Battle of Eggmühl, 22nd April 1809

Wargaming yesterday; delighted to welcome Goya and Stryker from Up North (or Further Up North, I suppose). Goya brought along an Austrian army (on the train - we are always at the leading edge of technical innovation here at Chateau Foy) and Stryker brought along Marshal Davout. Stryker and I were to command the French forces.

Our game was - unusually for me - one of the published scenarios from Commands & Colors: Napoleonics. This was No.312 - Eggmühl - Day 2 - French Left, which I think must be from Expansion 3 (the Austrian bit). One reason I am always hesitant about using other people's scenarios is because they are usually designed to give both sides a chance of winning, which is OK from a social aspect but sometimes dubious historically, and often (I have found) they give you a grinding match while one side waits for a lucky dice roll or a show-stopping card to give them an edge. I'm sure that GMT Games and their countless fans will not worry at all about my views, I hasten to add.

Anyway, we used the scenario, and it looked interesting, and in fact it gave us a nice game. A feature of the day was that we also used some experimental house tweaks to the rule system. I don't wish to say too much about these at present, since they are still under development, but they seemed promising.

Neither am I going to discuss the real (i.e. historical) battle, since it is well-known, and the portion of it we were playing, though it makes a decent standalone game, is a bit odd in isolation. I will, however, mention briefly the small matter of spelling. If you know better, or can give a better-informed view, please do pitch in here. The locals call the place Eggmühl - I have a locally-produced tourist souvenir of the battle, and there it is - Egg - as in Scrambled Egg. Not Eck, as in Prince of Eckmühl, or as in Bloomin' 'Eck. I assume that the proper German name must be Eckmühl - "the corner mill" (bend in the river Grosse Laabe?), and that the local Bavarian dialect says Egg. The French have always called it Eckmühl, of course, but their track record with German place names is not good anyway. [Ratisbonne? What's that?]

As usual, I'll attempt to fill in a narrative around the photos. In passing, I managed to get hold of some brighter bulbs for the over-table lighting (1200 lumen halogens, two of them, which are supposed to give the same light as old-money 150w jobs, but much less heat), so the photos may be a little brighter than in previous efforts.

As a spoiler, I have to tell you that the French lost [damn]. It wasn't a complete whitewash, but the field is very busy with villages and woods, and the Austrian line infantry, slow-moving and potentially brittle though they are, have 5-blocks-worth of musketry per battalion, and that is a very serious prospect all round. And, of course, Goya commanded his defence rather better than did Rosenberg in 1809. Our rules of the day stipulated 10 Victory Banners for the win, but the situation was sometimes quite difficult to follow, since there were temporary VBs available for possession of the villages, and the exact timing of when these counted was sufficiently complicated for me still to be unable to understand it this morning. I think the final score was about 10-7 to the Kaiserlichs, but I'll take advice on that. French did well enough, but couldn't keep up any kind of momentum in the face of the Austrian musketry.

By the way, if my account of the day shows a little French bias, I hope you will indulge me - the defeat is too recent and too painful. Like all military history, it may take some years for a truthful impartiality to creep into the narrative.

General view from behind the French right flank, at commencement. The French cavalry in
the foreground were always going to struggle to get some open ground to work in. Beyond them
are Von Deroy's shiny new Bavarians, then St Hilaire's Division, and at the far end Friant's boys.
The villages are, in order of proximity to the camera, Unterlaichling, Oberlaichling and
Obersanding, with various arrangements of VBs available for each.

View straight down the middle of the table at the same stage - note that the Bavarians
have some distance to advance across open farmland to attack the village and woods
in the centre.

Unterlaichling - first attack and the Bavarians took the place. A brief moment of glory -
subsequently the village and its neighbouring woods changed hands so many times I
lost count, though our lot never seemed to be in possession when it came time to tot up
the temporary VBs.

On the French left, Friant made a big push through the woods and towards Obersanding.
Heavy going. The dude on the right hand edge, on his own, is Davout, currently Duc
d'Auerstadt and, sadly, destined to remain so.

The problem - too many Hungarians in the Plastic Forest. You're sure of a
big surprise.

Erm - and suddenly the French had a lot less troops advancing on the left...

...and St Hilaire's division in the centre didn't fancy their chances much...

...and the Bavarians, though they are fleetingly back in Unterlaichling here, with some
French légère boys on their left, were running out of men and out of steam. 

Theme for the day - the French needed a bigger superiority in numbers to win the day.
Here they just don't have enough fresh troops left, and we are getting near the end.

After the official VB target was reached, we played on for a little while. I fiddled around
with some of the under-employed French cavalry on the right flank, which was fun but
enhanced neither the result nor the historic narrative. Faint shades of Borodino - some
cuirassiers capture an artillery position on the Bettelberg, but it makes no difference!

Hooptedoodle #233 - Hannibal, Me, and Napoleon Makes Three

Useful hiker's map of the Zillertal area - our grand walk seems insignificant,
up in the top right hand corner, starting from the blue reservoir and heading
towards the corner

Yesterday we arrived back from our family holiday in Austria. We had a really great time, for a number of reasons, though it was a bit hotter than I find comfortable, and we have duly started sorting through our photographs. There's a sort of drill when we get home - check the house is OK, check the goldfish are still alive, switch the phones and the water heater back on, look at the mail, unpack the bags, put the dirty clothes in the laundry basket, and check we have enough to eat for the next 24 hours. This year we had the additional task of summoning the man from Lothian Pest Control to sort out a mighty wasps' nest in the roof space over the South Wing of the Chateau, and only after that did we have the time to check over our photos.

