13. The British Fought the Napoleonic Wars With One of History’s Crappiest Swords
It might seem difficult to screw up the design of a sword – a weapon that has been around for thousands of years. Yet, that is what the designers of the 1796 British Infantry Officers Sword, commonly known as the “1796 Spadroon”, managed to do. They went to the drawing board, and returned with a weapon that was bad at cutting, thrusting, defense, and topped it off with poor manufacture. The first problem was the hilt, which was for a purely thrusting weapon such as a rapier. That made the sword ill-suited for the hand grip necessary for cutting and slashing.
If the user managed a cutting swing, the blade was too light and flexible, and frequently bounced off even from naked skin. The excessive flexibility also made the sword nearly useless for thrusting – both because the sword bent, and because it was not as pointy as it should have been for piercing. Then there was the hilt guard: instead of a solid saucer to protect the hand, the guard was a folding clamshell, secured by pins liable to break under impact. Poor hand protection was made worse by a thin and weak knuckle-bow (the projecting piece on the hilt) that bent easily, and was frequently smashed into or pinched the user’s hand. As a contemporary British general summed it up: “Nothing could be more useless or ridiculous than the old infantry regulation [sword]; it was good for neither cut nor thrust and was a perfect encumberance“.