He was also prodigiously talented. Between 1973 and 1974 he would win the British Open, the Commonwealth Games, and his international colors. I regularly lost to him, albeit by narrow margins. It was generally accepted that he had a short fuse: after one disputed decision I watched him hurl his mask the length of the hall, and once, in a grudge fight against a man who had seduced his coach’s wife, he delivered an uppercut to his opponent’s mask, hilt side on, that almost laid the man out.
By Saturday evening, it was becoming difficult to concentrate. I arrived at Baker Street’s Seymour Hall, a building of faded Victorian grandeur more often used for lectures and conferences, and made my way round the back of the audience to the rooms put aside for the fencers. There was no one there, just several sets of discarded clothing, but I could hear the muffled shouts and applause as the épéeists did battle. I donned my white breeches, long white socks, and special fencing shoes, and slipped into a ragged T-shirt that I superstitiously thought brought me luck, then put on my canvas jacket. Glove, mask, and saber in hand, I walked from the changing rooms past a long line of spectators, feeling like a prizefighter about to enter the ring. As I stepped up onto the piste I saw that David was already there.
In 1972, the scoring system in saber (unlike foil and épée) had yet to be electrified, so we each had two judges watching us, one on either side of the piste, who would move up and down the strip in concert with us, expected to assess every hit. Controlling the fight and posted in midpiste was the referee, whose job was to analyze the action and add his vote on hits—five judges for two combatants.
I saluted each in turn, then my opponent.
“Gentlemen, en garde. Are you ready?” said the referee. “Then fence.”
What does one look at in a duel? The eyes of one’s opponent? His face? The angle of his body, the stance he assumes? Or maybe his blade as it arcs towards its target? All of them, in a way. One is hyperaware, sensing how the audience may be reacting, while focusing on the man in front of you. One thinks at lightning speed: they say that one needs at least a twentieth of a second to decide on an appropriate action, as long again to carry it out. But often there is no time for thought at all. So fencers, whatever their level, take lessons not just to learn new moves but to hone those they already know, so that their reactions become instinctive. That is the challenge—to place what one’s muscles know by heart at the disposition of what one is telling them to do.
When we changed ends at the halfway point, I found I was leading 5–1. Maybe to play up to the large crowd, David had been taking flamboyant parries, trying to predict where my blade would land, but his guesses were going wrong and each time I got through. The change of sides, however, brought a change in fortune. Suddenly David’s guesses seemed telepathic, as if he knew exactly where I had chosen to aim. Three times he parried me, his ripostes whipping through. I shifted tactics, concentrating on defense; but he advanced rapidly, launching a long attack that landed across my chest. His judges’ hands shot up immediately: 5–all.
Fleetingly I reflected on how such intuition comes into play far more than one thinks—that racing drivers can know exactly when to accelerate, tennis players sense just where their opponents are going to place the ball. Small comfort now. I tried to attack again, but David stretched out his arm at just the right moment, and, rushing forward too eagerly, I impaled myself on his point. As soon as the referee told us to fence again, I attacked at David’s head, but he took a fast parry and, with a loud cry of triumph, riposted to my mask, using so much force that his blade whipped over the protective mesh and sliced into the back of my head. My jacket was spattered with blood. I could hear gasps from the audience.
The score was 5–8: I was down by three hits. This wasn’t how it was meant to be. I was the good guy, the one who wouldn’t fix the fight—the Catholic ex–public school boy, courteous and in control, up against the state school playboy villain. The hall seemed suddenly hot, and when I put my free hand to the back of my head my fingers came away red and sticky. I glanced at the audience but saw only one of David’s side judges looking at me with disgust, as if to convey that no one who threw away such a commanding lead deserved to win.
I had to change tactics but still keep up the pressure. I tried taking smaller steps forward and hold up my attacking movement, to gain the split second that would tell me when David committed himself to a parry, so that I could alter my attack accordingly. He was so caught up in the success of his comeback that he continued to take premeditated parries; only now he was again guessing wrong. When he next attacked I caught him on the arm as he stepped forward. Soon it was 9–all.
