Many of our contemporaries, direct participants in hostilities in hot spots of the planet, truly understand the importance of the presence of a bayonet-knife in the equipment as an indispensable assistant in achieving victory in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy, survival in extreme conditions.
Specialists studying the history of the creation and development of cold steel argue that the first cases of using a knife complete with firearms were recorded in the middle of the sixteenth century. It was at that time that the baguette first appeared - a knife with a modified handle design, which is a prototype of a gun bayonet.
History of the appearance of baguettes
Understanding baguette that this is the predecessor of the famous bayonet is quite difficult to understand. An ordinary knife, only a thin handle. But it is in this handle that the mystery of the origin of the deadly bayonet is concentrated.
Many researchers give wild hunters primacy in making baguettes. They motivate their position by the fact that, going on a hunt, the participants in this field, in addition to single-shot guns, took peaks with them - long poles with combat tips.
This weapon was used in cases when it became necessary to finish off a wounded beast or to defend itself from its attack, using stabbing, cutting blows. It was inconvenient to wear poles and peaks; they limited freedom of movement, especially in a dense forest. As an alternative to cumbersome attributes, a baguette was invented - this is an ordinary knife, but with a thin round handle that was inserted into the barrel. Thus, the gun transformed into a dive.
Another of the existing versions of the reasons for the appearance of the baguette is that this weapon appeared in the French city of Bayonne and its historically correct name is the bayonet (in harmony with the name of the city). Ostensibly, the smugglers there were the first to come up with a way to use a knife that was inserted into the barrel of the gun immediately after a shot to gain an advantage in hand-to-hand combat with French or Italian authorities. In favor of this theory is the fact that it was the French army that was among the first to take the bayonet into its arsenal.
Improvement of the prototype of the bayonet
Which of the researchers is right does not really matter. The important thing is that someone came up with a wonderful idea to change the handle of an ordinary knife so that it can be inserted into the barrel of a gun.
This is exactly what baguette looked like, a drawing of which can be found in the literature on weapons-related topics. Its original purpose was to use like cold steel at a safe distance for itself, without bothering to wear a peak.
The idea was successful and in demand. For almost half of the seventeenth century, the main area of improvement for baguette was attempts to select the most functional material, the configuration of its handle.
Its shape on its various parts became conical in order to more securely fix the gun in the barrel.
Thus, the person who first changed the design of the handle of the knife, adapting it for use by inserting a gun into the barrel, created the prototype of the gun bayonet - a deadly weapon used in hand-to-hand combat for several centuries.
Baguette armed with armies
Since the forties of the seventeenth century, European armies have adopted baguette for service. It was at this time that the process of replacing massive, heavy, bulky guns such as the French musket, Russian berdysh, which were used with the use of additional supporting devices, with lighter guns - fusees, took place. Manning them with baguettes led to the gradual abandonment of such weapons as spades, halberds, and fighting forks.
Using the baguette of the 17th century, the musketeers became at the same time rifle guns and spearmen, which allowed to increase the number of shooters due to the retraining of part of the soldiers, therefore, to strengthen the combat power of the army.
Baguette modernization in the armies
Realizing the strategic necessity of using a knife in combination with a gun, gunsmiths faced a problem: a weapon equipped with a bayonet lost the ability to fire a shot. Specialists began to work on the modernization of this system.
The efforts were successful, a technical solution was found that allowed the knife to be mounted next to the barrel. So in creative torment and search, a prototype of a gun bayonet was created.
First gun bayonets
At the end of the seventeenth century, on the guns of the Swedish army on the right side of the barrel, they began to fasten at first the ring, and then the tube, which allowed the simultaneous use of firearms and cold steel. This design option was the closest prototype of the gun bayonet.
Already in the late nineties, the armies of European countries began to arm with all-metal structures of knives with a tube, which was easily worn on the barrel and mounted on it. There were quite a few options for such mounts - slotted, solid, with clamps, latches.
Types and types of bayonets
The same nineties included the established use of two bayonet designs - with a short wide blade type blade and an elongated needle-shaped bayonet in the shape of a tetrahedron.
The main advantage of the needle bayonet was its weight - less than that of the blade. This parameter was of no small importance, given the large intrinsic mass of small arms and the method of attaching bayonets to it - on the end of the gun barrel.
At the same time, the blade type of bayonet is more versatile and was used by many European states. Thus, the German bayonet throughout its use in the equipment of the country's army soldiers had an unchanged blade shape.
According to the method of wearing, the bayonets were divided into two types - detachable, it was worn separately from the gun in the pouch or on the soldier’s belt, and also integral, which was attached to the barrel of the gun, but not in a fighting position.
Russian bayonet
The appearance of bayonets in the arsenal of the Russian army is associated by historians with the beginning of the eighteenth century, as well as with the name of Peter I. At his command, the Russian army received a bayonet, which was a needle-type blade. Its shape was represented by a trihedron, it was connected to a round tube using an oval-shaped neck.
Russian military leaders from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries paid great attention to this addition of rifles, sought from soldiers and officers to perfect mastery of hand-to-hand combat using a bayonet.
In documents that have survived to this day, literary works one can often find the idea that the bayonets of the Russian army brought her victory over the enemy. Not guns, not guns, but bayonets. That is what the great Russian generals of those years, their contemporaries, thought, claimed.
Pronunciation by baguette
In forums discussing the problems of linguistics, the word baguette is mentioned, the emphasis of which is put on different syllables. The correct pronunciation is difficult to determine. In the dictionaries of the modern Russian language, this word did not make it, like some others of foreign origin. There is no interpretation, including phonetic, in the well-known academic dictionaries of Ozhegov and Dahl.
It is generally accepted that in the French language stresses tend to fall on the last syllable, however, in our interpretation of this word the concept of stress in this language is absent. The French language is characterized by prosodica, in which the end of the spoken phrase is stressed.
If we take as a basis that the analogue of the baguette, the word "bayonet" comes from the name of the city of Bayonne, then we can assume that the emphasis on the second syllable is the correct option. It is more convenient for Russian-speaking people to emphasize the last syllable, and there is nothing reprehensible in this.