Review Essay - The Feel of Steel: The History of Swordsmanship

By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers and Olympic Champions

 Written by: Richard Cohen,

The Modern Library, New York, 2002,

ISBN: 9780812969665, 519pp.

Review Essay by: Michael Evans

It is well known that sword fighting is an excellent training ground for developing the reflexes of military professionals. In 1954, the International Council for Military Sports placed fencing at the top of recommended sports for military elites, particularly modern air-combat pilots. Long before the American strategist, Colonel John Boyd, developed the theory of the competitive decision cycle, a perceptive Italian military officer wrote, ‘there is a profound analogy between aviation and fencing ... Fencing is a particularly good sport because it accustoms [the pilot] to an evaluation of the strength of the opponent, to the use of reasoning and the exercise of courage’. In World War II, when Free Polish fighter pilots arrived in Britain to fly with the Royal Air Force, one of their first requests was for a fencing master and a place to train in order that they could maintain their combat reflexes. The International Council for Military Sports also noted that all those military professionals faced with the prospect of close combat could benefit from swordfighting. ‘Fencing’, the Council observed, ‘develops serenity under fire, because the fencer does not have to deal with an object but with a thinking person—his opponent—in a struggle fought at terribly close quarters and with movements of lightning rapidity’.

The above insights are taken from Richard Cohen’s fascinating history of swordsmanship, justly praised around the world as the definitive study of an art that is at once a deadly form of military combat, a cultural ritual and a martial sport. Cohen, a former British sabre champion, brings unparalleled authority to an analysis of the role of swordplay in both military and social history. His discussion ranges from the use of the sword as a battle weapon, to its employment in the rise and fall of duelling, through to the emergence of fencing as a modern Olympic combat sport. In the words of British military historian, John Keegan, By the Sword is an enormously learned but gripping book that ‘describes the part sword fighting has played in the history of male society ... and succeeds in conveying the sensations, excitement, and sometimes terror of the contest’.

The sword is deeply etched in human culture, not least in the military realm. We speak of men having the strength of Damascene or Toledo steel—famous places of swordsmiths. Throughout Western military history, it has been common to give young soldiers swords of honour for outstanding achievement; yet, when an officer was disgraced, his sword was always broken. Whole armies have been surrendered by the symbolism of a general giving up his sword to a victor. Battles have been won and lost, from Hastings to Omdurman, by the actions of cavalry wielding the arme blanche. The military salute is derived from knights armed with sword and shield on horseback lifting the visor of their helmets. As late as 1939, the British War Office sent out a special order: ‘all officers will sharpen swords’. In 1942, a US Army field manual warned American soldiers that their Japanese enemies should be regarded as highly trained in classical swordsmanship of the foil and épée.

More broadly, many of the social mannerisms of our everyday life owe their origins to the cultural role of the sword. For example, we shake hands to demonstrate that we are not reaching for our swords; a gentleman traditionally offers a lady his right arm because his sword was always at his left hip. A gentleman’s coat always buttons left over right so that in a duel he may unbutton it with his left, unarmed hand. Politics and sport freely borrow from what Cohen calls ‘the linguistic romance of steel’. Politicians and sporting teams regularly speak of thrust and parry, lunge and riposte. In the British political tradition, the two main parties in the House of Commons are separated by exactly two sword lengths—a legacy of an age in which men wore rapiers and disagreements might have meant more than an exchange of heated words. Moreover, European knighthood was conferred by the touch of a sword on the shoulder.

The romance of the sword is, of course, not confined to the West. In Japan, swordsmanship is one of the classic disciplines of Zen Buddhism, while in World War II, Japanese kamikaze pilots took their samurai swords into their cockpits in order to go to their deaths with honour. The sexual symbolism of swords also resonates throughout human history. In ancient Rome, the Latin term vagina originally meant a sword’s sheath, while gladius (sword) became the popular slang term for the penis. Popular culture is also saturated in what Cohen calls ‘blade worship’—from the sword of Damocles, through King Arthur’s fabled Excalibur, to the light sabres employed in the Star Wars films.

