Much Ado about Slicing

The Schnitt in KdF and in modern competition

In the Kunst des Fechtens treatises, particularly the Ringeck, Danzig, and Lew (RDL) glosses on Liechtenauer, they speak of the “Drei Wunder”. The three wounders, or the three wonders:

The hew
The stab
And the slice

These are the three ways of wounding with the blade of your sword, at least as per these texts.

The hew and the stab are generally well represented in modern HEMA. There are many examples of people in sparring and in competition using these wounders well.

The slice tends to be the forgotten third child of the KdF drei wunder. We see slices less often, they score seldom, often they are left unused and untrained.

Why is this? I’ve long wondered about that.

This article will examine the slice from several perspectives. Firstly, what is the purpose of the slice in Kunst des Fechtens? Secondly, why do we not see the slice much in modern play? Thirdly, how can we integrate the slice into our competitive fencing, and what training and rules may be necessary to bring it into more prominence?

The Slice in the Sources

Let’s start with our sources. What does Liechtenauer’s Zettel tell us about the slice?

”In all winding
 learn to find stroke, thrust, and slice.
Also you should
 Apply stroke, thrust, or slice,
In all encounters,
 if you want to fool the masters.”

“Slicing Off

Slice off the hard ones,
 from below in both attacks.
Four are the slices:
 two below and two above.”

Fairly vague, as the cryptic words of the Zettel are meant to be. We see however that the slice is meant to be an integral part of our toolbox, and we’re advised to use the slice from both below and above. Do the glossators provide more detail? Helpfully, the Jud Lew gloss provides us with more detail and some advice on the tactical niche of the slice:

Lew: “Note these four slices. Firstly, the two from above are appropriate to conduct against the fencers that like to strike around to the other side from the act of parrying or from the bind of the sword. Preemptively break that with the slice like this: When the opponent binds against your sword on your left side with a parry or otherwise and immediately strikes back around to your right via a crosswise cut, spring to their right side with your left foot, away from their cut and fall across both their arms from above with your long edge and press them away from you via the slice. You shall conduct this from both sides at any time they strike around from an act of parrying.”

Item. The two slices from below are appropriate to conduct against the fencers that rush in with uplifted arms. Execute them like this: When the opponent binds against your sword, be it with an act of parrying or whatever, if they subsequently rise up high with their arms and rush in, to your left side, then twist your sword around into their arms with your long edge under their hilt so that your thumb comes below and press upwards with the slice.

Or if the opponent rushes in with uplifted arms to your right side, then twist your sword around into their arms with your short edge under their hilt so that your thumb comes below and press upwards with the slice. These are the four slices.”
(Trosclair trans)

Lew first of all gives us more detail on what exactly the slice is: A pushing movement, either from above or below, with the edge, with enough force that it will press or push the opponent away from us. This implies a fairly forceful shove, using the edge to concentrate and transfer this force, which disrupts the opponent’s posture and striking mechanics. It’s also a close distance technique, as we are told to use it against the opponent striking around with the Cross Cut (Zwer), or against the opponent rushing in against us (Presumably to grapple or wrestle). Both of these are close distance scenarios, so the slice is a short range technique suitable for such situations.

Secondly, Lew tells us the situations where we should use the slice: When the opponent cuts around from our parry to our open side, then we drive the slice into their arms from above, and when the opponent rushes in on us with arms high, then we again drive the slice into their arms from below. In both cases, the slice functions as a disruption of the opponent’s actions.

The Slice as described in the Lew gloss fits well with the principles of Liechtenauer given to us by my primary source, MS 3227a. Particularly, it lines up well with the advice to use short and direct attacks, to target the closest opening, and not let the opponent come to blows.

Let us consider the first use case of the slice, disrupting an opponent striking around. The opponent has opened with a cut, which we have met with a parry. They move to cut around to our open side, which is a common enough play in modern longsword as well. We could try to switch our parry to the opposite side, but often people have difficulties doing this and get hit regardless. Instead the gloss advises that we shove our long edge into the opponent’s arms. The opponent’s arms or wrists are generally the closest thing we can reach in this situation, and the slice is a short and direct movement, so this is easily achieved within the timeframe of the opponent’s follow up cut. Generally speaking, you should be able to complete a slice either as fast as or faster than a parry, and you must complete it faster than the opponent can complete their strike.

I often describe the effect of a good slice in the midst of an opponent’s cut as like unto shoving a stick in the spokes of someone’s moving bicycle wheel. It jams their action, your sword becomes a physical barrier to the movement of their arms, and the push of the slice disrupts the mechanics of completing their cut. Ideally it should also shove the opponent away from you, leaving them unbalanced and vulnerable.

It’s hard to find examples of this playing out in sparring, but this clip from Umea HFS in Sweden is the best I have found for illustrating the idea:

A modern fencing theorist like Johan Harmenberg would I believe describe this as a destructive parry, a parry which disrupt the opponent’s ability to carry out their preferred plans and directs them closer to your own preferred area of fighting. In this case, the slice physically disrupts their ability to strike at you, and delivers the fencer to close range where you can seek to land hits by KdF’s many close range techniques, such as Zwerhau and Duplieren.

