The Book of the Sword, Part Two: Weapons of War.

 

This week marked the half-way point in my Academie Duello Introduction to Longsword course, and I'm please to say that I've begun to enjoy the classes more now that we've settled in.
 
Miguel, our instructor, has done an excellent job of familiarizing us with the various longsword techniques, and my fellow students have been quite accommodating when we've been practising as a group of three. The school also has some standard methods of rotating partners so that people get to practise with a variety of opponents.

After three sessions on longsword technique, we spent our last class working with polearms - which, interestingly, are considered to be superior to a sword in a combat situation.  Our instructor informed us that every time they've matched polearm against longsword, the polearm has been the clear winner, based on leverage and flexibility in attack and defense.  He compared a polearm to a rifle and a sword to a pistol in terms of their relative authority on the historical battlefield.

In case you're not a student of edged weapons, the term polearm is generic, covering a wide range of offensive options attached to the end of a pole, with the simplest of polearms being the spear.  More elaborate weapons are the glaive (sword on a stick), poleaxe (axe on a stick), and bardiche, which falls somewhere in between glaive and poleaxe with its extended curved blade (third from the left in the above photo).  Our exercises tonight were done with halberds, a combination axe blade with a spear point on the end and a hammer on the reverse.

We were cautioned to use extra care when practising against an opponent, even with our rubber-tipped mockups.  As Miguel pointed out, whereas a sword can be blunted and capped, a wooden pole is perfectly capable of doing damage all on its own.

The school is very aware of the potential for harm during practise, and as such everything is done at about a quarter of normal speed.  This can be a challenge to maintain, and also requires a certain amount of what Miguel refers to as "honesty" during the sparring process.

 If I'm lunging at someone's face and they move to the side as the start of a parry that will control my blade and allow them to lunge over top of it into my face, I actually have lots of time to redirect my sword to their new location.  However, in an actual fight, I'd be committed to my lunge, and as an honest opponent, I need to maintain that commitment in the same manner.  However, there are some moves, such as defensively snapping a lunge out of line, that simply can't be done slowly.  As I once read in a novel set on a glacial planet where the local wildlife even hunted at a snail's pace in order to preserve energy, regardless of how slow you're moving, there's only one speed for a jump.

- Sid