The Sabre

Sabre: from Hungarian szablya, one of the few words that came into Europe on horseback. Spring 1800, a cavalry barracks in England: a new light dragoon holds a sword for the first time, and we ride back a thousand years to the grasslands where the blade first curved... Inside: why a curved edge draws as it cuts, the kilij's false edge, the winged hussars at Vienna, the Cossack sword worn edge up, the Mamluks at the pyramids, six cuts on a painted wheel, blades proved by bending, the valley at Balaclava, the Patton sabre that does not curve, a charge against tanks that never happened, and a Hungarian fencer who won gold at fifty. John Gaspard Le Marchant will be there too. Chapters: The grasslands · Westward · The winged horsemen · The hussars of Europe · The Cossacks · The Mamluks · The book · The six cuts · The proof · Cut or thrust? · The valley · The last swords · The sabre that stayed · The students · Evening · A thousand years. Sources: Le Marchant's Sword Exercise (1796), Royal Armouries and National Army Museum notes, Polish Army Museum, Olympic records. Read by a synthetic voice; script written and fact-checked by the show's team. Additional sounds: Joseph Sardin, BigSoundBank.com (CC0).

The script

A sabre is a sword that learned to ride.

It is curved, and it is made to be swung from a horse's back, at speed, so that the edge slides along whatever it meets, drawing as it cuts. For more than a thousand years, from the grasslands of Asia to the parade grounds of Europe, wherever men fought on horses, they came, sooner or later, to the curved blade.

And it was the last sword to leave the battlefield.

The Quiet Armoury. Episode five... the sabre.

This story is read by a synthetic voice. If these stories keep you company at night, follow the show... it helps others find it.

It is a spring morning in the year eighteen hundred, in the south of England, in a cavalry barracks outside a country town.

You are eighteen. You were a groom on a farm until last autumn, when a recruiting sergeant came to the market with ribbons in his hat, and you signed your name, and were given a shilling and a red coat... no, a blue one, and a tall leather helmet, because you have joined the light dragoons. You can already ride better than most of the recruits. You have never held a sword.

This morning, for the first time, you will.

The riding school is a long, high building with a floor of soft sand, and windows high up in the walls. Outside, in the yard, horses are being led from the stables, their breath steaming. The riding master is already there, a stout, red-faced sergeant with a voice like a door slamming. Beside him, on a wooden rack, a row of sabres lies in their steel scabbards.

He picks one up and holds it out to you, hilt first.

It is the new pattern. It is only four years old. And every light cavalryman in the British army is learning to use it, in exactly the same way, from a little printed book.

But before we learn what is in that book, let us go back, a very long way, to where the curved sword began.

Chapter one. The grasslands.

Across the middle of Asia, from the edge of Europe to the borders of China, there is a great belt of grassland, flat and open, thousands of kilometres long. It is called the steppe. And for thousands of years, the people of the steppe lived on horseback.

They herded their animals across it. They raised their children on it. And when they fought, they fought from the saddle, with the bow first of all... and with a sword when the fighting came close.

The first swords of the steppe were straight, like everyone else's. But somewhere in the six hundreds and seven hundreds, in the lands of the Turkic peoples and their neighbours, the blades began to curve. Only slightly, at first. A gentle bend toward the back, near the hilt, and a single edge.

Why curve a sword?

Think of a rider, galloping past a man on foot, and striking down at him. A straight blade, swung at speed, hits like a club. It strikes, and stops, and the shock runs back up the arm. It may even be wrenched out of the hand.

A curved blade does something else. As it strikes, the curve makes the edge slide along what it meets, drawing across it, like a knife pulled across bread rather than pressed down into it. It cuts more, and catches less. And as the horse carries the rider on, the curve lets the blade come free by itself.

The curve also changes where the weight sits. The point lies a little forward of the hand, which makes the cut fall naturally, and the blade lighter to move. And from the saddle, it is easy to draw a curved blade from its scabbard in one long, smooth movement.

All of that was learned slowly, by riders, over generations. Nobody wrote it down. They simply found that the curved blade worked.

Chapter two. Westward.

From the steppe, the curved sword travelled west with the horsemen who carried it.