Cohen traces the origins of the sword as a military weapon to Minoan Crete and Celtic Britain between 1500 and 1100 BC. Although Greek hoplites used swords, it was the Romans that first viewed the edged blade as a distinct weapon with special uses and rules. The Romans elevated the art of swordplay both through their legions that specialised in the close-quarter, short-sword fight and through the pursuit of gladiatorial combat. The Roman philosopher, Seneca, made an observation that has echoed down the centuries: that the way a man uses a sword reveals his essential character. As he put it, ‘the swordfighter reveals himself only when he gets in the arena’.

In the ancient world, alongside the Romans, the Celts of Gaul and the Spanish were renowned swordsmen. The Celtic Gauls favoured cutting and slashing, but the Spanish pioneered the use of the thrust. In the history of war, however, the evolution of the sword as a military weapon owed much to the battle of Adrianople in 378 AD. At Adrianople, a mounted Visigothic army decisively defeated the Roman infantry legions under the Emperor Valens. The Visigothic cavalry, greatly assisted by a new invention, the stirrup, used their horses as mobile platforms to wield long swords and cut the Romans to pieces. After Adrianople, the age of heavy cavalry replaced the age of the infantry and the long, slashing sword largely eclipsed the short, thrusting blade. Above all, the sword earned equality with both the spear and the lance, especially when used by cavalry employing shock tactics.

Following the fall of Rome, the sword became a token of mythic power and majesty throughout the Europe of the Dark and Middle Ages. In the famous Chanson de Roland of 778, the Emperor Charlemagne’s champion, Roland, wields a great sword called Durendal, that symbolises chivalry and honour. As the two Frankish heroes, Roland and Oliver fight a doomed rearguard action against a horde of Saracens, Roland declares, ‘I will smite with Durendal, my good sword that Charlemange gave me. If I die, he who inherits it will say, “It was the sword of a noble vassal”’.

The Chanson de Roland became the emblem of an age of chivalry in which the sword lay at the heart of a medieval code of honour. It represented inner power and nobility, and was the weapon of the aristocratic knight. During the Middle Ages, the broadsword was used mainly to cut and slash opponents in battles such as Crecy and Poitiers. By the 15th century, however, the long reign of the mounted knight wielding sword and lance was being challenged by missile weapons such as the English longbow, by new gunpowder weapons and by the rise of the Swiss pikemen. However, another invention, that of the printing press had the revolutionary effect of disseminating knowledge of swords and the art of swordplay from the confines of the privileged aristocracy to a broader cross-section of European society.

In the Renaissance Europe of the early 16th century, printing permitted a variety of informal fencing techniques to be widely studied and then transformed into a systematic doctrine for the use of the sword as a combat weapon. As with science and literature, Renaissance Italy led Europe in the art of swordsmanship. In 1553, the Italian writer, Camillo Agrippa, published his Treatise on the Science of Arms with a Philosophical Dialogue, which included engravings of sword play by Michelangelo. Agrippa described the use of the thrust and the lunge, and systematised the four basic guard positions: prima, secunda, terza and quarta—parries that served to quarter a swordsman’s chest: upper and lower left, upper and lower right. Agrippa described the extended-sword arm thrust and discovered the ‘disengage’—that is, moving the blade from one line of attack where it is blocked to another that is not protected. Another Venetian theorist, Giacomo di Grassi, produced The Art of Defence analysing the need in sword fighting for parrying, footwork, speed and balance.

In the 17th century, a succession of Italian masters further developed the structure of swordplay. The Spanish espada ropera (dress sword)—a slender, double-edged four-foot sword (dubbed the rapier in English)—emerged and was quickly adopted throughout Italy, France and England. The specialised rapier—with its thin, deadly fifty-inch blade encased in a swept hilt—was designed for thrusting and was often used in conjunction with a foot-long dagger. The rapier’s general adoption throughout Renaissance Europe led to the triumph in sword fighting of the thrust over the cut. In an age in which privatised violence was unregulated, the Italian duello (duel), derived from the Latin words bellum (conflict) and duo (two), flourished. There were frequent ‘killing affrays’ or duelli alla macchia between groups of swordsmen and such Renaissance figures as Benvenuto Cellini and Michelangelo Caravaggio were inveterate duellists.

