Blade preservation on an antique military sword

Hi folks, Matt Easton here, Scholar Gladiatoria and Eastern Antique Arms. I'll put a link to the latter below this video. So, I'm mostly known for my passion for antique British military swords, but as well as all the other things I'm interested in, so Indian swords, and medieval and renaissance swordsmanship, and even Roman stuff as well. Something which most people don't know I'm also interested in is French military swords, and pretty much of the nations of, at least of the European nations of military swords, after British swords, French are my favourite. They're very nicely made, they were very closely regulated in France, so the quality tends to be very good, they're often dated, and there's not very much variety in the models, not as much as British swords, they don't vary as much, but the models that they do have are nice swords, they handle nicely and they're well made. And a model of French sword that I've never owned before is the 1882 model for infantry officers, and I recently found one in an antique shop, and I picked it up and I loved it, so I bought it. And initially I bought it with the intention of possibly selling it on, but I've since become quite attached to it and so I'm going to keep it, at least for now. But, when I first picked it up in the antique shop I noticed something about it which really intrigued me and which is what this video is mostly about. But let's just start off looking at the hilt of the 1882 pattern. So you'll notice it's similar-ish to the British 1821 light cavalry officer's sword. This one has a wooden grip that's actually got some form of horn covering over the wood, which is quite common for French swords, with wire in the recesses. Just try and catch the light on it there. So that's fairly standard, it's got a fairly nice shape, fairly conservative, nothing particularly unusual about that. It has a back strap, no checkering on the back strap, a fairly standard rounded pommel cap and it's peened at the end. The guard is, as I mentioned, it's similar to the three-bar hilt used on British 1821 patterns, and in fact it's probably, or possibly, inspired by that. However, you'll notice it has an extra branch, so rather than being a three-bar it's a one, two, three, four-bar. On British swords, in fact I have one by my foot but I won't scramble around trying to pick it up, you do sometimes get four branches on British, particularly Royal Artillery officers' swords. It's fairly rare and it's more often associated with either swords that were given as a prize for something, for example swordsmanship or riding or whatever, or it's associated with volunteer branches of the artillery, but that's for another video. So you do get that number of branches on some British swords but it's rare. This is a French thing, you do find this number of branches on the hilt on certain heavy cavalry French swords, but this was the first time they put it, as far as I'm aware, on an infantry officer's hilt. It gives a really good protection to the hand, pretty good anyway. This guard is steel as well, much like the British hilt, so it's more protective than the brass hilts. You'll notice also it's not a flat plate, it actually has these raised ridges, a bit like corrugation, and on the rear quillon as well. It's a pretty robust, strong guard and that ridge runs all the way around to there. So it's a pretty good, pretty strong guard and it doesn't get in the way of the hand or restrict the hand at all. You'll notice of course there isn't very much protection on the inside, but that's because of the way you grip the sword. Most of your hand is on this side rather than sticking out on this side, assuming you're right-handed. If you're left-handed you need a different sword, or you need to learn to fight right-handed. I get asked that question a lot actually in reference to antique swords, what did left-handed people do? Well very simply in the 19th century you have to recognise a lot of left-handed people were forced to be right-handed, that's the first thing. But secondly even if you were left-handed, and we know that some people were, you'd have to have a different sword that projected more on the left-hand side and less on the right-hand side. But there were some hilts that were specially made to be symmetrical. But generally speaking a right-handed sword like this doesn't work very well if you use it left-handed because obviously all of your hand is exposed there. Okay so the hilt is nice but it's nothing particularly unusual. However when I picked up the blade in the shop I looked at it and I thought well that's really weird, the blade has been put on backwards. You'll notice there's a fuller running here, so there's the guard, so we'd assume that this is the front of the sword, but you'll notice that the fuller is near the front of the edge, the front edge, the cutting edge, the main cutting edge. I thought that's very odd. And initially I thought they'd put, someone had dismounted it at some point and put the blade on backwards and then I thought could there be a deliberate, because looking at the sword I looked at immediately if you think a blade has been refitted or tampered with, you look at the peening on the end and that looks really aged and there's no roughness, it doesn't look like it's been tampered with at all. So I thought what on earth is going on there? And then I turned the blade, so you'll notice the fuller is near the front, I turned the blade over and now the fuller's in the back. So this is a really unusual blade cross-section and I don't know how common this is on French swords. I have an 1882 blade on an earlier hilt on another French sword I have and that's actually symmetrical with the double fullers in the centre, a bit like a sort of rapier blade I suppose. But this is completely different, this has the fuller at the front on one side, there we go, the front on one side but the back on the other side. Now this is quite curious because what this gives is if you imagine a sort of S shape, if we cut through the blade the shape that we're getting is like that. Now what that does of course is massively increase the stiffness and when you look at this sword when you pan out and look at it in wide context, that makes a hell of a lot of sense because what they've done is they've created a blade cross-section, this S shape. It's not going to be the best cutter in the world and certainly it's a narrow blade anyway so it was never going to cut fantastically but they found a way of having an edge front and back so it's double edged and it's a really stiff blade for its weight and size and width. So it's a very interesting blade cross-section and that's really what I wanted to make this video about and as soon as I realised that the blade was made like that I immediately thought well this will make a good video because I shouldn't imagine there's that many of you out there who would have seen a blade of this cross-section before. So just to reiterate one more time, the fuller is at the front, the front edge on one side but the back edge on the other side. That means that the cross-section overall is double edged like a sort of lozenge or diamond, flattened diamond section but with a scoop out here and a scoop out there giving it a sort of S corrugation which means that for thrusting it's now a very light blade but very stiff and it's a similar solution to what they do with small swords which are hollow ground triangular section and yes I will talk about that small sword soon. So there we go guys, the A version, A type of the French 1882 Infantry Officer Sword and I've got to say it's a lovely sword in the hand, it feels fantastic. It very much is a thruster, it wants to use the point and it's nimble with the point. You could hit someone with the edge but you're not going to do a huge amount of damage. Yes if you slash them across the neck or perhaps across the inside of the forearm you are going to sever some meat and you are going to do some damage but chopping someone on the shoulder through a military coat you're probably not going to do much other than slightly hurt them. So it is really a short rapier. There we go guys, cheers. Thank you for watching, please subscribe and feel free to follow us on Facebook.