Two officers of Napoleon’s army meet on a lawn with smallswords. Feraud rides in, and D’Hubert is already there, warming up against a partner. Two more men stand a little apart, one to a side. Birds are tweeting while sheep bleat, and from the group of men there to see it done properly, “Alright gentlemen.”
The opponents come on guard and then they hold, a long time, neither man committing. Sword tips dancing in tight little motions, waiting. Then d’Hubert raises a hand. Feraud steps back and waits, politely, if impatiently, on the man he has come to kill.
D’Hubert sneezes.
A duel to satisfaction or death has just been suspended so a participant can attend to his sinuses before the grisly part. Then it passes. The two come back on line, stare at each other a while longer, and the fighting itself takes about three seconds. Feraud drops his free hand to the ground, comes up under the guard, and puts his point into d’Hubert’s chest. D’Hubert grunts and turns away.
This is Ridley Scott’s The Duellists, from 1977, out of a Conrad novella. By this point these two officers have been at it for years, and they will keep at it for years more, sixteen in all, across most of a continent and the ruin of an empire. The original grievance was an order d’Hubert was made to deliver, and Feraud has never once let it go.
In a smoky, private room deep in New York City, Mike McDermott sits with the last of his money already on the table. He is a law student, and the money is not spare cash, it is his entire tuition, staked on the next hand. He is not gambling with his life. He is gambling with everything that was supposed to become his life.
He has three nines and a pair of aces, the best hand he has held all night, and by the time the money is all in the middle he is hiding a predatory grin. Across the table, a dour Russian named Teddy KGB calls without looking at his cards twice. Seeing Teddy’s face, Mike knows he has lost before the cards are even turned over. “Aces. Full. Mike,” Teddy says. He rakes in Mike’s stake, and Mike sits back, slack-jawed.
This is Rounders, from 1998. Mike opens the film promising that if you cannot spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, you are the sucker, and he has just spent that half hour reading everyone at it except the one man who beat him. Nobody cheated him. The cards came up a notch short, and he knows it, which is why he does not argue. He walks out and swears off the game for law school, and he will break the promise before the year is out.
Twelve men are shut into a jury room on a hot afternoon, and the fan does not work. A judge has just told them that one man is already dead and another man’s life is now entirely in their hands, that “the bench will not entertain a recommendation for mercy,” that the sentence is mandatory, and that the verdict has to be unanimous. He tells them, “You are faced with a grave responsibility,” and sends them in to settle it with words. Juror Eight is the only one of the twelve who thinks that responsibility deserves another hour of argument first. A while later, small things start to move.
Juror Nine remembers it: the woman who swore she saw the killing has two little marks on the sides of her nose, the kind eyeglasses leave after years of being pushed up. But she hasn’t worn glasses in court. Another juror finishes the thought out loud: she had to identify a man sixty feet away, at night, without them. Juror Four has those same marks. “Strange,” he says. “I didn’t think about it before.” A minute ago he was ready to send a man to die on that woman’s word. He is not anymore.
This is Twelve Angry Men, from 1957. Another man’s argument turned Juror Four, and the proof was in the little marks on his own face.
Capable men, three contests. Men with swords, deciding who is better with a blade. Men with cards, deciding who has the nerve and the read. Men with words, deciding whether a man lives. Different ends, entirely. The same form underneath.
An honest fight
They were trying to beat each other, and they meant it. But every one of them also wanted it to be a true contest. Feraud waited on the sneeze because he had come to find out who was better with a blade. Running a man through mid-sneeze would only have settled which of them was alive.
The contest has to be what it appears to be. Take that away and the motions survive perfectly. The fight does not.
You have to understand the other man well enough to manage him, to know what he is doing while he is doing it, which means carrying his intention in your head beside your own. A boxer who cannot read the man across from him is not fighting, he is swinging. A chess player who calculates only her own plan loses to an opponent calculating both. And the reading is not sympathy. The most careful attention one man ever pays another is often paid by the man trying to beat him.
Genuinely opposed, each obliged to understand the other, and the contest what it appears to be. That is an honest fight.
What an enemy is for
April, 1805. Napoleon is master of Europe. Only the British fleet stands before him. Oceans are now battlefields.
- opening title card, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
Captain Jack Aubrey, of HMS Surprise, has orders to intercept the Acheron, a French privateer bound for the Pacific to carry the war into those waters: sink her, burn her, or take her a prize. He finds her early, and she nearly sinks him first, bigger, faster, and better gunned than his own ship. He survives it, and he does not let it go. For the rest of the film Aubrey cannot stop talking about her, the design that lets her outrun and outgun him, and her captain’s own cunning, which he brings up unprompted, more than once, with something closer to admiration than resentment. He is still trying to get inside that man’s head when the credits roll.
