At the word “Los!” the blades sing and whistle in the air, the work being done almost wholly with the wrist, some four blows are exchanged, there is a pause, then at it again, till the allotted number of bouts are over, or one or the other has been cut to the point where the doctor decides that there shall be no more. We follow them downstairs again, where, after being carefully washed, the combatants are seated in a chair one after the other, their friends crowd around and count the stitches as the surgeon works, and comment upon what particular twist of the wrist produced such and such a gash.
I have seen scores of these contests, and during the last year as many as a dozen or more. There is no record of any one ever having been seriously injured; indeed, I doubt if there are not more men injured by too much beer than too much sword-play.
It is perhaps expected that the foot-ball player should sneer at bull-fighting; the boxer at fencing; the rider to hounds at these Schläger bouts; and that we game-players should say contemptuous things of the contests of our neighbors. Personally, if one could eliminate the horse from the contest, I go so far as to believe that even bull-fighting is better than no game at all. As for these Schläger contests, they seem to me no more brutal than our own foot-ball, which is only brutal to the shivering crowd of the too tender who have never played it, and not so dangerous as polo or pig-sticking, and a thousand times better than no contest at all.
I am not of those who believe that the human body and that human life are the most precious and valuable things in the world. They are only servants of the courageous hearts and pure souls that ought to be their masters. Without training, without obedience, without the instant willingness to sacrifice themselves for their masters, the human body and human life are contemptible and unworthy. I claim that it braces the mind to expose the body; that an education in the prepared emergencies of games and sport, is the best training for the unprepared emergencies with which life is strewn.
The most cruel people I have ever known were gentle enough physically, but they were hard and sour in their social relations, and often enough called “good” by their fellows. The disappointments, losses, sorrows, defeats, of each one of us, trouble, even though imperceptibly, the waters of life that we all must drink of; and to ignore or to rejoice at these misfortunes is only muddying what we ourselves must drink. I believe the hardening of the body goes some way toward softening the heart and cleansing the soul, and toward fitting a man with that cheerful charity that supplies the oil of intercourse in a creaking world of rival interests.
To see a youth swinging a sword at his fellow’s face with delighted energy; to see a man riding off vigorously at polo; to see a man hard at it with the gloves on; to see another flinging himself and his horse over a wall or across a ditch; to see a man taking his nerves in hand, to make a two-yard put for a half, when he is one down and two to play; to see these things without seeing that - perhaps often enough in a muddy sort of way - the soul is making a slave of the body, that courage is mastering cowardice, that in an elementary way the youth is learning how to give himself generously when some great emergency calls upon him to give his life for an ideal, a tradition, a duty, is to see nothing but brutality, I admit. Who does not know that the Carthaginians at Cannae were one thing, the Carthaginians at Capua another! I have therefore no acidulous effeminacy to pour upon these German Schläger bouts. I prefer other forms of exercise, but I am a hardened believer in the manhood bred of contests, and though their ways are not my ways, I prefer a world of slashed faces to a world of soft ones.
Prosit, gentlemen! Better your world than the world of Semitic haggling and exchange; of caution and smoothness; of the disasters born of daintiness; of sliding over the ship’s side in women’s clothes to live, when it was a moral duty to be drowned. Better your world than any such worlds as those, for
“If one should dream that such a world began
In some slow devil’s heart that hated man,
Who should deny it?”
Milton held that “a complete and generous education fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.” It is my opinion that the Schläger has its part to play in this matter of education. A mind trained to the keenness of a razor’s edge, but without a sound body controlled by a steel will, is of small account in the world. The whole aim of education is, after all, to make a man independent, to make the intelligence reach out in keen quest of its object, and at its own and not at another’s bidding. An education is intended to make a man his own master, and so far as any man is not his own master, in just so far is he uneducated. What he knows, or does not know, of books does not alter the fact.
Much of the pharisaism and priggishness on the subject of education arises from the fact that the world is divided into two camps as regards knowledge: those who believe that the astronomer alone knows the stars, and those who believe that he knows them best who sleeps in the open beneath them. In reality, neither type of mind is complete without the other.