By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  Sharpe held his straight-bladed sword pointed at the Lieutenant’s throat and locked his elbow as the Frenchman fell onto the blade. There was an instant’s resistance, then the sword’s point punctured skin and muscle to tear into the great blood vessels of the Frenchman’s neck.… Then the Frenchman was falling away, and his dying weight ripped his body clear of the long steel blade.6

  Loss of blood has always been the most common danger. While a duelist’s surgeon would be able to stanch the peripheral bleeding caused by limb injuries, he would be able to do little for deep cuts to the head or trunk. The victim’s only hope would be that the bleeding could be sufficiently contained to allow time for transfusion or emergency surgery. After massive bleeding (exsanguination) and infection, most deaths are caused by air in the bloodstream (embolism), suffocation (asphyxia), or collapsed lung (pneumothorax). Even if major arteries are cut and severe loss of blood ensues, an adult can remain fully conscious from two to thirty seconds, with death occurring from between three seconds and two minutes later. Even mortally wounded duelists were sometimes able to continue fighting effectively long enough to take the lives of those who had taken theirs. A stricken man frequently does not feel the full effects of his wound and, blinded with rage, may simply throw himself on his opponent with renewed fury.

  The many deadly encounters in France in the late 1800s are listed in Christoph Amberger’s Secret History of the Sword. In each case only one duelist survived. “This is not surprising,” writes Amberger. “After all, the weapon itself is designed for antagonistic combat. Its point can indeed be described only with the cliché of ‘needle-sharp.’ It will snag veins, arteries, and muscles on its path through the body, tearing them as the blade progresses. (A blunted tip, such as that of the modern sports saber, will push them aside rather than tearing them.) The resulting damage is a function of organs hit and depth of penetration.”7

  Yet outright kills depended as much on sheer luck as on skill. A thrust would kill for sure only if it penetrated the internal organs, not when it jammed against a bone. Amberger continues, “Given the anatomical variants of the opponent’s body, a deliberate attempt at an instant kill with a thrust into a ‘vital point’ could be compared with trying to impale an airborne fly hovering behind a curtain.” Some years ago my own doctor was stabbed in the back with six inches of steel by a New York serial stalker, whom the policed dubbed “the Spiderman,” but Spiderman missed his fly. Dr. Kinkhabwala was back at work within two days.

  One Marseillais turned himself into a deadly duelist to avenge the deaths of his bride, parents, and family at the hands of Jacobins and Bonapartists. He picked his victims by their choice of reading: the Figaro or the National. His strategy was clear, if chilling: “If I thrust en quarte, I pull out with a barely perceptible shift of hand position into tierce, or vice versa. That kills. He’ll stay down for ever … because the lung then is damaged, and sepsis will follow.”8

  Sword wounds caused particular problems for the doctors called in to mend them. Dr. Richard Wiseman, surgeon to Charles II, gives a detailed account of dealing with such injuries, as when a blade remains embedded in its victim’s body. A doctor may have to “consider whether you may with safety pluck out the Weapon or no. Some will live a day with the Weapon in their Body, who would expire upon the moment of Extraction. But if your judgment suggest to you that the Patient is recoverable, make haste, out with it before the Part be inflamed.”9

  One problem with puncture wounds is that they are prone to prolonged suppuration, which antiseptic dressings normally assuage. Some treatments are distinctly unorthodox. Oscar Kolombatovitch (1919–2002) had a long and varied career as weapon maker and fencing master (he taught at both West Point and the Metropolitan Opera, his pupils including an ungainly Pavarotti). He also found time to work for the OSS. In Italy during the 1930s, he fought several duels and on one occasion was badly wounded in the groin. “Bleeding like a stuck pig,” he was rushed to the very rudimentary local hospital. “My main worry was the hospitals there—they had already killed Puccini and Caruso.” Here he was attended by a pretty young nurse, who to his surprise kept offering him the local cigarettes, “Nazionale,” which tasted like “horse dung with toilet paper.” “Why are you doing this to me?” he growled. The nurse looked up from his injury. “I want to see whether the smoke comes out down there.”

