By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  Now in his early sixties, Wolf Peter has never fought a Mensur himself, but as he proudly took me around his workplace he picked up one of his weapons and immediately got on guard in the perfect Mensur posture, moving his fencing arm deftly through the various positions. He is a slight, friendly man, about five feet seven inches in height, and the big sword looked strange in his hand.

  Modern-day corps brothers swear loyalty in a ritual ceremony. The upper reaches of certain leading German companies are still said to require a dueling background. (illustration credit 13.2)

  Duels with the heavy saber are still forbidden in Germany, although Wolf Peter was not sure of the current law. I asked how many clients he had, and he showed me a well-thumbed order book containing a hundred names and addresses—each a fraternity club, the names of the club secretaries evoking Germany’s nationalist past. There was one customer in America, another in Scandinavia, a couple in Switzerland, but the rest were all in Austria or Germany. He was, Wolf Peter said, kept extremely busy. For the last fifteen years he has been the only maker of Mensur and Schläger swords in Germany and, so far as he knows, in the world. He has no assistant, no apprentice; his daughter, he told me, now grown up, takes no interest in his calling. So there will be no one to continue his skills when he retires, maybe in three years’ time.

  I drove off leaving Wolf Peter standing outside his workshop, gently waving good-bye. Somehow, I felt, a successor would be found. The Mensur may be an anachronism, but there is a call for it still. And since the 1920s its practitioners have not suffered a single fatality—making it, ironically, one of the safest sports in the world.

  * Thirty years later, in 1869, Motley became his country’s minister to London. On his arrival there, an enterprising publisher decided to reissue the book. Motley was horrified and searched in vain for a copy. He discovered that the only one that remained in Europe was in the British Museum. He could not lay his hands on it, as it had been withdrawn by a member of the publishing firm, who was engaged in copying it in the reading room. Motley finally got permission to read his own work one Sunday afternoon, when the reading room was closed to the general public. A few days later the publisher was surprised by a visit from Motley, who offered to pay a considerable sum for the book’s withdrawal. To this day, the only public copy of Morton’s Hope in Europe lies buried in the British Museum.

  † When Herzl came to draft a constitution for the State of Israel, his old enthusiasm resurfaced and he legislated that dueling was to be virtually without restriction, “in order to have real officers and to impart a tone of French refinement to good society. Dueling is permitted and will not be punished, no matter what the outcome, provided that the seconds have done their share towards an honorable settlement. Every saber duel will be investigated by the dueling tribunal only afterwards.”16

  ‡ J. Christoph Amberger, a German based in Baltimore, fought seven Mensuren between 1985 and 1987. His account of one of these bouts, held in Göttingen in 1987, is the best description of what a Mensur is like at the sharp end. After a prodigous to-and-fro, Amberger, already badly cut, at last gets in what turns out to be a winning hit:

  I can still see my opponent’s sweat-drenched face. A hair-fine line appears across his forehead, five, six inches long. Then a red curtain falls, turning his face into a mask of oily scarlet, from which the inch-high rims of the goggles stick out black and ghoulishly.

  Commotion. My opponent disappears behind the tattered leather back of his second. The doctor approaches, looks and shakes his head. A moment later the second will turn around, request silence while unhooking his gauntlets, and courteously thank [me] for a fair fight.

  Suddenly all the tension that has drained me for an hour has evaporated, my lungs expand, and a breeze seems to cool my face. And not even the prospect of having needles shoved through the gaping fringes of my cuts can dim the elation. I know I won’t feel a thing: the combination of wound shock and adrenaline will take care of anaesthesia.23

  Aldo Nadi, master of all three weapons, undefeated for twelve years as a professional. (illustration credit p5)

  The only instrument with which one can conduct foreign policy is alone and exclusively—the sword.

  —DR. JOSEPH GOEBBELS, Der Angriff, May 28, 1931

  The contentious concept of sport summarized in the phrase “Sport for sport’s sake” is a fiction. Fascism has exploded this fiction once and for all.

