades as so-called 'hand lances' really sells it. Largely, the sword is the only weapon in which romanticized notions of back and forth fights, sword against sword, man against man, have endured. The sword did not stop being a weapon, but it went back to ONLY being a utilitarian tool optimized for killing.

As to the hilts, there are a few parallel origin points:
-The honeysuckle hilt is an evolution of an earlier Austrian pattern I believe, similar to the 1796 LC and HC writ large.
-The acanthus hilt is derived from the Scinde Irregular cavalry
-The 1788 and others also share lineage from early modern Walloon or Mortuary hilted swords around the English Civil War

I know there were other rare and experimental hilts trialed, but we only have scant records on them unfortunately. Some units, especially the Yeomanry and Northwest Frontier units did have special patterns. I believe it was in Robson or Latham that one of the Yeomanry units was noted to have a half-basket from a list of regulation patterns. While it might be believed that this was just shorthand for the other bowl guards, they alone have this wording on theirs and it makes me curious what it might have been.

As an entirely unnecessary addendum, I feel that the best possible sword to meet these design goals would be taking the hilt of the German Trials sabre alongside possibly the grip or a more neutrally oriented (left vs right) and more canted 1912 grip, and the blade of a Swedish 1893, modifying it to be ~10mmx35mmx95mm at the base, and giving it a wicked hollow grinding. I also have a French pre-1882 Colonial sword with one of the canular/Z-shaped fuller/diamond cross section blades I find to be all but perfect, floats in your hand almost despite a 950g weight due to proper shaping, but is utterly stuff with the thin edges and width allowing for good cuts, it is my single favorite sword I own despite arriving covered in rust and costing me 260 euros in 2021. It is the last image and frankly even giving this a more symmetric guard and canted grip would make it damn near perfect and easy to manufacture.