At such a point, a bout is close to an actual duel. One hit, and it is over—not death or painful injury but defeat and, most often, elimination. A fencer becomes acutely aware that it is one on one, steel on steel.
I moved quickly down the piste, determined to be the one to launch the final attack. As I advanced, David straightened his sword arm just as he had earlier, reckoning that I wouldn’t expect that move again. This time, though, I brought my saber sideways in a swift chest parry. The blades touched, and I jabbed out my riposte to the side of David’s mask. As I did so I felt the tip of David’s saber land hard just below my heart. Had I parried sufficiently, or would the judges rule that David’s counter had gone straight through? I knew I’d been hit, but that could have been the “remise”—David hitting me only after my parry? I looked down at the judges on David’s side of the piste. Both had their hands raised. I glanced at David. I couldn’t make out his eyes, but it was obvious from the way he was standing that he too was unsure how it was going to go.
The referee turned first to David’s judges. “The point counterattack—did it arrive?”
“No. I’m claiming for the move after that,” said the first judge. So for him my parry was good—one vote for me.
The second judge’s turn. “First parried.” A second vote for me.
The referee turned to my judges, but David didn’t wait. He already had his mask off and was holding out his hand. “Well done,” he said.
Later that year David left Salle Paul and joined our club, gold medallion and all. He turned out to be one of the most sporting fencers I have known: no more right uppercuts. Our club used the £100 purse to help send its top five sabreurs to the annual international in New York the following March: my first visit to America. Now, thirty years on, I am sitting in my Manhattan apartment writing a history of the sport that has obsessed me for forty years.
AT THIRTEEN I WAS SENT TO DOWNSIDE, A PRIVATE BOARDING school in the heart of the Somerset countryside, whose teachers were mostly Benedictine monks from the adjoining abbey. One day, as we gathered for assembly, a monk named Dom Philip Jebb was ushered in to give us a special address. I later learned he was the grandson of Hilaire Belloc.
That morning Father Philip spoke to us about the sport he ran at the school. He told us about the three weapons, foil, épée, and saber, how each had its own character. He explained that fencing was the only combat sport without weight classes or height restrictions, and while you could be quicker than your opponents or technically superior, such advantages would not necessarily bring victory—you had to outthink them as well. He spoke of Downside’s long unbeaten record and declared fencing the best of all sports, the most difficult at which to achieve mastery.
He invoked the traditions of honor that surround swordplay: how each fencer was expected to salute the judges and his opponent at the beginning of a bout and shake hands at its end; how, if you were hit, it was your obligation to acknowledge it. Handel had fenced, and Goethe and Michelangelo and Saint Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits.
We loved Dom Philip. He would come down to the gymnasium in off-white breeches, white socks, and tennis shoes, wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket in place of the normal white canvas jacket. The locals had dubbed him “The Fighting Monk,” but he was just as keen on archaeology, and his small room in the monastery was filled wi
th jagged pieces of stone and metal—like the silver stylus found near the Roman lead mines in the nearby Mendip Hills. Just such a one, Father Philip would say, was all that Julius Caesar had at hand to defend himself against his assassins.
It was Father Philip who taught us the rudiments of foil, the first weapon we were expected to master. He explained how the target area had been limited to the torso because that is where the vital organs lie. But that didn’t mean that we could just attack each other whenever we wanted: in both foil and saber there existed a “right of way” (a priority of actions) according to which if a fencer started an offensive movement, he had either to miss or be parried before his opponent could legitimately reply. The result of such rules was that “phrases” could be built up, like a movement in music, with attack followed by riposte, itself followed by counterriposte, until there was a “conversation of the blades.” There were even two kinds of “time,” ordinary time and fencing time.
To begin with, much of this seemed pathologically formal, as did the weird stance we were required to adopt, feet at ninety degrees to each other, thighs agonizingly bent, nonweapon hand held up high and behind, angled over like a floppy wave. Father Philip taught us that fencing divided the torso into quadrants, each section of the chest being named for the parry that covered it. Fourth (“quarte”) and sixth (“sixte”) did for the top part of the torso, seventh (“septime”) and eighth (“octave”) for the bottom half. If it helped, we could call them respectively “upper left,” “upper right,” “left side down,” and “right side down” until we got used to them. The position of fifth (“quint”) was reserved for the saber, to parry attacks to the head. As for first (“prime”), second (“seconde”), and third (“tierce”), we would learn about them when we started saber. For now, we should try to get a feel for the blade, the all-important sentiment du fer.
