By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  The duel between Floquet and Boulanger took place toward the end of the period in French history when dueling was often more absurd than dangerous. In 1830, the writer Charles Augustin Saint-Beuve (1804–69) fought one of the owners of Le Globe in heavy rain; Saint-Beuve held an umbrella throughout the duel, claiming that he did not mind dying but he would not get wet. In 1870, the great Édouard Manet, angered by the brief review his friend, the critic Louis Duranty, had made of two of his paintings, fought sword to sword in the forest of Saint-Germain (Émile Zola being Manet’s second) in a duel that lasted three days, before Duranty was wounded above the right nipple. The adversaries remained friends thereafter.

  Near-duels—such as the Bismarck sausage exchange—are often ridiculous but nonetheless interesting. In 1954, Ernest Hemingway was called out in Cuba, but declined. Jack London was challenged at foil and duly beaten by his young opponent, Charmian Kittredge, whom he proceeded to marry. As recently as October 1997 reports appeared that a duel had been arranged between a mayor in southern Italy and certain Mafia capi. I investigated and found that, indeed, one Giovanni Maria Calabretta, of Vaccarizzo Albanese, mayor of some 512 families in the province of Cosenza, “tired of continuous acts of vandalism and of daily anonymous threats,” had put up posters all over town challenging local leaders of the Honored Society, but this was left to languish.

  When Vladimir Nabokov was twelve years old, he was told that his father, Vladimir Dmitrievich, a member of the Duma, had been drawn into a duel that might prove deadly. “The most powerful of the Rightist newspapers employed a shady journalist to concoct a scurrilous piece containing insinuations that my father could not let pass,” Nabokov recounts in his memoir, Speak, Memory.3 “Since the well-known rascality of the actual author of the article made him ‘nonduelable,’ (neduelesposobnyy, as the Russian code had it), my father called out the somewhat less disreputable editor of the paper.”

  Young Vladimir had himself been taking fencing lessons for almost a year, “from a wonderful rubbery Frenchman,” M. Loustalot, who came almost daily to spar with his father. Nabokov “would dash, with my fur coat on, through the green drawing room … toward the library, from which came a medley of stamping and scraping sounds. There, I would find my father, a big, robust man, looking still bigger in his white training suit, thrusting and parrying, while his agile instructor added brisk exclamations (‘Battez!’ ‘Rompez!’) to the click-clink of the foils.” Now he had to consider his father using those same movements in a fight for his life. “A Russian duel was a much more serious affair than the conventional Parisian variety.” It took the editor several days to decide whether or not to accept the challenge, during which Nabokov fils filled his mind with foreboding:

  What would his adversary choose, I kept asking myself—the blade or the bullet? Carefully, I took the beloved, the familiar, the richly alive image of my father at fencing and tried to transfer that image, minus the mask and the padding, to the dueling ground, in some barn or riding school. I visualized him and his adversary, both bare-chested, black-trousered, in furious battle, their energetic movements marked by that strange awkwardness which even the most elegant swordsmen cannot avoid in a real encounter.

  To his relief, he returned home one day to find that the challenge had met with a belated apology. “I saw my mother’s serene everyday face, but I could not look at my father.” Tragedy was not to be stayed, however: one night in 1922, at a public lecture in Berlin, Nabokov’s father threw himself in front of the lecturer, an old friend, and took two bullets from a couple of Russian Fascists. He knocked down one assassin, but the other discharged a third and fatal shot.

  This kind of memory I find extremely moving. Equally interesting are the journals of Paul Gauguin. When I first researched By the Sword I discovered that Gauguin had fenced, but I imagined it a schoolboy activity, never a serious hobby. I could not have been more wrong. “No more painting, no more literature; the time has come to talk of arms,” he writes, covering fencing in four different towns for five pages. “One must always begin the study of arms with foils,” he goes on.

  That is the best foundation. But one has to apply this knowledge quite differently in a duel, where the question is not one of correctly touching certain specified spots; here everything counts. One must consider that on the field dangerous strokes are also dangerous for oneself.… In fencing there are no dogmas, any more than there are secret thrusts.

