Wargames

by Martin van Creveld

  During the eighteenth century the authorities in Prussia, as the most important German state after Austria, did what they could to prevent dueling. Later, with the aristocracy tamed and forming a bulwark around the throne, attitudes changed.127 As was the case with their opposite numbers in other countries, Prussian officers were especially likely to engage in duels, which often resulted from the most trivial causes. The difference was that those who refused to answer a challenge would be tried in front of a so-called Ehrengericht, or court of honor, consisting of their peers. If the verdict went against them, they were almost certain to be dishonorably dismissed from the army. Ehrengerichte, incidentally, continued to exist until 1945. Towards the end of World War II they were used to get rid of the conspirators of 20 July 1944, which cleared the way for them to be handed over to the notorious people’s courts.

  Throughout the nineteenth century the wisdom of these arrangements was the subject of a fierce debate. As in other countries, there were liberals and progressives who regarded dueling as stupid, wasteful, and reactionary. In particular, the representatives meeting at St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt in 1848 wanted to abolish the custom which, perhaps more than any other, marked the special status of the military in Germany.128 Perhaps more than in other countries, it was defended by those who claimed that honor and courage were the quintessential qualities of officers, and that freeing them from the obligation to respond when challenged would destroy the army’s morale. Dueling, indeed, was sometimes seen as a means of strengthening the solidarity of the officer corps.129 This idea, it is said, was supported by none other than Goethe.130 Dueling between civilians was defended as a victory of honor over interest and also as proof of the individual’s independence over an increasingly omnipresent state. Even Marx, who saw it as a relic of a bygone age, fought a duel during his days as a university student at Bonn and later had some good things to say about the practice.131 In practice a sort of compromise was worked out. Compared to that which students engaged in, the number of duels fought by officers and civilians each year was almost vanishingly small.132

  On the other hand, the combats German officers and civilians did undertake tended to be fought with pistols and were very serious indeed. German ideas concerning what was and was not appropriate differed from the rest. French and British duelers often satisfied their own and their opponents’ honor by firing into the air. Not so in Germany, where doing so was considered a mortal insult and might invite a bullet through head or heart. Russian duelers were allowed, even expected, to engage in histrionics. Not so German ones, who were supposed to demonstrate iron self-control. This was taken to the point where they had to face their opponents’ fire without so much as twitching a muscle. In duels conducted with the saber, punching with the free hand or the guard, kicking, pushing, touching the ground with hand or knee, transferring a blade from one hand to another, or following up an attack that had disarmed an opponent or caused him to fall were all disallowed. There was to be no talking, screaming, or taunting through word or gesture. Clinches were broken up by the seconds.133

  In Weimar Germany, student dueling all but disappeared.134 In April 1933 Hans Kerrl, Reich Commissioner, tried to revive it by sending a circular to public prosecutors throughout the country ordering them not to prosecute students who engaged in saber duels. A month later the law was changed and student duels were expressly declared to be exempt from punishment. In 1934 a challenge for a duel with sabers was actually issued, but nothing came of it. The Nazis also made duels obligatory for members of the SA and SS and for officers of the Wehrmacht. Following the Italian Fascists, they were provided with daggers for the purpose. However, social attitudes had changed. As far as we know, during the twelve-year Reich there took place just one duel. The combatants were the reporter Ronald Strunk and one Horst Krutschinna, adjutant to Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach. The latter had used Strunk’s stay in Spain, where he covered the Civil War, to have an affair with his wife. Krutschinna, as the challenged party, wanted to fight with swords. Upon Strunk producing medical proof that he was unable to use one, pistols were substituted. The shoot-out ended with Krutschinna slightly wounded and Strunk dead. Thereupon Hitler, incensed at the loss of Germany’s only internationally known journalist, decided that any future duels would have to be approved by him personally.135