The Magyars, whose descendants are the Hungarians, rode into central Europe at the end of the eight hundreds, from the east, and settled in the great plain of the Danube. Their graves hold some of the oldest sabres in Europe... slender, gently curved, with short guards ending in little balls, and grips set at a slight angle to the blade, so that the edge falls true when the hand is relaxed.

For a while, the Magyars took up the straight swords of their new neighbours. But the curved blade never left the plain. Hungary, and the lands around it, would become, centuries later, the true home of the European sabre.

In the south, the curved sword came with the Turks.

The Ottoman sabre, the kilij, has a broad, heavy blade, more deeply curved than the old steppe swords. And near the point, its back suddenly widens again, into a short second edge, sharpened, like a little false blade. That widening put extra weight near the tip, so that a cut from a kilij fell with tremendous force. And the false edge allowed a quick cut upward, too.

The Ottomans carried the kilij, and its many relatives, across the Balkans, to the gates of Vienna.

Further east, in Persia, the curved sword became the shamshir... long, narrow, deeply curved, sometimes almost into a half-moon, light and beautiful, made for drawing cuts from horseback. Its steel, at its best, showed the flowing pattern of crucible steel from India. From Persia, its shape and its name spread into India and beyond.

And in India, the talwar, curved and broad, with a hilt of iron shaped into a disc at the end, like a little saucer, and a grip so short that it locked the hand firmly in place. Indian sword masters used it with a turning of the wrist that made the blade spin and slice.

Chapter three. The winged horsemen.

In the fifteen hundreds and sixteen hundreds, the kingdom of Poland and Lithuania stretched across a huge part of eastern Europe. It bordered the Ottomans, the Tatars of the steppe, and Muscovy. And its nobles, its szlachta, fought, almost all of them, on horseback.

The Polish noble's sabre, the szabla, became the badge of who he was. He wore it every day, with his long coat and his fur hat, at home, at church, in parliament. It was his right, and his honour. A Polish nobleman without his sabre was hardly dressed.

One kind of Polish sabre, worn for best, was the karabela. It had a gently curved blade, and a hilt that ended in a shape like the head of an eagle, its beak curving over to protect the little finger. The hilts were often set with stones, silver and gilt. The karabela was elegant, light, and quick. It was the sabre of the parliament and the feast.

And in war, the great cavalry of Poland were the hussars. The winged hussars.

They wore half-armour of polished steel, and leopard or tiger skins over their shoulders. They carried very long lances, hollowed out to make them lighter, and a sabre, and often a long, stiff thrusting sword strapped under the saddle as well, for piercing armour. And on their backs, or fixed to their saddles, many of them wore tall wooden frames set with feathers... wings, rising behind them, like the wings of birds.

Why the wings? Historians still argue about it, with great pleasure. To make the hussars look taller and more frightening. To make a sound in the charge, a rushing hum, that frightened the enemy's horses. To guard against a lasso, or a sabre cut from behind. Or simply for display, for parades, and pride. Experiments with modern copies have not settled it. The wings certainly did not make any noise that anyone could hear over a charge of thousands of horses.

In the year sixteen eighty-three, the Ottoman army besieged Vienna. On the twelfth of September, a relief army of Germans, Austrians and Poles came down from the hills above the city. Late in the afternoon, the Polish king, John the Third Sobieski, led one of the greatest cavalry charges in history down the slopes toward the Ottoman camp. Thousands of horsemen, the winged hussars at their head.

The siege was broken in a few hours. It was the last time the Ottomans would threaten Vienna.

Chapter four. The hussars of Europe.

The Hungarians, meanwhile, gave Europe a word.

In Hungary, the light horsemen who fought on the borders against the Ottomans... fast, lightly armed, riding small tough horses, raiding and scouting... were called huszár. In the sixteen hundreds and seventeen hundreds, other armies hired them, copied them, and then formed their own. France, Prussia, Russia, Sweden, Britain... all of them, sooner or later, had regiments of hussars.

And with the name came the costume, copied faithfully from Hungary. A short jacket, heavy with rows of braid across the chest. A second jacket, trimmed with fur, worn hanging from one shoulder like a cape. Tight trousers. Short boots. A tall fur cap, or a tall shako. And at the hip, a curved sabre, in a steel scabbard that rang against the stirrup.

