SWORDDUELING.COM

The purpose of fencing is to develop a man with enough self-control so as to make him able to direct his attack with accuracy and avid as much as possible the deadly end. – Jean-Louis Michel

In an age when there were no greater swordsmen on earth than the French, the greatest swordsman in France was an immigrant from Haiti.

When a 11 year old slight boy was offered a chance to resettle in France after Haiti’s 1795 insurrection, Jean-Louis took it and was enlisted in the 32d Regiment.

Sent to the local fencing school, sale d’armes, his devotion to the art (despite his youth and size) led to take his exam for maitre d’armes as the youngest candidate ever, in which he passed with honors.

One of his contemporaries described his style being such that he

omitted everything that was superfluous; the affected salutations, the counter-coups, the capricious pauses, all shocked him and appeared to him unworthy of such a serious art. One admires both his simple, natural, and well-becoming defense, and the development and rapidity of his attack, his sure judgment, his impassibility in the defensive, as also the regularity, even in the most unforeseen circumstances, of all his movements, which followed each other like the rings of a chain.

His most famous fencing feat came on the heels of drunken brawl of soldiers where the 1st Regiment battled the 32d, ending in arrests and injuries. To restore morale a council convened and decided that 15 fencing masters to a side would represent their units and fight duels.
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Oh me or my (& re last post)… why couldn’t somebody just man up and do this?

From 2002

Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan Taha Yasin Ramadan al-Jizrawi Ramadan made the following remarks without giving any outward sign he was joking, although reporters who were present detected a note of irony in his voice.

“Bush wants to attack the whole (of) Iraq, the army and the infrastructure,” Ramadan said.

“The American president should specify a group, and we will specify a group and choose neutral ground, with Kofi Annan as referee, and use one weapon, with a president against a president, a vice president against a vice president, and a minister against a minister in a duel. In this way we are saving the American and the Iraqi people.”

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/dueling.html
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/meast/10/03/iraq.bush.duel/

Back in the day, kings led charges and Alexander the Great was the first over the wall. Our modern commanders’ only sword is their pen and the only blood they risk is strangers’.

Harper’s Weekley, 1863

“There are parts of the United States where a politician must necessarily be prepared to fight duels … a politician who will not fight must stand aside, and cannot command the popular suffrage … Man is a carnivorous and bloody-minded creature. Civilization, even of the purest kind, only half tames him. Many of the best of men have a secret relish for blood, and slaughter, and horrors.
“Political duellists are the prize-fighters of their part of the country … Jones and Smith, of Arkansas, may not like being shot at; but the people of Arkansas – like the rest of us _ relish the excitement of a duel, and this is the price they set on their suffrages … Candidates among them they require to be fighting men.”

Good examples of this spirit are evidenced in the Burr-Hamilton duel where the much maligned Aaron Burr finished off Alexander Hamilton (who is the seed of the AmeriCorporatEmpire), Senator John Randolph and Speaker of the House Henry Clay, and Andrew Jackson’s duel with Charles Dickinson. Jackson may have been in 5 to 100 duels according to historians (a fav trick of Old Hickory to to show up wearing a massive clock, wherein his slender frame was hard to aim at).

Jackson and Dickinson were rival horse breeders and southern plantation owners with a long-standing hatred of each other. Dickinson accused Jackson of reneging on a horse bet, calling Jackson a “coward and an equivocator.” Dickinson also called Rachel Jackson a “bigamist.” (Rachel had married Jackson not knowing her first husband had failed to finalize their divorce.) After the insult to Rachel and a statement published in the National Review in which Dickinson called Jackson “a worthless scoundrel” and, again, a “coward,” Jackson challenged Dickinson to a duel.

On May 30, 1806, Jackson and Dickinson met at Harrison’s Mills on the Red River in Logan, Kentucky. At the first signal from their seconds, Dickinson fired. Jackson received Dickinson’s first bullet in the chest next to his heart. Jackson put his hand over the wound to staunch the flow of blood and stayed standing long enough to fire his gun. Dickinson’s seconds claimed Jackson’s first shot misfired, which would have meant the duel was over, but, in a breach of etiquette, Jackson re-cocked the gun and shot again, this time killing his opponent. Although Jackson recovered, he suffered chronic pain from the wound for the remainder of his life.

OLD
Sir Palomides and Sir Goneyeres entered the field, jousted, and broke their spears. Then they both drew their swords; with his first stroke Sir Palomides knocked his opponent to the ground, and with his second stroke beheaded him. Then Sir Palomides went to supper.

NEW
The challenge gave Alexander K. McClung the right to set terms, and they were odd: From eighty paces apart, each with four pistols and two bowie knives, they would walk toward each other shooting at will. If the last bullet was spent and both were still standing, the bowie knives would finish the matter.

They met in a bushy tract along the Pearl River. At the signal, they started forward, and Allen cried, “Now we’ll see who’s the coward!” and raised his first gun, “Yes, we will,” said McClung, but he kept his own gun down. They were still over a hundred feet apart. Allen, nervous, fired and missed.