  Probably originating as a cross between the medieval trial by combat and ordinary brawls, the kind of wargames that duels represented could not have existed for as long as they did if the powers that be had really done what they could to stamp them out. If, in spite of countless prohibitions, the games continued to exist, then this fact had everything to do with honor: in other words the realization that the readiness to kill and be killed – the latter perhaps even more than the former – is absolutely essential to war and the fear that, should dueling be abolished altogether, readiness would be hard or impossible to maintain. Going back to the Middle Ages, such ideas were widely held by the aristocracy, including the blue-bloods who sat on thrones and including also the officer corps, most of whose members were themselves aristocrats. As bourgeois officers increasingly began to join the services after 1789, naturally they sought to imitate their betters. Bent on showing that they, too, had honor, civilians of any standing did the same. In England dueling was reserved for gentlemen, an ill-defined class that nevertheless rested on a widely understood code of behavior.

  Early on, duels differed little from skirmishes – indeed they were skirmishes, often fought by small groups of men with whatever weapons they had in all sorts of deserted places where the authority of the state did not yet reach. However, as the vast number of published handbooks show, later they tended to become more formalized and rule-bound. The variety of weapons duelists were allowed to choose was also reduced. As had also happened with tournaments, time caused duels to become less relevant to the conduct of war at any level. Depending on the country where they were held, some duelers fought to kill, though the percentage of those who did so probably declined as time went on, during the late nineteenth century in particular. Others were happy if honor could be satisfied by means that were less injurious to health. German student duels, being arranged, were especially harmless. This is probably another reason why there were so many of them and why they were tolerated, even encouraged, right into the early years of the twentieth century. Late nineteenth-century French duels also had a reputation of being numerous but relatively bloodless. At the other extreme were American duels – many of which are perhaps better characterized as pre-arranged brawls – Austrian-Hungarian duels, and Russian duels. Duels between German officers, though not numerous, also tended to be more deadly than most.

  Though swords never entirely disappeared, starting around 1770 a growing number of duels were fought with pistols instead. Right from the beginning dueling with pistols was considered less honorable than doing so with swords, the reason being that whereas the latter allowed real fighting to take place the former did not. The more advanced the technology in use, the more acute the problem. The introduction of sighted pistols with rifled barrels from around 1870 made it much easier to hit an opponent. It is true that combatants sometimes used old pistols which did not have these technical refinements, but such weapons, as well as the black powder and balls used to load them, were themselves becoming increasingly hard to obtain. Faced by an opponent armed in this manner, it was all duelers could do to prove their courage by sticking to the rules and facing their opponent without flinching.

  To put it another way, the point came when technology developed to the point where strategy, in the sense of a two-sided interaction between two parties, became impossible. Either duelers found some way to settle the matter – as far as may be determined, during the last years before 1914 the number of fights with a deadly outcome tended to go down – or else all that was left to them was to look their opponents squarely in the face. Honor, in other words, became almost synonymous with stupidity. Perhaps not surprisingly, that was als
o the moment when dueling finally came to an end.

  1 A good medieval example is The Mirror of Justices, W. J. Whittaker, ed., London: Selden Society, 1895 , vol. III, no. 23. A. MacC. Armstrong, “Trial by Combat Among the Greeks,” Greece and Rome, 19, 56, June 1950, pp. 73–89 , uses the term “trial by combat” while referring to episodes which, in the present volume, are included under single combat and combat of champions. So does P. Wilutzky, Vorgeschichte des Rechts, Berlin: Trewendt, 1903, pp. 137–40.

  2 Livy, History of Rome, 28.21.5–10.

  3 Velleius Paterculus, in Compendium of Roman History, LCL, 1924, 2.117–18.

  4 Quoted in P. Fouracre, “‘Placita’ and the Settlement of Disputes in Later Merovingian Francia,” in W. Davies and P. Fouracre, eds., The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe, Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 16.

  5 See on all this G. Neilson, Trial by Combat, New York: Macmillan, 1891, pp. 3–14.

  6 Saxo Grammaticus, The History of the Danes, p. 143.

  7 Kiernan, The Duel in European History, p. 29.

  8 H. W. Dewey, “Trial by Combat in Muscovite Russia,” Oxford Slavonic Papers, 9, 1960, pp. 21–31 ; G. Jones, “The Religious Elements of the Icelandic Holmganga,” Modern Language Review, 27, 3, July 1932, pp. 307–13.

