By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  But mainstream society was impressed. Peter carried the American flag at the Barcelona Games in 1992 and again at the Pan-American Games in 1995. His last Olympics were those of 1996, but by then his life had taken another turn. In 1991 he had established the Peter Westbrook Foundation, largely from his own savings, an organization to help disadvantaged inner-city youth not only to learn fencing but to improve their overall performance in school. At the first meeting six children turned up; now there are more than a hundred people enrolled, ranging in age from nine to twenty-one. The foundation has become one of the most successful inner-city sports programs in the country, producing four of the country’s current top five saber fencers and several strong women contenders too. Keeth Smart and his sister Erinn were among the half dozen who appeared at that first class in 1991; both went to the Sydney Olympics in 2000.

  Westbrook worked for IBM in the 1970s and is an adept marketing man, ensuring that newspaper articles on his club appear regularly and making TV appearances. In an interview in 1999, Sports Illustrated recorded, “Westbrook has a simple rule: Do well in school or don’t fence. He hires tutors and holds bi-monthly essay-writing contests, awarding $50 prizes to the top three entrants. He charges kids for private lessons so they’ll feel obligated to get the most from their investment. The fee is a rock-bottom $20 a year, and he often reduces even that.”40

  The foundation pays instructors’ salaries, equips the fencers, and rents the current premises on Twenty-fifth Street. In effect, it has folded itself into the old Fencers Club, a nice irony. It provides money for travel to competitions—all on a shoestring annual budget of around $175,000, which Westbrook raises on his own. As a “black-almost-white guy” and a member of the U.S. Olympic Committee, he knows he is ideally placed to speak to both sides, but he is also not beyond motivating his charges by reminding them of their blackness in what is still predominantly a white man’s sport. “Why do inner-city kids make the best fencers?” he says. “They’ve got more rage, more anger, great fighting spirit. That anger and rage is what it takes to be an Olympic champion.”

  One of Westbrook’s most promising pupils is Ivan Lee, a slim, 160-pound left-hander now on a full athlete’s scholarship at St. John’s University, where several of the foundation’s members have found harbor. “Where I’m from, the sport of fencing is about as far removed from the people as square dancing and classical music,” he wrote in one of the essays he prepared for Westbrook. “Honestly, how many skinny, black, 16-year-old boys with glasses do you know that fence?”

  Peter Westbrook (center) flanked by his pupils Akhi Spencer-El and Keeth Smart. Both Spencer-El and Smart made the 2000 Olympics, and by March 2003 Smart was ranked the number one sabreur in the world. (illustration credit 11.4)

  I first met Westbrook when we fenced against each other in a team match at the World Championships in Grenoble in 1974, and we have kept up our friendship over the years. In April 2000 we were sharing a coffee together near his club when Ivan Lee came by. He had narrowly failed to win the world youth title, ending up in third place, and was reporting in to discuss why he had fallen short. Lee admitted that in the semifinal he had felt afraid, not only of what his opponent might do but even more of the prospect of victory. He had refused to acknowledge it, and that had made him seize up. “You didn’t use the fear,” Westbrook told him, grasping the boy’s upper arm. “We all feel that fear; you’ve got to learn to bring it out into the open.”

  They agreed to work on the problem together. A year later Lee came second in the same tournament, ending up number two in the world youth rankings—and, even more impressively, came third in a top senior event, beating most of the world’s leading fencers. Small wonder that in March 2002 Disney paid to develop a film based on Westbrook’s life, and have “fast-tracked” the project, or that The New York Times dubbed Westbrook “the most influential fencer in New York today.”

  The paper might have gone further but for another great change in American fencing. Following the collapse of Soviet hegemony in 1989, scores of top-class fencers and masters have emigrated to the United States—not only from Hungary, as in 1956, but from Poland, Russia, and Bulgaria. A onetime U.S. team captain told me, “We currently have the greatest concentration of coaching strength ever—and I’m including Italy.” In the world championships in 2000 the United States won its first-ever team gold medal—at women’s saber. The women’s coach was a Pole based in Oregon. Luck, said some; and women’s saber was a new event and therefore less competitive. But a year later, at the world championships in Nîmes, the Americans took bronze in the women’s foil, besting a strong German team 45–43.