Spanish rapiers became both weapons and fashion accessories for gentlemen. Elizabethan London was full of swordsmen, mercenaries and assorted military adventurers, and the swagger they brought to the city streets led to their being called swashbucklers. Not surprisingly, with hordes of swordsmen on the streets, public duelling was widespread, and the watchmen of London frequently found ‘dead men with holes in their breasts’ in doorways and alleys. Shakespeare’s plays capture the prevalence of violent swordplay. In Romeo and Juliet, Mercurio and Tybalt duel with rapiers and daggers, as do Hamlet and Laertes in Hamlet. Duelling died hard in Britain. In 1720 in London, a mass swordfight involving 100 men had to be dispersed by a troop of Horse Guards, while during the reign of George III, there were 172 duels and ninety-one fatalities. It was only in 1844 that the practice was finally banned in Britain.

Cohen reveals that, in France, in the thirty years between 1559 and 1589, duelling was so popular that between four and five men were killed per week from sword fighting—an extraordinary death toll. In the 17th century, governments found that trying to ban sword fighting was like trying to ban adultery. The French saying that ‘divorce is the sacrament of adultery’ was modified as ‘duelling is the sacrament of murder’. The Chevalier d’Andrieux, a notable French champion for hire, killed seventy-one men before he was aged thirty. When his next opponent boasted, ‘Chevalier you will be the thirteenth I have killed’, d’Andrieux coolly replied ‘and you my seventy-second’—and he was true to his word.

In the 17th century, France was a nation of duellists. In 1652, the English Ambassador to Paris was moved to report to London that ‘there is scarce a Frenchman worth looking on who has not killed his man in a duel’. It was the French that developed the art of fencing with phrases d’armes or sequences of specialised moves and countermoves—attack, parry, riposte—in what they styled a ‘conversation of blades’. It was this culture of swordplay that the great French novelist Alexandre Dumas immortalised in his famous books, The Three Musketeeers and The Man in the Iron Mask.

Duelling proved extremely difficult to outlaw in Europe because it was considered to be a form of ‘heroic archaism’ and served to introduce young men to the ancient ways of society. The practice persisted into the 19th century. In 1837, Alexsandr Pushkin, the Russian Byron, who excelled at both poetry and swordplay, was killed in a duel. In Italy between 1879 and 1889 there were 2759 duels recorded (93 per cent fought with swords) with 3901 wounded and fifty killed. Georges Clemenceau, Prime Minister of France in the years 1906–09 and 1917–20, fought five duels with the sword and seven with pistols. It was said that French parliamentarians feared him for his sword, his pistols and his tongue in that order. Clemenceau’s politics reflected his skills with the sword—aggressive and persistent with a penchant for the unexpected coup de main.

In the 17th century, the rapier was gradually replaced by the shorter ‘town sword’ or ‘small sword’—ideal for attack and defence in confined space—which led to the abandonment of the dagger. In France, the small sword became known as the épée courte, a ‘transition rapier’. The foil, the first purely sporting sword, and the fencing mask made their appearances in the first half of the 18th century, as did the sabre—a weapon descended from the Turkish scimitar. First adopted by the Hungarians in their wars against the Turks, the sabre spread throughout the armies of Europe. European infantry officers who commanded troops using first the plug and then the socket bayonet on their muskets soon carried sabres in combat. Today, the three weapons that emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries—the épée, the foil and the sabre—are the basic weapons of fencing as a modern combat sport.