  9 Neilson, Trial by Combat, pp. 31–3, 251–4; J. E. R. Stephens, “The Growth of Trial by Jury in England,” Harvard Law Review, 10, 3, 1896, pp. 153 , 155; M. J. Russell, “I. Trial by Battle and the Writ of Right,” Journal of Legal History, 1, 2, 1980, p. 112.

  10 Domesday Book, G. Marin and A. Williams, trans., London: Penguin, 2004 , 2.146, 2.176, 2.277b, 2.190.

  11 See, for the quote and for what follows, Neilson, Trial by Combat, pp. 5–7, 36–53.

  12 The Saxon Mirror: A “Sachsenspiegel” of the Fourteenth Century, M. Dobozy, trans., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, pp. 87–8 .

  13 M. J. Russell, “II. Trial by Battle and the Appeals of Felony,” Journal of Legal History, 1, 2, 1980, p. 140.

  14 R. W. Ireland, “First Catch Your Toad: Medieval Attitudes to Ordeal and Battle,” Cambrian Law Review, 50, 1990, p. 55.

  15 The Saxon Mirror, pp. 80, 82.

  16 See S. Eidelberg, “Trial by Combat in Medieval Jewish History,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 46−7, 1928–9, pp. 8–19.

  17 See G. Kisch, The Jews in Medieval Germany, University of Chicago Press, 1949, p. 128.

  18 Russell, “II. Trial by Battle and the Appeals of Felony,” p. 140.

  19 Ireland, “First Catch Your Toad,” p. 57.

  20 The Saxon Mirror, p. 88.

  21 Russell, “I. Trial by Battle and the Writ of Right,” p. 115; The Saxon Mirror, p. 88.

  22 Wilutzky, Vorgeschichte des Rechts, p. 139.

  23 The Saxon Mirror, p. 96.

  24 Neilson, Trial by Combat, p. 14.

  25 See, for what follows, E. Jager, The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal and Trial by Combat in Medieval France, New York: Broadway, 2004 , passim.

  26 Froissart, Chronicles, pp. 113–14.

  27 J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965 [1924], pp. 98–9.

  28 C. Wickham, “Land Disputes and their Social Framework in Lombard-Carolingian Italy, 700–900,” in Davies and Fouracre, The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe, p. 113.

  29 Neilson, Trial by Combat, pp. 33–6.

  30 See Eidelberg, “Trial by Combat in Medieval Jewish History,” p. 107.

  31 Ireland, “First Catch Your Toad,” p. 55.

  32 See Russell, “I. Trial by Battle and the Writ of Right,” pp. 118–19, 131–2.

  33 M. Wade Labargue, St. Louis, Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1968, pp. 175–6.

  34 See on this L. Jillings, “Ordeal by Combat and the Rejection of Chivalry in Diu Crône,” Speculum, 51, 2, April 1976, pp. 262–76.

  35 Neilson, Trial by Combat, pp. 161–4 and 218–24.

  36 Russell, “II. Trial by Combat and the Appeals of Felony,” p. 137.

  37 Neilson, Trial by Combat, pp. 64–5, 203.

  38 J. S. A. Adamson, “The Baronial Context of the English Civil War,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 40, 1990, p. 93.

  39 See for this entire story J. Hall, The Trial of Abraham Thornton, London: Hodge, 1926.

  40 See on this E. Cohen, The Crossroads of Justice: Law and Culture in Late Medieval France, Leiden: Brill, 1993, pp. 54–73.

  41 These are the terms used by J. P. Gilchrist, A Brief Display of the Origins of Ordeals . . . and the Decision of Private Quarrels by Single Combat, London: by the author, 1821, p. 26.

  42 J. B. Hurry, The Trial by Combat of Henry de Essex and Robert de Monfort at Reading Abbey, London: Elliot, 1919, p. 26.

