By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbu

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

New York: Modern Paperback Library, 2003. Pp. xxiv, 519 pages.
Illus., notes, index. $15.95 paper. ISBN:0-8129-6966-9.


While Richard Cohen's By the Sword isn't directly related to the
topic of military history, it does provide the reader with a rare
and fascinating glimpse into the development of the sword, a weapon
that played a pivotal role in warfare for at least three millennia.

A former Olympic fencer himself, the author starts off by telling us
that it was the ancient Assyrian king, Nimus, who first made fencing
into a formal sport and hired fencing masters to teach his troops
swordsmanship. Cohen then tells the reader that the classical
Greeks, for all their record of military success against the
Persians and in producing brutally efficient soldiers like the
Spartans, looked down on the art of swordplay. They admired skill
with the javelin more than the sword, feeling that it was a weapon
of last resort only.

Cohen devotes an entire chapter to the art of sword-making. He tells
the secret of the Damascus steel, used to make some of the most
highly prized swords of the Middle Ages. The city's famous sword
smiths would use special steel ingots imported from India that were
a mixture of low-carbon and high-carbon iron alloys that gave
Damascus blades the combination of strength and flexibility that
made them so highly valued in their time. Each culture would have
its own unique way of testing the sharpness of a newly forged sword.
Arab smiths would place a new blade point down in a stream to see if
it could cut a drifting leaf. The Japanese used what had to be the
most gruesome method of all to test a blade's quality: one medieval
Japanese sword smith certified his blades through the use of the
iai, a special upward thrust that involved chopping a condemned
criminal in two by slicing him from hip to shoulder.

One of book's charms is that Cohen populates it with interesting
characters. We learn that d'Artagnan, the famous hero of Alexandre
Dumas's The Three Musketeers, actually existed. Born in 1615, the
French swordsman led a life just as adventurous as the one described
in Dumas's novel, including service as a secret agent for Cardinal
Mazarin, the successor to the fictional d'Artagnan's nemesis, the
real-life Cardinal Richelieu.

One truly strange personality was the 18th century French swordsman,
the Chevalier d'Eon. The best fencer of his day, the Chevalier was
also Europe's most notorious transvestite. In 1787, when he was 59,
he participated in a duel in London witnessed by the Prince of Wales
and other members of English high society; Dressed like a
grandmother, and nearly 20 years older than his opponent, d'Eon
still won the match, outscoring his adversary by seven hits to one.

As the stories of d'Artagnan and the Chevalier d'Eon show, it is the
idea of the duel that ties Cohen's book together. Long after the
sword began to lose its military utility, the ability to use a blade
remained a mark of character and skill. Otto von Bismarck, Germany's
Iron Chancellor, was a duelist during his student days. Even Karl
Marx learned to fence. In pre-Civil War New Orleans there was a
dueling ground called "The Dueling Oaks" where at one point up to a
dozen duels were held every week.

And sometimes the art of the sword was an aid to the imagination.
The duels in Alexandre Dumas's books were more than just the
products of a vivid imagination. T he French novelist took fencing
lessons three times a week. The tradition of using swordplay to
settle matters of honor survived throughout the 20th century. Duels
were being held in Italy as late as the 1920s. Even modern Germany,
the land of Siemens and BMW, still quietly maintains the custom of
the duel. Cohen notes that between 1500 and 2000 non-lethal duels
are still fought in Germany and Austria every year. And though it's
never mentioned in their quarterly reports, some German companies
require a dueling background if a person wants to become a senior
executive. Settling affairs by the sword seems to fulfill a primal
need for personal combat in some very modern people.

It's when By the Sword discusses fencing as an Olympic sport that it
is at its weakest. The last few chapters of the book turn into a
litany of famous—to a fencer at least—fencing masters and Olympic
duels that are of only mild interest to a non-fencer. But even here,
Cohen makes things lively by dropping in an interesting character or
two, including the beautiful Helene Mayer, a German Jew who competed
for the Nazis at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Overall, By the Sword is a gold mine of information about a world
that has generally only been available to the public through the
lens of a movie camera. It's the only book you're ever going to need
about the history of the sword. Unless you plan to take up
swashbuckling, of course.

Reviewer: Michael G. Gallagher