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Tactical
Swordsmanship J. Mark Bertrand
My first taste
of what I have come to think of as tactical swordsmanship came on a blistering
afternoon in the spring of 1998. At the conclusion of a daylong seminar taught by John
Clements, which had covered a wide variety of weapon systemsfrom sword and buckler
to pole weaponsa final treat was announced. We had already divided into two teams
and given group combat a try; now, John invited everyone in the group to be on one side
while he alone comprised the other. Such opportunities present themselves rarely. In the
controlled environment of the classroom, the instructor always has the advantage, but
against a dozen highly motivated (albeit novice) swordsmen, there would be no mercy. As
they say, John would have to put up, or shut up.
I played this one smart. While a good number of students rushed forward to attack
John immediately, I fell back into the second wave hoping that once he was engaged with
the others, I could take him on the flank. The only problem with my approach was that John
didnt engage with anyone. The moment the combat began, he was running.
At first he seemed to be beating a retreatsensible move, under the
circumstancesbut once a sufficient gap opened in our ranks, he suddenly reversed
course, passing through the gap like a needle through fabric, cutting and thrusting as he
ran. On the first pass, he struck one or two students without stopping. Those who slowed
down and assumed a guard position he simply bypassed, often cutting them on
the back of the leg for their trouble. He never stopped to cross swords with anyone.
There was something more than prowess at work here. Part of Johns advantage
was his experience, and part was his warrior mindsetwhat for many of us was a game
of tag was for him deadly serious. I was reminded of Sir Richard Greenville who, in 1591,
sailed his ship Revenge into a fleet of fifty
Spanish vessels off the Azores. To subdue the Revenge,
the Spanish had to fight desperately for fifteen hours, had two of their ships sunk and
two more sinkingand this was at odds of 50 to 1. To be sure, John had a bit of
Greenvilles tenacity that day, but tenacity alone could not account for his results.
As the author of Ecclesiastes, no stranger to
the sword, reminds us:
the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the
strong,
but time and chance happeneth to them all. Swift and strong he may
have been, but there was something more to the way John Clements suspended time and chance
that afternoon. And once he had dispatched us all, we gathered around him and he began to
explain
tactics. TECHNIQUES ARE
NOT TACTICS
If our purpose is to train for the duel, learning technique without tactics is
sufficient. In fact, I would say it is ideal, because the greater one ventures into the
realm of tactics, the less demanding technique tends to bethe temptation is to
compensate for rough technique by seizing the tactical advantage. And that would hardly be
sporting, would it?
If, however, our interest is in Medieval and Renaissance swordsmanship, the
elimination of tactical considerations imposes an intolerable limit on our training. My
own reading suggests that polite dueling was the exception at this time, not the rule, and
that the man at arms had to be prepared to face danger in many shapes. As Rocco Bonetti
would have attested, one possibly was as likely to be assaulted with oars as with rapiers!
(And if one had never given the oar vs. rapier fight much thought, one would probably
lose, as Rocco did.)
To be honest, the need for tactical swordsmanship did not occur to me until I began
to re-read Benvenuto Cellinis Autobiography.
I recalled that the Italian sculptor had described a number of melees and I wanted to draw
on his first-hand accounts for a paper that I was researching. Much to my surprise, duels
are quite rare in this quarrelsome narrative. In fact, the one duel I managed to locate
never came to fruition, as Benvenutos opponent failed to show upno doubt cowed
by Cellinis reputation as a brawler! Instead, the combats in the Autobiography are down and dirty fighting, often
initiated with the dagger and resembling nothing so much as assassinations. The fights are
frequently lopsided, with Cellini facing a number of men on his own, or a handful of his
friends standing up to fifty men of the city watch. With the advent of firearms, we are
accustomed to fights ending in a matter of seconds, but in the days of hand-to-hand, they
could go on and on, and a small group of determined swordsmen could hold their own against
a much greater number. And well-dressed gentlemen of Cellinis day, like narcotics
agents of our own time, never left home without their body armorin this case, a
discreet mail shirt worn under the doublet.
