A Napoleonic Period L.C. Officers Sabre in the Saxon Taste.

This sabre is one of the many clones of the famous French AN IX / XI L.C. Cavalry sabre line,



floating around the marked in Europe as testament to French influence on the international Officers Corps before, during and after Napoleonic times. As such it is no wonder that the provenance of sabres like these is not easy to ferret out .
More so because of the freedom the Officer of the period had to personalize his weapon to such an extend that clues as to national identity could be discarded at will.
And so it is here.
Looking for said clues I found another look alike in the iron hilted French Sabre du Garde Nationale, see below.



Not to be outdone on the confusion front, the Dutch introduced the , also, iron hilted M1813 L.C. no.2 in the same period my sabre was made. The M1813 no. 2 is a spitting image of my ,, Saxon ''.







One might think the scabbard furniture style is a big give away, were it not that those ,, typical Saxon '' ring mounts pop up all over the place too, especially in France on the ,, Sabre de Luxe '' for higher Hussar Officers. Variations in the design of these cradle ring mounts can be observed from Revolutionary times onwards. There are even some British presentation Light Cavalry sabres around that have these mounts.



I found four variations in l'Hoste alone that come quite close, albeit that two of them were incorporated in the ,, a la Hongroise '' sabre style.
So, where is the source of this cradle like mount? Is it the French aping Hungarian / German / Polish styles or vice versa? Of course the Hungarian sabre was the source for the European sabre as we know it today and it may not be totally off the mark to suggest that this mount style came to Europe via the Turkic / Tatar steppe way. This craddle mount is ideal to hold together a more or less primitive leather over wood scabbard. Thinking about the incredibly huge amount of looted weaponry the Allies carried off from the Battle of Vienna in 1683, one may speculate that this could be the moment of introduction of the mount into Europe, though it could just as well be argued that the introduction was much earlier. Since I did not find any hard evidence that this type of mount is really Saxon, one may suggest that in Saxony the style was appreciated better and for longer than anywhere else, but that is as far as I would go. So I must, against my will, rely on the consensus that says ,, Saxon mounts '' and we all know that rather elusive entity ,, consensus '' is more often wrong than right. Case closed?
It has to be said though that these ,, Saxon '' mounts are mostly made from brass or bronze, as indeed sometimes entire scabbards.......


Saxon Cavalry Officers sabre in the style from around 1815.

And mine are iron...... And according to sources I cannot verify, the Saxon Cavalry had full steel scabbards with steel furniture and only the Saxon Infantry had the fancy bronze mounts. That must be the rule for Troopers than. Because I see a Saxon Uhlan sabre with bronze mounts in the picture below, the one at the top. And in my universe the Uhlan was Cavalry.



Confusion.. .. Might the scabbard design be the product of the creative imagination of a Dutch Officer? I did find a picture of a sabre that looks like an M1813 no. 2, but could also very well be another piece of historical flotsam, with iron scabbard fittings ,, en tonneau '' much like those one may observe on the scabbards of many a French Cavalry Officer model of the period, albeit those were made from bronze again.....



So, to find closure in the matter, I contacted the friendly and very helpful people of ,, Sabels Net '', a Dutch sabre site, as they had proudly presented their newly acquired M1813 no2 ( sabels.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=35&Itemid=18 ) and they in turn contacted the Dutch Army Museum for me, but to no avail. Nobody wanted to burn their fingers with sabres like this one it seems. The same with questions asked on the Deutsche Blankwaffen forum and the Oldswords database is also void of anything helpful related to the conundrum.
So, for the present, it seems like I have to settle for ,, Napoleonic Period Light Cavalry Officers Sabre in the Saxon Taste''.
I am very sure that if there was even the slightest, defensible, opening for the people of Sabel Net or the Dutch Army museum to label my sabre as ,, Dutch M1813 no. 2, an Officers variant '', they would have jumped at the opportunity to get hold of it and I can assure you, museum conservators go to great lengths to get what they want. Ask a friend of mine, who was awakened in the middle of the night by loud and persistent hollering. He found a conservator of a top of the bill Dutch archaeological museum standing on his front lawn, shouting his lungs out and demanding his attention, because my friend had got hold of some ultra desirable Roman artifact. The gentleman had heard the news late in the evening via the ,, jungle tamtam '' and he wanted the artifact for the museum at any price. In my case they did nothing. Which is just fine because I like my sleep. That they did not resort to such questionable albeit funny action is not proof in and of itself that the sabre is Saxon, merely that in their opinion the sabre is ,, something other than Dutch ''.


