By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  Beppe had been a good fencer. In 1893 he so dominated a competition in Hungary that he was invited to stay on and coach there. “I am from Livorno,” he replied, “and in Livorno I stay.” Nedo was born in June of that year, Aldo six years later. Beppe’s two sons would become both his victims and his obsession. Nedo was the first to be subjugated. “I will make him the strongest fencer in the world,” his father told his friends. “Nedo will defeat everybody, and when he tires of being number one he will pass the title on to Aldo.” Nedo had his first lesson at the age of six and took two lessons a day thereafter, morning and evening, and finally three. For his first few months he was permitted to make a set number of moves, then for two years he was forbidden to free-fence with the other boys; he could only practice, and if he made a mistake or did not complete an action to his parent’s satisfaction, he would be struck hard on the legs with his father’s blade.5

  Nedo remained under strict supervision even outside his lessons. He was not allowed to fence anyone at the club other than the three or four top members, so that he would fight only those of a standard he might meet in international competition. He spent his whole childhood fencing—few friends, no games, no forms of escape. At the age of twelve he won the Italian foil championship. Two years later he was desperate to fence in the 1908 Olympics, but his father told him he was too young. In 1909 he traveled to a prestigious international tournament in Vienna, where he won in all three weapons with ease. “We have just seen fencing’s Mozart,” reported a Viennese newspaper. But Beppe wanted his son to concentrate on foil and saber, telling Nedo that épée was “the prostitution of fencing.” The champion-in-waiting was beginning to rebel, however, and would sneak off to fence the forbidden weapon with a friend. Otherwise his progress continued, and within two years he was selected for the Stockholm Olympics.

  He traveled there by train, second class—the Italian government was too preoccupied with its war in Libya to find money for sportsmen—and arrived suffering from bronchitis, with his foil event the very next day. Nedo’s look of youthful innocence contrasted with his aggressive style on the piste, and the crowd took to him, applauding every hit he made and anointing him its favorite. Never seriously challenged, he swept to the gold medal. By the time of the saber event he was exhausted and came in only fifth. He did not compete at épée because of an ear infection. Beppe was delighted with his son’s performance and threw a huge party for his return. The menu read: Olympic soup; boiled fish with Swedish salsa; vegetables “on the strip”; veal roasted in foil; fencers’ salad; cookies “gold medal”; tricolor fruit; and “July 8” coffee—the day of Nedo’s victory.

  The following year Nedo went to Bucharest. The Romanian capital, eager to ape Paris, gloried in receiving the Olympic champion of “France’s sport.” Prince Carol, himself a fencer, introduced Nedo to his parents, Queen Marie and King Ferdinand, who inducted the nineteen-year-old into court society, then effectively kidnapped him, urging him to stay in Bucharest to give their son lessons. After twelve days, Nedo begged his father to find some urgent excuse to recall him to Livorno. The Romanian king kept up his interest in Nedo, sending the young lieutenant food parcels and “military advice” throughout the First World War. Nedo was suitably embarrassed, and every time he moved to a different unit had to explain his “Bucharest connection.” The war made a great impression on him. In one engagement, near Venice, Nedo left a village unprotected while he and his troops went to blow up a nearby bridge. The village was attacked, and many of its inhabitants killed. This tragedy, and the death of several friends, left him melancholic and reflective. When he and his wife would stay at home listening to classical music, Aldo would scoff at them as “those two poor fessi [fools].”

  FOR MOST OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS at any sport, let alone international competitions, were simply inconceivable. When young men competed with each other it was on the battlefield. Outside the British Isles (the English were known to be a sports-crazed people, better left alone), there was minimal literature on sport; what little could be found was about riding, boxing, maybe singlestick fighting. But by the final quarter of the century a new atmosphere was detectable, and sports of all kinds came to be seen as instruments of national pride and personal development. Partly this was a consequence of the age of steam and the telegraph; international consituencies of specialized activities could keep in touch with one another, and with communication came uniform standards of excellence. A new world of sporting contacts had come into being.