  FENCERS WERE OFTEN DUELISTS, ESPECIALLY IN ITALY, THE MOST notable being Aldo Nadi, who before he left Italy for America was continually getting into arguments with his fellow countrymen, with predictable results. Despite many challenges, he fought only a single duel, but being a surprisingly gifted writer he recorded the experience in one of the best accounts we have of what it is like to duel (particularly if one is a fencer) and how it feels to be hit by a sharpened blade.10

  His opponent was Adolfo Cotronei, fencing editor of the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera. The quarrel began in 1924 when the great French champion Lucien Gaudin was to fight en gala against the Italian champion, Candido Sassone. The site for the match was the Hotel Augusteo in Rome. “Mussolini was present,” Nadi writes. “Somebody took me to his box, and I was introduced to the dictator.” It being an exhibition bout, no strict score was kept, but Nadi reckoned that Gaudin ran out the clear winner. At a dinner following the match, Nadi announced his views to the assembled company. Cotronei, who was present, said nothing but a few days later published an article asserting that Sassone had won 9–7. “Apart from the fact that in exhibition fencing the reporting of a definite score simply is not done,” Nadi states dryly, “this was the biggest lie of the century.” He goes on, “It must be remembered that this was Fascist Italy; and no champion belonging to Fascist Italy could possibly be defeated by any foreign and non-Fascist champion, let alone in the presence of the Number One.”

  Nadi did nothing at first, but it was reported to him that Cotronei had publicly called him a “mascalzone.” “The word,” Nadi wrote, “belonging to Tuscan slang, cannot possibly be translated into English. But you may rest assured that such an appellation is very insulting indeed.” He issued his challenge.

  Cotronei was in his early forties, the survivor of five previous duels; Nadi was twenty-five and had never dueled before. The rendezvous was the paddock of the famous Milan racetrack of San Siro. Nadi arrived there shortly after dawn and recalled having been at this same track a few weeks before, and losing heavily. A few yards away he noticed Cotronei talking idly with his seconds and remembered that he was a racing aficionado; the editor seemed as relaxed as if awaiting a training gallop.

  Nadi underscores that being a champion fencer was no guarantee of going home alive: “The layman … may have certain romantic notions about dueling, and even see some sort of glamour in it, while the [modern fencer] knows it is, at best, a thoroughly unpleasant, grim business.… One is a world of hate, courage and blood; the other of courtesy, courage and skill.”‡

  He could see a couple of doctors in white shirts silently laying out a “hideous assortment of surgical instruments” on a little table. Before putting on his glove, as dueling regulations required, his seconds fastened a white silk handkerchief to his wrist. “What’s that for?” he asked. “To protect the main arteries.” It was not the most comforting of explanations. Nadi looked around. There was a small crowd of celebrated artists, writers, and journalists and several equally well-known sportsmen, including a number of well-known masters and amateurs. He quickly picked out the master who trained Cotronei. He could beat him, all right, but felt less sure about the pupil. The only member of his own family there was his brother Nedo—“a great fencer, but he seems absolutely terrified.” Aldo had told his brother that, as the injured party, he had chosen épées rather than sabers. “While saber duels may be bloodier than épée ones, they are less deadly … if a few inches of an épée hit a vital organ you’ve had it.” Nedo had winced.

  The doctors had meticulously sterilized the épées, and only then did both men pick up their weapons. �
��Despite its narrow width, you know only too well that it is practically unbreakable. It certainly won’t break when it meets your flesh! You cannot help being mesmerized by its point, its needle sharpness reminding you that it can penetrate your body as easily as butter.”