The sabre.



A rather light Officers model with a two bar hilt, a facetted back strap, pointed langets and a forward bend and long guillon ending in a slightly domed button. The grip is made from wood and bound with cord with leather on top. Two strands of twisted copper wire, that once may have been silvered, sit in the spaces between the leather covered cord wrap. It is adorned with a Montmorency style blade, which is peened on top of a small rectangular plate. The blade is engraved.



Symbolism: The meaning of the engravings.



The first section of both sides of the blade is engraved in the French style, depicting bunches of flowers, military trophies and a moon. The blade has a so called ,, ENTRELAC '' on both sides.



The entrelac is always placed at the very beginning of the blade, just under the guard. Here it is partly covered by the langets. It is typically found on engraved blades from the 17th - 18th - and the very beginning of the 19th century. The entrelac often has a frame, like a picture or possibly nearer the truth, a window frame, with a linear design and points or stars or variations thereoff in the framed field. Often the name and address of the furbisher and / or manufacturer was engraved over the entrelac. The entrelac is symbolic for perpetual motion, the endless movement of evolution. I would like to suggest that there may also be something to say for it to be a view of the night sky as seen through a window, the perpetual motion of the stars, the greatness of the universe, which makes man feel like a mere speck of dust. Just the right mindset for a warrior.



According to ,, Armes Blanches '' by the Messrs l'Hoste and Buigne, a book I can wholeheartedly recommend, the flower engravings on military blades became the fashion after knowledge of new archaeological discoveries, mainly in Italy and Greece, seeped through to the elite mainstream, to those outside of the narrow world of what we might call ,, the professionals '', or antiquarians, mostly viewed by their contemporairies as loonies and nutters, in the later 18th century. Think the first glimpses of Pompeii here. Foremost the depictions of flower arrangements in the paintings on the walls of Pompeian houses. So, in the 18th century still Classical schooled and romantic and let us not beat around the bush here, highly naive and idealistic mindset conserning the enterpretation of all things thought of as Classical or antiquarian, it was quite a new science after all, the images of the bunches of flowers were translated into references to Roman life and more so of what were thought to be the ,, proper '' Roman values. The trophies stand for the soldier, his prowess on the field of battle and the moon for the flow of a soldiers life. Life and death, death and life, which brings us nicely back to the meaning of the entrelac, to start all over again. Perpetual motion indeed.
Since the blue and gild have long since disappeared, I counter polished the formerly blue area. That way the engravings stands out a bit more and one may have a better impression of what the blade must have looked like long ago. The blade carries the Solingen Rose on the spine right under the guard. There are no stamps or engraved retailer or manufacturer names to be found.



One thing became quite obvious during the cleaning: This blade was made from the hardest steel ever.
Never during my foray with cleaning the blades in my little collection have I ever encountered something like this. And the last third of the blade still is quite flexible too, so I believe it is not brittle at all.
It must be said that the grip is in its last stage before turning into compost.



It was severely eaten by worms and has also rotted a bit here and there. I have left it alone for now. Maybe I will stabilize it with epoxy or make a new grip. For show it does not matter much and as it is original I might as well leave it be. Which brings us to the work I did on it.

Work: General state when bought.



The grip we covered above.
Hilt and scabbard were covered in thin red surface rust over old oxidation and peppered with fine pitting. The blade had quite large, but luckily rather superficial, dark spots amidst clusters of very small pits. The much dreaded pin pricks.