  Fencing was slow to respond to these changes. In November 1913 the Fédération Internationale d’Escrime was founded at the Automobile Club in Paris. Eventually the first European individual tournament—at épée—was held, also in Paris, in 1921. The following year a saber championship was added, and eight years later individual championships, with a complete program of team and individual events for men in each of the three weapons but offering women only an individual foil championship. A European women’s team event was held from 1932 on but did not become part of the Olympics until 1960.

  One reason for this slow development was the acrimony between France and Italy. In 1912 the French stormed out of the Olympic foil event when their proposal that the upper arm be included as part of the target was rejected, leaving the way open for Nedo’s victory. Within hours an Italian proposal, that the length of the épée blade be extended, was likewise rejected, and it was the Italians’ turn to walk out.

  Fencers in other countries began to wonder if all nations could ever agree to a tournament in which everyone could participate. The 1916 Olympics, which were, ironically, to have been held in Berlin, were a casualty of the Great War, and until 1919 there was no official Franco-Italian encounter. That year the French and the Italians participated in the Inter-Allied Military Games. Nedo and Aldo, as officers in the Italian armed forces, both competed, Nedo coming first in foil and Aldo third in foil, second in saber, and fifth in épée. The following year saw the Antwerp Olympics and Nedo’s five gold medals. Nedo’s main rival was Lucien Gaudin, who the year before war broke out had defeated him at a key encounter in Spain. Gaudin was in his prime and considered unbeatable at foil; but first came the team event. “After Italy and France had defeated all other nations easily,” Aldo explains in his autobiography, “they were to meet for the championship. As a rule, the captains of the teams meet in the opening bout, but Nedo, partly because he feared Gaudin like the plague, partly because he knew that I didn’t care one way or the other when I fenced him, put me down first on the team order so that the match started with Gaudin and me. Further, Nedo realized that if I succeeded in defeating the French captain, the victory would give our team a tremendous shot in the arm. It worked perfectly. Officially I defeated the so far invincible (or so he claimed) Gaudin three to one.”6

  Gaudin, possibly demoralized, scratched from the individual events, saying he had hurt his foot in a match against the United States. The Nadis had the field to themselves, and Nedo failed to take all six gold medals on offer only because he decided not to fence in the individual épée, citing exhaustion: he had been competing sometimes eighteen hours a day for seven days in a row.

  Following the Games, Nedo turned professional. After the months of intimidation by Blackshirts back home in Livorno and his meeting with Mussolini, he left for Argentina. His departure should have prompted his brother to step into his shoes. Aldo had certainly been groomed well enough. He had started to fence even younger than Nedo, at the age of four, in the blouse and short skirt worn by young children of both sexes at that time. By eleven he had won his first championships, open to all Italian fencers under eighteen, at both foil and saber. Nedo was his exemplar, but he also had to live in his shadow, and when Nedo had won saber gold in Antwerp and Aldo the silver it was generally understood that the younger Nadi had been under instructions to lose. Unsurprisingly, Aldo developed an all-consuming urge to outdo his brother. The two became estranged—although, whenever anybody criticize
d Nedo, Aldo was the first to defend him.

  After Aldo’s defeat of Gaudin in 1920, the stage was set for a return match. It eventually took place in Paris on January 30, 1922, before a crowd of seven thousand, some three thousand more having to be turned away. The best seats went for 100 francs and were resold on the black market for as much as 1,000—the equivalent of two weeks’ income for an American family then. Cabinet ministers in evening dress were out in force, and the press had come from all over Europe. But Aldo made a fatal mistake: keen to prove his superiority, he accepted the French request to count hits on the upper swordarm as valid. He lost 20–11, with more than half the Frenchman’s touches, he later claimed, arriving in the conceded area. (Léon Bertrand later wrote that he had counted only five hits so awarded.) Other attacks by Nadi were ignored by the judges, some spectators recorded, even when he had to straighten his foil blade after the hit. Aldo was twenty-two, Gaudin thirty-five. Aldo tried repeatedly to entice his adversary into a third encounter, but Gaudin systematically refused. Eventually, in 1924, they fought an exhibition match in Florence, in a huge arena filled with fellow fencers, personalities from other sports, members of the European press, and other fans. No official score was kept, and each side claimed its champion the winner.