  —LANDO FERRETTI, PRESIDENT OF THE 1928 ITALIAN OLYMPIC COMMITTEE

  WHEN MY FATHER DIED IN 1994, I HAD THE RESPONSIBILITY OF going through his possessions to decide what to throw away. After clearing out an old clothes chest, I glanced at the newspaper lining the bottom of a drawer. It was from the Daily Mirror of Saturday, March 11, 1933, and I still have it, yellowed and almost crumbling. “HITLER BECOMES SUPREME IN GERMANY” runs the headline, alongside an article on Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration. The subheading reads, “Reign of Terror by Nazi Troops—Three More States Taken Over.” “Britain Asked to Help ‘In Averting Another European War,’ ” the subheadings continue, “American Couple’s Home Raided … Consul Protests Against ‘Brutal Nazi Attack’ … A sensation has been caused by a three-day suspension of the Berliner Tageblatt, the most celebrated newspaper in Germany. No reason is given.”

  What struck me then is how clearly a popular paper saw the menace of Nazism, only weeks after Hitler assumed power. If the Mirror could recognize the brutal nature of Nazi rule, why did it take others so long? I was reminded of the old saw about a frog in boiling water: drop it straight into a boiling pan, and it will jump out at once; heat the water gradually, and it will swim around happily until it is too late.

  The fencing community did its share of swimming. The right-wing drift of the sport was a gradual process, and when the fascists took over fencing in several countries there was no one to stop them. Right-wing politicians in particular seem to have had a fondness for fencing. Heinrich Himmler had something sim’lar. At the end of the First World War he was at university in Munich, where he longed to be part of the dueling fraternities but was held back by his strong religious beliefs, as dueling was against Church doctrine. His desire to duel won out, and he joined a war veterans’ league, the Reichskriegsteilnehmerverband, where he went into training for his first duel.

  In the summer of 1922, aged twenty-one, he at last secured the duel he had longed for. Despite his small stature and spindly frame, he felt he performed well, and noted in his diary: “I certainly did not get agitated. Stood very well and fought technically beautifully. My opponent was Herr Renner, Alemannians [fraternity], he struck honest blows.”1

  The fight, the thirteenth of fifty scheduled that day, was stopped when Himmler had taken five cuts, for which he received five stitches and a ligature. “I did not flinch once,” he recorded. Afterward his head was buzzing, and he slept badly—a small price to pay: he had proved himself, and had a scar to show for it. By the time he became leader of the SS, like many Nazis, he patterned his cult of honor on the chivalric medieval archetypes that fencers so identified with. His headquarters at Wewelsburg boasted a vast dining hall with an oaken Round Table around which Himmler’s twelve most prominent Obergruppenführer clustered. As he once reminded a similar assembly, “Never forget—we are a knightly order.” Then there was Hermann Göring, who at grand state occasions would wear a crusader’s sword; while Hitler’s desk had on it a motif of a sword being drawn from its sheath. But Goebbels had no duels at all.

  Enthusiasm for fencing among military leaders was not confined to the Third Reich. It was the favorite pastime of the sports-obsessed dictator Juan Perón (husband of Evita), who was his country’s army champion and who was due to fence at the 1924 Olympics, but was barred from leaving his country by his War Minister, while General Franco fenced as a cadet in Toledo and won a decoration for gallantry after a desperate fight with sword and dagger with a Moroccan tribesman, from which, he would recall with pleasure, he “still had the glorious scars on his
head.”2*

  Apart from military figures, Ezra Pound was at the same fencing club at university as his fellow poet William Carlos Williams. Williams had no fascist leanings, but Pound’s sympathies led him to broadcast from Italy during the war, and after he had been imprisoned he gave lessons to his fellow internees—using a broomstick. He also wrote a poem in memory of his fencing master, which is unusual in seeing Death as a keen fencer:

  Gone while your tastes were keen to you,

  Gone where the grey winds call to you,

  By that high fencer, even Death,

  Struck of the blade that no man parrieth.

