Shurely Some Mistake?
The long, low ridges of the Somme, in northern France are now synonymous with the senseless stalemate of the Western Front in 1916. But the exhausted, grimy English soldiers stumbling through this landscape, sinking up to their knees in mud, once wore kettle helmets and padded jerkins. Their weapons were not Tommy-guns but longbows, each six feet long and weighing 150 pounds, strung with gut and equipped with arrows so finely barbed that they could pierce armour-plate.
"Bowing to the longbow", The Economist 22/10/05 p98
There are times when I wish I was a good cartoonist.
ETA the mistake in question is that 150lbs is the draw weight of a longbow (i.e. the amount of weight that would be necessary to draw the bow), not the weight of the bow itself. Longbowmen did not carry weapons about as heavy as they are!
"Bowing to the longbow", The Economist 22/10/05 p98
There are times when I wish I was a good cartoonist.
ETA the mistake in question is that 150lbs is the draw weight of a longbow (i.e. the amount of weight that would be necessary to draw the bow), not the weight of the bow itself. Longbowmen did not carry weapons about as heavy as they are!