  “Hundreds of experts had their paper and pencil out to count the touches,” recalled an American fencer in the audience that night.

  The two great adversaries fenced superbly for about twenty minutes.… I can still feel the excitement, the enthusiasm of that evening. Toward the end, every Frenchman present was convinced that Gaudin had an edge of a touch or two; every Italian was ready to swear that Aldo was slightly ahead. They were superb and very evenly matched. Then the director [referee] asked for the last three touches … and Aldo had one of those superhuman moments. In quick succession, he scored all three touches against Gaudin, who called them in a loud voice as a tribute to the greatness of his opponent. After Florence, Gaudin stated: “No one will defeat Aldo Nadi in the next twenty years,” and the prediction came true.7

  Both fencers were amply paid for their appearance—although Aldo typically squandered his entire fee on the Monte Carlo gaming tables the following day and had to wire his father for the train fare back to Italy. Worse was to follow. The FIE, French-controlled, told Aldo that the fee he had taken made him a professional: he was no longer eligible for the Olympics. Gaudin suffered no such fate, as he gave his fee of 40,000 francs to his federation (which may or may not have repaid it in goods and services) and went on to win two gold medals in 1928. Neither Aldo nor Nedo ever fenced the French champion again. Gaudin died suddenly in 1934, at forty-eight—but for ten years he kept his distance, and much of his reputation.§

  When Aldo was made a professional, he was just twenty-two. In the mid-1920s individual matches between top fencers were regarded as a step higher than international tournaments, Olympics included. These matches ranked among the foremost sporting events of Europe, with a system similar to world championship boxing: the two best men were set against each other, and the event was built up in the press. Public interest translated into huge crowds and considerable financial rewards for the promoters (and occasionally for the contestants). It was in such matches that Aldo excelled, and he was soon commanding extraordinary fees—as much as $50,000 for an evening’s fencing—which enabled him to live in the most expensive hotels in Europe, enjoying the life of a playboy. A compulsive gambler, he thought nothing of making $15,000 from one event (for fifteen minutes of fencing), then blowing it all on a night at the gaming tables. After a succession of romantic conquests, in 1925 he married Ruby Malville, a Scotswoman descended, she claimed, from George III of England. Ruby was a society beauty who shared Aldo’s love of good living. They flitted between Cannes, Nice, Deauville, and Biarritz, dined with the Aga Khan and Noël Coward, played chemin de fer with Winston Churchill, befriended Maurice Rostand (son of the author of Cyrano de Bergerac, with whom Aldo rather identified), and stayed up into the small hours drinking with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. In Vienna in 1928 he was given the leading role in a Jean Renoir silent film, The Tournament or Le Tornai dans la cité (“Allez-y, Aldo, faîtes votre scène!” the great director would cry), and won admiring reviews in the French press.

  During the next seven years Aldo won fifty-six international contests, defeating every opponent set before him. The French champion René Haussy later wrote, “Aldo Nadi is unquestionably the most difficult adversary I have ever encountered,” while Roger Ducret, an Olympic champion also among Aldo’s victims, called him “the living sword, the phenomenon of fencing, the best man with all three weapons.” Other eminent fencers spoke equally highly of him.

