Academic Exercises (34 page)

Greek craftsmen made weapons to order for middle-class citizen soldiers who paid for their own equipment. The Romans were into mass production for huge professional armies. They copied a Spanish design; a short, broad double-edged blade, easy to make, wide enough to have thin edges that cut superbly, the edges running parallel for most of the sword’s length before tapering sharply to form a wickedly efficient point. The
gladius Hispaniensis
is an outstanding design, and Roman infantry tactics were founded on it for centuries. It cuts brutally but its primary purpose was stabbing. It’s very short—big deal, said the Romans; when we fight, we like to get close to the enemy—because if it was any longer it’d be too heavy to use. Swords need to be light. Two pounds is the optimum. Some two-handed medieval longswords weighed over three pounds, but they had long handles to give extra leverage, and they were so well balanced that they felt much lighter in use. Any form of swordfighting is exhausting work, and if you get tired and slow, you don’t stand a chance.

When Julius Caesar fought the Gauls in the first century AD, he noticed how, in the heat of hand to hand combat, the Gallic warriors often had to stop and straighten their swords under their feet. Their swords were soft iron, not steel. The extraordinary virtue of heat-treated carbon steel is that it has a memory; bend it, and instead of staying bent as iron does, it springs back.

These days, we know exactly how steel works. It has to do with the carbon content of the metal, which enables steel to change its crystalline structure when heated red hot and immediately quenched in water or oil. This makes the steel extremely hard, but also brittle—if you drop it on the floor, it might just shatter like glass. To make a flexible blade (which is basically just a spring with sharp edges) you need to reheat the hardened blade to a specific temperature and quench it again. Luckily for smiths, before the invention of thermometers, the steel itself tells you exactly when to quench it. It changes colour, running through the rainbow from pale straw yellow to purple to deep, then light blue. You quench swords at the dark blue point, to make them as springy and tough as possible while still able to hold a sharp edge. Or you can dip them in oil and stick them in the fire until all the oil burns off, or you can simply dunk them in molten lead, whose melting point just happens to be the same temperature as the blue stage; these processes are easier and more reliable, but far less aesthetically satisfying.

To make steel, though, you need the right sort of iron—not the pure stuff, but iron alloyed with a small quantity of carbon. There were places where you could dig naturally-occurring steel-bearing ore straight out of the ground. The most famous deposits known in antiquity were in India—King Porus gave Alexander the Great thirty pounds of it—and came to be known as
wootz
. For the vast majority of smiths who couldn’t get hold of the imported material, making steel was a mysterious hit-and-miss affair. You were more likely to get steel if you recycled old iron—horseshoes, wheel tires—than if you used fresh ore, but it was a combination of luck and serendipitously-acquired skill, which wasn’t freely shared. What actually happened, of course, was that carbon from the charcoal universally used to fuel the smith’s fire until the Industrial Revolution migrated into the iron, but they didn’t know that. As a result, decent hardening steel was rare and precious, and only an idiot would dream of making a whole sword out of it.

Instead, bladesmiths all across the world developed the technique now known as pattern-welding. Horribly time-consuming and requiring exceptional skill, pattern-welding was used for hundreds of years, until some point in the ninth century AD, simply because there was no other way of making a half-decent sword. Pattern-welding is based on the happy fact that when two pieces of steel or iron are brought to a temperature just shy of melting—you have to get it just right or the steel is ruined; it’s blinding-white hot, so you judge the exact moment by the soft hissing noise it makes—you can fuse them together by gently hammering. You can weld short bits together to make a useful length; you can also weld hardening steel to soft iron, which means you can make the body of the sword out of cheap, pliable stuff and save the rare, brittle-hard steel just for the cutting edges. Dark Age smiths twisted hundreds of iron twigs together and welded them into billets, then welded the billets into a core, then added the steel edges. The pattern part of the description refers to the swirls, waves, spirals and parallel lines that show up when you etch the finished blade with acid; an unintended by-product, but stunningly beautiful. A pattern-welded sword would have taken weeks to make, and only a deeply skilled man could do it—one mistake, one chunk of slag embedded in the fabric, one seam not heated up enough and failing to fuse—would ruin the whole thing, turning it into gorgeously-figured scrap. The end result was a conflict between two diametrically opposed materials, one soft and ductile, the other hard and brittle. A pattern-welded sword is a supreme triumph of skill, beauty and ingenuity, and it just about gets the job done. A blade beaten out of a SAE 5160 truck leaf spring will outperform it every time.