  Pound’s political hero, Benito Mussolini, was once asked by a journalist which was the greater, the pen or the sword.† He replied immediately, “The sword—because it cuts. Cuts. Ends things. Finish.” In Italy, fencing came to be known as “the Fascist sport.” The country’s record in competition was formidable: in the sixteen years of European and Olympic championships leading up to 1935, Italians won twenty-four gold, twenty-seven silver, and fourteen bronze medals, and finished fourth seventeen times. Such success, nearly all achieved under Mussolini, had political implications: the government looked fondly on fencing and helped promote it. Mussolini himself had always been attracted to swordplay, a passion that could be traced back loosely to his schooldays, when he had been expelled for stabbing another boy with a penknife; he continued into adulthood to carry a knife wherever he went (though, incredibly, he never learned to use a razor properly, and “shaved himself as though in a fury with hasty and careless strokes.”3).

  Throughout his life Mussolini craved various forms of release. He would cycle eighteen miles for flying lessons, sandwiching in driving instruction and the occasional duel; but despite his determination to excel he was as clumsy with a sword as he was behind the wheel of a car—even on mountain roads, with the engine boiling, he never saw the need to change gear. “All through his life to acknowledge defeat was to risk exposing himself to ridicule—the one thing he feared above all,” wrote Richard Collier, one of his biographers. “Though he wielded his rapier like a bludgeon, grunting and grimacing, he threw out challenges with the aplomb of a d’Artagnan—fighting under bridges, on the banks of streams, once in a rented room after the seconds had piled all the furniture on to the landing.”4

  On a typical day, he would be up at seven, take a cold bath, swig back a glass of milk, then go off riding for an hour, leaping onto his horse cowboy-fashion. After that he would fence. According to a sympathetic biography published in Italy in 1928, he generally preferred the saber, and with his teeth set in grim determination would fight “with a style that was totally personal, full of clever ruses, sudden counterattacks, blows unexpected according to the logic of his adversary, which the Duce launches like the punishment of God.”5

  In his early days, Mussolini would use a special code with his wife, Rachele, whenever he went off to duel, to avoid frightening their children. “Have spaghetti today,” he would say. Rachele would take out the bloodstained shirt in which he fought all his duels, while the family handyman, Cirillo Tambara, set off for the local store to buy pitch, with which Mussolini would coat his fencing glove so that no adversary could inflict shame by disarming him. Hemingway once said that really brave men do not have to fight duels. Nor do they have to pose for photographers with a tame lioness or drive at breakneck speeds along bad roads and boast about it. Mussolini was not a physical coward, but he was scared of being thought one.

  Five of his duels took place while he was still a journalist, mainly between 1915 and 1922, the most memorable in October 1921, against the socialist Francesco Ciccotti-Scozzese, an old friend become a sworn enemy. The Ministry of the Interior learned of this duel and was determined to stop it, not least because Ciccotti-Scozzese had a heart condition, but the two men left their homes in Milan and traveled to Emilia to fight—closely followed by the police. They went on through the Cisa Pass, then Livorno, with the duel finally getting under way at a house in Antignano. At this point a local official, Marcello Vaccari, discovered them, and they fled once more. The fight ended in Livorno on October 27, after fourteen separate starts, and then only because of fears for Ciccotti’s health.

  In his autobiography, Mussolini describes this last encounter with pride: “I had a duel of some consequence with Ciccotti-Scozzese, a mean figure of a journalist.… Among other various imperfections, one might say he had that of physical cowardice. Our duel was proof of it. After several assaults the physicians were obliged to stop the encounter because of the claim that my opponent had a heart attack. In other words, fear had set him all aflutter.” He continues in typical vein, “I think I have some good qualities as a swordsman—at least I possess some qualities of courage, and thanks to both, I have always come out of combats rather well. In those combats having a chivalrous character, I endeavor to acquit myself in a worthy manner.”6

  As he grew older, he devoted more time to cultivating physical fitness. His most intimate retainer besides his housekeeper and cook was Camillo Rodolfi, his riding and fencing instructor, who enjoyed a well-paid sinecure as a noncommissioned colonel in the Fascist militia. By 1923 Mussolini had given up alcohol and tobacco almost entirely. To demonstrate his youthful vigor, he would run down a line of soldiers when inspecting a parade. Foreign newspapers were not allowed to refer to his age, and he successfully concealed the fact that he needed to wear spectacles; occasionally he even invited foreign journalists to watch him fence.

