Romantic History but no Use in Modern War

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 29, 18 February 1937, Page 13

Romantic History but no Use in Modern War

The Sword as a Weapon is to be Shelved by the British Army

OMEBODY at the War Office has hada brain wave (says an English writer). It is announced, eighteen years after the Great War, that the British Army, except for. ceremonial purposes, is

about to abandon the sword. An inspired military correspondent, dealing with this momentous decision, makes the shattering assertion that "the* sword is losing its authority as an effective instrument of war." The next bulletin, I suppose, will intimate the demise of Queen Anne. During the whole course of the European War, so far as the Western Frorit was concerned, I saw only two swords. One was decorating the beautifully tailored left hip of a Staff officer at Le Havre, and the other was romanticaUy brandished in the glovecfc fist of a young German officer, who suddenly and incontinently, in brbad daylight, led a raiding party from the enemy's front trench on an unhealthy sector out of the blue. y^HETHER he did it for a vow, or a bet, or had suddenly gone all operatic and Wagner, nobody could guess. He fell within a few yards of his own wire, and too far away for anybody to attempt to investigate his pockets. Lord Fisher, who invented dreadnoughts, tells us in one of his piquantly written books that, if the Navy Brass Hats had had their way, we should have been fighting at Jutland with wooden threedeckers and muzzle-loading guns. Hitherto I have taken that to be one of the gallant Admiral's characteristic flights of hyperbole, a picturesque way of intimating that the Sea Lords in Whitehall have aiways tended to be somewhat coiiservative and reactionary in their professional outlook. The sword emerged far back .in the mists of human history in mankind's primitive stage, although learned authorities refuse to accept the wooden and stone weapons of earliest tribal warfare as true

swords. They hold that these were really flattened clubs. Yet that seems to me-to be the idea that was behind the sword's direct ancestry. Sword is a genuine Old English word, first written as "sweord," though it probably derives from an Indo-European root word meaning "to wound." Amongst the earliest relics of that combative animal, Man, whose quarrels usually centred around that other provocative animal, Woman, are daggers made from reindeer antlers. From the dagger to the, fulllength sword would appear to be a simple and natural evolution. Some tribal strategist doubtless wanted to over-reach his enemy. JpROM the flint dagger of the Neolithic period the primitive armourer-smith progressed to the copper, then the bronze, and finally the iron sword. Directly our ancestors acquired any skill in metal work, they set about making swords to fight with. Whole volumes, of fascinating interest, tell the story of the sword. Any reai connoisseur could write a book about even hilt-embossments alone. There are cities old in story whose world-wide fame still rests upon the fine temper of , their swOrd blades. Still unsettled remains the age-long controversy whether the straight or the curved blade, or a comptomise between the two like our modern cavalry swords, is the most effective weapon. pOR a period, impressed by the success of Turkish cavalry, which was probably due to elan and horsemanship more than anything else, European nations adopted the curved Oriental sabre. But the besfc authorities contend that the Romans were, as usual, sound in their faith that the straight thrusting weapon was the most formidable. The art of the swordmaker remains still a romance of industry. Every modern cavalry sword, after being hammered out in its blade, goes through an exquisite ritual of tempering. At one stage it is so

brittle that even a slight blow would break it. When finally tempered, and before it is polished, the blade ls tested by striking lt with a 1201b. blow on its edge and back and with a 601b. blow on both its flats. It is then put? to bending tests, and must, to pass muster, recover its straightness, after being bent, with a 351b. weight bearing on its tang. Only after emerging from these flery and other ordeals is a sword deemed flt to be trusted with a man's life. Before modern machinery was adopted in swordmaking, the blade had also to be tested for poMting by driving it through a steel plate about an eighth of an inch thick. Little wonder that the swordsmith was a man held in high honour in the age of chivalry. But what place has the shimmering white arm of mediaeval chivalry, of the age of brave knights^and gallant plumes, in an epoch when even the high explosive shell is being superseded by poison-gas, when fleets and armies hurl wholesale destruction at each other from a range of twenty miles or more, or the skies rain down hissing death from invisible chariots of the air? J?OR these purely romantic reasons one laments the passing of the sword. The world even yet evinces no strong impulse fcowards universal peace. The grand transformatlon of swords into ploughsliares, or poison-gas retorts into scent factories, is curiously retarded. Slaughter will continue on an ever more ambitious scale of mass scientific production. But never again may we hope to admire, outside the pages of fading print, such sword-arm wizards as the niercurial D'Artagnan, gallant de Bussac, or that "bonnie fechter" Alan Breck. Primitive man probably first armed himself with a pointed prop. But the survival of the bayohet has its own moral. The nations may go off the gold standard. They will not forsake steel. Such is the supremacy, in ultimate human affairs, of realism over mere artificial convention.