Gradually it started to make sense. Our muscles accepted the new positions and our minds the notion that French was the language of fencing, so we had better get used to prises de fer, coupés, doublés, corps-à-corps, and the whole linguistic romance of steel. It really did make us feel like incipient musketeers—the more so when Father Philip told us that at university he had fought for a team called “The Cambridge Cut throats.” In due time I, too, went off to Cambridge, where I decided to concentrate on saber, which, with its cutting, slashing, and greater mobility, had captured my imagination. In 1969 I won the British Junior title and was invited to train with the Olympic squad. On my first outing the national coach, a formidable ex–Royal Marine, took me aside: “Well, son, the Junior win shows you can fight. Now let’s see if you can actually fence.”
Was there a difference between the two?
THERE HAVE BEEN MANY ATTEMPTS TO CAPTURE THE APPEAL OF fencing. The nineteenth-century historian of swordplay Egerton Castle saw the sport as “a superior kind of pastime, combining mental excitement and bodily exercise—the excitement of a game of skill not entirely independent of chance, together with the delight—innate in all healthy organizations—of strife and destruction—and an exercise necessitating the utmost nervous and muscular tension while it affords the refined pleasures of rhythmical action.”1
This formidable figure was captain of the British team at the 1908 Olympics, choreographed fights for the stage, and traveled the country putting on lectures and demonstrations. He also left a remarkable monument: Schools and Masters of Fence: From the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century, a dry title for the foremost history of fencing in English, published in 1885, one so far ahead of others that many writers still shamelessly crib or paraphrase from it. Castle shows how swordplay evolved, particularly in Italy, France, Germany, Spain, and Great Britain. He deals with the watersheds of the long history of the sword: its introduction as an instrument of self-defense, its apotheosis in the age of chivalry and dueling, and finally its decline, when men of fashion determined that bearing a sword was outmoded—although that change went far deeper than a shift in taste and had to do with the fundamentals of society, both as to the means of killing and in the outlawing of private violence. Although Castle’s history stops some years before the end of the nineteenth century, his work remains indispensable. I am keenly aware how much I have been treading in his shadow.
I execute a “horizontal flèche” against Dom Philip Jebb, wearing his trademark biker’s jacket. This was in 1965, with the trees of Downside Abbey forming the backdrop. (illustration credit prl.1)
Egerton Castle, in a cartoon by Spy. (illustration credit prl.2)
Another shade from the past has been Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–90), possibly the most famous of all British explorers, the first European to reach Lake Tanganyika and also the first Westerner to see the Sacred Stone at Mecca and to make the pilgrimage (in full disguise) from Mecca to Medina. He was a treasure hunter, and a spy during the Crimean War. Between 1883 and 1888 he published his translations of the Arabian Nights, The Perfumed Garden, and the Kama Sutra: he is said to have mastered thirty-five Oriental languages. Yet he would write, in middle age, “The great solace of my life was the fencing-room.”
Burton started to fence almost as soon as he could walk, taught by a veteran who had lost a thumb in the Napoleonic Wars. He practiced from the start with “real, not wooden, foils and swords.”2 By the time he went up to Oxford (where he challenged a fellow student who mocked his mustache to a duel) he was taking three lessons a day, and in the summer of 1841 set off to enroll in the “famed Heidelberg fencing brigades.” Some years later his wife, Isabel, urged Burton’s master to teach her, so she could “defend Richard when he and I are attacked in the wilderness together.” One of the coach’s favorite demonstrations involved Isabel’s standing motionless while he made a moulinet, or circular swing, at her head. “You could hear the sword swish in the air as he touched me like a fly in the act of doing it—he did it frequently to show what he could do, and he used to say he could not do it to any of his pupils, for fear they would flinch … but he knew I should stand steady: I liked that.”
