Julio Martinez Castello received his diploma as Maestro de Armas from the Sala de Armas Carbonel in Madrid in 1906 starting a career in Spain and Argentinathat culminated in a long period of training fencers in New York. His final work, The Theory and Practice of Fencing, published in 1933, built on an earlier text Theory of Fencing (1931).
Maestro Castello's two books present a well thought out description of timing, normally thought of as picking the correct moment to attack, not necessarily a topic addressed in detail in either modern of classical period texts. In Theory of Fencing Castello provides a very limited discussion of the subject, but in the three sentences he makes three important points that deserve considerable attention:
- The movements of the two fencers in the bout have an interrelated sequential relationship with the proper timing of one movement depending on the preceding movements.
- Timing is the selection of the most opportune moment to execute either an attack or a parry.
- The use of timing requires that the fencer have combined sense of both time and distance.
I completed an analysis of modern timing concepts three days before I wrote this blog post. Castello used three sentences to do what took me 51 sentences and detailed study of two important sources, Czajkowski's Understanding Fencing and Szabo's Fencing and the Master. Castello's work is theoretically both impressive and modern, once more demonstrating the link between classical period and modern fencing.
In The Theory and Practice of Fencing Castello expands on the subject of timing. He suggests that the opportune moment for the action must be created in most cases. Two fencers of equal speed and skill will tend to create a stalemate in which attack is met by the defense. Attack and defense operate in a rhythm that both fencers adopt. The key to success is to break the rhythm, taking advantage of the other fencer's commitment to it with a hesitation or unexpected movement. The opponent will continue with the normal sequence and rhythm for a fraction of a second, allowing the fencer to score. To Castello this is as much a psychological problem as it is a fencing problem.
Maestro Castello offers two examples of how this change can be executed:
- Attacking with multiple threats. When the defender accepts the rhythm and attempts to parry each, a break in tempo breaks the rhythm creating the opportunity for the final attack.
- When the opponent advances or threatens. The defender appears to adopt a plan of attempting to react as the attacker expects, only to counterattack when the attacker thinks that the defender should be following the feint.
Castello acknowledges that there are risks associated with this tactical approach. Most obviously, you may not be able to establish a rhythm. The opponent may break the rhythm first, employing a counterattack into the threats you are using, or making a real attack when you are attempting to set up your counterattack.
Castello's bottom line is that timing is most commonly used to attack when the opponent is preparing an attack. In this case you take advantage of the very short interval between when the opponent is focused on the development of the attack and the point at which he or she realizes that a parry is needed against the attack into preparation.
In examining Maestro Catello's comments on timing, I would offer several comments of my own related to his first three points:
- The identification that timing is based on expectations of a common sequence of actions between the two fencers is important. For one fencer, the opponent's actions create the opportunity to break the sequence. For the other fencer, the fencer's own actions create a situation in which he or she becomes vulnerable to a break in rhythm.
- The idea that timing can apply to execution of the attack or the defense sets the theoretical basis for the selection of the stop hit, time hit, the feint of parry to draw the commitment of the attack to its final line, or the forward parry or parry in the lunge to collapse distance.
- The thought of time and distance as being interrelated leads one to conclude that in operational terms we can apply the time-speed-distance equation to understand that distance defines the time required and that time defines the distance possible. When we add to that the gain in time created by the opponent having to react to the break in the rhythm, the advantage of time actions becomes clear.
Copyright 2019 by Walter G. Green III
Castello on Timing by Walter G. Green III is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