  While still outside the top ten fencing nations, the United States has started to dominate the youth international circuit, as the French, Germans, Italians, and Russians have done for years. There are currently a hundred thousand fencers in the country and about eight hundred clubs. The many Eastern Europeans jockeying for coaching jobs throughout the United States have yet to prove they can manage a club, not just give excellent individual lessons, but the future looks bright. From comic strips such as “Peanuts” and “Tank McNamara” to cartoons in The New Yorker, a teenage Lex Luthor fencing in Smallville, and doctors on ER staging impromptu fencing bouts, consciousness of the sport is growing nationwide. All that is necessary, one might cynically add, is to relocate the country in the middle of Europe.

  * In 1814 Pierre Thomas was appointed “swordmaster,” becoming the first full-time physical education instructor in any institution in America. His successor, Herman Koehler, was called “master of the sword,” a position dryly renamed “director of physical education” in 1947. In 1953 both fencing and horsemanship were discontinued, applied psychology and electronics being introduced in their stead. Fencing returned to the academy as a club sport in 1957. The U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis taught fencing from its founding in 1846, one of only three sports in which cadets could engage. Naval boarding parties still used cutlasses, so every sailor was drilled in fencing; but in recent years Annapolis has dropped it too. Only the U.S. Air Force Academy still teaches swordplay.

  † In February 1899 Faure died in the Elysée Palace from a heart attack while in the arms of his mistress, whose hair was gripped so tightly by the stricken president that she could not struggle free. Luckily, a sword-armed garde Republican was on hand, and the mistress, slightly shorn, was soon able to make her way home. She later became a character in an Agatha Christie novel and ended her life as Lady Abinger, dying in Brighton in 1954.

  ‡ Twain himself describes a particularly grisly duel in an almost two-page footnote on such encounters in Life on the Mississippi: “Two ‘highly connected’ young Virginians, clerks in a hardware store at Charlottesville, while ‘skylarking,’ came to blows. Peter Dick threw pepper in Charles Roads’s eyes; Roads demanded an apology; Dick refused to give it, and it was agreed that a duel was inevitable, but a difficulty arose; the parties had no pistols, and it was too late at night to procure them. One of them suggested that butcher knives would answer the purpose, and the other accepted the suggestion: the result was that Roads fell to the floor with a gash in his abdomen that may or may not prove fatal.”24

  § Several of America’s keenest fencers of this period found fame in other worlds. Admiral Forrest Sherman—who in 1943 was Admiral Chester Nimitz’s “right arm, if not a major part of his brain,” and became chief of naval operations after the war—was reckoned one of the finest swordsmen of his time. Richard C. Steere, a member of the bronze medal–winning team at the 1932 Olympics who fenced on into his eighties, was General Patton’s leading weather expert, determining Patton’s strategies in the North African landings, defying Washington and London’s forecasts, and earning from Patton the nickname “Commander Houdini.”

  A German student, restricted by his injuries following a Mensur duel, drinks as best he can. (illustration credit p4)

  Haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like? What would be that feeling of
a real blade entering another man’s body? That initial resistance … and that sudden giving? The surprise on another man’s face!

  —THE VILLAINOUS MASTER (ERIC ROBERTS) IN By the Sword, 1991

  Wounds of the flesh a surgeon’s skill may heal,

  But wounded honor is only cured with steel.

  —FROM A NINETEENTH-CENTURY CHALLENGE TO A DUEL

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1995 A “SWORD-SWALLOWING GUIDE” APPEARED in The Sword, the official magazine of the British Fencing Association. It opens:

  Bored with practice sessions with foil, épée or sabre? Try swallowing the weapon instead! According to a recent newspaper report, a surgeon who has studied the technique of swordswallowing claims that “once you have learned to do it properly, it is harmless.” A novice starts by swallowing a ball attached to a strong cotton thread, which he repeatedly pulls up until the gag-reflex is suppressed. He then graduates to swords of increasing length to a maximum of two feet. A big meal prior to performance weighs down the stomach so the sword dramatically disappears up to the hilt.

