Secrets of the Sword

I

“We will continue the course of instruction of which you have studied at present only the first page; I am going into very minute detail, as you see.

“Our scholar now knows the different positions, and can appreciate why they are to be commended, and what is to be gained by adopting them. At the next lesson, – and each lesson would consist of not more than three bouts of eight or ten minutes each, – I should show him and make him execute the simple attacks and the simple parries: —Disengagements in tierce and quarte, straight thrusts, the cut over, and parries of quarte and tierce. The attacks will exercise him in the lunge, the parries will improve the flexibility of his wrist.

“I should make him continually retire and advance. I should, even at this early stage, take pains to secure a certain degree of life and speed in his execution, and I should be careful to vary the exercises, and never appeal to his intelligence at the risk of checking the activity of his movements. Sluggishness, I repeat, is a deadly foe, against which every avenue must be closed from the very first.

“Next I should go on to composite parries and composite attacks. I have already named them, and you remember that they are not very numerous. Counters, double counters, and combinations of the cut over and disengagement are the most useful things to practise, because they work the wrist in every direction, and make it both quick and supple.

“Although a great many instructors would say that I am wrong, I should make it my principal aim to form and cultivate a habit of executing all movements at speed. I should insist less on precision of control than on smartness of execution, and at the same time I should call my pupil’s attention to the mistakes which he must be most careful to avoid, and to the points of danger where he must exercise the greatest caution.

“I should practise him in retiring quickly, and should make him deliver simple attacks on the march, keeping his blade in position. After a few lessons I should repeatedly place my button on his jacket, if he did not parry quickly enough, or if he was slow on the recovery. In a word I should put plenty of life and go into my lessons from the first, and not allow them to become tedious.

“After every lesson I should direct his serious attention to the principal faults I had noticed, and I should make him understand the dangers to which these faults must inevitably expose him. For instance, if he caught the fatal trick of dropping or drawing back his hand, I should take care to make him attack and riposte in the high lines, in order to get him to carry his wrist high, and vice versa. In this way I should exercise his judgment by making him think, and his hand and body by keeping him closely to his work.

II

“Above all, the master’s lesson must not lose itself in a maze of attacks and parries and ripostes, which in some treatises are as numerous and interminable as the stars of heaven. The strict limitation of the number of strokes to be taught renders their execution proportionately easier, and makes a clear impression on the mind. Experience and fencing instinct teach, far better than any lesson, certain niceties, which give life and finish and character to the play. There you have the lesson complete.

“As the scholar gradually grows stronger, he learns to hold himself correctly, and acquires ease. He understands what to do without being told, and his hand is in a fair way to become the faithful echo of his thought.

III

“We here touch on another point, where I find myself at variance with nearly all the professional instructors.

“I have read in the books which deal with this subject of ‘the danger of premature loose play.’ ‘You run the risk,’ say some, ‘of spoiling a promising pupil, and of arresting his future progress, just when he is beginning to form good habits.’ Others go further and declare that: ‘The instructor who allows his pupil to commence loose play too soon sacrifices by an act of fatal indulgence the whole future of fencing.’

“I do not agree with this view. I cannot even see that it logically applies to those who mean to devote all their time to the study of sword-play, and who are prepared to make a determined effort to reach the topmost summit of this difficult art. Much less, then, to my mind, is it applicable to the generality of men, who have no ambition to become such learned fencers, as we were saying the other evening. The professors wilfully refuse to see this.

“And yet of all arts, the art of fencing may be considered from the most widely different standpoints, and particularly may be approached with very varied degrees of knowledge and application. Is it so very certain that ‘premature loose play,’ as the professors love to call it, is so pernicious as they think, – the bad seed that cannot fail to produce an evil crop of vices? Right or wrong, I can only say once more that I am of quite the contrary opinion.

“I fail to see that it is dangerous for a pupil to attempt the assault, when he has learnt by taking lessons for a month, – more or less, according to the progress made and his natural capacity, – to understand the various strokes I have described, and can already execute them with some degree of liveliness and control.

IV

“Of course I am quite ready to admit that his first assaults, like all first attempts that require a trained habit of mind, cannot be free from mistakes, exaggerations, faults of all sorts. But is not the master there to correct these errors with his lesson, and to bring his pupil, who is inclined to go astray, back to the right path? Cannot the leading strings be readjusted?

“The very fact that the master has had an opportunity of observing the mistakes, to which his pupil is most liable, when left to himself, enables him to devote all his care to overcome and correct them by both practice and precept. More important still, he has also had an opportunity of observing his pupil’s bias; he notices the strokes which come naturally to his hand, the parries he most affects, the natural promptings of his impulse, impetuous or cautious as the case may be. He makes a study of his artless scholar, who is clumsily feeling his feet, reads him like a book, catches him in the act so to speak, and detects the working of his character, and thenceforward he knows the way in which his studies may be most profitably directed to give full play to his individual temperament.

