By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  Seven of the saber finalists were Italian, and the event was won by a young army officer, Italo Santelli. Using a lighter saber and fast footwork, he appeared, in the words of one Hungarian, to be “the Edison of fencing.… Even for the layman, it was an obvious pleasure to watch his brilliant technique, his perfect movements, his lightning-quick hands. He fenced with the stunning self-assurance of a juggler.”5

  Santelli was invited to stay on in Hungary and teach at the leading club in the capital. The Italians were not worried—they had masters enough—and Santelli was pleased to go. In September 1896 the twenty-five-year-old moved to Budapest with his wife and young family. Not only did he have to change the way Hungarian sabreurs made their cuts; they had little or no footwork. Santelli did not discard everything from their style but combined it with what he had learned in Rome. He taught that it was not shameful to foil an attack simply by moving out of distance, and with lighter blades he could teach feint actions and faster handwork. He explained that he was joining Italian cunning to Hungarian passion—by which he meant “temper.” But he also discovered that many Hungarians had an uncanny sense of timing, a skill he set out to exploit to the full.‡

  Santelli soon became a popular figure in the city; even his inability to master the Hungarian language, though he would live in the country more than forty years, became endearing. He would use verbs only in their infinitive form, saying, “Well, young man, you to be very clever must to work much more” or “How you to be?” Before long his students had picked up his mannerisms and had started speaking like him whenever they came to the salle. Yet despite his reputation as the friendliest of men, Santelli was a man of strict discipline, and his lessons stretched his pupils to the limit. They might laugh at his difficulties with their tongue, but they respected him as a teacher—and as a fencer.

  Even so, accounts of their master’s eccentricities circulated through the city. There was the story, for instance, of the student who avoided paying for his lessons. Once, at the end of a session, he looked out of the window of the salle and to his horror saw his tailor below. He ran to Santelli and asked for help. Santelli told him not to worry and instructed him to get a newspaper and hold it up before his face, as if reading it. The tailor duly made his way up to the salle and asked Santelli where his young charge had gone: he owed money on a suit. Santelli—aware that the young man could hear their conversation clearly—replied, “My dear sir, I to be afraid we are not to deal with a gentleman. He a villain who cheat everybody. He not to pay for lessons for a year.” The young man rustled his paper but couldn’t say anything. After the tailor had left, he not only paid for his back lessons but thereafter settled his accounts without delay.

  Santelli gave private lessons to anyone who would pay for his services. He was a handsome man with winning ways, popular wherever he went. Two of his private pupils were beautiful young ballet dancers, to whom he gave morning lessons. Both girls worked with him in leotards or the then-equivalent. One day his wife appeared at the club, kicked them out, and set about her husband with an umbrella. Far from being ashamed, Santelli regularly told the story, saying that it marked his first and only defeat on Hungarian soil.

  With the advent of the First World War, Hungary and Italy found themselves on opposite sides. Most Italians in Budapest were immediately regarded as aliens, but Santelli was never ostracized. The Hungarians didn’t think of him as “really” Italian, while his home government respected him for all he had done for fencing and gave him the title “Cavaliere”—the equivalent of a British knighthood. Santelli just went on teaching.

  The habit of dueling was still alive, and various salles d’armes specialized in offering quick instruction to men facing duels who had previously never fenced.6 Santelli’s club in Pest was one such; his salle took over the whole of one floor and was the city’s main venue for illegal duels: the changing rooms at either end had peepholes in their doors, through which spectators would illicitly watch. But not all duels were held there. One evening Santelli was approached by an overweight middle-aged man who asked for a lesson. What happened next is the fencing equivalent of an urban myth, but I am assured that it actually took place.

  The new recruit explained that he had to fight a duel. “When?” asked Santelli. “Tomorrow morning.” The master threw up his hands. “What can I to do in an evening? What do you expect?” He looked at the man evenly. “What is the name of your opponent?” When he was told, he became even more exasperated. “He is a well-known duelist. And to my knowledge, he has never lost.” Santelli thought for a moment. “Well, I have an hour to give you. Maybe I can to teach you a move or two. But I must tell you that your opponent will not be satisfied with first blood; he likes to disarm his rivals, then to kill them. There is chance to hit him as he attempts to disarm you—if he thinks you are novice he to be overconfident. Let us see what we can do.” They were soon at work, although after about forty minutes the older man was exhausted. It did not bode well.

