By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  * Born in 1855 as William Grenfell, Desborough was a cricket and soccer star at Harrow, where he set a school mile record that stood for sixty-one years. At Oxford he was president of athletics and the boat club and rowed number four in the famous 1877 boat race, the only one to end in a dead heat. He was punting champion of Great Britain three years in succession, sculled from Oxford to Putney, 105 miles, in a day; stroked an eight across the English Channel; and fenced for Britain in the 1906 Olympics at the age of fifty, winning a silver medal. He climbed extensively in the Alps, including three successful assaults on the Matterhorn, by three different routes; went big-game hunting in India and shooting in the Rocky Mountains. In one season’s stalking in Scotland, he bagged a hundred stags, and during three weeks’ fishing in Florida caught a hundred tarpon. He twice swam Niagara Falls, the second time in heavy hail and snow. As the Daily Telegraph’s war correspondent in the Sudan in 1888, he once confronted the dervishes alone, armed only with an umbrella.

  † After Kean’s death the weapon was auctioned off. Around 1935 John Gielgud was playing Hamlet when a dealer came backstage and presented it to him. Gielgud kept the sword for fifteen years, looking for a suitable successor, then one day was so overcome by seeing Laurence Olivier as Richard III that he passed it on. Who next? Richard Burton? Paul Scofield? Alec McCowen? In the end Olivier kept it; maybe he thought no one else was good enough.

  ‡ Sydney Anglo points out that even Castle—“whose primary interest lay in the evolution of swordsmanship towards the sport of his own day”—recognized that “things are done with the foil which would never be attempted in earnest with a sword” (Castle’s words), and accepted that modern play is artificial and that “foil practice may in fact be looked upon as ‘diagrammatic’ fencing.”10 As Anglo points out, “What is at issue here is the psychology of combat.”

  § In 1896, Joseph-Renaud won the amateur foil championship of France, but by 1900 had decided that it was foolish to practice both foil and épée (mixing disciplines to the detriment of both), so devoted himself entirely to the “new” weapon—a considerable act of principle, as by this time he was one of the foremost foilists in Europe. Four years later, in London for a major épée competition, he rose from his sickbed to help the French team to victory and the next day won the individual épée championship, much to his own astonishment. In 1908 he was a member of the French team that came fourth in the Olympic Games—at saber. Over the years he refereed several hundred private duels, justifying his role by saying that “generally both parties are so nervous that nobody gets hurt, the offended hero soothes his honor and everyone goes away happy.” He lived until 1953. In addition to his career as a championship fencer, he was a journalist, playwright, and novelist, with more than sixty books to his credit, ranging from a meditation on the institution of marriage to a study of French and English boxing.

  ‖ Several novelists fenced but never made use of their experience in books—for instance, Richard Adams, Peter Cheyney, Paul Gallico, John Dickson-Carr, and Anthony Burgess (despite a cameo appearance of a swordstick, “a fine starry horrorshow cut-throat britva,” in A Clockwork Orange). Among those who did are Mervyn Peake (in Gormenghast), Georgette Heyer (in The Quiet Gentleman), Robert A. Heinlein (in Glory Road), J. P. Donleavy (in A Singular Man), Edgar Rice Burroughs (but not in his Tarzan books), W. G. Sebald in Vertigo, and Desmond Bagley in several thrillers. Rex Stout has Nero Wolfe investigate a murder committed with a tampered weapon (“the épée that was sticking through him had no button on it …”) in Over My Dead Body, but the details are slapdash. Friedrich Dürrenmatt has a play, Der Besuch der alten Dame, featuring a woman duelist defending her honor, Isabel Allende had a duel in The Legend of Zorro (hard to avoid one) and William Boyd a hilarious account of a lesson with an irascible master in Stars and Bars. Saul Bellow refers briefly to fencing in Henderson the Rain King. Most famous of all, Holden Caulfield is manager of his school fencing team in The Catcher in the Rye and manages to forget all their kit; but that is all we learn of his enthusiasm.