  Shortly after he seized power in October 1922, Il Duce had created the Colosseum of Mussolini, a sports center whose aim was to turn out winning international teams over a whole range of sports, much like the academies that now exist in many advanced nations. The best amateurs and professionals in various disciplines were selected with few other requirements than to prepare for competition, then win. Fencing was one of the chosen sports. Even so, Mussolini’s interest might well have cooled, had circumstances not provided him with an unusual opportunity.

  Mussolini practices under the watchful eye of his coach. (illustration credit 14.1)

  Nedo Nadi in 1931, shortly after his return from Argentina. By 1932 he would be Italy’s team captain at the Los Angeles Olympics. (illustration credit 14.2)

  At the 1912 Olympics an eighteen-year-old from Livorno, Nedo Nadi, won the gold medal at foil. Eight years later he broke all records at Antwerp, winning individual gold at foil and saber and gold medals in all three team events, where Italy made a clean sweep. Following these Games, Nadi returned to a country in political ferment. Within two years Mussolini was in power, and demanded that all Italians show their support by joining the Fascist Party. Nadi made no attempt to do so: by nature, he was apolitical, so much so that in the 1914–18 war, after having been decorated for bravery, he was sharply reprimanded for being openly friendly to one of his Austrian prisoners whom he discovered had been a fencer. “I just treated him as a human being,” Nadi insisted, but he was stripped of his medal all the same.

  Back in his home town of Ardenza, just outside Livorno, the local Fascisti tried various means to make the country’s new hero into a party member. He was not interested. He was happy, he said, teaching alongside his fencing-master father at their local club. The Fascist militia refused to let matters rest there. Mussolini had recently survived an attempt on his life, and to celebrate his deliverance special processions were organized throughout Italy. It was decreed that all Italians should hang Fascist flags out of their windows for the duration of the proceedings. Nadi refused. Blackshirts went by his house yelling abuse, and when this had no effect they decided that more positive action was required. A group of them held a secret meeting and planned to ambush Nadi on his way home from work. The plotters selected a pinewood grove about a hundred meters from Nadi’s club, electing to do more than just give the recalcitrant sportsman a good beating: they would break his sword arm.

  One of their group, a well-built boy called Piero Polese, happened to be a pupi
l of Nadi. As soon as he heard about the new plan, he drew his gun and dared anyone to try to harm his teacher. Polese then went to see Nadi’s formidable wife, Roma Ferralasco, to tell her that her husband’s life was in danger. For some reason, Roma chose not to tell her husband. Instead, she arranged for Polese to accompany Nadi from the club every afternoon; he told his master that he had a girlfriend who lived along the same route. Then, from 4 P.M. on, Roma, who would by then have finished her work as a physical-education teacher, would take over. Soon she was shadowing her husband around town, a revolver in her handbag. Support for the ambush melted away. Throughout, Nadi appears to have had no idea what was going on.

  When the next Fascist parade day came round—there were one or two a month—Roma again refused to put out the required flag. As the Fascists stomped past, shouting, throwing stones and trying to see inside the house, she shouted back, “If you have something to say, say it to my face.” Her husband, meanwhile, continued to devote himself to books, classical music, and fencing. It was as if everyone knew he was walking a tightrope except Nadi himself.

  The Fascists decided that their next move would be to burn down the Nadis’ house, but again Roma was tipped off, and the attack averted. Still the threats continued. The local chief of police, one of the leading Fascists in town, took to walking up and down the street outside their home, whip in hand, his glistening boots clicking on the cobblestones. He would stop and gaze up at the Nadis’ windows. At other times he would spur round on a large white horse he used for official occasions and repeat the exercise—an unnerving exhibition of power and intimidation.7