The Burtons finally gave up competing in 1883, when he was sixty-two, she fifty-two, after their master committed suicide. There survives a fine oil of Burton in full fencing rig, painted during his consular posting to Trieste around 1876. By then he was a fully qualified master, sufficiently pleased with his accomplishment to place his diploma after his name on the title page of The Book of the Sword. This was to be his great work, covering—in three volumes—the sword in all countries from the earliest times. The first volume, which takes the reader over some three hundred pages from the sword’s origins to the early Roman Empire, was judged too dry by the reading public, and he never got around to volumes 2 and 3. The second volume, The Sword Fully Grown, was to have ranged from the decline of Rome under Constantine to “the gunpowder age”; the third volume, Memoirs of the Sword, to have covered “descriptions of the modern blade, notices of collections, public and private, notes on manufacturers; and, lastly, the bibliography and the literature connected with the Heroic Weapon.” All that now remains of the enterprise are three green box files at the Huntington Library in California. Burton was writing The Book of the Sword at the same time as he translated the Kama Sutra: an interesting conjunction.
Richard Burton in 1883, painted by his friend Albert Letchford. (illustration credit prl.3)
“SPORT IS JUST A PARADIGM OF LIFE, RIGHT?” EXCLAIMS THE NARRATOR of Richard Ford’s novel The Sportswriter. “Otherwise who’d give a goddam thing about it?” Is fencing? Of all sports arguably the most romantic, it also most closely simulates the act of armed manslaughter. Ever since the third millennium B.C. language has, in metaphor and aphorism, been filled with images of thrusting, slashing, and cutting. We shake hands to show that we are not reaching for our swords; a gentleman offers a lady his right arm because at one time his sword was at his left hip; a man’s coat buttons left over right, so that a duelist may unbutton it with his left, unarmed hand. The two main parties in the House of Commons are sep
arated by the precise length of two sword blades; and each MP’s locker still contains a loop of silk on which to hang up his sword. Kamikaze pilots took their samurai swords with them into their cockpits.
From the earliest days, from China and Japan in the East to Persia, Greece, and Rome, the sword has served as a symbol of justice, power, and righteous authority. With a touch of his superior’s sword a man is knighted; with the breaking of his own he is disgraced. Whole armies are surrendered by the giving up of a single sword, while swords have been used as currency, even for healing. The Tower of Babel, as designed, was to have included at its summit an idol carrying a sword, as if to challenge whatever deity presumed to reign above.3 Through the centuries, swords have been bestowed as the greatest of gifts and from generation to generation as the most emotionally and historically charged of family possessions. Some have been buried with the dead to provide protection in the afterlife, but generally swords survive their owners. As instruments that both take and preserve life, swords are often embellished with memento mori or religious inscriptions. In Japan, where swordsmanship is one of the classic disciplines that students of Zen must follow, blades bear invocations to the Buddhist powers. Tacitus, writing around A.D. 100, tells how a couple about to wed gave each other swords as bridal offerings. Fourteen centuries later, when Lucrezia Borgia remarried, Pope Alexander VI consecrated a sword and sent it to his daughter as his gift to her bridegroom. A leading seventeenth-century mathematician, Don Juan de la Rocha, traced fencing back to the creation of the world and the struggle between good and bad angels.
Napoleon fenced. So did George Washington, Charles Dickens, Voltaire, Karl Marx, Grace Kelly, and Alexandre Dumas, who based The Three Musketeers on real-life characters. Confucius liked to wear a sword. Casanova wrote a book on the duel. Anthony Chenevix-Trench, the headmaster of Eton from 1964 to 1970, who was infamous for his floggings, would sometimes, instead of beating a boy, take down two sabers from his study wall and engage him in combat. In Moby-Dick, an amateur midwife delivers the Indian sailor Tashtego from the sperm tank of a whale, and an onlooker suggests that both midwifery and fencing should be integral parts of a man’s education. A recent Miss Venezuela was also her country’s foil champion; Jim Naismith, who invented basketball, was a fencing master. When the American Academy of Motion Pictures instituted its annual awards in 1927 (nicknamed “Oscars” in 1931), the chosen trophy was a standing figure bearing, as a mark of authority, a single upright sword.
By the Sword Page 2