  43 The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor, C. A. Mango, trans., New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, no. 303, p. 435 , and no. 304, p. 436. See also E. N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Army, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009, pp. 10 and 397.

  44 Nithart, Historiae, E. Mueller, ed., in Ausgewaehlte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters, vol. V: Quellen zur Karolingischen Reichsgeschichte, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1955, p. 442; Widukind of Corvey, Res gestae Saxonicae, H. P. Lohman, ed., ibid., p. 78.

  45 See for the behourd, or buhurt as it is sometimes spelled, J. B. Bumke, Hoefische Kultur: Literatur und Gesellschaft im hohen Mittelalter, Munich: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986, pp. 357–60.

  46 See the description in Ulrich von Lichtenstein, Frauendienst, Klagenfurt: Wiesler, 2000 [c. 1255], pp. 89–92.

  47 Chronicon Turoniensis, quoted in J. R. V. Barker, The Tournament in England, 1100–1400, Woodbridge: Boydell, 1986, p. 5 ; Passio Karoli comitis, quoted in Bumke, Hoefische Kultur, p. 342.

  48 S. Muhlberger, Jousts and Tournaments, Union City, CA: Jousts and Chivalry, 2002, p. 20.

  49 William of Newburgh, “Historia Rerum Anglicarum,” in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, R. Howlett, ed., London: Rolls Series, 1885, vol. II, pp. 422–3.

  50 The letter is quoted in Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, Edinburgh: Black, 1874, vol. II, pp. 614–15.

  51 Froissart, Chronicles, p. 373.

  52 See on this Barker, The Tournament in England, pp. 152–3.

  53 Jean le Bel, Chronique, J. Viard and E. Deprez, eds., Adamant, 2005 [1904], 2, 35.

  54 The History of William the Marshal, London: Birkbeck College, 2002, line 3421.

  55 Der Pleier, Tandareis und Flordibel, F. Kuhl, ed., Graz: Buchheim, 1885, lines 13199, 13929, 14398.

  56 Geertz, “Deep Play,” p. 82.

  57 See W. Strickland, War and Chivalry: The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1066–1217, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 149–50.

  58 Muhlberger, Jousts and Tournaments, p. 69, following Geoffroi de Charny.

  59 Giselbert of Mons, Chronicon Hanoniense, L. van der Kindere, ed., Brussels: Kiessling, 1904, p. 157.

  60 William the Marshal, line 4782.

  61 Adam Murimuth, Continuatio Chronicarum, quoted in Muhlberger, Jousts and Tournaments, p. 61.

  62 Von Lichtenstein, Frauendienst, pp. 94 and 545.

  63 William the Marshal, lines 1417–22 and 2497–500.

  64 M. Dallapiazza, ed., Parzifal, Berlin: Schmidt, 2009, canto 812, lines 9–16.

  65 See Bumke, Hoefische Kultur, p. 355.

  66 Quoted in F. H. Cripps-Day, History of the Tournament in England and France, London: Quaritch, 1918, p. xxv .

  67 Balderich, Gesta Alberonis, G. Weitz, ed., in Die Wundergeschichten des Caesarius von Heisterbach, Bonn: Hanstein, 1937 [c. 1155], pp. 598–9.

  68 M. van Creveld, Men, Women and War, London: Cassell, 2001, p. 84.

  69 See C. H. Hefele and H. Leclercq, Histoire des Conciles, Paris: Letouzey, 1912, vol. V, p. 7.

  70 Jakob von Vitry, Sermones Vulgares, in J. B. Pitra, ed., Analecta novissima spicilegii solesmensia
s, Paris: Didot, 1888, vol. II, no. 52.

  71 Berthold of Regensburg, Predikten, F. Goebel, ed., Regensburg: Manz, 1882, vol. I, p. 176.

  72 See on this entire subject Barker, The Tournament in England, pp. 70–83.

  73 Bumke, Hoefische Kultur, p. 346.

  74 Barker, The Tournament in England, pp. 47, 61.

  75 The earliest reference is in Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, vol. II, p. 650.