Hussars became famous for courage, for speed, for wild behaviour, and for spending more on their uniforms than they earned. There is a saying attributed to a French hussar general, that a hussar who is not dead by thirty is a blackguard. He was killed in battle himself, at thirty-four.

Chapter five. The Cossacks.

Further east, on the wide steppe north of the Black Sea, along the great rivers... the Dnipro, the Don... lived the Cossacks. Free communities of horsemen, farmers and fighters, on the open frontier between Poland, Muscovy and the Tatar khans.

Their sword, in later centuries, was the shashka. It is a very particular sabre. It has almost no guard at all... only a plain grip, with a split, slightly hooked pommel, like the head of a bird. Its blade is only gently curved. And it is worn the other way up from almost every other sword: hanging from a shoulder belt, with the edge facing upward, toward the sky.

That is not an accident. A shashka worn edge up can be drawn and cut in a single movement... the hand comes across, closes on the grip, pulls up and forward, and the blade, leaving the scabbard, is already travelling in a cut. There is no moment where the sword is out and not yet in use.

And because it had no guard, it was not much good for fencing, for parrying blow after blow. It was a weapon for one decisive cut, from a galloping horse. The Cossacks were famous for their riding... standing on the saddle at a gallop, hanging down the horse's side, picking things up from the ground without slowing down. A rider like that, with a shashka drawn in one movement, did not need a guard. He needed to be fast.

Chapter six. The Mamluks.

In Egypt, for more than five hundred years, the rulers were the Mamluks... a class of horse soldiers, bought as boys from the steppes and the Caucasus, raised and trained in barracks, and freed to become the masters of the country. Their whole life was the horse, the bow, the lance and the sabre. Their training grounds in Cairo were famous across the Islamic world.

In the summer of seventeen ninety-eight, a French army under a young general named Napoleon Bonaparte landed in Egypt. Near Cairo, within sight of the pyramids, the Mamluk cavalry charged the French.

They were magnificent horsemen, in silks and turbans, with sabres of fine steel, and each man was worth several French cavalrymen in single combat. But the French infantry did not fight them one by one. They formed great hollow squares, bristling with bayonets, and fired steady volleys. The Mamluk charges broke against the squares, again and again. By evening, the battle was over.

And yet the French were deeply impressed. Napoleon took a young Mamluk into his service as his bodyguard, who stayed with him for fifteen years. French officers brought home Mamluk sabres, and had copies made, and wore them... a curved blade, and a simple cross-shaped hilt with a grip of ivory or horn. For a generation, a Mamluk sabre was the height of military fashion in Europe.

That is the shape of the sword that the American Marines still carry today. But we will come to that.

Chapter seven. The book.

Back in the riding school, in the year eighteen hundred, the sergeant has a small printed book in his coat pocket. It is called the Rules and Regulations for the Sword Exercise of the Cavalry. And it is the reason you are standing here holding this particular sword.

It was written by a cavalry officer named John Gaspard Le Marchant.

A few years ago, the British army fought in Flanders alongside the Austrians. And Le Marchant, watching the British cavalry fight, was dismayed. They had no common way of using their swords. Each regiment, each man, did as he pleased... great wild swinging blows that tired the arm, missed the mark, and, he wrote, did more harm to their own horses than to the enemy.

The Austrian horsemen, by contrast, used their sabres with neat, controlled cuts and a quick recovery, and were far more effective.

So Le Marchant set out to fix it. He studied the Austrian and Hungarian methods. He wrote a short, clear book of drill, with six basic cuts and their guards, so that every cavalryman in the army could learn the same thing. And he worked with a sword-maker in Birmingham, named Henry Osborn, on a new sword to go with it.

Le Marchant did more than that. A few years from now, he will found a college to train young army officers properly, in mathematics, in maps, in tactics... the college that will one day become Sandhurst. And in the summer of eighteen twelve, in Spain, at the battle of Salamanca, he will lead a great charge of heavy cavalry that breaks a whole French division. At the end of it, he will be killed.