  He does not record whether he ever had to fight a duel himself.

  Gauguin was one of the many pupils of Adolphe Grisier (along with a Russian czar and Alexandre Dumas), and once he felt proficient he offered to teach his friend Vincent van Gogh. Van Gogh became sufficiently exasperated with his fellow painter’s belligerence that he wrote to his brother complaining sarcastically, “Fortunately Gauguin and I and other painters are not yet armed with machine guns and other very destructive instruments of war. I for one am quite decided to go on being armed with nothing but my brush and pen. But with a good deal of clatter, Gauguin has nonetheless demanded in his last letter ‘his masks and fencing gloves’ hidden in the little closet in my little yellow house. I shall hasten to send him his toys by parcel post.”4

  Nevertheless, it was during his stay with van Gogh in Arles that Gauguin witnessed one of the most famous cuts in history. One morning, having stayed overnight at a small hotel, he made his way to van Gogh’s house to find a great crowd gathered: his friend “had cut off his ear close to the head.” Gauguin continues:

  When he was in a condition to go out, with his head enveloped in a Basque beret which he had pulled far down, he went straight to a certain house where for want of a fellow-countrywoman one can pick up an acquaintance, and gave the manager his ear, carefully washed and placed in an envelope. “Here is a souvenir of me,” he said.

  Stories of the famous and their adventures steel in hand are difficult to resist. Not only, for instance, was Marx a keen fencer (as I have recorded), but so too was his collaborator Engels. Jean Sibelius completed an orchestral piece, Fäktmusik (“Fencing Music”), and August Strindberg a short story in which a practice foil sets off a life-changing brawl. Originally I had recorded that Conan Doyle never fenced; but in his memoirs he mentions crossing swords with “a medical man from Southsea,” who insisted that Doyle wear a heavy plastron. “A necessary precaution, for the doctor’s foil broke and the sharp point created went deeply into the padding: I learned a lesson that day.”5

  This brings me to other errors in By the Sword. Several readers wrote about wrong dates (luckily, still in single figures) or mistakes of emphasis. Some of these are matters of judgment. A reviewer on Amazon chided me for relegating the infamous “Coup de Jarnac” of 1547, after which French kings “forced dueling to be an illegal act,” to no more than a sidebar on secret thrusts. The duel, “Henning O.” from Stockholm wrote, “had implications on fencing and how it was being regarded. Rarely in history we can point at an individual event and say: Here is a turning point, here history actually changed direction.” It is true that the king, Henri II, was so disgusted by what he witnessed that he turned against any form of judicial settlement by arms; but since within a year of his ruling, duels in his kingdom were as rife as ever, I find it difficult to see his proclamation as radical. (Across the Channel, a century on, Oliver Cromwell issued a similar proclamation against dueling, and—according to Jonathan Swift, who was in a position to know—encouraged his court to tease and josh one another, hoping that factitious insults would prevent real ones. He was no more successful than Henri.) A more telling point is that the duel of honor, as taken up throughout most of Western Europe, derived primarily from the Italian Renaissance idea of the gentleman; I might have given this more emphasis.

  Another Internet reviewer, “Suspira” from Pittsburgh, Pa., turned to swordplay in films, and wrote in defense of Tyrone Power, saying that Flynn was never an accomplished swordsman, whereas Power was “an EXPERT swordsman who NEVER—read this—NEVER used a double.�
� She was not the only reader to have defended Power, but her contention is simply not true: Power’s fencing in The Mark of Zorro was all done by Albert Craven, the son of Fred Craven, the film’s fight arranger, and while Flynn was no fencing aficionado, he was such a fine sportsman that I doubt if the pudgy, ill-balanced Power could have bested him—but then again, everyone has their view on imaginary contests.