Suppose the two of them had sat down to dinner before any of it. Aubrey could have asked him directly which of them was the better captain. The man might have answered, but he could not have known, and neither could Aubrey. A question like that can only be answered when the smoke clears, the butcher’s bill is accounted, and victory turns one way or another. That is what an enemy is for: to answer the question.
It is not only the losing side. Ask the man who threw a fight-ending punch and he will tell you about the two rounds he spent selling a jab he never meant to land, and wonder whether the other man was better than the scorecards showed. The one who lost an argument will tell you weeks later, unprompted, that the other one had him on the second point. She has been thinking about that point too, and is less sure of herself than she was.
Neither of them is discussing the result. They both know the result. What they want is what happened inside it. The play-by-play. The breakdown. Sportsmanship is a polite manner and can be put on. This is not that.
A man who takes the pot on a bluff never has to show what he was holding. He rakes in the chips, and the cards go back into the deck to be shuffled away before the next hand. In one sense the truth of the prior hand is gone for good. In another, the truth is stacked in front of the winner in chips.
And the man who folded would love to know what those cards were. He will always wonder whether he was beaten or bluffed. But the cards were never the contest, any more than the swords were. The right equipment helps, but isn’t the test. What gets tested is will and wits. The thing that does that best is an opponent who really means to beat you.
On the winning side that knowledge goes further. To take a man apart you have to get inside how he thinks, and there is no way to do that from a distance. It requires intimacy. At the end of the film Rounders, Mike goes back to Teddy KGB’s club. He does not win because his cards were better that time. He wins because he has spent the whole film learning the man holding them.
Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game follows a boy taken from his family young and trained to command a war. He turns out to be a brilliant commander. This is his own account of why:
In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them […] I destroy them.
- Ender Wiggin, in Ender’s Game
Whatever that is, it is not warmth. Feraud had none for d’Hubert, and knew before anyone on that lawn what d’Hubert was about to do. He meant to defeat him, and that is what made the answer worth anything.
Keeping it honest
For any of that to work, the contest has to be real. If the man across from you is not actually trying, you do not have a fight. If it does not answer the question, you do not have an honest one.
In some fights the rules need only be written down, understood, and kept. In others somebody else is present who did not come to fight. At a duel he was called a second, and each fighter chose one to stand beside him. The two seconds worked together: they measured out the ground, checked that neither weapon favored either man, and stopped the thing when it was finished. Two men came to fight, and the rest came to see it done properly.
A debate has one too, and the name there is moderator: she keeps the clock, holds the order of speaking, and rules a question out of bounds. Moderari, in Latin, is to restrain, to temper, to keep a thing within measure. The English word turns up in the late fourteenth century for whatever regulates the movement of the celestial spheres, and it does not come down between two arguing men until the 1560s. Behind all of it is a root meaning to take appropriate measures, and it is the same root that hands us medicine.
So the office is for measure. She cannot make either man argue in good faith, and has no instrument for trying. What she holds is the measure inside which arguing is possible, and both men submit to it because both of them came for what it makes possible. A debater who talks over his moderator has not won a harder debate. He has stopped having one.
The Greeks had a sport called pankration. Punching, kicking, strangling, breaking a joint, striking a man already down: all of it allowed. No weight classes, no rounds, no time limit. Men died in it.
And a man could end it by raising one finger.
There is no round to survive to, no bell, no clock running down. Just submission, given with a raised finger. The man who is winning takes his hands off a man he could still be beating. He is not being generous. The fight is over. The question is answered. A man who keeps squeezing after the finger goes up has not established that he is the better fighter. He has established that he is the sort of man who will keep squeezing.
At Olympia 564 years before Christ, a pankratiast named Arrhichion was caught in a strangle he could not break, fighting for a third crown. From inside the hold he twisted his opponent’s foot until the pain was unbearable, and the other man raised his finger. But the strangle had finished first. Arrhichion was dead.
Olympia crowned the corpse, and the opponent did not contest it. He survived, but he still lost, and by his own submission. Denial would not have changed which of them was better. Usually the dead man is the one who lost.
Some arguments turn, and you feel it early. Your opponent has stopped reckoning with what you said and started listening for something cheap to grab, and you may notice yourself doing it back. By the end you are both defending positions neither of you held an hour ago, and you are tired and angry. An argument that goes well is not friendlier. You are still hunting the weak line in what the other one said. The difference is that you would rather have yours found than keep it hidden.
Somewhere in the middle of a good argument, you give up a point. Not the argument, just a point. Something you had been holding and would rather keep, and she says a thing you had not considered, and you sit with it for a second. She is right about that part, and you say so. You could have talked past it, and half the time no one would have noticed. But talking past a point does not answer it. You would carry the same hole out of the room, and now you would know it was there. Juror Four gave up a conviction he had argued for all afternoon when he understood what the marks on the witness’s nose meant, because he had them too.