  As if on cue, the referee said in a strong voice: “Gentlemen, en garde!” Nadi continues:

  You have got en garde thousands of times before, but never like this. In competition the good fencer takes his time weighing up his opponent before starting in. But in a duel this isn’t possible, because your adversary immediately executes a plan which he has obviously thought out in advance: surprise the youngster at the very beginning; take advantage of his lack of dueling experience, possibly neutralize his ingrained technical superiority; work on his nerves and morale. Get to him at once. Disregarding the risk, old Cotronei attacks with all the viciousness he can muster, letting out guttural sounds as he does so.…

  You counterattack, and your sword-point lands precisely where you wanted it to—at the wrist, piercing both the glove and the white silk. But during your opponent’s flurry of action his blade has clashed with yours, and its point whips into your forearm.… “Halt!” shouts the referee. Oblivious to your own wound, you look at once at your opponent’s wrist, then up at his face. Why on earth does he look so pleased? Wasn’t he the one to be hit first? Yes, but this is not like a competition bout. He has every reason to be pleased at having wounded you.…

  The doctors take care of both wounds. What? They are bandaging up your wound but not his! Preposterous! You feel furious with everything and everyone—but above all with yourself. You curse, but silently, under your breath, as if in a competition.… You are on guard again. Fine. The duel continues, with more touches, more wounds. While these are being disinfected and the blades elaborately sterilized, my seconds repeatedly suggest that I accept the proposals from my adversary’s seconds to call a halt. I do not even bother to reply.

  After the sixth set-to they again ask us to stop. I could hardly say that at this point I lost my temper—that had long since gone.… Quietly but firmly I said: “Stop annoying me. I am going to fight till daybreak if I have to.” Remember, I was still young. Much later I was told that it was at this point that one of the spectators muttered: “I think he’s going to kill him.” My own doctor, a young scientist, was as white as a sheet and looked ready to collapse.…

  Up to that point the slippery pebbles of the paddock, on which my street shoes (dueling regulations again) could not gain purchase, had prevented any truly aggressive movement.… Now it was a different story.… I wanted to lunge, and lunge I would. My left foot went to work at once. Pawing and pushing away like a dog after a rabbit, it cleared the little stones beneath it and settled in the sticky ground underneath. I was ready—but first a vicious curiosity made me look up at my opponent’s face.

  It was distorted physically and morally. It displayed none of the defiance and self-control it had shown just before the fight. His eyes seemed hypnotized by the point of my blade. It dominated his whole world. He seemed so drained of energy that he could hardly keep on guard: all his reserves were exhausted. He was in my hands, unable to escape.… Now was the time to press that attack.

  The Adolfo Cotronei–Aldo Nadi encounter. “If I’d known there was going to be such a turnout I would have sold tickets,” boasted Aldo Nadi (left) in his memoirs, but at the time he was anything but confident. (illustration credit 12.1)

  The outcome of Nadi’s duel can be discovered in his memoirs; but suffice it to say that both he and Cotronei survived, honor dented but vital organs intact. Almost immediately Nadi set off for Cannes, where he won an épée tournament and spent the night making love to a woman he met at his hotel.

  AS FOR COMPETITIVE FENCING, ONLY IN THE GERMAN MENSUR ARE wounds actively encouraged, and these are never inflicted with dire intent. But the sport has its dangers. One is still simulating an attempt to kill, and even within a protected environment swordfights can go wrong.§ Up until the nineteenth century it was generally accepted that if you fenced for any length of time you would finish bruised, minus an eye or tooth, or even dead. Eye injuries remained a constant hazard. In the seventeenth century a Scots gentleman, who had procured the assassination of a master in revenge for having had an eye destroyed during a lesson, pleaded at his trial that it was the custom to “spare the face.” In the early 1600s John Turner, a leading English master, had a reputation for hitting his opponents in the eye and had killed one John Dun in this way. John Maningham recorded the bout in his Diary: “Turner and Dun, two famous fencers, played their prizes this day at the bankside, but Turner at last ran Dun so far in the brain at the eye that he fell down presently stone dead; a goodly sport in a Christian state, to see one man kill another.” Later, Turner was to put out the eye of the Scottish laird Robert Crichton during a practice bout, and it was for this Crichton had him assassinated.‖ As far on as 1840 John Tenniel, later the famous illustrator of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was taking his daily fencing lesson, without benefit of masks. The master concerned, a pupil of Angelo, was Tenniel’s father. The button fell off the senior Tenniel’s foil, and the blade, flicking across his son’s right eye, blinded it. Tenniel Junior—only twenty at the time—made no sign that he had been seriously wounded, and his father, amazingly, never learned what he had done. It was later said that the blinded eye may have caused the loss of dimension in Tenniel’s drawings.