One of the most interesting aspects of Cohen’s book is the way in which he deals with the mysticism and romance surrounding the sword. He explains the quest by Italian theorists of fencing for the botta segreta (the perfect thrust), a special killing manoeuvre long sought by expert swordsmen. There is also an excellent chapter on Japan’s relationship with the sword. In Japan, the way of the sword and the way of Zen were seen as identical—both aim to kill the ego. Sword fighting for the Japanese samurai was essentially a spiritual activity and the perfect Japanese samurai was the 17th-century swordsman–philosopher, Miyamoto Musashi. As a kensei (Holy Man of the Sword), Musashi wrote The Book of Five Rings, much admired today by Western strategists and businessmen as a primer on competitive behaviour. It is no accident that one of the most admired Japanese films in the West, Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, is an epic about honour, duty and swordsmanship.

One of the finest American swordsmen was none other than George S. Patton. Acknowledged as the foremost expert on the use of the sword in the US Army, Patton redesigned the 1840 US cavalry sabre and wrote a manual for its use. In 1912, Lieutenant Patton represented the United States in fencing at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, beating twenty-one opponents out of twenty-four and narrowly missing becoming an Olympic champion. Reports on Patton’s fencing are fascinating to read since they serve as metaphors for his later approach to strategy in World War II. One observer wrote, ‘Patton’s pugnacious slashing, give-no-quarter attacking style easily made him a crowd favourite [at the Olympics] but tactically often left him vulnerable to the finesse of his competitors ... To attack was to succeed, to defend was to invite defeat’. Another instructor commented that Patton’s defence ‘was the despair of his teachers for the aggressive Patton was interested only in offense. His method of parrying was to counterattack’. Seneca would not have been surprised at the close analogies between the character of Patton’s swordsmanship and the character of his generalship.

Swordplay entered popular culture through two media: the romantic novel and the cinema. In the 19th century, Sir Walter Scott’s novels, such as Rob Roy and Ivanhoe, and Alexandre Dumas’s musketeer romances brought the world of military adventure, chivalry and swordplay to the mass public. Other writers such as Captain Marryat, P. C. Wren and Anthony Hope followed in this tradition, producing a series of swashbuckling novels that influenced generations of young men. Following the invention of cinema, many of these stories were adapted to the screen and the swashbuckler movie emerged as a major attraction at the box office.

Despite clear differences between classical sword play and screen duelling, film became a powerful medium for conveying what the French call sentiment de fer (the feel of steel). What made the celluloid swashbucklers so popular was the atmosphere conveyed by the involvement of professional masters of the sword, such as Fred Cavens, Bob Anderson, Ralph Faulkner and William Hobbs. Both Cavens and Anderson were ex-military professionals—the former a Belgian Army officer and the latter a British Royal Marine. Faulkner was an American Olympic sabre fencer, while Hobbs was Australian swordsman. Between them, these four sword masters choreographed many of the greatest fights of the silver screen, including Douglas Fairbanks Snr in the silent version of The Three Musketeers, Errol Flynn in Captain Blood, Ronald Colman in The Prisoner of Zenda and Tyrone Power in The Mark of Zorro. Who can resist the duelling scene in that almost perfect 1937 film, The Prisoner of Zenda, when Ronald Colman as the hero, Rudolf Rassendyll, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr as the villainous Rupert of Hentzau match blades and words in the bowels of a castle:

Rupert: Why don’t you let me kill you quietly?

Rudolf: Oh, a little noise adds a touch of cheer. You notice I’m getting you closer to the drawbridge rope?

Rupert: You’re so fond of rope, it’s a pity to have to finish you off with steel. What did they teach you on the playing fields of Eton? Puss in the corner?

Rudolf: Oh, chiefly not throwing knives at other people’s backs.

Many professional fencers consider that the finest sword fight ever filmed occurs in the 1940 version of The Mark of Zorro between Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone. Rathbone, an English actor, was a natural swordsman who did his own fencing on screen, but Power had to be extensively doubled by Fred Cavens’ son, himself an expert sword fighter. Nick Evangelista’s Encyclopedia of the Sword declares the duelling scene in The Mark of Zorro to be ‘the finest example of movie swordplay Hollywood has ever produced’. Errol Flynn, although often doubled by professionals for more complex sword fights, is rated in the same publication as ‘the most convincing swordsman ever to have appeared on screen’—largely because of his all-round athletic ability.