  An interesting piece of history concerns stirrups. This may seem arcane, but the introduction of stirrups, one of the greatest inventions in the history of warfare, which I had dated from 378 A.D., provided horsemen with greater purchase to strike a foe, helping swords gain ascendancy over other weapons. Reviewers argued that stirrups were not employed before Charles Martel, Duke of the Franks (688–741 A.D.), and were not in general use before the late eighth or even ninth century. My argument was that the Romans did not know of the stirrup, and so gave up a vital advantage to the Visigoths in the Battle of Adrianople (present-day Edirne, in European Turkey) in 378. A letter published in the rarified pages of the Australian Army Journal6 convincingly argues that the stirrup was known at least by 175 A.D., when used by eight thousand Sarmatian heavy cavalry, part of the Roman auxiliary forces. Thereafter, Roman commanders appear to have made a deliberate choice not to use the stirrup, finding instead the Celtic horned saddle perfectly adequate for mounted operations. Further, the employment of physically larger Gallo-Roman and Germanic troops at Adrianople led to the issue of longer and heavier swords throughout the army. The Romans lost at Adrianople through poor generalship. This leaves open the question of why the sword quickly triumphed over so many other weapons, which my book has been able to address only in part.

  More glaring was my underestimation of the degree of skill possessed by medieval swordsmen. As has been pointed out since publication, medieval fighting relied heavily on parry as well as thrust. For example, Manuscript I.33, the oldest fencing treatise in existence, displays parries with the blade on about 35 of its 64 illustrations. Overall, it contains all the core principles behind modern fencing: timing, distance, line, blade sensitivity, parries, beats, binds, and on through the repertoire (and also includes the earliest mention of a lady fencer, one Walpurgis, who appears in four of the illustrations). I concede that these systems were both sophisticated and complex, my error being that I relied less on original sources than on the writings of such nineteenth-century commentators as Egleton Castle and M. J. O’Rourke, who generally disparaged the skills of medieval swordsmen, describing swords throughout this period as heavy and unwieldy. This prejudice lasted at least until the 1950s (though it still rings through in the writings of Charles de Beaumont, for one), but modern scholarship argues that by far the majority of swords weighed no more than three pounds.7 I also trusted the view of the great expert on European arms R. Ewart Oakeshott, who held that fighters of that time preferred not to use their blades for defense but to move out of the way. Maybe they did; but the knowledge of how to parry was there.

  Oakeshott, who died in October 2002, is only one of several key experts on arms and swordfighting to have passed away in the last six years. Others include the great Hungarian épeé coach Bela Rerrich, Emil Beck, Christian d’Oriola, Ellen Müller-Preis, and Jerzy Pawłowski (as well as his CIA nemesis, Philip Agee).

  During the last half-decade, several interesting books on fencing have been published, from histories of dueling, such as Barbara Holland’s survey Gentlemen’s Blood (2003) to facsimile editions of many of the earliest treatises. My favorite is probably James Landale’s The Last Duel (2005), which tells the story behind the last recorded fatal duel on Scottish soil. It mentions, among other unusual facts, that the queen still retains an official champion, whom she can call out to defend her if she is challenged: the current incumbent, Lieutenant Colonel John Dymoke, came into the office in 1946, is now over eighty, and has yet to appear on Her Majesty’s behalf. Landale also unearths an apposite epigraph from Evelyn Waugh’s 1955 novel Officers and Gentlemen, second in his Sword of Honor trilogy:

  “Guy, what would you say if you were challenged to a duel?”

  “Laugh.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “What made you think of that now?”

  “I was thinking about honor. It is a thing that changes, doesn’t it?

  I mean, a hundred and fifty years ago we would have had to fight if challenged. Now we’d laugh. There must have been a time hundreds of years or so ago when it was rather an awkward question.”

  Just as the meaning of honor changes, so does the nature of the honorable sport of fencing itself. Since 2002, at international level it has become ever more professional (my daughter, who in 2005 won the British épée title, then put off her studies to be a doctor for two years to become a fulltime athlete, which she viewed as the only way to win an Olympic place at the 2012 Games). Each year, the rules change to accommodate the demands of TV and sponsors; while at the Games in Athens, the men’s saber final had neither wires nor boxes, but special lights fixed inside the masks, lighting up when a fencer scored. From 2009 on, foilists have had to contend with the mask bib being part of the target, which has changed technique all over again.