But that is a long way off. Today, he is only the name on the little book in the sergeant's pocket.

That sword is the one in your hand.

It is the Light Cavalry Sabre of seventeen ninety-six. Its blade is broad and strongly curved, about eighty-three centimetres long, widening a little near the point, so that the weight falls forward and the cut bites deep. Its hilt has a simple steel guard, a single curved bar, like the letter D, around the knuckles. Its grip is wood, wrapped in leather, ridged so that it will not slip in a wet hand.

It is a fierce cutting sword. It is perhaps the best cutting sabre the British army ever had. Your sergeant believes so, anyway, and he will tell you so, at length.

Chapter eight. The six cuts.

The lesson begins on foot.

The sergeant shows you how to hold the sabre... not clenched in the fist, but held lightly, with the thumb along the back of the grip, so that the wrist can move. Then he shows you a target, painted on the wall of the riding school. It is a circle, with lines crossing it, like the spokes of a wheel, and a number at the end of each line.

Six cuts. Two falling diagonally, from high on either side, down across the target. Two rising diagonally, from low on either side, upward. And two straight across, one from each side, level.

And with each cut, its guard... the position that defends against the same cut coming at you.

You stand in front of the wall, and cut. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Slowly, at first, while the sergeant walks behind you and corrects your elbow, your wrist, the angle of the blade. The cut must come from the wrist and the elbow, not swung from the shoulder. The edge must lead. A cut that lands with the flat of the blade is no cut at all. The sergeant has a phrase for it, which he says many times that morning. Let the edge go first.

Then the sergeant shows you the moulinets. They are not cuts at all, but circles. You hold the sabre out in front of you, and turn it, from the wrist, in a full circle beside your body, first on one side, then the other, the blade whirring past your shoulder and your horse's imagined head, over and over, like the sails of a windmill. They make the wrist strong and supple. They are also, the older men tell you, the best way yet invented of cutting your own ear.

Then faster. Then the guards. Then the cuts and guards together, one after another, in a long chain, until your arm burns and the sabre seems to weigh as much as a fence post. It weighs just under a kilogram.

In the afternoon, you will do it on a horse.

That is a different thing altogether. The horse moves under you. You must keep your seat, hold the reins in your left hand, keep your knees tight against the saddle, and cut, left and right, without striking your own horse's head or neck. Le Marchant's book is very firm about that. A horse cut by its own rider is a horse that will not stand, and a rider who will be on foot.

So in the riding school, there are posts set up along the wall, and on top of each post, a round ball of turf, or a turnip, or a leather head stuffed with straw. And you ride past them, at a trot, and later at a canter, and cut at them, one after another, the sand flying from the hooves.

Chapter nine. The proof.

Where did your sabre come from?

The hilt was made in Birmingham, or London. But the blade, quite possibly, came from Germany. For centuries, the town of Solingen, on a hill above a small river in the Rhineland, made blades for half of Europe. Its smiths had water power for their grinding wheels, a long tradition, and good steel. British sword makers bought blades from Solingen by the thousand, fitted their own hilts, and sold them to the army... a fact which, in time of war with the German states, sometimes caused embarrassment in Parliament.

A good maker tested every blade before he sold it. The tests had a name: proving.

The blade was bent, flat, against a board, until it curved by a measured amount, and then released, to see that it sprang back straight. It was struck, hard, with the flat and then with the edge and the back, against a block of wood. Sometimes, it was bent in both directions, by a man with both hands and his foot. A blade that cracked, or stayed bent, or rang false, was rejected.

Later in the eighteen hundreds, one London sword maker, Henry Wilkinson, became famous for proving every blade he made, and stamping it with a small brass disc to show it had passed. Officers paid extra for that disc. It was a promise that, on the one day it mattered, the sword would not break.

Chapter ten. Cut or thrust?

There is an argument that runs through the whole history of the cavalry sword, and it is still being argued in the riding school, over beer, in the evening.

Should a cavalryman cut, or thrust?

A cut is natural. Anyone can learn it. It makes terrible wounds. But a cut is slow, it uses the whole arm, and a thick coat or a leather helmet can stop it. Men struck by many sabre cuts sometimes survived, and went back to the fight.