For many cinemagoers, however, the most famous sword fight in movie history is that between Stewart Granger and Mel Ferrer in the 1952 film version of Rafael Sabatini’s novel, Scaramouche. In visual if not technical terms, Scaramouche is the classic film of swordplay. The film’s climactic six-and-a-half-minute final duel between Granger and Ferrer, both of whom performed their own work on screen, remains impressive, even today in the age of special effects. More recently, the most realistic portrayals of sword fighting on the screen occur in Ridley Scott’s 1977 film The Duellists, based on a Joseph Conrad short story. Tracing the rivalry between two French cavalry officers during the Napoleonic wars, The Duellists—choreographed with great attention to technical detail by the Australian fencer, William Hobbs—is arguably the most accurate and bloody portrayal of military swordsmanship ever put on camera.

Other films notable for their simulated sword fights include the 1995 version of Rob Roy, featuring tense duelling scenes with Tim Roth and Liam Neeson, and the interesting 1999 Spanish film, The Fencing Master. Although, on screen, the highly technical, austere and minimalist thrusting movements of professional swordsmanship are often sacrificed to create an athletic spectacle, it is film that has kept the sword alive in the popular consciousness. Some of the most successful contemporary films from the Star Wars series through Gladiator to The Lord of the Rings explicitly identify codes of military honour with the symbolism of swords and swordplay.

Thus, while the substance of combat may be abandoned in favour of flamboyant style, of all art forms, it is cinema that has succeeded in conveying the spirit, if not the reality, of swordsmanship. This spirit is captured by Jeffrey Richards in his 1977 tribute to cinema swashbuckling, Swordsmen of the Screen. Richards writes nostalgically, ‘never to have sailed the Spanish Main with Errol Flynn, never to have ridden the King’s Highway with Louis Hayward, never to have fought the Cardinal’s Guard with Douglas Fairbanks is never to have dreamed, never to have lived, never to have been young’. This romance of the sword is not confined to males. In December 2000, the Australian writer, Helen Garner, wrote in the London Guardian of her love of fencing. Describing her Hungarian instructor, Garner admitted, ‘what he taught me was a way of formalising aggression and defence, of making fighting beautiful’.

The second half of Cohen’s study covers the Mensur duelling culture of Germany, where sabre scars were marks of honour for regimental officers and university students. It is interesting to note that, just as the samurai tradition can be detected in the competitive culture of corporate Japan, so too is Mensur duelling important in the world of today’s German business executives. There is also a fascinating discussion of how Fascism and Nazism, in their rejection of 20th-century social norms, took inspiration from the warrior culture of sword play. As a young man, Spain’s future dictator, General Francisco Franco, won a decoration for killing a Moroccan tribesman in a hand-to-hand combat with swords.

In Italy, Benito Mussolini sought to make fencing ‘the Fascist sport’, while Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader, was a leading exponent of the épée. Finally, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the internal security section of the Nazi SS, was an outstanding sabre fighter and one of the most formidable swordsmen in Germany. When the Germans conquered Western Europe, Heydrich assumed the presidency of the International Fencing Federation (FIE) by summarily removing its Belgian president. Heydrich was still FIE president when he was assassinated by Czech partisans in Prague in May 1942.

The final chapters of Cohen’s study are devoted to the development of fencing as a modern Olympic sport and are perhaps of less interest to the military reader. As Aldo Nadi, the great Italian fencer once noted, real combat with a sword—the most military of weapons—and fencing as a sport cannot be easily compared: ‘one is a world of hate, courage and blood; the other of courtesy, courage and skill’. Nonetheless, for readers curious about the role that the blade has played in history from Roman short-sword through Spanish thrusting sword to rapier, épée, foil and sabre, Cohen’s masterly study is at once a work of military social history and of intellectual and cultural analysis. By the final pages, one is convinced of the truth of the famous words of the French Nobel laureate, Anatole France, who in 1921, described the sword as ‘the first tool of civilisation, the only means man has found to reconcile his brutal instincts and his ideal of justice’.