  There are new heroes, new nations in contention. Stanislav Pozdniakov of Russia (born 1973) has won two Olympic individual golds and five individual world titles and shares four team titles: the best record ever. The Italian Valentina Vezzali (born 1974) has won three Olympic individual foil golds, a silver, and five world championship titles, two silvers and two bronzes—as well as five team golds. In 2006 she published her autobiography, A Volto Scoperto (With Uncovered Face), making her possibly the only living fencer to have published her memoirs while still actively competing. Both champions achieved their extraordinary success amid the fiercest competition ever.

  If France, Italy, Russia, and Hungary remain world leaders (only this year did I learn that the Hungarian for boxing translates literally to “fencing with fists,” a real sign of national priorities), they have been joined by countries such as Korea and China. African and South American nations now host major events. Over the last six or seven years, the United States has threatened to join the elite: fourth in both men’s saber and men’s foil at Athens, it gained its first-ever Olympic gold in 2004, when a last-minute replacement, Mariel Zagunis (the daughter of Olympic rowing parents), won the women’s saber. Over the last eight years the United States has easily the best record of any nation at that event, with at least five different women winning major titles.

  The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and Angelina Jolie were both keen fencers in their younger days. I had my own slightly odd taste of celebrity when in the autumn of 2002 my old saber coach Bob Anderson recruited me to join the cast of that year’s James Bond adventure, Die Another Day. My job was to be a “specialist extra” for the fencing scene, set inside one of London’s gentlemen’s clubs on Pall Mall. Throughout filming, there had been one constant topic: Would Madonna turn up? She was said to have put off her one scene time and time again, adding thousands to the budget, and gossip on the set was that her fee would be a million dollars for just a single day’s shooting. She was forty-four, a mother of young children: How would she look? She was to play the part of Verity, the club’s fencing coach, and originally she was to have been one of Bond’s ex-girlfriends, but she objected to being his castoff and rewrote both her lines and his, remodeling herself as a lesbian, beyond Bond’s reach.

  On the day she was due to make her long-awaited appearance, the rest of us turned up, as usual, at seven in the morning, ready for action. At eight, I was backstage looking at the previous day’s rushes, when I became aware of an eerie silence on set: Madonna had arrived. She wandered nonchalantly across the fencing room in a black Versace outfit that included a figure-hugging corset that she would later ask Bond to do up for her. Her black leotard was so tight it looked like cling-film. Her arms, muscular as a gymnast’s, were bare, and as she sauntered across stage she licked at a red lollipop.


  A few minutes passed, then entered Pierce Brosnan, and the two stars eyed each other like boxers weighing up who has the heavier punch. Eventually the director called for action, and Brosnan reentered the salle to ask if he could have a lesson. Madonna, though physically adept, had trouble with the moves, and the scene required several takes. As the two stars waited for the camera to be reset, they chatted together, and Madonna turned the conversation to fencing. “Have you had a go at this?” she asked. “It’s great.” One more convert.

  A final story. An oddity of swordplay is that it appeals to the widest range of people. One of the least likely fencers must surely be the great German philosopher Friederich Nietzsche (1844–1900), a man plagued all his short life with health problems. Yet in the early 1860s we find him at university, drinking, rejoicing in the nickname “Gluck”—and swordfighting. According to his friend Paul Deussen, “Nietzsche practiced as well as he could, and he also managed to get a challenge to a duel.” Apparently the future author of the Superman (übermensch) philosophy went out drinking one night and asked an Armenian fellow student if he would “hang one” on him—scar him in a formal duel. Nietzsche was even at that age “somewhat corpulent … and moreover very myopic,” but was not a whit abashed by what he had let himself in for. Come the chosen day, Deussen records: