18.3. Colmore Dunn on False and Decoy Attacks

H. A. Colmore Dunn was an amateur fencer and a member of the Inns of Court School of Arms.  That said, he was also is the author of Fencing, a quite useful book that provides a thorough discussion of fencing technique in the late 1880s.  This text was published in a number of different editions including in 1889 as Fencing in London and 1891 as Dunn's Fencing Instructor in New York.

One of the interesting discussions in Colmore Dunn's text is that he identifies two categories of actions that are not intended to hit, but that create the conditions for subsequent blade action to score.  These he classifies as False Attacks and Decoy Attacks.  This is an early discussion of the False Attack, and indeed in this volume the False Attack is not the False Attack of later fencing.  And therein follows a detailed analysis of the Decoy Attack.

First, the False Attack.  Colmore Dunn's False Attack is the feint of a compound attack.  We normally do not consider a feint to be a false attack.  However, if we look at how a false attack is described in a convenience sample of texts (in other words the first four books pulled from the book case), we see:

Louis Rondelle's Foil and Sabre: A Grammar of Fencing (1892):

• The False Attack - Is a movement feigning the real attack, and is employed in order to bring about an attack on one's self, or to disconcert the adversary and entice him to make irregular movements which can be taken advantage of.

Fencing (the 1908 translation of the Ministry of War text for the Amateur Fencers League of America:

• The "fausse-attaque" is a simple or composed attack, more or less pronounced, but never completely developed.  Its object is to disconcert the adversary, to discover his plans and his favorite parries; to baffle the former, and to deceive the latter, …

Joseph Vince's Fencing (1937):

• These are actions which have the appearance of real attacks.  However, they are not carried through to completion.  The purpose of a false attack is to make an opponent believe that the action is real, inducing him thereby to disclose his reactions, either by revealing his preferred parries, which can then be deceived, or by inducing him to make a parry and riposte, against which a counter parry and counter return can be utilized.

Clovis Deladrier's Modern Fencing (1948):

• The false attack is an attack made in one or several movements without any intention of touching the opponent, accompanied by a simulated lunge in which the right foot is brought forward a short distance.    

Colmore Dunn has a point.  Feints are executed to resemble the start of a real attack.  They are more or less obvious, but in and of themselves never develop into real attacks to touch the opponent.  They make the opponent reveal his preferred parry or reaction, and allow the fencer to deceive that parry or exploit the reaction.

When it comes to the Decoy Attack he describes this action as: "These are false attacks, but are not designed to serve the same purpose as the other kind of false attacks which we have dealt with under the heading of feints, but are intended to set your adversary on the move to attack you, so that you may take advantage of any unsteadiness on his part to deliver an effective return, such as one or other of the various ripostes."

The essential difference is that a False Attack as feint is an integrated preparatory part of a first intention action intended to hit.  A Decoy Attack is a second intention false attack intended to draw an opponent's action that can be hit.

Colmore Dunn recognizes that both the False Attack and the Decoy Attack create a decision making problem for the opponent.  Committing a parry and riposte against his False Attack is a reasonable course of action.  But against his Decoy Attack committing the parry and riposte is exactly what the opponent desires so that he can parry and counterriposte to hit.  He suggests that wider actions by opponents are more likely to be Decoy Attacks, and narrower ones to only generate a sufficient opening to hit with the final attack are more likely to be False Attacks. 

Why is this discussion important?  Very often we think about fencing in stovepipes.  The same physical action is assigned to multiple stovepipes, given different names, and taught as though they are different things.  For example, the change of engagement, circular parry, change parry, and change beat are all circular blade movements differing essentially only in the degree and purpose of blade contact.  Instead we view them as distinct actions of preparation, defense, or offense.  

When we read the full descriptions of false attacks in the four sources quoted above it becomes clear that feints and false attacks are considered by the authors to be very different things.  Colmore Dunn has done us a service of pointing out that they have much in common and that both exist to create the opportunity to hit because of the opponent's attempts to parry our attacks.  It is tempting to regard differences in terminology in earlier sources to be just the use of a different name for something you already understand or as a lack of sophistication.  Instead they are important windows into the development of fencing doctrine in the classical period.

Copyright 2019 by Walter G. Green III

Colmore Dunn on False and Decoy Attacks by Walter G. Green III is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.