By the Sword
Page 40
The weapon of choice was the Stossdegen, similar to a modern epée, only with a larger guard and a three-sided blade. The edges were not sharpened, so the main object was to skewer one’s opponent. Following a particularly gruesome death at Göttingen in 1767, a sword was developed that produced less gory injuries, and this led to the Schläger (“striker”), derived from the rapier. Universities east of the Elbe River adopted a bell-shaped guard like an inverted saucer (referred to humorously as “the soup plate of honor”) and an obliquely pointed blade, while elsewhere students used the Korbschlager, with a basket guard and a squared-off (i.e., nonpiercing) tip, whose edges were as sharp as a razor for about eighteen inches along each side. These new swords changed the Mensur: the style of the bouts adapted to the need to parry the swinging blade, while distances contracted with time until combatants kept their back feet entirely stationary. The most vulnerable parts of the body were shielded, while the ubiquitous student cap, originally worn to protect the eyes (with pieces of plaster of Paris secured by tape just under the eyes), was replaced by specially constructed goggles.
In most universities the venue was always an inn on the outskirts of town. At Heidelberg, Mensuren were fought in Hirschgasse (“Stag Lane”) in the room of a hostelry paid for from fraternity funds. A junior fraternity member would be sent to inform the “Paukarzt,” the attending surgeon. Two seconds, two witnesses, and a referee were required, and the room was often thronged with spectators.
Most detailed accounts of Mensuren have been left by foreign guests. One of the best is Mark Twain’s, who devotes two chapters to them in A Tramp Abroad. Twain describes the venue as a two-story public house set in a narrow valley: “We went upstairs and passed into a large whitewashed apartment which was perhaps fifty feet long, by thirty feet wide and twenty or twenty-five high. It was a well-lighted place. There was no carpet. Across one end and down both sides of the room extended a row of tables, and at these tables some 50 or 75 students were sitting.”1 Twain stayed from 9:30 in the morning until 2 P.M., witnessing four Mensuren and one formal duel.
Between 1848 and 1870 the duel and the Mensur assumed contrasting characters. While the duel kept most of its original features, the rapier blade of the Schläger gave way in the Mensur to a curved saber blade, about three feet in length, and the distance between opponents contracted to a single blade’s distance from chest to chest. The target shrank too, simply to the head, partially protected by goggles. Thus the Mensur exposed a small, vulnerable, but generally not fatal area, while in the duel both head and torso were fair game.
Each fighter was brought into the room by his second and his witness, after which he would don his cap, whose size varied from ordinary student headgear to a much larger contraption with a broad peak. Divinity students always fought in these peaked caps, as a scar would terminate their careers. Eventually the caps were replaced with massive glassless iron goggles. Next came a wide scarf, usually reaching up to the chin and pulled in tightly. For the sword arm, whose binding had to give protection while not restricting the action of the wrist and elbow, a fine leather glove was used, bound and secured to the wrist with a silken ribbon. The Stulp, a thick, well-quilted silk arm cover, was pulled down over the glove and fastened with more ribbons.
Finally the duelist climbed into his Paukhosen, thick leather trousers laced together behind by leather thongs, which rose over the stomach and ribs to form a cuirass. Even so, it left a good part of the chest uncovered. A second thick glove was fastened to the back of the Paukhosen to keep the nonsword hand firmly out of the way throughout the fight. Combatants removed their coats, waistcoats, ties, and suspenders and slit their shirtsleeves from wrist to shoulder to leave the arm free, regular challengers keeping special shirts for the purpose.
Once fully kitted, the opponents would be conducted into the dueling room, where they would strut up and down, each supporting his sword arm on his witness. The seconds would mark out the boundaries of the fight with chalk: if either man retreated behind his line three times, he was dismissed “with shame and insult.” The rules recognized at least six different forms of engagement, from “twelve rounds with the great cap, until a conclusive wound” to a single round lasting fifteen minutes. A round would continue until one combatant had landed a clear blow, this being defined as one of at least two inches, deep enough, to use the student phrase, “to cut through the two skins.” When such a wound was made, the wounded man’s second ended the fight by crying out “Remove him!” or (to the umpire) “Please declare a bloody one” [a “Blutigen”].