In another tradition, Miyamoto Musashi might call the slice an example of his principle of “holding down the pillow”, suppressing the enemy’s useful actions and only allowing his useless actions.

All of this sounds great, no? So why does the slice not show up so often in modern KdF practice?

The Slice and its challenges

There are a few difficulties to applying the slice in your sparring or competitive fencing, which I think is why we see this technique less often than others in the Liechtenauer repertoire.

The first is that it is both technically and more importantly psychologically challenging.

To illustrate this idea of a technique being psychologically difficult, let me step away from the slice for a moment and discuss something else in my training which should make it clear what I’m talking about.

Recently, I’ve ben focused on using lateral footwork. It’s something that 3227a tells me to do, to drive to the right side in all fencing and that it is easier to take the adversary that way. This is indeed often true, there are many advantages to moving sideways in your fencing. In particular I’ve been trying to work on stepping sideways with my parries, to create a larger opening for striking my Nachschlag after a defence. But when I try to do this in sparring, instinct takes over and when an opponent strikes at me I often step straight back away from the blow.

Why is this? Because when an opponent is swinging a length of steel at your head, the human animal has a very strong preservation instinct, and the safest and simplest thing to do is spring directly backwards away from the threat. Going to the side is perhaps more advantageous for fencing, but it’s difficult to make your body overcome that instinct.

This is a technique being psychologically difficult. Some techniques require us to overcome our natural instincts in fighting in order to gain a greater advantage, but this is very difficult to do under the pressure of fencing.

The slices are similar. In a situation where an opponent is barging in to close distance with us, striking from one side to the other, the slice requires us to drive forward, into the opponent, rather than back and away. This is quite psychologically difficult to carry out in the heat of action, as it brings you closer into the zone of danger, against our natural instinct to get away.

Secondly, the slice is rather physically and technically challenging. It requires you to place the edge of your blade very precisely against the opponent’s arms or wrists, in the middle of the timeframe of their action. The timing window is narrow and the action requires both precision and a good deal of force, making it one of the more challenging techniques to successfully execute. It can also be difficult to achieve the pushing effect of the slice, particularly if your opponent is larger or heavier than you.

Secondly, I think the competitive rules we often perform the slice under in tournaments often makes it difficult to use the slice in its intended tactical niche.

Let’s go back to the texts, here quoting the Pseudo-Danzig gloss on a break against the Zwer:

”Note when you have bound the opponent against your sword, if they then strike from your sword around to the other side with the crosswise cut, then fall into their hands or upon their arms with your long edge and press their arms away from you with everything you've got with a slice, and from that slice of their arms strike them on their head with your sword.”
(Trosclair trans).

The emphasis is mine. The slice here is a preparatory action, you slice the opponent’s arms to stop their Zwerhau and then you follow up that slice with a strike at their head. The slice, although it is capable of wounding, is not the fight-ending or scoring strike in itself, it creates the opportunity for our strike to succeed.

We see this aspect of the slice, that it is not necessarily a fight-ender, in another of the plays of the Zwer:

“Here note the break against the upper slice into the arm

Note when you strike the opponent with the crosswise cut to their right side, if they then fall into your arm with a slice, then strike them in their mouth with your short edge from behind their sword's blade by doubling.”

Again the emphasis is mine. In this case, the opponent slices our arm, and we strike them in the mouth anyways. So implicitly, the slice to the arm is either an action that has not necessarily wounded us, or is expected to wound only so lightly that we can still strike the opponent more decisively in spite of being sliced.

However, that is not how competitive rules treat the slice. In most competitive rules I have fenced under, the slice is a scoring action in itself. That is, you are supposed to be able to win a point by making a slice, and critically the slice is supposed to stop the action.

There’s a few problems with this though. As noted, it doesn’t really match what the RDL texts imply about the slice in my opinion. But more relevantly for competition purposes: Slices play out at close range, when the fencers come corps-à-corps. It is often difficult for the judges to cleanly and clearly observe what plays out in close range scrums between fencers, so many slices that per the rules should have stopped the action and scored for one fencer are just plainly missed.

Additionally, there are many times when a fencer may drive a slice into the opponent’s arms, and yet be touched by the opponent’s sword anyways. The slice may have robbed the cut of all its force, and with sharps it may not have succeeded in cutting at all, but if said touch is either observed by the judges or makes a loud enough impact noise to be heard, then often the judges will award the point to your opponent in said situation.

Since the slice often does not score even though the rules say it should, and since attempting a slice in close quarters may only result in you being scored upon instead, many HEMA competitors simply will not use the slice at all. The end result is the oft observed lack of slices in competitive longsword fencing, and many fencers dismissing the slice as an inapplicable or useless technique.