  Dueling was another matter: in The Tragic Comedians (1880) George Meredith depicts under the most transparent disguise the fate of the great socialist intellectual and friend of Bismarck, Ferdinand Lassalle, killed in 1864 defending the honor of a countess; Anthony Trollope includes an unlikely duel involving an MP in a Palliser novel (and Arthur Fletcher, the decent politician of The Prime Minister, regrets that he cannot shoot Ferdinand Lopez, the mysterious man whom the woman he loves seems to prefer); and Thackeray, another member of Salle Bertrand, wrote at length of the Mohun-Hamilton duel in Henry Esmond.

  a Grisier wrote that during the wars with England the French prisoners in the English hulks found themselves “abandoned to measureless and dangerous idleness.” Accordingly, they organized various pastimes, including fencing; but most knew little about the sport and, cut off as they were, even those with some experience fell into bad habits. When peace came and the prisoners were released, France was “flooded” with a crowd of swashbuckling irregulars, “une masse de ferrailleurs,” who, having little else to turn their hands to, set up as masters. Thus was founded a new school: “la méthode venue des pontons d’Angleterre.”

  Grisier goes on to give a dramatic description of the various wickednesses of the school, which include glisser la monture (to let the grip slide in the fingers to increase the available length of the sword), “a trick of the worst kind,” and standing square on, ignoring the “effacement” of the body inculcated by the old school. The new villains would also jump about wildly, rush in with their heads down, thrust without taking aim, advance without covering themselves, parry in the wrong line, refuse to give the blade, even counterattack without the right of way. Grisier—or Dumas—had great fun, and came near to describing the foil techniques of today.

  b There is much swordplay in Peter Pan, which climaxes in a duel between Peter and Captain Hook: “Without more words they fell to and for a space there was no advantage to either blade. Peter was a superb swordsman, and parried with dazzling rapidity: ever and anon he followed up a feint with a lunge that got past his foe’s defense, but his shorter reach stood him ill and he could not drive the steel home. Hook, scarcely his inferior in brilliancy, but not so nimble in wrist play, forced him back by the weight of his onset, hoping suddenly to end all with a favorite thrust, taught him long ago by Barbecue at Rio.”

  I would have liked to have had a lesson from Professor Barbecue.

  c The singlestick has a long history. Originally a round stick of ash of about 34 inches, thicker at one end than the other, in its original form it was known as the “waster”—in the sixteenth century merely a wooden sword used in practice. By the 1720s the sticks had become cudgels with sword guards, and under the first and second Georges were immensely popular under the names of “cudgelplay” and “singlesticking.” The rules had players close together, their feet not moving and each stroke being delivered with a whiplike action of the wrist from a high guard, the hand being held above the head. Anywhere above the waist was a valid target, but all blows except those aimed at the head were employed solely to gain openings, as each bout could be decided only by a “broken head,” i.e., a cut on the head that drew blood. At first the nonsword hand and arm were used to ward off blows not parried with the stick, but near the close of the eighteenth century the unarmed hand grasped a scarf tied loosely around the back thigh, the elbow being raised to protect the face: there is a lively description of cudgel play in Tom Brown’s School Days. With the introduction of the light saber the singlestick’s days were numbered, although French cane fencing is similar; the French version, however, is designed more for defense with a walking stick—which is how Holmes uses it.

  Conan Doyle may have been influenced by a report that appeared in The Herald of September 13, 1891, headed “The Italian Sword-cane Fencing Fad,” which, the paper recorded, “is being introduced in London, although it is hard to see what use it will be in a country where the possess
ion of a sword-cane is a crime. The fencer uses the blade to attack, and the sheath to assist in defence. The sheath is held in the left hand, and the blade in the right. When standing on guard the sword-arm is farthest from the enemy—an exact reversal of the rule in ordinary fencing.” Holmes would have had no truck with such an ungentlemanly weapon.