One foreign observer described these encounters as “not very dangerous” and records students who “have fought from 30 to 40, and even 60 times, and yet have come out of them all with a few slight wounds in the face.”2 All such fights were quite against the law—the last legal swordfighting in the German lands had taken place back in 1793—so the students had to employ an elaborate warning system, stationing “foxes” (first-year students) on each side of the road every hundred feet to signal the approach of the “poodles” (Pedellen), the university beadles. Once the alarm sounded, the combatants would strip off their gear and rush into the woods. Sword handle, guard, and blade could all be unscrewed and hidden, the hilt and guard under a cloak, the blade inside a hollow walking stick. If a student was too slow to get away, there was always a neighboring cornfield or the garret. At one time, two undergraduates regularly hired the garden shed next to the inn so that escaping duelists could be presented to the authorities as visiting friends. Eventually the police forbade anyone to rent the building.
A British traveler in the 1930s, Robert Southcombe, was allowed to attend both a Duell with heavy saber and a Mensur contest. The morning Southcombe went to watch, there were one young doctor and two or three medical students present. On a table near a window he could see basins of water, sponges, and a number of crooked needles threaded with coored silk. Cuts were washed in cold water. “As I understood it,” Southcombe commented dryly, “a salt preparation was rubbed in to preserve the scar. To flinch unduly, or even at all, when cut in Schlager fighting was to court social ostracism.”3
Twain’s account of fifty years before suggests that nothing much had changed. “The student is glad to get wounds in the face,” Twain explained, “because the scars they leave will show so well there; and it is also said that these face-wounds are so prized that youths have even been known to pull them apart from time to time and pour red wine in them to make them heal badly and leave as ugly a scar as possible.… I had seen the heads and faces of ten youths gashed in every direction by the keen two-edged blades, and yet had not seen a victim wince, nor heard a moan, or detected any fleeting expression which confessed the sharp pains the hurts were inflicting.”4
James Morgan Hart, another American visitor, was less impressed. “Bloodshed aside,” he recorded, “the general appearance of the duelists is very comical. The pad and cravat and spectacles made them look somewhat like a pair of submarine divers in their armor. Then, it is interesting to watch the left hand pulling on the tag in convulsive sympathy with the movements of the right hand.… I doubt whether the civilized world can afford an odder sight.”5 Hart later asked a friend, a corps student and first-class Schläger fencer, what he really thought of the Mensur. “Oh, it’s a horrible piece of nonsense (ein grässlicher Unsinn),” he said, “but at any rate it’s better than street-fighting.”6
Each of these accounts is accurate so far as it goes, but relatively sanitized, and avoids mention of the copious drinking that was so vital a part of fraternity life and does not describe what Mensur fights could be like at their worst. Around 1900 the English actor, playwright, and author Jerome K. Jerome biked through Germany and wrote up his travels in Three Men on the Bummel,7 a sequel to his earlier great success, Three Men in a Boat, his voyage with two friends up the Thames. Most of the book offers a sympathetic portrait—but not his report on dueling.8 The Germans, he wrote, believed that the Mensur built character. (Ten years
before, the Emperor Franz Josef of Austria had suggested that dueling clubs provided “the best education which a young man can get for his future life.”) “Their argument is that it schools the German youth to coolness and courage,” wrote Jerome derisively. The student “fights not to please himself, but to satisfy a public opinion that is two hundred years behind the times.” Far from being a virtuous exercise, “all the Mensur does is brutalize him.”
The fight might be brutish and short, he continued, while “the whole interest is centered in watching the wounds. They come always in one or two places—on the top of the head or the left side of the face.” Sometimes a portion of hairy scalp or section of cheek flies up into the air, “to be carefully preserved in an envelope by its proud possessor, or, strictly speaking, its proud former possessor, and shown round on convivial evenings.” Each bout produces “a plentiful stream of blood. It splashes doctors, seconds, and spectators; it sprinkles ceilings and walls; it saturates the fighters, and makes pools for itself in the sawdust. At the end of each round the doctors rush up, and with hands already dripping with blood press together the gaping wounds, dabbing them with little balls of wet cotton wool.” The point, of course, is to “go away from the University bearing as many scars as possible” and so merit the admiration of one’s peers, the attention of the fairer sex, and, eventually, “a wife with a dowry of five figures at the least.”
