T.6. Burton on the Secret Thrust

The recurring fantasy of fencing is the Secret Thrust, a technique so powerful and so rare that it will defeat any attempt to counter it.  Fencing Masters reputedly knew the secret thrust and would reveal it to deserving students for an appropriately large fee and occasionally an oath that it would never be used against the Master.  During the 1500s at least one Master is reported to have had a special room within his Salle in which he would teach the secret thrust, well away from the eyes of other students.

The Secret Thrust surfaces in two related books of the classical period.  In the first, Secrets of the Sword (Clay translation in 1900 of the 1862 text), Baron de Bazancourt dismissed the Secret Thrust with the obvious when he said "... if they were taught, they would no longer be secret."  He suggested that he believed in "out of the way and onlooked for strokes," not in ghosts, but that the use of a truly secret stroke in a duel would expose the duelist to the range from disapproval by other gentlemen for iniquitous behavior to a charge of manslaughter or murder.

Richard Burton, a noted swordsman and holder of the brevet de pointe, was heavily influenced by Clay's translation of de Bazancourt's work when he wrote The Sentiment of the Sword: A Countryhouse Dialogue, published in 1911.  In his volume he expanded significantly upon de Bazancourt's treatment of the subject:

• Repeated de Bazancourt's assessment that once a stroke was used it was no longer secret.
• Stated that what were typically called secret strokes are irregularities, not actual fencing actions.
• Suggested that their reputation as unknown was their sole chance of success; otherwise they were harmless to the fencer and dangerous for the opponent that used them.
• Classifies them as either (1) attacks or (2) actions that oppose the attack.

Burton lists a variety of attacking actions that he considered to be such irregularities:

• The attacker who suddenly withdraws his arm to avoid the parry, and then rushes forward, moving off the directing line to thrust at the fencer's flank (note that rushing is not defined and may only indicate the speed of the lunge). 
• The attacker who ducks beneath the riposte and delivers a low line thrust.
• The attacker who before the start of the attack executes a loud appel accompanied by a shout, simultaneously withdrawing his sword from engagement, to cause the fencer to involuntarily stop, followed by a quick attack to score on the startled fencer.
• The attacker who takes the blade and executes a demi-volte using a circular movement to bring the rear foot ahead of the front foot and reverse the body position (this appears to be the inquartata carried perhaps further than normal).

Burton suggests that each of these actions can be inverted to defeat the attack.  For example:

• The defender jumps to the left or right of the attacker, causing the blade to miss, and thrusts to the flank or abdomen.
• The defender executes a passata soto with a low line thrust.
• The defender beats the attacking blade down, does an inquartata, raises the hand in tierce, and executes a downward thrust before the attacker can recover (which he identifies as the imbroccata).  

It is notable that many of these actions were (and are today) reasonably well known, and Burton even characterized them as "old dodges" or "venerable practices." Looking at both the attacking actions and defending actions, we find at least half of them well described by the middle or end of the classical period.  To some degree the actions relying on attacks off the directing line by angulation might not have been practical before the introduction of wider pistes as the planche was phased out, and actions off the directing line might have seemed irregular to anyone who considered departing from that line as irregular.  The appel and shout is described in the 1880s and 1890s and was apparently a staple of exhibition bouts by Fencing Masters.  The passata soto and the inquartata were well established classical techniques.

In Burton's analysis these are actions of desperation, succeeding only by the opponent's resolve to hit and by recklessness.  They overcommit and offer no way for the individual using them to defend himself or herself in the case of failure.  He goes further to comment on the etchics of their use, noting that in his day they would be irregular, almost illegal, and, tinged with treachery, not the sort of thing a gentleman would do in a duel. This moral component, found in both de Bazancourt and Burton, reflects a common view that good technique is ethical, but that irregular technique is clearly not.

Copyright 2019 by Walter G. Green III

Burton on the Secret Thrust by Walter G. Green III is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.