The armed and police forces of the world had their choices made for them by virtue of the very number of recruits needing instruction.

But how did they get them to look good from a distance…

There are two basic approaches to teaching the handling of the sword: The individual approach of turning a student into a competent athlete or artist via one-on-one progressive instruction.

And the approach of turning a mass of raw recruits into functional literates of the sword via group drill in preset basic patterns .

Totalitarianism (and American cheerleading choreographers) instinctively grasped the beauty and appeal that could be distilled from a mass of people doing the same moves in an orchestrated fashion. From Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens to the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, moving pictures have liked the aesthetic reduction of the individual into a smoothly functioning cog in a machine.

Looking good for Il Duce: "The Metropolitan Police force puts on a stirring exhibition to celebrate the founding of the famous organization. Rome, Italy."—c. 1936

One of the rare and early samples of fencing’s mass choreography in the Amberger Collection is a snippet of film cut from a 1935-37 newsreel, featuring a saber exhibition by the Rome Metropolitan Police. The slug accompanying the 35mm negative strip reads:

“The Metropolitan Police force puts on a stirring exhibition to celebrate the founding of the famous organization. Rome, Italy.”

(Maybe our Italian readers—you know who you are!—could help us dating this even more closely! Grazie!)

As a magnifying click on the above picture will show, the weapon used in this athletic exhibition is modern-style straight-bladed sports saber, not the famous sciabola di terreno.

The secret to the eye-pleasing mastery of spatial relation is revealed in a close-up: A complex grid of chalk lines on the muddy ground keeps the individual fencer from straying and spoiling the clean line—another triumph of the will of the fencing master, the artistic director, and groundskeeper Luigi and his chalk applicator.

And since he ended up behind the Iron Curtain, in a different country, he even escaped the politically correct B.S. that imprints modern Germany…

"Small potatoes make the steak look bigger." Not in this case, they don't.

Good things come with small packages. Breslau University’s Fechter has been leaning on his blade for over a century now, pondering where he put his steroid supplements.

Designed by Hugo Lederer (1871-1940), Breslau’s Fechterbrunnen (Fencer’s Fountain) was cast in 1901 and installed in 1904. It even comes with a pious explanation why our muscle-bound Bender of the Épée Blade is nekkid as a jaybird:

“It is said the sculpture was a warning to the students not to gamble as one could be left naked with only one’s sword. “

A likely story, even for the literary over-interpretation biz… who wouldn’t take a gambler’s underwear and socks before taking his sword?

The statue was originally cast in two sizes by the Martin & Piltzing Foundry of Berlin. Various other sizes of the statue are in existence. And while the larger versions these days seem to have adopted épées, smaller samples feature foils.

Our mission is to discover to you the true Secrets of the Sword.

Revealed today: How did cavalry troopers make sure their blades had a perfect edge?

We don’t know when exactly this picture was taken, and what war our gallant hussars are preparing for. But since this British postcard was “Printed in Bavaria,” we feel safe to say it was before 1914, when Bavaria was a backward German state whose Catholic work ethic was deplored by Max Weber in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Now, we promised to reveal a secret, not poke fun at our Bavarian countrymen (although there’s enough Saupreiß in us to justify it!) So what about the Secret of the Sharp Blade. How did these guys manage to keep their swords sharp?

Like most secrets—outside the magnificent mysteries laid out in, say, The Lazarus Smile—this one’s a bit on the skimpy side:

To make sure you had a sharp blade at hand when you went into action, you didn’t sharpen your blade until it needed to be sharp. Because nothing ruins a sword as quickly as grinding down an ever-new edge.

This was not just practiced in Britain, but in Germany as well. (Read up that in Swords of Germany 1900-1945 by John R. Angolia (1988).