  Paris, January 1922: Aldo (right) takes on the great French foilist Lucien Gaudin before a crowd of over seven thousand, with three thousand more being turned away. Aldo’s accommodation of allowing upper arm hits as valid proved his undoing. (illustration credit 16.4)

  Then, between 1929 and 1931, Aldo, plagued by marital troubles, gave up fencing completely (a fact he omits in his autobiography) and settled in Florence. Shortly afterwards his marriage failed, and by November 1932 he was back on the exhibition circuit, beating the French épée champion in Paris 12–4. In 1934, after a convincing win over yet another French champion, the authoritative Italian Sport d’Italia wrote prophetically, “Will this latest victory of Aldo Nadi’s mean … that our champion must stop fighting because there will be no one willing to take him on? Who would want to meet him again when his power and class literally expose to ridicule whoever faces him?” Another paper declared, “Not everyone is longing to face Aldo Nadi. For this great champion is anything but a diplomat. In front of an opponent he knows only this law: to beat, exceed, laminate, destroy, reduce to dust.” By 1935 the French federation forbade its members to compete with him, believing that such bouts would hurt their careers. The supply of opponents had dried up, and the Great Depression had sounded the death knell of professional fencing competition. Aldo decided to call it a day.

  WHAT HAD MADE ALDO SO SPECIAL? HE NEVER HAD HIS BROTHER’S strength and all-round technique. After losing to Gaudin in Paris, he decided that the aggressive attacks taught him by his father were not the answer and set out to create a style of his own. He practiced parrying at the very last moment, allowing the tip of his opponent’s blade within an inch of his body—thus bringing his adversary all the closer for a counterattack. He aimed constantly to surprise. When an opponent started to advance, Nadi would not retreat, to preserve distance as others might, but went on the attack, to take advantage of the advancing fencer’s slight loss of balance.

  Throughout his life Aldo was always catching colds and fighting off pneumonia, and though six feet, two inches tall weighed only 130 pounds. Nedo could make strong, repeated attacks, each with equal force; Aldo could not. Given his limited stamina, he could not preserve a constant intensity throughout an entire bout, and so would relax, then suddenly summon his energy into an all-out attack. He would put particular pressure on his opponent toward the end of a bout, when both men were tiring and when his adversary might be losing concentration.

  Further to fluster his opponents, he would attack not into their weak spots but into their best protected lines, forcing them to counterattack when they did not wish to. In a 1941 article, he wrote, “Napoleon said: ‘The whole art of war consists in a well-thought-out defensive, together with a swift and bold offensive.… One must lead one’s opponent to give battle under the most unfavorable conditions, then, when his last reserves are engaged, destroy him by a decisive attack … the dominating features of any successful campaign are energy and rapidity.… Energy, speed in analysis, decision and execution of a plan, boldness, these are the qualities of a good soldier.’ ” He did not need to add, of a good fencer too.8

  Who was better, Aldo or Nedo? “They were both great champions, two perfect machines, both thoroughbreds,” recalled the memorably named Bino Bini, one of their contemporaries. “It was Aldo’
s luck to have had Nedo, who taught him even more than their father.” That is to sit on the fence; but it is difficult to compare them. For a start, the brothers were so different in character. Where Nedo had a faultless style, a superb competitive temperament, and great charm off the piste, Aldo was unpredictable, a daredevil fantast, vain, and contrary. In his early days in Livorno, fellow club members called him “Saber” because of his cutting tongue. He would shrug this off: “Life would be very dull without enemies.” At the 1920 Olympics, he got into a fight with an Italian weight lifter, who advanced on him with a large stone in his hand. Aldo was carrying a small whip, which he flicked at his opponent, lacerating the man’s arm so badly that he was unable to compete. He then went around boasting of his feat.

  In 1935 Aldo left Italy for France but, finding no work, emigrated to the United States, teaching first in New York, then in Los Angeles. In 1943 he wrote his treatise on foil, a copy of which, with characteristic hubris, he sent to Bernard Shaw, who replied with a three-hundred-word letter and two photos, one with the caption “This is the only portrait of me in which I could pass as a fencer, which I never was.” Twelve years later Aldo completed his autobiography, a well-written and vainglorious absurdity. Not published until 1995, long after his death, it evokes a lifestyle radically different from that of any other fencing champion.