  The following day Santelli went to his salle as usual and was surprised to find his new pupil there, his face wreathed in smiles. “I did just as you told me,” he bubbled. “As he went for my blade I did the move under his arm, aiming at his wrist. Only I was so wound up I did it too fiercely and cut off his entire hand.” Santelli accepted the profuse thanks offered but was further surprised when the man continued, “I have one more favor to ask: will you now teach my son?” The boy was a teenager, so there was no duel in sight. His godfather had given him fencing kit for his birthday, and after being teased by his friends he had joined a fencing club, just to spite them. Santelli was pleased to take the boy on. What was his name? Endre Kabos, he was told.

  In 1933, in Budapest, Endre Kabos, watched by his master, won the European championship in saber, beating Gustavo Marzi in the final. He won again the following year, in Warsaw, and in 1936 became the Olympic champion, once more pushing Marzi into second place. Kabos had been taught by Santelli to fence left-handed. He was one of six Jews on the Hungarian team. Another, Attila Petschauer, also a sabreur, and a very good one, came second three times and third three times in world championships between 1925 and 1931. He failed to win a medal at the 1932 Games, but a fellow Hungarian told me that he would have won the gold had anti-Semitic judging not robbed him. “He was emphatically the best there—the most natural fencer I ever saw in my life.” Both Petschauer and Kabos had to withstand considerable prejudice in Hungary, where the anti-Semitism of the reactionary government pervaded many sports. Fencing officials openly disdained Jews, even their Olympic champions—including Kabos, despite the several medals he had won in the First World War. Both men died in the Second World War, Kabos the day before his thirty-eighth birthday, when a tram crossing the Margaret Bridge in Budapest was blown up by the Germans, who had put mines under all the main bridges across the Danube, and, without warning, exploded them all. Petschauer was tortured to death in a Hungarian concentration camp.

  Recently the lives of both men were formed into one composite figure in the film Sunshine (2000), the story of three generations of Austro-Hungarian Jews, the Sonnenscheins. In the second of its three sections, young Adam Sonnenschein (Ralph Fiennes) becomes a promising fencer. The film’s Oscar-winning director, István Szabó, had himself been a fencer, but he put the swordfighting scenes into the hands of László Szepesi, who had just completed a coaching assignment with the French saber squad.§

  Surrounded by anti-Semitism, Adam changes his surname to “Sors,” “something more Hungarian”—although, in Latin, it also means “prophecy” or “fate”—and converts to Christianity. He also moves to Budapest, where the Italian master of the Officers Fencing Club (Santelli, but given a different name here) changes him from a right-handed sabreur to a left-handed one—with immediate results. Sors is chosen for the 1936 Olympic Games and amid mounting excitement beats his Italian rival to take the individual gold. With the outbreak of war, he is imprisoned and eventually tortured to death in front of his teenage s
on.

  SANTELLI TRANSFORMED HUNGARIAN SABER, PRODUCING A STREAM of world and Olympic champions and first-class masters. Yet he was not alone. Two home-bred masters formed with him a famous triptych of Hungarian coaches: “The Officer,” László Borsodi (who looked down on Santelli, only a sergeant), and “The Professor,” László Gerencsér.

  Following Santelli’s lead, a special school for training masters was created, the Toldi Miklos Royal Hungarian Sports Institution. During the 1930s and 1940s its director was Borsodi, a strict disciplinarian whose countenance was partly hidden behind an immense Prussian moustache. The club that emerged from the school was the MAC, probably the strongest in the country, which, because all its members were military men, was a place of strict order and discipline. Everybody knew his place.

  Borsodi was a martinet, unfriendly and with a painfully sharp tongue. As soon as his lessons were over he wanted no further conversation with his pupils. Nobody liked him, but he was revered because he was such a fine teacher. He worked exclusively with fencers who had already completed their basic training, and although he would correct his pupils’ technical errors, he was more interested in tactics and strategy, teaching his students how to observe their opponents on the piste and how to exploit their weaknesses. Before major competitions he would reveal to his favored pupils some secret or little-known move, tricks he guarded jealously and demonstrated only out of sight of other club fencers. Once a year he pitted trainee masters against one another, stripped to the waist, with only gloves and masks for protection; in this way, he argued, his charges could experience the physical and psychological sensations of the duelist.