  But don’t hiccup. Last century an Indian swordswallower hiccuped during a performance in London. His beautifully dissected esophagus and the sword are on display at University College Hospital.1

  When this article appeared I was a member of Britain’s Board of Fencing, with particular responsibility for safety. A colleague phoned me shortly after the magazine had been distributed to say that there was a real danger of a young fencer experimenting: we should circulate every subscriber with a warning. I opted for inaction, and fortunately no pioneer hiccupped that summer. But the practice exerts an odd fascination. Shakespeare wrote about it (in Henry VI, Part II: “I’ll make thee eat iron like an ostrich, and swallow my sword like a great pin, ere thou an I part”), and the practice is recorded long before—Lucius Apuleius (c. A.D. 123–170) and the Spanish humanist Ludovicus Vives (1492–1540) both mention it.*

  By the mid–eighth century sword-swallowing was popular in Japan, having first traveled from Greece to India and on into southern China. In the Middle Ages sword-swallowers, like other “magicians,” were condemned and persecuted by the Church, and it was not until the mid–seventeenth century that they could wander Europe more or less freely. They became popular in America from 1893, when their acts were one of the features of the Chicago World’s Fair, but still their veracity was doubted, with Webster’s Dictionary defining a sword-swallower as “a performer who pretends to swallow a sword.” Some performers use a guiding tube of thin metal that they have already ingested, but for most the act is genuine, with all its attendant risks.

  In 1895 the editor of a London magazine described one Signor Benedetti, who had just performed at the Westminster Aquarium and Canterbury Hall. The blade used by Benedetti, we learn, was thirty and a quarter inches long. “The point of this sword,” the writer added,

  when passed up to its hilt down Benedetti’s gullet, can be felt in the left groin, so close to the top of the leg that another inch would carry it into the limb. For a man of Mr Benedetti’s height (5ft 8ins, without his boots) the ordinary distance an instrument could be passed would be from 24 to 25 inches. Benedetti tells me that sometimes, though very rarely, his long sword stops when passed at a distance of about 25 inches, and at a spot which would be in the proper line of the bottom of the stomach.

  Without a trace of humor, the article continued, “Being a wise man, he does not attempt on these occasions to push the sword further, but immediately withdraws it.” The rationale for this feat exercises a certain fascination:

  In seeking for an explanation for this remarkable accomplishing [sic], it seems more probable that the sword passes out of the stomach rather than that the stomach is of such an extraordinary size that it extends as far as the groin, especially when we remember the difficulty there is sometimes experienced in passing anything beyond the natural distance, and on the supposition that the sword passes out of the stomach, it must pass either into an elongated pouch, or into a natural elongation of that organ. But the outlet into this natural continuation is normally placed at right angles to the opening of the gullet into the stomach, and about 5 inches from it, and therefore is in such relation to the gullet orifice that a straight rod, passed through the latter, would not go anywhere near the former.

  The writer argued that the passage into the Italian’s stomach was, unusually, in a direct line with his gullet:

  If the sword entered into a pouch of the stomach it is difficult to understand how it is that no trouble is ever experienced with the food. With such a blind sac of five inches in length, there must of necessity be at some time or another some disturbance to the system from the detained accumulation of food, but no inconvenience ever seems to occur to M. Benedetti.

  Signor Benedetti had first attempted this act in 1863, at the age of fourteen, when he discovered he could pass down a blade of almost the same length as the one he came to employ in his prime. So his act was not the fruit of any gradual process of stomach distension through constant practice. However, honing his art over the next thirty years, he so accustomed his stomach to steel that it could take a sword for some minutes without disturbance.

  A tragic case involved the American Maud D’Auldin, who was married to the sword-swallower Delno Fritz, who together performed a professional circus act from 1912 on. In 1920 the two gave a command performance for George V and Queen Mary. It was Maud’s custom to pass her sword around the audience before swallowing it, so it could be seen as the genuine article. On this occasion, someone in the crown put a nick in the blade—with fatal results.