“The assault teaches the novice what no amount of lunging at the master’s pad can drill into him. It enters him to the sudden emergencies, which in one shape or another arise at every moment, to the movement and exertion and keen emulation of real fighting. The assault is in fact a lesson subsidiary to the formal lesson, and you may rest assured that the instruction it conveys is equally salutary.”

V

“Then,” smilingly remarked the Comte de R., “you are for open war with the existing routine?”

“And with the old traditions. Yes, I am afraid I am. But what can I do? You admit the force of my arguments?”

“Certainly.”

“And that fencing taught on my plan loses its terrors?”

“Yes, I quite admit that.”

“And in fact it is not really formidable. My system is able to satisfy the requirements of all, and I do not overshoot the mark, by over-anxiety to reach it.

“It is most important to bear in mind that it is not necessary or even desirable to attend all the professor’s lectures, to pass all the examinations and finally to qualify as Bachelor of Arms in order to become a fair ordinary fencer. After all in every art one usually admits the professor’s right to dictate the elementary principles of his subject, but after the elementary stage is passed we are not, I believe, always ready to accept the professor’s estimate of the importance of the art which he happens to teach. The remark applies equally to music, to painting, to literature, and why not to fencing? Poets we know are nothing if not first-rate, but why should fencers be singled out for this invidious distinction?

“You may judge how firmly my own belief is rooted, when I say that I am as strongly convinced of the good results that follow from ‘premature assaults,’ as I am of the necessity of making the lesson as simple and as clear as possible.

VI

“I remember a story told by my friend, M. Desbarolles, an artist who is endowed more liberally than most of my acquaintance with the warm artistic temperament. It is to be found in one of his neatly written essays. He had, it seems, studied fencing for two years under a French master, in Germany I think, when he paid a visit to M. Charlemagne, one of the most famous instructors of the day, to whom he had an introduction.

“He fenced before the professor, and when the bout was over expected to be complimented, under the impression that he had done rather well.

‘Will you allow me, Sir, to give you a word of advice?’ asked the great man.

‘By all means,’ replied my friend.

‘Then, let me recommend you to give up loose play altogether for at least a year, and confine your attention entirely to the lesson.’

“Good heavens, what amazing perversity, what pompous humbug! M. Desbarolles remarks that he was utterly taken aback, and I can well believe him, but he goes on to say that he accepted the master’s verdict, and never had reason to repent it.

“If he had not given his word for the fact, I should certainly have ventured to hope, most sincerely, that his sense of humour was sufficient to save him from following such a piece of advice to the letter, and in any case I am sure that it was quite unnecessary for him to do so, in order to become the charming fencer that he is and one for whom I have the warmest admiration.

“Do not tell me that the quickness of hand and rapidity of movement, the alertness of body and mind required in loose play, can be imparted by the lessons of a skilful instructor, if only he is careful to graduate his instruction in proportion to his pupil’s progress. The result is mere clock-work with the professor for mainspring, counterfeit vitality set in motion by the word of command; a most mechanical use of the intelligence. The pupil cannot go wrong because he is tied to his master’s apron-strings. The master’s sword shows him exactly where to go with the precision of a finger-post. He is like a man swimming in a cork jacket, practising the motions of swimming at his leisure, and not caring in the least whether these motions would really support him on the surface or let him sink to the bottom.

“That the formal lesson is useful I do not doubt, that it has a monopoly of usefulness I emphatically deny. Why allow it to meddle with and domineer over things which do not concern it? Let it keep its place and refrain from trespassing outside its own dominions.

“The lesson can explain the logic and theory of fencing, it can assign reasons and exhibit the mechanical process, but it cannot deal with the great Unknown, the tricksy spirit, which suddenly starts out on the fencer under every shape and form, always assuming some new disguise and upsetting in a moment the most perfect theories and the most scientific combinations.

“The young fencer who undertakes his first assault is like the heroic youth of the fairy tales, who leaves his humble cottage and goes out into the wide world to seek his fortune. Like him he will meet with many strange adventures, which will try his mettle, put his character to the touch, and call into play all the resources of his intelligence.

VII

“Perhaps you think that by continually presenting this question to you in a new light I am detaining you too long on one part of my subject. My intention is to bring home to your minds the conviction I so strongly feel myself. If you only knew how many striking examples I have witnessed of the truth of my assertion!

“You may see one of these pupils taking his lesson. He is a magnificent spectacle; his hand perfectly correct, a grand lunge, his action smooth and free; he follows his master’s blade through a cunning series of feints and false attacks, ripostes and counter-ripostes, his parry is never beaten; not a fault, not a single mistake; he is an animated illustration of his master’s treatise, which the author with pardonable pride displays before you.