The more I read of Cellinis exploits, the more I realized that despite my
study of the sixteenth century fencing treatises, I was completely unprepared for a humid
Roman night at the tavern. There was a whole level of combat reality that had passed me
by: the realm of tactics. THINKING
TACTICALLY
For the most part, the tactical advice offered by the masters is limited to
considerations about whether the left-handed swordsman has the advantage, or whether one
should proceed to the dueling field unaccompanied. Their mindset was more technical than
tactical, perhaps because the reality of tactics was much more apparent to their students
than to those of us studying the art at a distance of five hundred years. Still, to
develop the kind of skills that would serve us well in one of Cellinis battle
royals, we can benefit by introducing some tactical exercises into our training. TRAINING
TACTICALLY
THE TACTICAL
SCENARIO First, arm a
swordsman with sword and daggerboth of which are sheathed. If
youre using wooden wasters then metal or leather rings can be used; if using padded
weapon simulators, you will have to approximate the sheathing. The point is to force the
student to draw his weapons before he can use them. You can naturally substitute a buckler
for the dagger, but I think it is best to start with the dagger since it can be used more
effectively as a close quarters offensive weapon. Now that your swordsman is armed, you
will run him through a number of tactical scenarios designed to do the following: ·
Make him choose which weapon(s) to employ As I mentioned
previously, this is an essential consideration. If your opponent is seated across a table
from you, drawing your sword doesnt make sense. On the other hand, if he is some
distance away, or already in the process of drawing his own weapon, not drawing your own sword is foolish. Tactical
scenarios should first present the student with a decision to make about the nature of his responsein other words, the
situation must be assessed. ·
Make him control distance If, under
stress, the student fails to control distance, he must pay for it. The tactical scenario
should be designed so that only proper control
of distance will allow success (this where learning to close and fight inside also comes
into play). For example, if the student turns to find a man rushing forward unarmed or
with a dagger in hand (as in the situation I described earlier), then it is not enough for
the student to draw his own weapon in response. He must simultaneously step
backcontrolling the distanceto insure his safety. In fact, no action is more
important in the tactical scenario than control of distance. ·
Make him act decisively and quickly The dueling
scenario allows students to act defensively and gives them time to think. The tactical
scenario should be designed so that immediate action is required to solve it. The student
must act before thinking. Rather than waiting
for openings, the student must create them or face the consequences. This kind of training
is essential for people like me, who prefer to counter punch, playing a
defensive game until the other guy makes a mistake. In a tactical scenario, as in a fight,
there will be plenty of mistakes to go around, and not enough time to wait for them. ·
Make him subordinate technique to tactics In a fight,
fencings complex attacks and counterattacks are abandoned in favor of simple action.
Under stress, simple actions are the easiest to perform. The goal of a tactical scenario
is to produce the stress necessary to reduce the student to simple, effective actions. Of
course, there is no actual opposition between technique and tacticsultimately,
technique is nothing more than tactics codified, but for the student it is important to
understand that the perfection of technique is irrelevant to the outcome of the fight. A SIMPLE
SCENARIO If you want to
see the way tactics are codified into technique, lets look at a very simple
scenario. We place our swordsman facing a corner of the training room, his back to the
opponent, who grasps a dagger in icepick fashion. At the signal, the opponent
will rush forward with the intention of stabbing the swordsman. The swordsmans
response, as we have seen, will be to step back, ward with his left hand, and draw his own
dagger with the right hand. There are variations on this, of course, but the response
should follow these lines. We place the swordsman in the corner so that he can only move
back so muchhe controls the distance, but he is forced to act decisively to solve
the problem.
Now, if you run this scenario with a number of students, they will observe one
another and in time develop a correct response to the scenario. When
faced with an opponent rushing forward with his dagger held aloft, I will step back, check
his right arm with my left, and bring my own dagger out to stab him. And whats
that? A technique. In fact, when you interpret a technique from the historical treatises,
you can often work backward to glimpse the tactical reality from which it arose
(
which is makes up much of the HACA view). MULTIPLE
OPPONENTS Place the same
swordsman in the same corner, put the same dagger-wielding bad guy ready to pounce twenty
feet behind him, and another man armed with a sword twenty feet behind the guy with the
knife. Now you have a scenario with multiple opponents and dissimilar weapons. The corner
also represents an environmental challenge. Your swordsman turns, executes the technique
we just saw codified in the simple scenario, and then faces a swordsman armed only with
his dagger. He evades the first blow, aided by the dagger, and draws his own sword. Now he
is armed with sword and dagger against a man who only has a sword. If he has trouble
dispatching the first opponent, the second will be on top of him before he can prepare
himself. If he attempts to draw his sword at the wrong time or in the wrong way, he will
be wounded. But if he keeps his head and responds immediately to each threat, he can
successfully solve the problem. The scenario
can be repeated with bucklers or spears.
The goal of a scenario like this is different from the goal of playing loose (i.e.
sparring). When we spar, we are testing our skills against one another. When we train
using tactical scenarios, the opponents are facilitating the students
learning processthey act like sensible adversaries, but their goal is to get in
there and kill, not to fence. Instead of bobbing around, aiming for each
others extremities, everyone in the scenario should be going for the jugular. Yes,
this will create openings for the student to take advantage ofthats what
training is all about. But the scenario frees students to commit to action in a way that
they never will in sparring. It is a good supplemental tool to develop an instinct for
decisive action. THE
SWORDSMANS EDGE
To the extent that swordsmen confuse techniques with tactics and settle for simple,
one-on-one dueling constructs instead of tactically rich training scenarios, we squander
this advantage. It isnt enough to face off, sword in hand, and see who finds an
opening first. That surrenders too much to time and chance. Instead, we should begin most
all mock combats at a distinct disadvantage and train in such a way that we consistently
overcome it. We should learn how (and when!) to draw our swords, how to control the
distance, and when to abandon the complex and polished technique of the salle in favor of the real worlds rough and
tumble. We should not scoff at odds of twelve to one; instead, we should seek them out. As
swordsmen, we enjoy an ironic edge when it comes to trainingironic in the sense that
our training can never truly pay off in everyday life, an edge in the sense
that we can create realistic scenarios and fight against intelligent, skilled opponents.
These advantages are meaningless if we settle for mere technique. So go tactical.
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