“Are you content?” called McClung.
“No!” cried Allen and pulled out his second pistol.
McClung replied, “Then I’ll hit you in the teeth.”

He fired almost casually, they say, but it was an amazing shot, considered an American distance record for a dueling pistol, and exactly in the teeth as he’d promised. The ball imbedded itself in the back of Allen’s neck, and he died as he fell.

Mark Twain once almost had to fight a duel with a man who would have probably killed him dead. Fortunately he had a tutor named Gilles and when Twain’s opponent came by Gilles promptly shot the head off a small bird and told the man that Twain had done it and he was next. Everybody made up and walked away, but Twain later opined on dueling:

“I have never had anything do with duels since, I consider them unwise and I know they are dangerous. Also, sinful. If a man should challenge me now I would go to that man and take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet spot and kill him, Still, I have always taken a great interest in other people’s duels, One always feels an abiding interest in any heroic thing which has entered into his own experience.”

From Gentlemen’s Blood by Barbara Holland

AGAINST

In France, a splendid duel was fought in 1400 between a suspected murderer and his accuser, a dog. The Chevalier Maquer killed Aubrey de Montdidier in the Forest of Bondy, near Paris, and buried the body. The only witness was Montdidier’s greyhound.
The dog went back to town to a friend of his master’s and led the friend to the spot, where he whined and scratched the ground. The body was recovered and reburied, and the greyhound moved in with the friend. Shortly thereafter, it met up with Maquer and attacked him viciously; three men had to pull it off him. The dog was an otherwise gentle and amiable sort, but it kept on flying at Maquer whenever it saw him.

This was reported to the king, who decided it was definitely an accusation and arranged for the single-combat trial. The fight took place on the He de France in Paris, Maquer with a lance, the greyhound with its natural weapons. The dog sprang on the man with amazing ferocity and clamped its teeth around his throat and couldn’t be shaken off. Maquer screamed that he’d confess if they’d pull off the dog.

This, in contemporary eyes, proved the justice of combat trials pretty conclusively, and Maquer was hanged and strangled on the gibbet at Montfaucon.

VIA

[In the face of laws prohibiting dueling...s]ome few, even in the face of the strict new laws, managed to fight anyway. In India in 1894, two British colonial officers, Captain Phillips and Lieutenant Shepherd, suffered a falling-out and contrived an exotic local variation on the duel. They locked a deadly venomous snake, probably a cobra, into a dark room, waited an hour, and then entered the room from opposite doorways, groping their way blindly around the furniture. After ten minutes, Lieutenant Shepherd screamed. Phillips, they say, rushed out of the room with his hair turned instantly white; Shepherd died gruesomely a few hours later.

I already knew a good deal about Musashi from Kenji Tokitsu’s book and Takehito Inoue’s stupendously amazing manga Vagabond (which is literally like the best comic ever – the art, the pacing, the characters, the action, etc.)

However, Lives of Master Swordsmen has a surprising amount of detail about his later life, much of it extremely illuminating.

LOVE
For example, when Musashi was around 50, he 50 began a long-term relationship with the courtesan Kumoi, which prompted the following poem:

When in love
Avoid love epistles and amorous letters
Avoid poems expressing love to your beloved
In their place, devote all your strength
To accumulating and saving money.

MONEY
In light of the above advice it should be no surprise that Musashi was very thrifty. However, when he finally accepted employment with a lord, as part of his hiring requirements, he demanded a small salary. How unusual.

MUNENORI
I had always assumed that Musashi and Yagyu Munenori never came into real contact and thus could not duel one another. In fact, plans for a match against Munenori were twice shelved seemingly due to Musashi. Perhaps he didn’t want to make enemies with the shogunate.

BATTLE
Musashi’s military record is clouded and the traditional recountings of his achievements in the Battle of Sekigahara (1600) and the Battles of Winter and Summer in 1614/1615 are scant and vague. Although he was praised for his achievement, they aren’t listed out, but just described in hyperbolic, non-specific terms, unlike others. Perhaps this is due to fighting on the wrong side.
He also fought in the Shimabara rebellion, caused by tyrannical taxes on the peasants and a nascent Christian faith binding them together into 30,000 men, women and children, who were ultimately annihilated. Daimyo Matsukura, the lord over the district, was beheaded for causing the rebellion.

THE ROOT OF IT ALL
Late in life at 54, on a day when he was confined to bed, his lord Tadatoshi died. A friend paid him a visit. Staring at the sun, Musashi suddenly parted his hair and said, “Look at this. Look at the eczema scars that I still have from my infancy. I can’t shave my sakayaki (forehead to crown) the way all samurai did. I can’t wear a topknot.”

Is that the key to Musashi? Anti-authoritarian form childhood, spurred on by a ruthless single father towards strength, and predisposed against all strictures because superficial scars from a baby. & so Musashi dressed unclean and unkempt, as a way to say – I am fine as I am, able to cut down all you fancy samurai, so you proper people can go to hell.