The Point: Assumptions Guiding the Teaching of Fencing

One of the best aspects of teaching is that one learns in turn. I’ve been extremely fortunate to work with talented, insightful people, and few lessons pass where students don’t leave me with a lot to ponder. Yesterday, a student whom I normally meet Fridays, visited my adult smallsword class and wrote an inspired message to me with his views on some of the points I made in class. Jeff, the friend and student in question, and I have very much the same outlook on all this, but working one on one with him he hasn’t seen me present answers quite the same way I might in a larger class.

I’d like to share part of Jeff’s email here and discuss it. He wrote:

In your lesson, you reiterated what you have often said, that the goal is not to hit first, but to hit without being hit—-the double touch being no good to anyone. At least, not if the swords were sharp. I learned this many years ago from Nick Evangelista, and obviously it did not originate with him, and it is good to see instructors passing on this sound advice. The advice is both philosophical and practical. (Philosophical intersections are some of the reasons for fencing’s appeal.)

The application of this philosophy in HEMA highlights how far sport fencing has drifted from the martial art. To determine upon—or even to risk—mutual destruction in order to score the winning point in a match seems like a betrayal of the purpose of fencing. It is, however, worth considering some circumstances in which this might not be the case, if only to show why the exceptions should not tempt us to change the rule. I hope this argument is not circular, but it’s worth pondering what sort of fencing tradition (or martial arts tradition) encourages the double touch and whether it is honorable, respectful, or practical to attach oneself to that tradition.

“Greater love than this no man hath…”

Sometimes, a sacrifice is necessary. A man will deliberately forgo any safeguard in order to end a threat to his family, even if the certain result is death to him. Obviously, he would prefer to hit without being hit, but if a double touch is the only way, he will do it—no matter the weapon, physical or non-physical. We strive to attain skill, build experience, and learn strategy, so that such sacrificial encounters will be rare. We want them to be the last resort, not a clumsy, desperate stroke that we resorted to because our ignorance blocked all other opportunities.  But we must admit that such circumstances are possible.

The rest of his message was just as well-written and on point. Taking his first point up, yes, I reiterate the “don’t get hit” mantra often, and have to, because for us it’s highly theoretical. I’ve touched on this at length, so won’t do so here, but we train with friends, no one is angry or trying to hurt another, and we wear safety gear. Generally, the worst consequence we suffer is we get hit. Big deal, right? There is extremely little to no incentive not to take chances, and so, people do. All the time.

There are, true to say, instances in which one might choose to “double-out” or fight even knowing one might lose. A stand-out example, and one related to me over coffee by my late master, Delmar Calvert, is illustrative. He joined the French Foreign Legion at 15, and saw action in France just before it fell to the Germans. Delmar left the Legion for the partisans when fascist sympathizers within the Legion killed a few people in their sleep. In time, the OSS found him and the others fighting in the Maquis, and trained them for commando operations. [1] It was during one mission, after having attacked a German supply column, that they realized they were about to be overrun. One of his mates grabbed a heavy machine gun, and told the rest to run for it. This man knew he was going to die, but for the success of their unit and future operations, he made the choice.

In contrast to that real-world, life and death situation, our context in fencing, historical or Olympic, is specific, and if I may say so, narrow. Moreover, unless someone is doing something especially stupid, it’s safe. Wet assume a one-on-one battle. Even in “HEMA” most of the events boil down to one-on-one bouts, not melees. There are groups like Bohurt/The Armored Combat League that pursue melee fighting, but it’s not the most historically accurate endeavor (topic for another time).

So, as Jeff pointed out, we teach, train, and fight–ideally–under a specific assumption, namely that our opponents, like ourselves, do not want to be hit. This is, however, an assumption, and not one universally adopted or practiced. Perhaps more correctly it’s an assumption many pay lip-service to, which they either have trouble implementing in their practice or fail to realize they need to.

This assumption underpins nearly everything we teach. For me, it’s raised the question again and again of how those trained in ways similar to ourselves converted that training to melee/combat situations. [2] We don’t have a lot of information, not enough anyway, to fill out that picture. The way I normally explain it is that the sport and the historical duel have rules–combat does not. [3] Day to day, however, my task has been how to instill this sense of “don’t get hit” in class for our context, which assumes a room or at least a safe space, and safety gear.

Teaching fencing takes different forms. In the sport, for example, we use ROW in an attempt to instill the proper mind-set, that is, a defensive one, but being competitive, and rules being things people always find ways to exploit, we end up with deviations and if we’re really unlucky, features that undermine the original intent of the sport. Classic examples are the “flick” in foil and epee and the bell-guard slap in sabre. These are suicidal actions, but… since they can score points, and winning is the point, the choice for victory over accuracy tends to win out. That they are as ahistorical as they are senseless is immaterial–they earn one points.

In large part, the classical and historical movements owe their current form to dissatisfaction within the sport in the 1990s and early 200os. As I’ve mentioned before, the rise of the internet, and the speed with which information can travel, allowed not only for the sharing of ideas, thus helping these movements grow, but also made texts available on a global scale, one heretofore unknown. Both movements were, in theory, attempting to put fencing back on track. Of the two, classical fencing has had arguably more success within itself–focused on the three traditional weapons or close relatives, with copious sources, and even now a few elderly masters who remember how things used to be (though increasingly few of them), the classical approach is easier than that for earlier fencing, so little of which–in comparison–has survived if it was even written down at all. [4]

Historical fencing, and “HEMA” in particular, has always been a patchwork of good and poor research and interpretation, but it has been the rise of competition within hema that, ironically, has led that community to commit many of the same sins as Olympic, only under different names. Some people are aware of the irony, but most are not.

