Book Review: Hungarian Hussar Sabre and Fokos Fencing, Russ Mitchell (Illustrated by Kat Laurange)

 

Several weeks ago, I had the good fortune to attend an all-day class taught by Russ Mitchell and Kat Laurange on Hungarian sabre, which is well outside my usual sword wheelhouse; I tend to focus on two-handed cutting weapons primarily intended for foot combat, whether it's longsword, katana, or Dane-axe.  I consider it fully appropriate to say that class changed how I approach training and teaching.  I picked up the first in the Austro-Hungarian military saber (I'm American, consarn it, and I'll spell saber like George Patton intended it!) series that day, read it within the week, and have been debating how to review it properly since.

The reason for the delay is because I needed to separate the experience from the book, and also because there are at least three things that need to be reviewed when reviewing a historic martial arts manual.  The first is the manual as a book; the second is the martial system described as a martial system; the third is the historicity of the material.  Mitchell's book is only 182 pages, but it contains multitudes.

Let's start with the easiest to review - the manual as a book.  Mitchell writes in a conversational, informal style and starts with a fairly conventional analysis of what differentiates this from other fencing systems.  Most fencing texts describe what separates, for instance, Fiore from Liechtenauer or Manciolino from Marozzo.  This is useful information, but it's also very difficult to distinguish oneself in writing that.  Where this book starts to shine is its emphasis on the supporting infrastructure of training, particularly how he structures lessons down to the lesson timeline and the specific and illustrated mild calisthenics that he teaches for joint support.  Historical texts tend to take as written that a fencer will be able to meet Fiore's four virtues of forethought, audacity, speed, and strength rather than describing how to train those, and modern texts where they describe them tend to use static photographs.

So - selling point #1 is that the first twenty pages includes exercises and lesson structure that can be applied to any martial arts practice and not merely Hungarian saber.  I've recommended this book specifically for those exercises to my shinkage group.

Selling point #2 is that Mitchell includes not only specific drills and their execution, but also common errors, their likely causes, and recommended corrections.  From personal experience, there is little more frustrating than an instructor who can tell you you're doing it wrong, but not why you're doing it wrong or how to diagnose and correct, and very often those errors are not the obvious ones, but a subtler issue, and Mitchell does a pretty good job of walking through those, ably assisted by the art of Kat Laurange.

This is an excellent point for a side note; art in a fencing manual exists to support the text and the text exists to describe the art.  Historical manuals (most notoriously in my opinion the Paris Fiore) can often be maddeningly loose in their connection between text and art, or in many Italian manuals be highly text-dense in describing theory in what is an extremely physical activity.  The combination of conversational text and realist-cartoon line drawing is an excellent precedent for sword texts.  This book would be about half as useful without Laurange's illustrations, and the choice inclusion of motion lines is far better, even if the drawings are not the perfect anatomical drawings of Italian rapier, than Agrippa or Fabris for explaining what is actually going on.  Laurange's art adds so much to the understanding of the text that I would argue she's effectively a coauthor.

Selling point #3 - the art aligns with the text and provides strong support.

Since I am still discussing the literary aspects of this book with a little bleed-over, the tone and art are both conversational, easily understood, and - and this matters - enthusiastic.  One of the reasons I keep coming back to Guy Windsor is that his writing conveys how much he enjoys teaching, enjoys swords, and enjoys teaching swords, and conveys that you, too, can enjoy swords.  Mitchell and Laurange do the same.  This is one of the few times I will refer to the in-person session; I think the best word to describe the teaching style is "playful" - not flippant, but encouraging play and experimentation and enjoying it while you're at it.  What happens if you change the target of a downward cut from neck to thigh? While perfectly willing to pose the question, Mitchell and Laurange would rather you figure out the answer to that question than hand it down to you.