Funny things, holiday photographs - if you look through them as soon as you get home you see lots of stuff that is familiar because you have seen it very recently - it's basically just more of the same, and the tendency is to judge a photo by the quality of the composition (or something); a lot of them can get ditched because they aren't significantly interesting. Fine - now go and look at some holiday photos you have kept from 5, 10, maybe 20 years ago. Apart from the fact that everyone looks so much younger (ouch!), the pictures will leap at you, and will bring back places and events and feelings and people which would otherwise have been forgotten. What I am trying to say, I think, is that the criteria by which we judge very recent pictures are likely to overlook the main reason why we store away pictures at all - to jog the memory. Stryker recently commented here that once upon a time he carefully excluded his schoolmates from his snapshots of a school visit to the Tower of London, and now rather wishes he hadn't - with the passage of the years, those long-gone faces would be more interesting than the cold old stones of the Tower. I think that is significant - something to keep in mind.

One of the events we recorded in our photos from last week was a major hill walk on Wednesday - major by our own standards, that is. It was a wonderful day's outing which I shall certainly never forget, and as a result of it I am pleased to consider that I have joined a select group of people - some of them rather famous people - who have walked over the Alps into Italy. No matter that my route was not especially historic, nor that the definition of Italy for my purposes is rather new-fangled (post-1918) - that's close enough for me to claim Hannibal and Napoleon as potential drinking buddies. Also, if my own march lacked a bit of classical authenticity, I can claim the distinction of being older, by quite a bit, than my distinguished predecessors at the time of making the journey. Better and better.

We started by taking the public bus up a spectacular toll-road to the reservoir at Schlegeis - right up at the southern end of the Zillertal, and then trekked up the valley to Pfitscher Joch and the border with South Tyrol, which - thanks to President Wilson's crayon alterations to the maps at Versailles - is now in Italy. That probably sounds pretty unspectacular, but for a family day out this is tough going. The walk is about 5.5 miles each way, the start is at about 1700 metres and you climb up to something over 2200 metres. The path is rocky and steep in places, the temperature on Wednesday was about 30 deg Celsius, without a cloud in the sky, and the air is thin, offering reduced oxygen and pretty trifling protection from the sun. The trees gradually disappear as you climb, and there was still plenty of ice up on the hillsides - even in a heatwave in August. This is serious boots and walking poles and plenty of sun-cream, and no messing about. We took about 2-and-a-half hours on the way up, and a fraction under 2 on the way down. Marvellous - unforgettable views and a real sense of achievement for humble hikers like us - my knees are still stiff now!

The magical reservoir - what a place!

So off we go, climbing steadily...

...and the trees start to peter out, and it gets steeper...

...and more rugged...

...and steeper, and hotter...

...and we try not to think too much about the fact that the only way back
is the way we have come...

...and we drank about 2 bottles of water each - the stuff evaporates without trace...

...and eventually, with my Polar pulse-meter reading a steady 140+ because
of climbing in the thin air...

...we reached the border...

...courtesy of the Treaty of Versailles.

Here's a peek into Italy - I was interested to remember that Andreas Hofer and
many of his Tirolean rebels of 1809 would technically have been Italians
in the modern world. I wonder how they would have felt about that! 

Here are some of Hofer's pals on the monument in Innsbruck - doing
some serious skulking - it was a speciality.

We also did a few trips on the excellent narrow-gauge railway which
serves the Zillertal - it's efficient and it's cheap, though if you want to go
anywhere outside the valley you have to travel to Jenbach and get on to a
proper OBB train

And we did some cycling along the valleys - I have put my son's chain back in place
in some surprising locations, over the years.

It's always good to get some insights into someone else's culture.

The Catholic church is everpresent - the inescapable social, as well as spiritual,
core of the community. Here is the church of the little village of Hippach - this
was the weekend of the Ascension.

Moo. The Austrians manage to to make farming pay. After WW2, a great many
demobilised soldiers were given land grants to set up smallholdings - the
intention was that they would learn new skills, would feed their communities,
 and would eventually sell off the land and work on bigger farms. In fact, the
majority of the smallholdings are still there - the small farms were
kept in the families, and agriculture is the second most important industry,
 after tourism. The cost of living in Austria is not particularly high, but
farmers get about 28-30 euro cents a litre for milk, while their British
equivalents average about 19 pence (which is about 21 cents).
Differences? - subject for a lengthy debate, but the use of co-operatives and
the absence of chains of middle-men are contributors.

The rest is simply a series of things which amused me:

Not sure what this is (anyone remember Harry Worth on British TV?) - it seems
to be a very compact device for coming and going around town.

A warning of the potential dangers of walking on the river

...and of possible drastic measures for unathorised parking at the shoe shop. 

Here's an attractive sight for those who like their knackers smoked...

...but a street sign from the Old Town in Innsbruck reminds us of the need to avoid overindulgence.

Danube Trip - Vienna Army Museum

This will be the last blog post for this trip. We fly home tomorrow, and today is a shopping and sightseeing day.

We spent yesterday morning at the splendid Heeresgeschichtemuseum at the Arsenal here in Vienna. I saw a lot, and took a lot of pictures, which I shall have to sort out when I get home. The rest of the day was spent walking around the city - we estimate we walked around 12 miles altogether, which should cancel out a few beers.

I was particularly impressed by the collection of vehicles - not a subject I know much about, but they looked good to me. Some of the following date from the post-war army of occupation. Here's just a selection of photos:

The vehicle in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand had an especially bad day in Sarajevo

But is it art? We are not sure what it is, but it's interesting

Carl Hilpert's in Schulerstrasse - one of the great toy and model shops. Specialist in model railways

Oh well - all right then...  supper at Joma