  Such accidents were all too common. Angelo’s son Henry tells in his memoirs how he once, “in fencing without a mask, swallowed some inches, button and all,” of his adversary’s foil. When researching among Richard Burton’s papers, I came across a four-part article on the history of fencing dated spring 1881. The author’s name is not given, but I suspect it was Burton himself, notably from one paragraph:

  “A Fatal Fencing Accident,” as captured in the nineteenth-century magazine Bystander. (illustration credit 12.2)

  “One would think that the fencing of the last century would have been deliberate, even to tameness in comparison with ours if such accidents were not constantly happening.… At this day we should think fencing without a mask the merest foolhardiness; and it is now usual to protect not only the whole of the body but the leg down to the knee; though as late as 1847 Grisier, one of the last lights of the formal academic school, condemned thigh-pads and leather jackets as an extravagant new-fangledness, tending only to encourage wild fencing.”14

  One of the most dramatic of accidents overtook the French master Alphonse Pons during a bout in London with the hot-tempered Lord Geffrin. Incensed at being continually parried, Geffrin launched a furious attack. Again Pons parried, and the force of the blow broke Geffrin’s blade some eight inches from the tip, but the foil went on to penetrate the master’s chest. Pons was carried to a sofa, where he called for pen and ink. He then dictated a brief letter to his daughter: “My daughter, I am dying. It was my fault, I should have parried twice.” Happily, he recovered.

  The Geffrin-Pons fight raises the question of the differences between injuries caused by an intact weapon and those caused by a broken blade. The specific threat posed by the latter is a recent discovery. It is much easier to make body armor effective against a bullet than against a dagger, the cross-sectional force behind which is colossal by comparison (at its tip, roughly 3.75 tons per square inch, vibrating at 3,600 mph). A British épéeist, Ron Parfitt, has conducted several experiments with broken blades. They can function like a dum-dum bullet. “The essential point,” he says, “is that the blade bends increasingly until it snaps, when it flicks out straight and hits the jacket with a shearing action which cuts across the fibres rather than just pushing a hole through them. Again the forces are very considerable but different from the thrusting action of a dueling sword. An intact épée, by comparison, has a relatively large surface area at the tip and so penetration is less likely and will also go less deep.”

  It took until the middle of the nineteenth centu
ry for attention to turn to safety. Leather jackets, a variation on the jerkins worn under coats of mail, were introduced, later giving way to stiff canvas jackets and breeches. Special shoes with long projecting leathers at the toe, which gave the leading foot “a resonant sound,” began to be worn (Burton objected, saying that “practice does this with the common cricketing shoe easily and loudly enough”). Gloves varied widely, but most had special patches of stiff leather. Eventually—as late as 1970—thick canvas was discarded in favor of light, figure-hugging cotton costumes. Electric fencing provoked a new rush of problems. Despite the constant bending and straightening blades underwent, there was little regulation over how they were made or how they performed. (Administrators were more intent on scrutinizing how the tips of any new electric device were attached to the blades: they could not be glued or soldered on and had to have a thread of a certain diameter.)

  After a Finnish épéeist was killed at the Stockholm championships of 1951, canvas plastrons came in, specifically to guard beneath the arm. Eleven years later the existing épée point (which could pierce a mask’s mesh) was replaced with one with a flat top. The French master Michel Alaux, writing in American Fencing, sounded a warning:

  Now we face the problem of a new point whose edged cutting actions resemble those of the punch press used in steel production to test the resistance of metal.… While giving lessons I personally have felt the penetrating power of this new point. This is of some concern, and raises other questions. Has the point been tested against the mesh of the mask? Is the change a real improvement? Might it not be better to require a stronger mesh for the mask and forbid the use of rusty masks? Does this point’s shape reduce the force of penetration through the material of the jacket?15