The dueling students measure the distance. On their left are their seconds, on the right the official attendants. (illustration credit 13.1)
The second act of the spectacle took place in the dressing room. The “doctors” in evidence there were generally medical students, “coarse-looking men” who seemed “rather to relish their work” and who carried out their repairs without much regard to the pain or physiognomy of their charges. This is all part of the ritual, since “how the student bears the dressing of his wounds is as important as how he receives them. Every operation has to be performed as brutally as may be, and his companions watch him during the process to see that he goes through it with an appearance of peace and enjoyment. A clean-cut wound that gapes wide is most desired by all parties. On purpose it is sewn up clumsily, with the hope that by this means the scar will last a lifetime.”
One student from Göttingen recalled a duelist’s nose being hacked off. Another attested, “These seem to be no light matters; the wounds were sometimes formidable, and I have seen blood spurting an inch high from a vein.”9 Visitors to German universities would see students walking around town with their faces and noses swathed in bandages. Richard Burton, on a journey to Heidelberg, wrote of a particularly grisly encounter:
Sometimes too heavy a cut went into the lungs, and at other times took an effect upon either eye. But the grand thing was to walk off with the tip of the adversary’s nose, by a dexterous upward snick from the hanging guard. A terrible story was told of a duel between a handsome man and an ugly man. Beauty had a lovely nose, and Beast so managed that presently it was found on the ground. Beauty made a rush for it, but Beast stamped it out of shape.10
WHEN ONE LOOKS AT PORTRAITS OF HIM IN LATER LIFE, THE STERN, unforgiving stare above the huge walrus mustache, it is hard to imagine the future Prince Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck as he must have been as a student in the early 1830s. Göttingen University, in the kingdom of Hanover, had fifteen hundred students, and by the time Bismarck matriculated, ostensibly to read law, it was recognized as one of the best in Germany.
Bismarck was a Prussian Junker—“from Pomerania,” as he styled himself—the son of a rural, clodhopping father and a neurotic urban intellectual mother, and by all accounts he quickly became one of the sights of the university. He dressed wildly, in top boots with iron spurs, his long untamed hair swinging beneath a cap of flaming crimson and gold, with enormous wide trousers, a chaotic dressing gown, and a big brass ring on the first finger of his left hand. Strapped about his waist was a leather girdle into which were thrust two large horse pistols along with a long basket-hilted dueling sword. Shrieking children would follow him down the street.
Although “as thin as a knitting-needle,” Bismarck was unusually tall and regularly drank his fellow students under the table. He invented his own special draught, “black velvet,” a particularly deadly concoction of champagne and porter, but was equally at home consuming enormous quantities of wine or beer in student Kneipen (drinking bouts). He spoke of “my friend, the flask” and attended lectures only on the rare occasions when he had nothing better to do. He was forever at odds with the authorities, whether for setting a fox loose in the middle of a university ballroom, going on drunken midnight swims, or randomly discharging his pistols. He committed so many offenses that he spent considerable time in the college jail; the student prison door still bears his name, carved while serving ten days for acting as a second. Contemporaries dubbed him “Mad Bismarck.” He owned two dogs, one a dachshund named Ariel. On one occasion he threatened to duel with a passing student who admitted to having laughed at his dog unless the student apologized directly to the dachshund. Ariel got his apology.
Bismarck loved dueling. He joined the Landsmannschaft Hanovara, a dueling fraternity whose members came mainly from officer and civil service families in Hannovera, and was soon a legendary figure, given further nicknames, including “Achilles the Invulnerable” and “Baby-Head.” In all he fought twenty-five Mensuren between the summer of 1831 and his departure in 1834, receiving seven bloody hits and two illegal (incommentmässig) ones. He was both lucky and skillful, for the biggest cut he received was made by a fellow student named Biedenweg, whose sword, the press recorded, “flew from its socket,” and cut Bismarck, depending on which authority one believes, from the left side of his jaw to the corner of his mouth or from the tip of his nose to the edge of his right ear. Such was his skill that other students were careful not to challenge him—though obviously, from his tally of victories, not careful enough.