And a man on a lawn lowers his guard so the man he has come to kill can sneeze.
Every one of them turned down a move that would have won, and nobility is not what stopped them. A fight you had to cheat to win has not told you the thing you came to find out.
The form without the fight
Twenty-four centuries after Arrhichion, the Queensberry rules were written for the boxing ring, twelve of them, covering the gloves, the length of a round, the count a downed man is given. And a man taking a dive breaks none of them.
He wears the gloves. He keeps to the rounds. He does not wrestle or hug, and he goes down inside the count. Two men in a ring, doing what men in a ring do, in front of a paying crowd, and there is no fight in the building. Photograph any instant of it and you could not tell.
Back in the jury room, Juror Seven has tickets to a ballgame that evening. He has voted guilty all afternoon, and when the room turns far enough, he switches. “I’m getting a little tired of this yakity-yack and back-and-forth,” he says. “I change my vote to not guilty.”
Juror Three, who is losing a vote by it, objects first: that is no answer. Then Juror Eleven, who is gaining one, objects harder, and asks what kind of man plays like that with another man’s life.
In a borrowed classroom on a Saturday, the first debater is already speaking. The words run end to end with nothing between them, and every few seconds he snatches a breath the way a swimmer does mid-lap, head barely up, gone again. He is saying: “They dropped the impact turn, perm do both, no link to the disad, that’s conceded.” He keeps it up for eight minutes. The judge writes each argument down as it lands, one under another, a column growing down the page. Across the room the opponents write as fast as they can, because any point they do not respond to is judged to be conceded.
Debaters call it spreading. Everyone in the room came expecting it.
He breaks no rule. Nobody has to restrain him. He stops the instant his time does. If enough of his arguments go unanswered, he wins the ballot.
The boxer taking a dive is not trying, and neither is Juror Seven. This one is.
The ballot says one side carried the resolution. What the round established is that one man could put arguments into the air faster than another could answer them. The resolution itself may never have been tested.
So you can lose an honest fight and be glad. You give up a point, and something you had been carrying that was not true goes with it, and you walk out wiser than you came in. That is not the feeling a man carries out of a round he took by talking faster.
And men will go to a great deal of trouble to make sure they get it.
What the fight is for
In June of 1813, with Britain and the United States at war, a captain named Philip Broke lay off Boston in the frigate Shannon, waiting for the American frigate Chesapeake to come out. He wrote to her captain, James Lawrence.
As the Chesapeake appears now ready for sea, I request that you will do me the favour to meet the Shannon with her, ship to ship, to try the fortune of our respective flags. … The Shannon mounts twenty-four guns upon her broadside, and one light boat-gun — eighteen-pounders upon her maindeck, and thirty-two-pound carronades on her quarterdeck and forecastle, and is manned with a complement of 300 men and boys (a large proportion of the latter), besides thirty seamen, boys, and passengers, who were taken out of recaptured vessels lately.
- Letter from Philip Broke to James Lawrence, June 1813
He put the weight of his own metal and the count of his own hands on paper and sent it to the man he meant to fight. He noted that a great many of them were boys. He counted the passengers.
In the same letter he offered to sail out beside him under a flag of truce, to any place Lawrence thought safest from British cruisers, and to haul it down when it was fair to begin. His word for it was invitation.
He was going to get his fight anyway. The Chesapeake could not stay in Boston forever, and the Shannon was outside. A battle won that way would still be a battle won: the ship would strike her colors, the prize would be seized, the dispatch would go home. It would settle the question well enough for the war, but not as well as an honest fight.
Lawrence never received the letter. It arrived after the Chesapeake had already sailed.
A duel, a hand of cards, and an argument are not three practices that resemble each other. They are the same thing. A man who has never held a sword still knows exactly what it means to fight fair. Something in the way the world is put together seems to answer when two people set themselves honestly against each other, as though opposition were one of the ways reality consents to be known.
There is a man who spends a night at a river wrestling a stranger. It goes until daybreak, and the stranger does not prevail. Then the stranger ends it with one touch, one hand to the hip. He could have done that at any hour of the night. Instead he let Jacob fight.
Jacob will not let go without a blessing. He gets one, and a new name, and a nation carries that name afterward. He also gets a hip that never sits right again, and he leaves the river limping. He calls the place the face of God. He says he has seen God face to face and lived.
He did not find that out by asking.
An honest fight is for finding out. What he found out was a face. He paid a hip for it, and he carried the name of the fight the rest of his life.
That June in the waters off Boston, Philip Broke got his fight. The Chesapeake came out that afternoon, and he came off her deck with a sabre cut that laid his head open. Not a man aboard her had read what he wrote. The letter ended:
Choose your terms, but let us meet.