  The three great masters of Hungarian fencing: Italo Santelli (top left), László Borsodi (bottom), and László Gerencsér. (illustration credit 17.1)

  Eventually a group left the MAC and established their own club, the HTVK. This too was open to officers only and soon had a dictator every bit as dominating as Borsodi. His name was Colonel Endre Somogyi, and, although not a coach, he played a vital role both before and immediately after the Second World War. Somogyi recruited the army’s best fencers into the HTVK, so that the club became the principal conduit into the national team. Anyone who did not fit in, for reason of character or ability, was likely to find himself posted far away from the capital. Somogyi would position himself opposite referees during national competitions, indicating by a look or gesture which way a hit should be given. This is one reason why Petschauer never won a national title and was so often runner-up. Somogyi was as much hated as respected but he was credited with masterminding the successful selection of Hungarian teams. During the Second World War, he went to the highest official body and gained exemption for team members from being sent to the front. One top coach—Béla Bay—was actually on a truck ready to leave when the order came to recall him. Petschauer was not so lucky.

  Borsodi’s principal rival, Dr. Gerencsér, a professor and former lawyer, was of an altogether different cast from either Borsodi or Somogy. He taught at the main university club, the BEAC, where he was a stickler for good technique. If Santelli’s lessons were marked by speed of execution and Borsodi’s by their emphasis on strategy, Gerencsér was an astute planner of training programs. He had been an excellent track athlete in his day, some of his records going unbroken for years. Given a sympathetic audience, he could theorize endlessly; but his actual lessons were inspiring—and could last for an hour and a half or more. What interested him was the science of fencing, how its movements could be broken down into different components. What might appear to be second nature, an instinctive reaction, could to his mind be honed into a conscious and scientific procedure. Unlike the MAC or HTVK, the atmosphere in the BEAC was friendly and relaxed, and to avoid conflict with the two army clubs the students there tended to concentrate on foil and épée. They still produced several champion sabreurs, even if they knew that doubtful calls in national competitions would generally go against them. Like Santelli, Gerencsér was a much-loved figure. His club became a haven for Jewish fencers during the war.

  All three masters emphasized fluid footwork and insisted on the need to separate hand and foot movements, so that during one foot action the hand could complete as many as three different moves—an innovation that prompted yet another overhaul of fencing tactics. Borsodi and Santelli combined in the late 1920s to introduce the flèche (French for “arrow”), a fast-running attack that has the fencer throw himself at his opponent in what is half leap, half run, similar to a sprinter propelling himself from his starting block. They also pioneered anatomical, motion-mechanical, and motion-dynamic studies and invited input from masters of complementary sports.

  The Second World War took its toll: Borsodi, whose real name was Bloum but who had changed it on joining the army and converted to Catholicism soon after, shot himself in 1941, the day after it was announced that Jews had to wear stars on their clothing. Santelli died during the siege of Budapest, and his story is even sadder: as the Allies pressed for victory, Santelli liked to stand in his yard with his daughter, Fiorenza, and count the American planes flying in to attack. Early in 1944 his daughter was killed by one of their bombs, and in his grief the heartbroken master simply gave up eating and wasted away.

  The combined effect of these remarkable teachers would endure to produce an unparalleled run of champions. Only the United States, with its records in men’s diving and in pole vaulting, surpasses it. From 1908 on, when Hungary took first, second, and fourth places (third uniquely going to a Bohemian) and won the team gold, this nation of some 10 million people dominated the saber. In the 1912 Games, seven of the eight finalists were Hungarian, with a lone Italian—Nedo Nadi—in fifth place; thereafter, countries were restricted to entering three fencers per event. Competition stopped during the First World War, and Hungary was barred from taking part in 1920; but from 1924 to 1964 its sabreurs won the individual gold at every Olympics. They won every European or world tournament from 1925 until 1957, with the exception of 1938, 1947, 1949, and 1950, when they did not compete (due to a compound of political pressures and lack of funds). In the team event, after coming second to Italy in 1924, they won each year they competed until 1959, the first year of the Polish renaissance. They took gold medals in the Olympics and world championships for fifty-one straight years: an extraordinary record.