The stand-out example is doubling to win bouts. This was/is a standard strategy in epee, but we see it in nearly every aspect of hema now, regardless of weapon. It’s all either “beat them to the punch” or “well I got you too.” My issue with this is that both fail the principle of “don’t get hit.” Again, this is an assumption, but if competition is meant to show anything, then ideally it is meant to demonstrate that one opponent’s skill is superior (on that day at least…) to another’s. What has been proven if both are hit? What is proven if one wins by losing as one wins? It doesn’t make sense.

It’s confused, but then hema by and large is too, even down to vocabulary. One of the words I have come to detest in HEMA is “martial.” People use this as a synonym for “effective,” but the primary denotation of “martial” (e.g. warlike, pertaining to war) undercuts and confuses things. We aren’t fighting mock wars, but duels. A duel between two people isn’t a “martial” situation the way a 14th century field battle was. These are very different things, but since both are “fighting,” the similarity wins out over the many important differences. [5] The fact that hema tournaments want things to be “martial,” but then allow ridiculous, suicidal actions to count goes a long way in explaining why hema is a mess and why most trained martial artists and fencing coaches look down on it. Both of the latter, incidentally, get a lot of grief when they point out these flaws, and adding a self-inflicted bullet wound to their foot, the already concussed body of hema dismisses them as irrelevant.

To practice more combat-related actions at speed, with intent, will injure people and destroy gear, and no insurance company I know or have heard of is going to be okay with that. As I tell the younger folks I teach, we don’t want to hurt our friends because if we do, they won’t want to play with us. In short, there is only so “martial” we can be, and to pretend otherwise makes little sense and is misleading. Some systems, Fiore’s armizare stands out, were not meant for safe-play or competition, and surprise, what we see at events, even in many demos, is what can safely be illustrated. The same issue applies to later period weapons. This is one reason that I view the difference between “dueling” and “military” sabre as chimerical–they both relied on the same body of technique: what differed was how much one might use and the context in which one did.

For me, the best way to do right by the traditions I inherited is to present them as faithfully as they were given to me, and if possible, add a bit more of the historical context, something my other training makes possible. For the most part, since I’m preparing people to fight one-one-one, I teach according to the typical assumptions behind such combat. On the rare occasions I present material intended for different context, say weapon seizures and dirty fighting (punching with the guard, pommel strikes, kicking, elbow-breaking), I also admit up front that we can only gain an appreciation for this aspect as it is, quite literally, unsafe to train. I think there is value, however, for more advanced students in having a glimpse into that side of fencing, one we do not and cannot see short of law-suits.

One take away, and the one I’d like to focus on here, is that what most of us present to students is ONE view of a varied, far more colorful and interesting world. The sabre system I teach, Radaellian sabre, grew out of cavalry practice, and while we retain aspects of the from-the-saddle game, we cannot use it as for horseback. We don’t fight that way. Most of the surviving works for the Radaellian system cover unmounted drill, so happily we have a lot from which to draw, and can provide an impressively deep and robust system. When it comes up, or once they reach a certain stage, this is something I share with students, because they need to know that what I show them for fighting on foot would not work for a mounted context, not without adjustment. [6]

Being aware of the assumptions that underpin our program is vital. It helps us define not only what we teach, but also the “why” behind it all. It should also, ideally, help us delineate what we can teach from what we cannot or should not, the latter in the sense of safety. All the fancy stuff, the exceptions, the unique plays and actions, all of that is fun to explore, but it’s best for one to dive into all that after learning the fundamentals and having some skill with the weapon in question.

NOTES:

[1] See Bernard Coliat, Vercors 1944 Des GI dans le maquis, Bourg-les-Valence, FR: l’Imprimerie Jalin, 2003; see also https://www.lakeoswegoreview.com/news/from-foreign-legion-to-fencing-master/article_ed077025-e3a3-5f55-bd08-411da08f74a8.html

[2] For example, some officers learned via private instruction, so one-on-one. battles don’t work that way, so some adjustment from piste to field had to be made, or, one was unlikely to survive. We have hints of this. Hutton, in The Swordsman, remarks with reference to fighting in Afghanistan that

He will not politely salute you, he will not come on guard in correct fencing-room style and abstain from attacking until the blades have been engaged, and he will not in his fighting make use of the lunge and recover to which we civilised swordsman are accustomed, for the very good reason that he knows nothing about these things; but what he must and will do is exactly what our English sword and buckler men did in the days of Shakespeare, at which time the lunge had not been invented.

[“The Grips and Closes,” 127ff, Alfred Hutton, The Swordsman, Leeds, UK: Reprint The Naval and Military Press, LTD. with the Royal Armouries, 2009.]

Hutton’s typical Victorian sense of European superiority notwithstanding, the Afridi warrior he assumes as his example he clearly saw as a formidable opponent, and, one likely to have the upper-hand against a salle-trained fencer.

[3] Modern notions of combat ethics aside, historically and in most areas of the world, hand-to-hand fighting is utterly brutal. It has to be. What supposedly set apart the duel from a mere fight was the ritual apparatus around it, the rules and societal expectations around it. Often, it was better to lose a duel than survive one but break those rules.

[4] Classical fencing, alas, has its weirdos too, but being a smaller enclave of things swordy, it affects very few. Maitre Evangelista, a major proponent for fencing with sense, was vilified unfairly by many in Olympic fencing; he was right, and they didn’t like it.

[5] It’s the same logical failure that the ancient aliens and other conspiracy nutters tout. Reason, evidence, and logic have little sway when it comes to things people want to believe. The fantasy element in hema is strong, ditto the puerile machismo so often on display, but nothing anyone does or says will change that. To fix a problem means recognizing there is one, and that cuts too close to deep personal feeling to happen.