UNDERGRADUATE
Choose Your Weapons
By ROBERT MILNE -T Y TE (St. Catherine's, Oxford) T was to have been a quiet duel, an Eights Week diver- tissement, sober suits and revolvers at, twenty-four paces, no ostentation. But the ubiquitous Press lurked among the Christ Church cloisters, and so, as with the conduct of the Ruddigore lady, " paragraphs got into all the papers." If Kurt Werner read about it, among the shattered remains of the university at Munich, he must have done so with light contempt, fingering, through habit, the sabre scars on his broad forehead. Blank cartridges, Ach! For Kurt, who was an eighteen-year-old SS corporal when the war ended, is a master of the modified, post-war student duel. Not for him the dummy weapons and chemical ' blood' of our encounter. When he fights, in back rooms of sad, apologetic cafes sprouting among the ruins of Munich, the sabre blades are naked, and the blood which flows is real.
For the benefit of insistent journalists, a reason had been discovered for our affair. A girl in the foreground, quick words at a party, a slapped face, a glove thrown down, " My seconds will call."
But in certain university centres of Germany, no reason is sought. Behind locked doors, and protected from authority by, vigilant sentinels (since duelling, legalised by Hitler, is again unlawful) Fraternity Alpha meets its opponents from Beta by the fixture card, as casually as Brasenose and Lincoln meet on the Rugby field. , There are those among Germany s student population who call for the disbandment of the cliquish, semi-secret fraternities Which flourish at many universities, and for the practical as well as theoretical abolition of duelling. To them, the fraternity and the duel are symbols of a past in which they take little pride, of a tradition best forgotten. Not surprisingly, Kurt Werner opposes these views. Will- ingly he will forget the Nazi era, and the war. It was all a bad mistake, and it is convenient to wipe it from the mind. As for his own part. " There were two kinds of SS," he insists, " not both were bad. In those days I was proud to serve, you would have been too. It was all so different then." But he is faithful to the fraternities, for he claims, with a degree of justi- fication, that their permanent headquarters (usually on the business premises of some former member) are valuable centres of daily association. In the non-residential universities of Germany, some with student populations of ten or fifteen thousand, lunch hour at the fraternity house is the one Sure time to find one's friends.
As for duelling—and here he bases comparison on personal observation during a Hilary term in Oxford—it presents, he maintains, no greater hazard than some British sports. " It is not more dangerous than your Rugby," he tells me, a shade uncertainly as, prior to a duel, he straps himself into the leather armour which protects him from chest to eyebrows. Five minutes later the conte.;t is over and he lies in a deep chair, ale, and bleeding from a jagged gash high on the forehead. ' Ach, it is nothing," lie declares tenaciously, " in Rugby you break bones."
But for our contestants there were neither gashed heads nor broken bones. The encounter, a squib to enliven a curiously quiescent Trinity term, was an upstart affair, plainly the work of amatairs. Kurt would never approve, or perhaps even under- stand. It began, quite sacrilegiously, with a rehearsal. In a field, at Wolvercote, Forsyth expired with the histrionic authen-- 'On the appointed day, at an improbable pre-lunch hour, two crepitating carriages of the horseless variety carried the con- testants, with their seconds, to the rendezvous. At this spot, before the ivy-covered façade of the House's Meadow Build- ings, where Broad Walk meets the path to the barges, Royalist Prince Rupert is reputed to have duelled during undergraduate days at Magdalen. Perhaps when we arrived, the pale ghosts from that encounter lingered expe.:tantly there, but if so they were the only spectators, for the long, gravelled paths were empty of humans.
There was a brief plenary conference—the affair was point- less without any audience—and as we talked, warmth from Forsyth's body prematurely released chemical fluid from the phial strapped to his chest, staining his shirt an awesome crimson. The leaking phial was the deciding factor, obviously now plans would hate to be retarded, while fresh " blood " was obtained.
Two hours later, as people trickled down to the barges for the Fifth Division race, Eden and Forsyth stood back to back in Broad Walk, revolvers in their hands. At a word of com- mand they each marched twelve paces, turned, and after an excruciating pause, fired almost simultaneously. There was a rush as Forsyth staggered, blood ' soaking his clean, frilled shirt. Gasping in startlingly realistic fashion, he was half- dragged into Meadow Buildings, and, as we crowded round him, there were puzzled, alarmed faces among the knots of spectators, where previously there had been amused tolerance. Inside the college the revolvers were quickly disposed of. Wrapped in copies of The Times, they were spirited through Tom Gate looking for all the world like superior parcels of fish and chips.
And that, it seemed, was the end of the affair, except that a photographer found us (" You had me worried when they carried -you in," he said to Forsyth), and persuaded the prota- gonists to pose for action ' pictures. But it wasn't the end, for those two shots were 'louder than we had imagined, and for a week afterwards their echoes were heard.
The police came first. " Case of attempted murder," said the jovial detective who took statements. And perhaps that could have been the charge: at any rate, the law dons of one SCR argued the 'point into the small hours of one morning. Next an American radio correspondent 'called, and then, at the beginning of the following week, the post became reactive. Two gospels arrived anonymously from Scarborough, St. Luke for Eden, St. John for Forsyth. Then a letter from an Army 'man : Have you cleaned the revolvers? Blanks cause corro- sion." Another from someone's long lost cousin, and a re- proachful third from a Plymouth Brother. Finally, when the police had reported, the colleges acted, and there were discreet fines.
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