  There remained the danger of hiccups—or, at the least, of coughing. Here any would-be swallower is given a tip: in passing a blade down the gullet, unless the head is thrown back,

  it is necessary to keep the instrument pressed against the back of the throat—that is, against the vertebral column which forms the posterior wall of the gullet. If this is done, no fit of coughing need occur in using a moderate-sized and flexible instrument, although it can be borne but for a very few seconds.3

  This fascination with swallowing a potentially lethal weapon must have been keener in the times when swords were the preferred instruments of death. The ways a sword could do damage varied sharply: the hacking of a Roman soldier in gladiatorial times differed from the cutting of the broadsword, which differed again from the thrust of a Renaissance rapier; and the consequences of each also differed. Then there are the injuries incurred in fencing and the mishaps of stage and screen.

  Toward the end of The Courts of the Morning John Buchan makes the point that the basic human instinct is to grapple with one’s enemies. The use of a distancing weapon—one that confers space—requires a quite separate temperament; the encounter becomes multidimensional: one’s feet are set free, and sheer strength is no longer so vital an element. No animal regularly uses a weapon in conflict situations.† Swordplay is thus not an alien activity, but it is an unnatural one.

  During the latter part of the nineteenth century, about a fifth of the duels in Germany ended in death. The medical adviser to British fencing, Dr. Raymond Crawfurd, hazards an even higher rate for European duels overall: “I have seen a figure of 60 percent quoted. Presumably that means that in a minimum of 10 percent of duels both parties died! On reflection, I think that figure must be too high, when you allow for duels that only went to the first blood. Nevertheless, the penetrating blade injury is a highly lethal one.” Even if a victim’s internal organs were not hit, the raggedness of the opening and the almost certain likelihood of infection made rapier wounds fearsome. Duelists typically would ensure that they cleared their bladder and would not eat before an engagement, partly to make a slimmer target but also, should they be pierced in gut or stomach, to limit the danger of infection. Most died long after the actual fight; in 1578 one Jacques de Quelrus, a favorite of Henri III, took thirty-three days to expire. In England, it has for centuries not been considered murder if one’s victim took more than a year a
nd a day to die.

  What happens when a human being is struck by a sword? How deep does a wound have to be to take life, and where does it have to hit? G. K. Chesterton, who habitually carried a swordstick, often wrote about swordplay in his fiction. In his story “The Sins of Prince Saradine,” two duelists set to with “two long Italian rapiers”:

  the ringing of the rapiers quickened to a rattle, the prince’s arms flew up, and the point shot out behind his shoulderblades. He went over with a great whirling movement, almost like one throwing the half of a boy’s cartwheel. The sword flew from his hand like a shooting star, and dived into the distant river. And he himself sank with so earth-shaking a subsidence that he broke a big rose-tree with his body and shook up into the sky a cloud of red earth.5

  A vivid image, but one suspects that a simple collapse was not what Chesterton was looking for. Adventure fiction can paint a convincing picture of painful sword combat when it wants to, however. Bernard Cornwell sets a grisly scene on horseback in one of his novels:

  Sharpe stood his ground, his right arm facing the attack. The Lieutenant, like all good French skirmishing officers, carried a light curved saber; a good slashing weapon, but not the most accurate blade for the lunge. This man, eager to draw first blood, swerved as he neared Sharpe, then leaned out of his saddle to give a gut-slicing sweep with the glittering blade.

  Sharpe simply parried the blow by holding his own heavy sword vertically. The clash of steel jarred up his arm, then he kicked his heels back to force the stallion towards the road.… Sharpe was deliberately … letting the eager Frenchman overtake him, but just a heartbeat before the sun-bright saber whipped hard down Sharpe jerked the long sword back and upwards. The heavy blade smashed brutally hard into the mouth of the Lieutenant’s horse. The beast reared up on its hind legs, screaming, with blood showing at its lips and teeth. Sharpe was already turning the stallion across its front. The Lieutenant was desperately trying to stay in the saddle. He flailed for balance with his saber arm, then screamed because he saw the heavy sword coming at his throat. He tried to twist away, but instead his horse plunged back onto its forefeet and threw the Lieutenant’s weight fast forward.