Which leads us neatly to an assessment of the traditional Japanese sword, the
katana
. Most of the rest of the world got better, cheaper steel which allowed them to start making all-steel swords, but the Japanese didn’t, and so stuck with pattern-welding. They used
tamahagane
, steel smelted out of volcanic black sand, welded to a soft, multiple-folded iron core. The
katana
is single-edged; so, in order to make it strong enough not to bend or break, it has to be thicker in the body than practically any other sword type. To control and handle such a chunky, heavy object, the Japanese opted for a relatively short blade and a long, two-handed grip. The curved blade is ergonomically suited for cutting, particularly the draw-cut (where you pull the blade across the enemy’s flesh to slice rather than chopping at it); it’s got a point, but one that’s primarily designed to assist with cutting with the tip rather than thrusting. All in all, the
katana
is a clunker, an Edsel, fossilised, self-circumscribing, only capable of being used in a limited number of ways, and not much of a stabber; beautifully-made, because only the nobility were allowed to own them; rather like the traditional English game-shooting shotgun, still handmade by craftsmen in a fashion that’s hardly changed since the 18th century, a joy to look at and handle; but a mass-produced Remington slide-action kills birds just as dead, handles just as well, has three times the firepower and costs 1,000 times less.

The myth of the semi-magical Japanese sword arose after WW2, when GIs brought captured
katanas
back from the Pacific, and their sons started playing with them. This led to the Western discovery of the Japanese tradition of swordsmanship, which was unique in one vital respect; it was still alive. By 1945, sword-fighting was dead in the West. There was no living tradition; if you wanted to know how to use anything more practical than a bit of wire in a dish-shaped handle, you had to learn it from a book, which you’d have to go to a museum to read. The Japanese tradition, by contrast, was unbroken back to the 14th century. By the same token, the Japanese had been fighting with basically the same sword design for 600 years; hardly surprising, therefore, that they were about as good at it as it’s possible to get. The
katana
isn’t a particularly good design, and
kenjitsu
isn’t the supreme martial art; but by the second half of the 20th century it was the only game in town. The only swords apart from
katanas
that an American would-be swordsman was likely to encounter were 19th century military sabres, designed primarily for use on horseback, for chopping at the heads and arms of footsoldiers; good enough for that, not much use for anything else, heavy and forward-balanced, extremely unsuited for anything resembling scientific fencing. No wonder, therefore, that to the post-war generation, the
katana
was a magical object possessing practically supernatural qualities.

These days, there are scores, hundreds even, of swordsmiths working in the USA who will supply you, for the price of a decent desktop computer, with the best swords ever made. They’re better than anything produced in antiquity because they’re made of modern steel. Demand, based on the revival of interest in the Western martial arts, has been sufficient to justify outsourcing medieval replica sword manufacture to China. So, for around two hundred dollars, you can have an American-designed replica of a medieval sword, made in China out of 5160 steel, that’s better in every meaningful respect than the finest blade ever commissioned by the Kings of France. You’ll never use it, of course. You might slice into a water-filled plastic bottle. You might even dismember a 50 gallon oil drum, and post the ensuing carnage on YouTube. But the masterpiece you hold in your hand is obsolete at the moment of perfection. All you can really do with it is look at yourself holding it in a mirror, in the same way as a zoo lion stalks in his cage, glorying in his absolute possession of seven paces.