“Now in the assault pupils of this type are far from maintaining their superiority. Their mechanical agility is paralysed, when it is no longer set in motion by the accustomed spring. They know too little and at the same time they know too much. They find out that the assault is not the same thing as the lesson. Their opponent’s blade does not accommodate itself to theirs with the precision to which they are accustomed; the touch of the steel no longer conveys those delicate hints, to which they formerly responded with such alacrity, and of course they lose their bearings. They have not acquired the sort of defence which is ready for anything, alike for well directed thrusts and for more eccentric methods of attack, and they look in vain for a succession of passes strictly correlated in a systematic order.

“Instead of marching with a swing along the broad highway to which they are accustomed, they find themselves lost in a wild and difficult country without a guide and without confidence. Habit will perhaps enable them to maintain some smartness of appearance, but they make few hits, and in spite of their science and the skill, which they undoubtedly possess up to a certain point, they are continually beaten by fencers, who are less scholarly perhaps, but who have been better entered than they to the actual combat, the manifold emergencies of practical fighting, and who have learnt that strange language, by which the sword contrives to reveal the most delicate shades of meaning.

“I have seen this happen so often, that I have taken some trouble to study the question, and I am convinced that if these same pupils had been at less pains to make themselves pedantically perfect in the peaceful and philosophic practice of the lesson, and had been made familiar at an early stage with the changing incidents of the assault, they would have been equally well disciplined, and at the same time really dangerous fencers. Of course I freely admit that exceptions may sometimes be found, but they are the exceptions which prove the rule.

VIII

“We have now reached a point from which we may survey the thrilling spectacle of the assault, as fencers call the mimic combat, in which desperate and brutal fighting is controlled by skill, the hazardous duel, full of fire and fury, between two combatants, who summon to their aid all that they know or all that they think they know.

“I can say with literal truth, that I have never taken a foil in my hand for a serious assault without feeling a real tremor, and most fencers have experienced and indeed are generally conscious of the same sensation.

“You have listened so kindly to my rough attempt to put together an extemporary course of instruction, that I can confidently claim your attention now; for we are about to find in this great arena the rival systems face to face. I shall put before you and examine at no great length the various situations which are likely to occur.

“Our imaginary pupil has now become a fencer. He will no longer lunge merely at the master’s pad, henceforward he will cover his manly face with a mask. Shall we follow him in his career?”

“We will”; replied my host in tragic tones. “The standard of revolt is raised. Lead on, and we will follow you.”

“‘Tis well,” I answered in the same spirit. “The tryst is here, at the same hour, – to-morrow.”

I

The next day I continued my discourse thus: —

“In the assault with its incessant alarms and perilous crises, in encountering the wiles and avoiding the snares of the enemy, those who use the sword find their ‘crowded hour of glorious life,’ the hour crowded with illusions and disenchantments, the rubs of fortune, the ups and downs of victory or defeat.

“What legions of cunning counsels and crafty wiles, from the deep-laid stratagem down to the sudden surprise, one finds marshalled in the text-books, and how unmanageable and superfluous they generally are. All that the Spartan mother said to her son when he was setting out for the wars was: – ‘Be bold, be resolute, be cautious.’ Do not her words contain the whole? For all fighting, whether at long range or at close quarters, is very much alike, from schoolboys’ games to the most elaborate military operations; and all the advice of the world may be summed up in the eternal law of attack and defence, which is stated in these four words: – cunning, caution, energy, audacity.

“Deceive your enemy: seize the critical moment to attack him, that is the secret of fighting. Cultivate the mistrust which suspects the hidden snare, the caution which frustrates his plots, combined with the energy and audacity which surmount difficulties; try to encourage in your enemy a spirit of wanton confidence; turn a strong position which you cannot carry by a direct attack; threaten one point when you mean to concentrate your whole strength on another; draw your adversary by a show of weakness to attack you in your strongest position; keep your plans secret; mask your approaches; and then by the sudden impetuosity of your attack take him unawares, and if you cannot secure a victory, contrive a safe retreat. Such from the earliest times have been the methods of the greatest commanders.

“The tactics of the field of battle and the tactics of hand-to-hand fighting are identical, for the simple reason that skill, or strategy, or science, call it what you will, are but different names to express the same idea. These are the sage counsels; the rest belongs to inspiration, the inward monitor which in moments of danger warns us with tenfold insistence, and guides us right.

“Too much stress is laid on education, too little on individual intelligence. The lessons are supposed to have trained and directed this intelligence. But if your pupil is so wanting in intelligence that he cannot enter into the spirit of the game, if he can never rise to the occasion, and never strike out a line of his own, what can you expect? You may advise for ever, but his mind will not respond, he will only listen and forget.