  During this entire half century, only thirty individuals represented Hungary at saber. Team members soldiered on until well into their thirties, even their forties. One, Aladár Gerevich (1910–96) can claim to be the most successful fencer in history. (Originally his name would have been “Gurevich”—literally, “Ben Hur.”) He won seven gold medals during a career that stretched from 1932 to 1960, the only athlete in any sport ever to win gold over six Games—he was fifty when he won his last medal, a team gold in Rome. And he should have won even more: in the 1952 final he was at match point with his countryman, Pál “Foxy” Kovács, in the fight that decided the gold, when Kovács acknowledged a hit. The referee, however—Paul Anspach of Belgium—mistakenly awarded the touch to Kovács. Gerevich, said a fellow team member, György Jekelfalussy-Piller, was so far ahead of the field “he would have won wielding a pencil.” He was also six times Hungarian foil champion, and fourth and fifth in the épée.

  The prevailing philosophy behind such feats informs a story told me by seventy-year-old Csaba Pallaghy, now an American citizen, who as a young man was an ambitious and talented Hungarian sabreur. In 1956, just before the Melbourne Games, the national championships were held in Budapest. Pallaghy, then in his mid-twenties, reached the semifinals and saw his chance of making the Olympic team. He had only to beat the seasoned international László Rajcsányi (who had won a world bronze as far back as 1934) to make his first final. The score stood at 3–3, and the referee was György Piller, three-time world champion in the 1930s and thus an old colleague of Rajcsányi. Pallaghy made a fast attack to his opponent’s head, which arrived just before Rajcsányi could parry. Piller called “Halt!�
� and asked the judge on Pallaghy’s side if the attack had landed. “Yes,” replied the judge. “The attack?” Piller asked again, menacingly. The judge stood his ground; but the cowed second official, effectively threatened, abstained.

  Then as now a referee has a vote of 1½. Thus he can be outvoted by two judges voting together, but if one judge abstains he can outvote the other. Piller now said “Parried” in a strong voice, and Rajcsányi was given the hit: 3–4. Eager to make his point, Pallaghy decided he would try the same action, but this time even more quickly. Exactly the same thing happened: his hit arrived, only to be overturned by Piller, giving victory to the older man. Pallaghy was eliminated and lost his chance to go to Melbourne.

  Furious, he went to his coach, a product of Borsodi’s academy and indeed his eventual successor, Béla Bay. “Master,” he said, “both those last two hits were mine!” “Yes,” replied his coach. Bay then turned to look at the stream of spectators taking their seats for the final. “But look at those people. Do you really think they have come to watch you? No, they have come to watch Rajcsányi.”

  Pallaghy was not so easily to be pacified. “But I won—surely that’s the point. I deserve to be in the final.” His master took his arm. “No,” he said firmly, “that’s not the point. When you can score five hits that no referee can deny you, when you are so far ahead of your opponent that your supremacy is undeniable, then you will deserve your place.” The Hungarian way was hard, but it produced results.

  THAT AUTUMN SAW THE INVASION OF SOVIET TANKS TO QUELL THE Hungarian national uprising. That some 200,000 men, women, and children fled the country might imply there was a period of relatively easy access to the West. The opposite is true. One Hungarian master, only ten at the time and now teaching in Britain, recalls the few days of “freedom” as “very simply, a riot.… It was impossible to tell what was going on. It began with a well-intentioned demonstration by university students, then everything got out of hand. Prisons were opened up and criminals set free who from revenge went about killing people at random. Many innocent young people lost their lives.” Those who left the country did so in great haste and often great danger. “Along the border,” wrote Noel Barber, author of Seven Days of Freedom, the best firsthand account of the uprising, “the Russians stalked the fleeing refugees, particularly on the deathly still, frost-bitten zone by the Neusiedlersee, a reed-filled lake separating Hungary from Austria. Hungarians hid in the reeds, waist deep in the icy water, while marauding patrols hunted them.”8 Many who wanted to leave were arrested and thrown into prison. The diaspora was a desperate affair.