A thrust is quick, and it reaches further. A thrust with the point, carried by the speed of a galloping horse, rarely leaves its target able to fight on. But it is harder to aim, harder to learn, and the blade can be caught in the body and torn from the hand.

Different armies chose differently. The French heavy cavalry, the cuirassiers, carried long, straight swords, and were taught to thrust. Their light cavalry, the hussars and chasseurs, carried curved sabres, and cut. The British, at this time, are cutters... and many of their officers believe the French are right, and say so.

The argument was never truly settled. Over the next century, the swords of most armies grew straighter, and the drill books spoke more about the point. And in the very last years of the cavalry sword, it was settled, at least in Britain, in favour of the thrust.

Chapter eleven. The valley.

On a morning in October, in the year eighteen fifty-four, on a ridge above the town of Balaclava, in the Crimea, British, French, Russian and Ottoman armies were fighting over the approaches to a harbour.

On that one day, two charges of British cavalry were made, an hour apart.

The first was made by the Heavy Brigade... big men on big horses, in red coats. A great mass of Russian cavalry came over a low hill toward them. The British were fewer, and had to charge uphill. They did it anyway, slowly at first, in close order, and crashed into the Russians with their swords, cutting and hacking, and after a few minutes of confused fighting, the Russian horsemen turned and rode back over the hill. It was a success, and few remember it.

The second was made by the Light Brigade. An order was sent, unclear, from the commander to the cavalry. It was misunderstood. And some six hundred and seventy light cavalrymen rode, at a trot and then at a gallop, down a long valley with Russian guns on the hills on both sides, and more at the far end.

They reached the guns. They cut down the gunners with their sabres. Then they turned, and rode back up the same valley. Fewer than two hundred of them came back on horseback.

A poet in England, Alfred Tennyson, read about it in the newspaper a few weeks later, and wrote a poem, in a few minutes, he said, in the rhythm of galloping horses. Half a league, half a league, half a league onward. It made the charge famous for ever. It is still the first thing many people think of when they hear the word sabre.

The charge was a mistake. The men who made it knew it was a mistake. Everyone who saw it, even the Russians, said they had never seen such courage. A French general watching from the hills said it was magnificent, but it was not war.

Chapter twelve. The last swords.

The British cavalry's last sword was made in the year nineteen-oh-eight. It is long, straight and narrow, with a pistol-shaped grip that tilts the point forward, and a great bowl of steel around the hand. It is made almost entirely for thrusting, held out in front, the arm straight, like a lance, as the horse charges.

Many who know swords call it the finest cavalry sword ever made. It came almost too late to matter.

In America, a few years later, a young cavalry officer who had competed in the modern pentathlon at the Olympic Games, and studied fencing in France, designed a very similar straight sword for the American cavalry. His name was George Patton. The army called it the Patton sabre, though it does not curve at all.

And a few years after that came the First World War... machine guns, barbed wire and trenches. Charges of horsemen with swords still happened, here and there, especially in the first months, and on the wide eastern front. But the age of the cavalry sword was over.

There is a famous story from the beginning of the Second World War, that Polish cavalry charged German tanks with sabres and lances. It is not true. At a place called Krojanty, in September nineteen thirty-nine, a Polish cavalry regiment did charge, sabres drawn, and scattered a German infantry battalion. Then German armoured cars arrived, and opened fire. Reporters who came the next day saw the dead horses beside the armoured vehicles, and the story was born. Propaganda did the rest.

Chapter thirteen. The sabre that stayed.

The sabre did not vanish. It changed its job.

Officers carried it on parade. Navies kept a curved sword for their officers. Policemen in many countries carried sabres well into the twentieth century.

And in America, the Marine Corps officers carry, to this day, a curved sword with an ivory-white grip and a simple cross guard, shaped after the swords of the Mamluks of Egypt... the fashion that the French had brought home. It has been their sword since the eighteen twenties. There is a story that its pattern comes from a sword given to a young Marine lieutenant by a prince of North Africa, after a desert march to the city of Derna, in eighteen-oh-five. The story may be true, or may have grown in the telling. But the Marines are fond of it, and the sword is the oldest weapon still carried by the American armed forces.