  Several years later, in 1927, the great master Léon Bertrand wrote scornfully in Cut and Thrust: “I declare the singlestick to be of little if any value to the cause of fencing. Rigid as a poker, the singlestick could not possibly be employed as a thrusting medium. Its lack of pliability precludes any development of legerdemain … sense of touch, and its very grip affords little scope for skillful manipulation.” No one dared argue with him.19

  d The Greeks were determined that one of their countrymen should win what was almost their national event, the marathon, held over twenty-six miles between Marathon and Athens. George Averoff, the wealthy local architect who had largely funded the Games, was so caught up in the general fervor that he offered the Greek runners his daughter in marriage, along with a dowry of a million drachmas—exactly the cost of reconstructing the main stadium. Of the twenty-five runners, twenty-one were Greek, so the odds were favorable, and sure enough a local postman, Spiridon Loues, crossed the finishing line first. Fortunately for Averoff, Loues was already married, but he was happy to accept a voucher for 365 free meals, free shoe-polishing for life, and a plot of land known thereafter as “the field of Marathon.”

  e One member of Britain’s épée team, Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, would travel on the Titanic on its fateful voyage in 1912. The night she went down, April 14, Duff Gordon offered the sailors on the lifeboat that had him and his wife on board £5 each (roughly three weeks’ pay) to make up for the wages they would lose by the ship’s sinking; but he also argued that they should not go back to pick up those struggling in the water. There were 2,340 souls on the liner, lifeboats for only 1,100, and in the chaos just 651 escaped. But the sailors, feeling they had been undercompensated, blew the gaff. One of the actual checks Duff Gordon made out was displayed at the official inquiry, and Duff Gordon spent the rest of his life in disgrace, since many felt he had in effect bribed the men to let others die. He underwent the ultimate social indignity of that time: his entry in Who’s Who was expunged.

  f Over the years, attempts have been made to change the basic disciplines, for example replacing horses with motorbikes and fencing with judo. So far they seem unlikely to succeed. An article in L’Escrime Française in 1954 reported the findings of the International Council of Military Sports (CSM) concerning the value of sports to military training, and in particular for the requirements of modern air combat. Medical opinion in Europe placed fencing at the top of the list of recommended sports for air force pilots. An Italian expert stated, “There is a profound analogy between aviation and fencing.… Fencing is a particularly good sport because it accustoms [the pilot] to an evaluation of the strength of the opponent, to the use of reasoning and the exercise of courage.” The secretary of the committee summed up: “Fencing develops serenity under fire, because the fencer does not have to deal with an object but with a thinking person—his opponent—in a struggle fought at terribly close quarters and with movements of lightning rapidity.”30 Years later, when Polish fighter pilots arrived in Britain during the Second World War, one of their first inquiries was for a fencing master and a place to train.

  SWASHBUCKLER. 1560. One who makes a noise by striking his own or his opponent’s shield with a sword. A swaggering bravo or ruffian. A noisy braggadocio. The swashbuckling manners of a youth of fashion in the reign of Elizabeth I.

  —The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

  Make the viewer feel the blow.

  —YUEN WO PING, FIGHT CHOREOGRAPHER FOR Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon AND The Matrix

  IT IS SAID THAT CINEMA BEGAN IN PARIS ON DECEMBER 28, 1895, when thirty-three people crowded into the basement of a café in the Boulevard des Capucines to watch twenty minutes of primitive flickering images.1 The new medium developed with astonishing speed, even if many of the earliest examples of the filmmaker’s art were ornate fantasy sequences or trick shots, such as The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895), which shows the doomed queen’s headless body—a trick achieved by putting a dummy in place while the camera was stopped.

  The first full-length film featuring swordplay was probably Italian, The Crusades (1911), followed by the epic Quo Vadis? (1912), “the most ambitious photodrama that has yet been seen here,” but there was little in either of adept swordsmanship.2 Fencing in general, however, pervaded early cinema and became a staple with both American and European filmmakers. In particular, 1916 saw D’Artagnan, which cost $15,000 to make and brought in seven times that in profit. In the years that followed there were versions of The Three Musketeers, The Prisoner of Zenda, and Ivanhoe, as well as a 1920 Mark of Zorro—films crowded with flashing swords and extravagant postures but with no thought given to anything resembling technical accuracy. They were, as one film historian put it, “little more than knife sharpenings.”3

  In this the cinema took its lead from theater. For most of the nineteenth century, a prime qualification for matinee stardom had been swordfighting ability. Many a poor play was staged as an occasion for an exciting fight scene, and no melodrama was considered complete without a climactic set-to between hero and villain. Most actors took their stage fights seriously, one American actor launching into Richard III’s final combat with such fury that on one occasion he refused to yield at all and pursued his terrified antagonist off the stage and out into the street. Most performers just hacked away, waiting for the appropriate amount of time before one of them could fall dead, for no apparent reason. Lionel Barrymore, toward the end of his career and playing a villain, once stopped in mid-performance during a climactic duel after the play’s young hero had managed to lose his sword during their skirmish. “What am I meant to do now?” he asked rhetorically, “Starve to death?”

