I'll give you a quick cheat sheet for this book. Here are the four methods:
- Focus on the target (but don't follow the hand). This is excellant advice. I'm not sure it's worth being ranked as one of the foundational pillars of fencing épeé, but it's certainly advice every student needs to hear and follow.
- Stay out of distance from the opponent, and control how the distance opens and closes. Again, excellant advice, but it would have been helpful to include a discussion of how that exactly happens in the weapon; or the mechanics involved in opening and closing the space with an alert opponent who is anxious to score against you.
- Patience. Don't start an action until the opponent is vulnerable to being hit. Again, good advice, but how can you tell when the opponent is vulnerable? More importantly, what can you do to make the opponent vulnerable. Modern fencing isn't about waiting for things to happen, but in creating opportunities to score in the fencer's own time.This idea of patience would have been worth an entire book itself, but a few examples are given and the author moves on.
- Don't come into the distance until you have an intention to hit. This is also very useful, but only a few pages are spent on it.
None of these four ideas are wrong, and—I would say that three of them are absolutely critical. But one of the problems with fencing instruction is that it is so often based on truisms, such as "stay close enough to hit, but far enough away to not be hit", with very little detail about how a student of the sport actually accomplishes these skills.
The 135 pages or so of this book was just long enough to briefly outline some basic pillars of fencing, but little else. It had few revelations about fencing that most intermediate fencers won't already know.
Included in the text are some simple exercises that were familiar to me, and a lot of simple admonishments: "Footwork needs to be small", and so forth. Some simple tactical ideas are explored ("Attack the person who attacks all the time"), and a little bit of discussion about mental training ("make your actions with confidence").
The book is clearly written (it's translated from the French), though my American printed copy was of poor quality, with the inking uneven in spots to the point where some of the text was very hard to read. Ordinarily, though, this is not a huge deal if the information inside is valuable.
If you're in your first year of épeé, this book might provide some important information for you, but there's nothing here that your coach shouldn't already be reinforcing in your lessons and training. My advice is to pass on this book.
Copyright © 2023 by Allen Evans. This article may be reproduced freely, as long as it remains unmodified and his copyright notice is included.