And there is one more place where the sabre lives. On the fencing strip.

Of the three weapons of modern fencing, the sabre is the only one where you may score with the edge, by cutting, as well as with the point. And the target is the body from the waist up... the head, the arms and the trunk. It is often said that this is because, in the old days, a horseman never struck below his opponent's waist, which was hidden by his horse. Whether that is the true reason, fencing historians are still debating politely.

For much of the twentieth century, one country ruled sabre fencing above all others: Hungary. The old home of the hussars. Its fencers won the Olympic team sabre again and again, from the nineteen twenties to the nineteen sixties. One of them, Aladár Gerevich, won gold medals at six Olympic Games in a row, across twenty-eight years. He won his last one at the age of fifty, in Rome, in nineteen sixty.

The Hungarians had carried the curved blade out of the steppe a thousand years before. They were not in a hurry to give it up.

Chapter fourteen. The students.

There is one more strange descendant of the sabre, and it lives in the old universities of Germany and Austria.

In the eighteen hundreds, students there belonged to fraternities, and the fraternities fenced. Not for points, but for honour... and, in a way, for scars. The weapon was a straight, sharp, flexible sword with a basket hilt, a kind of fencing sabre. The bout was called the Mensur.

The two students stood facing each other, at arm's length, and did not move their feet at all. Their eyes were covered with steel goggles, their necks and bodies and sword arms heavily padded. Only the head and the face were bare. They struck, from the wrist, high cuts at each other's heads, in quick rounds, with seconds standing by, and a doctor waiting.

The point was not to win. It was to stand still, and not flinch. A cut on the cheek, which bled and was stitched up roughly, was worn afterward with pride, for the rest of a man's life, as a sign that he had stood his ground. In old photographs of German professors, lawyers and officials of a century ago, you can sometimes see them... the thin pale lines across the cheek.

Some fraternities still fence the Mensur today, with better doctors.

Chapter fifteen. Evening.

The day in the riding school is over. The horses are back in their stalls. You have rubbed yours down, and fed it, and watered it, before you were allowed to think about your own supper. That, too, is in the book... or if it is not, the sergeant says it is.

Your right arm aches from the shoulder to the fingertips. There is a blister on the inside of your thumb. In the barrack room, the older men sit on their beds, polishing their scabbards, and argue about cut and thrust, and the French, and whether the officers' swords are any better than theirs.

You clean your sabre, as you have been shown... a little oil on a cloth, along the blade, edge, back, and the guard. You slide it into its scabbard. It goes home with a soft, steel sound.

Tomorrow, the six cuts again. And the day after. Until one day, months from now, on some field you have never heard of, your arm will do them by itself, without asking you.

Later, when the lamps are lit, you go back out to the stable, as the youngest recruits always must, to check the horses one last time. They stand in their stalls in the half-dark, shifting their weight, pulling hay from the racks, breathing slowly. Yours turns its head as you come in, and pushes its nose against your coat, looking for something to eat.

A cavalryman, the old soldiers say, is a horseman first and a swordsman second. The sabre is nothing without the horse. You stand there for a while in the warm, dark stable, with your hand on its neck, until the trumpet sounds for lights out.

Chapter sixteen. A thousand years.

From the slight bend of a Turkic blade, on the grasslands of Asia, thirteen hundred years ago. To the Magyar sabres in the graves of the Danube plain. The kilij at the gates of Vienna. The karabela at the feast. The winged hussars coming down the hill. The light dragoons in their riding school, cutting at turnips. The long straight thrusting sword of the last cavalry. And the fencing strip, with its electric lights.

Each change came for a reason. A new way of riding. A new kind of armour. A new way of thinking about the point and the edge. But all of them, every one, was made for someone moving fast, on a horse, across open ground.

A sabre is a sword that learned to ride.

The word itself seems to have come, like the sword, from the east, into Hungarian as szablya, into Polish as szabla, into German as Säbel, and at last into French and English as sabre.

It is one of the few words, perhaps, that came into Europe on horseback.

Also from the late hours: Embers of History · Slow Orbit · Myth and Score