A lot of this could be removed without hardly any loss of material, but at a cost of much elbow grease and sandpaper because of the hardness of the blade steel. The tip is missing some material that broke off, but as the damage is minimal I left it untouched. There are some very small V shaped contact marks in the edge of the blade and one larger one, but nothing too serious. The hard steel took the ( counter ) polish very well. The blade needed a new red felt Officers washer and the hilt got some work done on it with steel wool. I popped out the scabbard mouth piece, which is held in place not by screws but just by friction, cleaned it and straightened out the metal langets that should have held the missing wooden liners in place.



Someone had bend the langets inwards to hold the blade after the old liners were gone, which is always a bad idea. The result of course is that a blade gets marred by scraping and that it does nothing to prevent the tip of the blade banging about in the scabbard. The French system is infamous for this scraping since it cannot be adjusted. From 1.5 mm thick so called airplane triplex, found at model shops and used in crafting model airplanes, new liners were cut, with the tops sanded to paper thin to fit between the inner scabbard wall and the langets on the mouth piece.







The sabre sheets very well now, in an almost sensuous way and does not rattle. One can even hold the scabbard upside down katana style without the blade dropping out.



This airplane model triplex comes in 0.5 mm - 1 mm - 1.5 mm and up, in slabs of 50 x 100 cm. The quality is very good, it is without any hard knots. It is stiff lengthwise and flexible over the width. It can stand moisture and oil and is relatively cheap too. Ideal stuff for making all kinds of scabbards and liners. Triplex this thin can easily be cut with a hobby knife. I will certainly use it when I finally get around to make scabbards for some of my small swords and Spadroons and for all my Windlasses with the flabby leather scabbards. This is about all the work I had to do to get this ,, Saxon '' presentable and fit for service for the next hundred years. ( Here I exclude the grip of course ).
A gold sword knot in a nice and generic Napoleonic style from The Uniform Store - London was ordered to finish the project. Sort of icing on the cake. The cherry on top. The spike heels under a new girlfriend.

Handling.

Super fast little number. Effortless cutter cum slasher with a roomy hilt offering good protection. I am quite sure a good whack with this one will cut a hand clean off, but that would be its limit for sure. Cutting heavier targets, I think ,, The Great Coats of the Crimea '' here, could become problematic. In my opinion the sabre does not have the mass to do that. This one is good for cutting and slashing the unprotected areas of the body. Even in its bad condition the grip is super though. My impression is that the first owner sure knew what he wanted. This is really a very well thought out sabre with pleasing lines to booth. Those ,, Saxon '' scabbard fittings are plain sexy.



The numbers.

Weight with scabbard: 1226 grams.
Weight of the sabre: 652 grams.
Total length: 100 cm.
Length of the sabre: 97 cm.
Length of the blade: 84 cm.
Thickness of the blade: 9 - 4.5 - 1.5 mm.
Width of the blade: 30 mm.
POB: 14.5 cm from the guard.

The distal taper is very aggressive. From 9mm to 5mm midway the first quarter of the blade!



Conclusion.

For now the provenance of this sabre is shrouded in the mists of time.
Though this sounds highly romantic, it just means that one day, when I will have long forgotten about this one and I will be , I do not know, making mayonnaise perhaps, its sister will pop up on the net somewhere. Or in a book.
Anyway, it is a nice addition to the collection and I am quite happy to own it.
A confusing relic, although I must say a rather stylish one, of confusing times and as such defenitly more interesting than a run of the mill French AN IX / XI.

Cheers.


Notes and aknowledgements.

Thank you Dave Kelly for keeping me on the straight and narrow!
I do have this tendency to wander off into the steppe and wind up in all kinds of swamps.



Kingdom of Saxony: www.almanachdegotha.org/id34.html



The Saxon Cavalry at the Battle of Borodino: www.napolun.com/mirror/napoleonistyka.atspace.com/Borodino_battle.htm



The Saxon Army circa 1810: www.napoleon-series.org/military/organization/Saxons/c_Sauerweidsaxons.html