  Generally, swordfights were a compound of saber and épée. A number of well-known routines were used, selected according to the needs of the play but not created for a particular production. These routines, referred to in the profession as “the Square Eights,” “the Round Eights,” “the Glasgow Tens,” and even one called “the Drunk Combat,” were made up of a series of cuts, or whacks of blade on blade, repeated as often as necessary.*

  In London in the late nineteenth century, the majority of the leading actors of the day became pupils of the “Master of Fence,” Félix Bertrand, who helped stage the most celebrated duels—between Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Fred Terry in Hamlet, for instance, in Charles Wyndham’s Cyrano, and Johnston Forbes-Robertson’s Macbeth. Not all stage fights were planned, however. During the climactic scene between Henry Irving and Squire Bancroft in The Dead Heart, only the final thrust was rehearsed. The rest, night after night, was improvised. “This fight,” says William Hobbs, who is seen by many as Bertrand’s successor, “set all London talking, and no wonder!”5 Both men put great energy into their duel—yet Irving was nearsighted. They must have been good fencers to have survived without injury. Bram Stoker (of Dracula fame, and Irving’s manager and biographer) observed with a certain admiration of a production of Romeo and Juliet that the swordplay was so spirited that on most evenings at least one member of the cast required medical attention. Once, in the fight between Romeo and Paris in the tomb, when Paris failed to die on cue, Romeo (Henry Irving) seized his adversary’s sword, hit him over the knuckles with his own, prodded him in the stomach with his knee, and cried, “Die, my boy, die. Down, down, down”—then elbowed and pushed his wretched victim into his grave.

  Another important feature was flying sparks. Irving so loved the effect that that he would attach flints to his blade. Later, with the advent of electricity, he would go even further and had his weapons wired, so that they would discharge sparks throughout the fight. He soon added rubber insulation.

  The net resu
lt was that filmmakers knew that swordfights made for great box office; but at first they paid little attention to how such fights should be orchestrated.† This was still true when Douglas Fairbanks produced The Three Musketeers in 1921. Demonstrations outside and inside the theater and throughout its first screening—when Fairbanks was called upon to make a speech before the film started, during the intermission, and a third time at the conclusion—confirmed that he had a success on his hands. Two-dollar tickets went for five.

  Although Fairbanks was later considered the embodiment of d’Artagnan, the idea of making a film inspired by Dumas’s hero crept up on him slowly. In 1918 he made A Modern Musketeer, a strange hybrid based on the now-forgotten novel D’Artagnan of Kansas. It opens with a scene showing Fairbanks as d’Artagnan, then switches to a modern accident-prone hero, “always chivalrous, always misunderstood,” and his attempts to woo a flapper, Elsie Dodge, away from her suitor, Forrest Vandeteer, “the richest man in Yonkers.” The opening credits ask, hopefully, “Do you remember d’Artagnan of France? Can you recall the thrills you got from the adventures of that famous swash-buckling gallant of three centuries ago?” (It was long believed that only the first reel had survived, but recently the missing reels have resurfaced, and the whole of this brilliant film should shortly be available.)

  Capitalizing on the success of Fairbanks’s The Three Musketeers, the Alexander Film Corporation quickly rereleased its 1916 D’Artagnan under Fairbanks’s title, while the French comedian Max Linder rushed out a knockabout takeoff, The Three Must-Get-Theirs. With Linder as “Dart-in-again,” it contained several marvelous spoof dueling sequences, all based on classical foil play, carefully arranged by the Belgian master Fred Cavens.