Now, let us discuss the martial system as a martial system.  Martial systems can be divided broadly into sportive and combative, that is, whether their training emphasis is on tournament or battlefield.  Meyer is sportive; Fiore is combative, at least out of armor.  Mitchell's lineage is clearly martial, and in fact goes a step further; it is a martial art for the martial profession.  The system described here is fundamentally basic, meant to train cavalry troopers who may only have held pitchforks up to now, with only a handful of major cuts that are heavily trained to make them instinctive.  In that regard, Mitchell has a lot more in common with Fiore and his seven blows described as up-down/left-right than either shinkage or German longsword, which often have highly poetic names and often differentiate to a degree I consider absurd (sideways cut at eye level, sure, we'll call that a 'squinter,' and make it seem fundamentally different from a sideways cut at knee level!).  It de-emphasizes complex footwork and the lunge, because it has to be used from both foot and horse, and it does not have the offline parries of French-derived fencing, preferring to keep the sword basically on the centerline of the body at all times and rotate that centerline to make that work, even for deflecting thrusts.  In that regard, it has a great deal in common with shinkage (and for that matter Fiore) - get behind the sword, closing the cutting line fully, and get past the point to close thrusting lines.

Thus, it is a simple system and its basics are fairly easily acquired.  This is not to say it is free of subtlety; quite the opposite, the false-edge play is exquisitely subtle.  I am not so certain that it would work as described on a well armed and armored opponent, but the rollover disengage and false-edge cut to the forearm is a thing of beauty to watch in play.  Likewise, once the student has mastered gross movements, this has the potential to be an extremely fast-playing system.

Is it perfect? No.  Like most post-1600 fencing systems it de-emphasizes close play; contrast this to Marozzo at the dawn of the rapier age, who basically says "sure, anybody can do wide play, but it takes an expert to fight close."  Close play, the argument goes, is evidence of inferior swordsmanship.  I disagree.  Especially in a system that so extensively uses the false edge, it feels like a failure not to use the full range of the weapon system - the weapon system being the Mark I, Mod 0 Fighter, with Saber Attachment.  Of course, I also disagree with the MMA/BJJ-induced idea that all fighting is grappling, even Kimura Masahiko had more techniques in store than simply "throw him on the ground."  It equally ignores the other pieces of the weapon system.  But a well-rounded combative system needs to have options at extreme, long, middle, close, and danger-close ranges.

You will note that I have not said anything about the fokos, the shepherd's axe.  That is because I have yet to evaluate that properly.  Much of what Mitchell says aligns with my own experience with a Dane-axe, but I want the chance to play with it before I render a final judgment on that, and I feel that doing so will require a radically different approach to axe-fighting than my own rather weird crossbreed of Fiore poleaxe, Japanese swordsmanship, and Le Jeu de la Hache.  Because I have been unable to approach it "cleanly," I have for the moment set it aside, but my literary comments about text and art apply to the entire book.

The final piece is historicity.  Living lineages are complicated in a historical sense; we can't really say for certain, for instance, that Munenori executed the wheeling cut at the beginning of sangaku to the forehead, or the underarm, just that the most-difficult version is the forehead cut so that's what we teach today.  Mitchell is up-front about this, that this will absolutely work with what we know from the archaeological record, and that this aligns with what we know about pre-Radaelli fencing in Austro-Hungary, but that we cannot be certain, partly because there was a concerted effort post-1945 throughout much of eastern Europe to create a modern revolutionary communist society at the expense of anything old and bourgeois, and partly because however hard we try we cannot un-know later information such as Italian footwork or hanging guards, and any system that existed at the same time as those, even if it did not use them, had to address how to counter them - and Mitchell actually gives an example of this in the section "why we do not refuse the leg."  However, the form of the saber is absolutely traceable to at least the first Turkic incursions, and the saber used differs little from the East Roman paramerion.  What this tells me is that if one wants to use a plausible system for those weapons, this is much closer than an explicitly later derivation like Hutton or Radaelli.

In summary, the system is plausibly historical, easily acquired at a basic level but capable of surprising subtlety, and ably illustrated by Mitchell and Laurange.  I would strongly recommend both this book, and experimentation with the system.