The New Orleans daily Democrat. [volume] (New Orleans, La.) 1877-1880, 1878-04-28
SWORDS SUPERSEDED.
Their UseIessness as weapon as shown
In the Late Wars.

Tt begins to look as If sword and bayonet
we're to be mustered out of service and re-
garded as no longer dangerous. They have
been for centuries almost ideal weapons !;
they have given visible picturesqueness to
armies and lent eloquence to the orator and
poet. Now they are themselves the object of
an attack which seems likely to cause their
withdrawal from "the field Of poised battle"
It has long been suspected that the bayonet
was % very harmless sort of braggart and
now the sword must answer to the same in
dictment.
The medical staff of Germany, in its report
of casualties in the war with France, chron-
icIes G5, 100 killed and wounded, and Of these
only 2l8 were killed or wounded by the sabre
or bayonet- and only six of these We're
killed! or the cavalry only 1873 were killed
of 2236 The cavalry numbered 10000, and
they swept fiercely over France for six
months, most of the time in raids in the rear
of the enemy, and in all that time they suf-
fered only six deaths from the sabre: 1t is
not likely that they inflicted more That is
to say that 10000 cavalry in both armies
swung their terrible sabres for half q year
when the armies were close together all the
WHILE and they killed in the aggregate twelve
men.
The record OF our war of the rebellion is
equally dscouraging for the sword-swngers.
| Out of 253 142 wounds recorded on the Union
sside during the four years contest, there
were only 906 inflicted by either sabre, sword
|
fatal In the Franco-German war less than
one in 300 of the wounded suffered from sabre
or bayonet; and in our own war there was
only about one in 20.
These facts have inspired Gen. Benet, Chief
of the United States Ordnance Bureau, to
write letter to the Secretary of War sug-
costing that it is time to Danish such useless
weapons from the army. I'm my mind, he
writes, "there exists not a doubt that the days
of the sabre and bayonet are numbered, and
that the only question to be decided Is,
whether the time is not already at hand when
they should be discarded" Gen. Sherman
concurs, stating that it is probably time that
their use, or, rather, their disuse, were dis
continued and Phil Sheridan the model cav
alryman, says: "The cavalryman wants,
first, good horse, a good Springfield rifle;
Evidently the days of sabre and bayonet are
numbered.
They both did good work when they were
Young The sword is mentioned more than
800 times in the Bible, and it has been the
aristocratic weapon OF all ages. In the early
times, when men were bruteS and fought foot
to foot the sword was far the most effective
arm of every military service. The bayOnet
was invented near Bayonne, in France,
whence it's name, about 240 years ago, and
was at first a sword whose handle was stuck
into the barrel of a musket. 1t superseded
the pike and was very useful in the old days
of short-range point-blank fighting. 1t is the
| improved artillery, the carbine, and the re-
peating rifle that have rendered swords,
sabres and bayonets cumbrous and useless.
Scientific precision and various death-dealing
devices have united to relegate all weapons
which imply personal contact to the old mu-
SeumS, where the spears, shields, battle-axeS,
bows and arrows and halberds wait for rusty
reinforcementS.