Bismarck struck up a friendship with John Lothrop Motley, a reserved New Englander from Boston who later became a noted historian and diplomat, serving in Vienna and London. The two became inseparable. A few years after leaving Göttingen, Motley wrote a novel, Morton’s Hope, or the Memoirs of a Provincial. In it Bismarck is fictionalized as Otto von Rabenmark, otherwise known as “the fox.” Motley evidently attended many of Bismarck’s duels, two of which he describes in detail. Here Rabenmark fights a student called Kopp:
For an instant they remained motionless, and eyed each other warily, but undauntedly. Suddenly Rabenmark raised his weapons, and making a feint at the heel of his antagonist, directed a violent blow at his breast. It was skillfully parried by the opposite party, who retorted with a savage “quart,” which, if successful, would have severed him nearly in two. The fox caught it on his sword, with a skill which I hardly believed him capable of, and then becoming animated, aimed a succession of violent and rapid blows, now “quart” and now “tierce,” upon his adversary. They were all parried with wonderful precision and coolness.
Motley writes with an almost brotherly concern, but with admiration too; he follows the convention of the time by referring to attacks to tierce and quart rather than flank (beneath the sword arm) and chest, as we would now. He goes on:
I perceived that the dexterity of my friend was nearly exhausted, and expected every instant to see him stretched upon the floor. At last, Kopp aimed a prodigious blow at Rabenmark’s head. It came within a quarter of an inch of the frontlet of the cap before Rabenmark succeeded in beating it off with a desperate and successful backhand stroke. The fox, now throwing himself entirely off his guard, rushed wildly upon his adversary. He beat down his sword before he had time to recover his posture of defense, and with one last violent and tremendous effort he struck at his adversary’s head. It was unexpected, and too late to parry; the blow alighted full upon the cheek of the enemy. Its force was prodigious; the Westphalian, stunned and blinded, staggered a few paces forward, and then his feet slipped, and he fell upo
n the floor.
“Alighted” is an oddly decorous choice of word in the circumstances; Motley was presumably trying to keep the reader’s sympathy for his friend even as he vaunted his ferocious fighting powers.
I went up and took a look at him. The Pauk-Doktor was busy sponging away the blood, and an assistant was applying restoratives to awaken him from his swoon. The side of the cap had been cut through by the violence of the blow, and a deep and ghastly wound extended from the top of the head across the temple and the cheek. The whole side of the face was laid open. “He has enough for the next six weeks,” said Rabenmark, coolly turning towards the dressing room.
“Verfluchter Fuchs” (“Cursed fox”), murmured the wounded man, reviving at the sound of his adversary’s voice for an instant, and then relapsing into his swoon.… From that day Fox Rabenmark was the most renowned Schläger in Göttingen.11*
Bismarck left Göttingen in August 1833. As his political career gathered momentum, he openly recommended violence as an instrument of policy—hence his famous slogan “Blood and iron.” “When I have an enemy in my power, I must destroy him,” he declared. “Passivity is taken for weakness and is weakness.” In September 1848, when Berlin was shaken by revolutionary movements, he told his wife regretfully that “unfortunately” blood was not likely to flow. In 1866, after seven weeks of war, he threatened to throw himself out of the nearest window if the king didn’t agree with him. In March 1886, at a cabinet meeting, he insisted that the government had to make “war to the knife.” He must have been saddened when, in one of the many duels he fought as an adult, his opponent—the leader of the moderate Liberal Party in the Prussian Chamber—chose pistols, not swords. Although Bismarck’s second suggested sabers, the two adversaries ended up firing one shot each, and both missed. Bismarck mused in a letter to his mother, “I should have been glad to have gone on with the combat, but dueling etiquette forbade it.”