SWORDS FOR SALE — BUT WHO CARES? THEY’RE NO USE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 14, 20 January 1948, Page 4

SWORDS FOR SALE BUT WHO CARES? THEY’RE NO USE

Among the collection of surplus war materials now offered for sale by the War Assets Realisation Board are swords and scabbard’s, in small quantity, all held at Ngaruawahia. They are described as used, but in good condition. Probably there will be buyers, though one finds it hard to imagine any practical use for a sword these days, in war or out of it. As an ornament, a sword is not much good. For committing a murder it has the disadvantages of being rather clumsy to conceal about the person on the way to the scene of the crime and deuced awkward to dispose of afterwards. Horribly obtrusive things, swords. There may be the odd farmer who would consider it more dignified and less messy to run the family mutton and dog tucker through the heart than to cut its throat in the good old-fashioned way. Certainly there will be none who will be prepared to buy up a bundle of swords for beating into ploughshares. High costs of implements haven’t made the country’s backbone that desperate yet.

Maybe the sale of swords will give a grand opportunity to that army of armchair strategists who won both world wars with their slippers parked on the mantelshelf to acquire on the cheap a bit of authentically warlike bric-a-brac to give a certain amount of colour to their, contention that they knew how to do the job in half the time, only never had the chance to get around to it.

As an come into its In this atomic age, should the world ever see another war, one can hardly imagine officers leaping into the fray at the head 'of the troops brandishing the good old carver and screaming their national equivalent of “On, On, ye Noble English!” Gone are the days when Kings, Generals and other Important People carved steaks off each other in mortal single combat while the two armies milled around like the crowd at a Ranfurly Shield game.

As a weapon, the sword has had its day. How it stands as a commercial proposition, the War Assets Realisation Board has yet to find out.