Training and Competitive Rules for the Slice

Perhaps none of this is of concern to you, as you are quite happy with your fencing sans slices. Personally, as a KdF Fencer it is my concern to try to understand and apply all aspects of the system which history has handed down to us. So I am concerned with training the slice and bringing it into its proper niche in competitive fencing, where it can be tested and used under the pressure of a resisting opponent.

To that end, I am going to make a few recommendations on how to train the slice, and a recommendation on how rulesets should change if tourney organizers wish to see the slice utilized more often.

I am not going to prescribe any particular exercises or drills for teaching or training the slice at your club. I leave that to your intelligence and creativity as an instructor. Rather I would like to recommend adjusting what our goals are for the slice, and make a recommendation on what kinds of contexts to train in for applying the slice.

Because it is part of the Drei Wunder, the slice is often considered as an action intended to wound with a sharp blade. Doubtlessly driving a sharp edge into the opponent’s hands or wrists has the potential of wounding your adversary, but as the textual quotes above indicate that is not in fact the tactical purpose which the RDL glosses recommend the slice to us, and since the texts also describe ourselves taking a slice and hitting the opponent regardless, evidently its wounding potential was minor.

When people focus on the slice as a way of wounding, often they end up trying to apply the slice in situations its not actually suitable for. You see this in the bickering that happens when one fencer slides their edge along the other after a missed thrust or something of that nature, while taking a cut to the head at the same time.

”I cut your head!”

”Yeah but I sliced your belly!”

Tied to this is the tendency for some instructors to introduce the slice in a vacuum, as one of the many ways of wounding with the sword, rather than as a specific action with a specific tactical use.

So to begin with, I think the slice’s wounding potential should be regarded as a secondary factor. Instead, the focus should be on the slice’s role as a destructive parry. When training the slice, you must impress in your fencers that the goal of the action is to physically disrupt the opponent. The objective of this action is first of all to stop the opponent’s attack, second of all to prevent them from further acting against us, thirdly to open them up for an attack of our own, and only fourthly to potentially wound them.

By thinking of the slice as a destructive parry, and training with that in mind, you will get closer to the tactical use described in the texts, and you will also give your fencers a useful tool for their fencing rather than another potential hit to bicker about in doubles.

Tied to this is the context of the slice. To make your fencers use slices, you have to train for defence in close quarters, the type of close range scrum where fencing in competition often devolves into both fencers twirling Zwers at each other, the infamous “Zwercopter”, or barge into grappling with each other. Shutting down an opponent cutting around from side to side or rushing in on us is the niche the slice is explicitly described as being used in. So your training for the slice needs to focus on shutting down these tactic from an opponent, within that close distance. Doing so under competition judging requires a slice which strongly disrupts the opponent’s ability to throw those Zwers, to make ourselves safe from any contact and make it very visually clear that we aren’t getting hit, hence again that we must focus on slices as a destructive parry, which shoves or presses the opponent and their blade away from us.

Training which puts fencers into those stressful, close distance situations is also necessary for overcoming the psychological hurdles of using the slice. A fencer who is overly nervous or uncomfortable with getting corps-à-corps will not be able to use the slice, even if they are perfectly technically competent with the technique. They have to get familiar and comfortable with that space to be able to use this technique successfully.

In terms of competitive rules, I would like to make a suggestion to organizers:

Stop treating the slice as a scoring action.

Counterintuitively, I think that this will in fact actually allow the slice to function properly in its intended role.

I have stated before that I think HEMA rulesets are often too complex anyways, with too many potential scoring actions which makes the judging cumbersome for officials and sometimes hard to understand or frustrating for fencers. Getting rid of the slice as a scoring action is one route to simplifying the rules and making things clearer for all parties.

When the slice is a scoring action which halts the fencing, then almost every close range encounter is immediately halted due to the potential of a slice. Yet because the slice is often hard to see among the limbs and blades of two contending fencers at close range, it’s often enough missed or unclear or called “messy”. and thus not scored. And because it caused a halt to be called, it cannot be used for the textually described purpose of disrupting an opponent and then landing a follow up strike. Further, because fencers try to apply it expecting a halt to be called, they often stop their slice short and fail to disrupt the opponent’s strikes with it, and then get hit and are scored upon by their opponent.

For all these reasons, there’s little to no incentive to use the slice because there isn’t a suitable context for its use under present rulesets.

So I would suggest removing the slice as a scoring action, but allow it as a non-scoring parrying action. That is: If one fencer stops the opponent’s cut with a slice to the wrists, you do not halt the action until said fencer lands a clear follow-up strike. The slice doesn’t score, but it allows the cut to score. Understand it like we understand clinching or grappling actions: Pushing the opponent’s elbow isn’t the scoring action, the cut you landed after the push was.

This small change will I think open up the tactical space where the slice is meant to be used, and turn the slice into a useful tool in the fencer’s toolkit. If the slice functions for stopping the opponent from scoring, and can also set you up to score yourself, then fencers will have incentive to learn it and use it, and we will start to see another element of Liechtenauer’s Kunst des Fechtens applied in freeplay and competition.

So much for slices. Now, dear reader, go out and train and fence and see what you can do with the slice!