History as Farce [3] – And It All Ended in Tears

And I knew it would. The first slightly uncomfortable moment came when the Imperial Headquarters were making themselves at home in Moscow. I was a bit worried about Napoleon riding his horse up the stairs, but the real shock came when someone burst into the room, shouting that Moscow was in flames, and when they drew the curtains back, sure enough, the whole city was an inferno. You'd think they'd have got some inkling of this a little earlier, but never mind - it was a great shot. The way home from Russia, of course, is very harrowing indeed - in fact this worked better than most of the film, since small groups of wretched stragglers looked more appropriate in this context. Then Napoleon is terribly rude to Metternich, who has come to Paris to tell him that it is all very well for him to declare peace, but the Allies would like to insist on a few conditions, and the subsequent unpleasantness of 1813 blends seamlessly into 1814 without any mention of Leipzig or anything significant like that. Next minute Paris surrenders and we're off to Elba. I am personally pleased to note that the surrender is blamed on brother Joseph, not on Marmont, for a refreshing change.

According to Gallo's script (apparently), Napoleon's decision to return to France is primarily triggered by his learning of Josephine's death, which seems a surprisingly oblique piece of whimsy, and when he gets there he is intercepted by the 5eme Ligne, commanded in person by Marshal Ney - an OOB which only ever existed in the screenplay for the Bondarchuk movie - I believe that in reality Ney turned up some days later. Waterloo is pretty much what you'd expect - a brave effort with sparse resources - but there is a strange moment when Grouchy has his classic argument with Gerard about whether their detached force should march towards the sound of battle. I’ve always envisaged this force plugging along muddy roads, but the artistic director prefers to have them arranged scenically around the countryside as though they were already in battle. Also, because of the obvious manpower shortages, battalions are seen marching about very smartly in what looks like about 33:1 figure scale - the units are 6 men wide by about 5 deep. It looks like a wargame played with real men - like giant chess.

There are some interesting bits while Napoleon considers a series of mad schemes to go to America (to become a scientist), to be smuggled through the British blockade in a barrel (which he rejects as inappropriate for the Emperor of the French) or to give himself up to the English and request a nice house near London with a few rose bushes. Of course, it's all baloney, and he ends up in St Helena, trying hard to re-establish some credibility as a nice guy. Hudson-Lowe, the governor, is brilliantly cast - the perfect Wicked Stepfather. As Napoleon's health worsens he has a series of flashbacks about his days at the military academy, where he was told that he would never amount to anything, and - infuriatingly - in his death-bed scene I didn't hear his last words, so will have to watch that bit again.

The scrolling text at the end explains that his ashes were eventually returned to France, where he now rests in Paris, and the splendid shot of Napoleon's tomb brought me a bit of a personal lump in the throat, since this is the exact spot where my grandfather introduced me to Napoleon and his adventures when I was 12 or so - and compromised the rest of my life! There is a family story that, years earlier, my grandfather, who moved to Paris in his early twenties, took his own father to the Invalides and the old man, who had a proverbially blunt turn of phrase, pondered the tomb for a while, and said, "Well, they certainly didn't want the bugger to get out of that again, did they?"

And on that note of appropriate bathos I shall leave Napoleon to the tender mercies of history, but I thought I'd mention a couple of points that came up in my reading this week - in the Campagnes du Capitaine Marcel, and in the autobiographical account of the Peninsular War by Lemonnier-Delafosse, I found two separate references to organisation of voltigeurs at brigade level, which I was pleased about because I have my wargames armies organised in this way, so all supportive evidence is welcome! Marcel was captain in charge of the voltigeur company of the 3rd battalion of the 69e Ligne, in the VI Corps in Spain, and he refers to a major of the 6e Leger who commanded the combined light troops of his brigade in action. Lemonnier-Delafosse was captain of the 4th chasseur company of the 1st battalion of the 31e Leger (who were, as it happens, Piedmontese) who were part of Ferrey's Division at Salamanca, which formed the reserve and covered the retreat of the French army - he describes the combined "battalions" of voltigeurs from each brigade being sent out en tirailleur to skirmish, with excellent effect.

That'll do nicely.

History as Farce [2] - Eylau, Tilsit, Spain...

Never buy a used car from this man, or any of his relatives

Very pleased to get back to the DVD of the French TV mini-series of the pantomime history of the Napoleonic Wars. Last night there were a lot of dealings with the Tsar (seems a nice man, but there's going to be real trouble over Poland, I think), and the Spanish royal family (despicable - Ferdinand VII even speaks with his mouth full, which is a dreadful thing to witness - at least as horrifying as the battle scenes). And then Murat and half a dozen cavalrymen rode through Spain setting fire to thatched cottages - thatched cottages being one of the things Spain is famous for, of course. Tilsit was excellent - much embracing by Napoleon and Alexander on the barge, while the extras of both armies stood on the shore and shouted "Hurrah" on the count of three.

Throughout, the infertility of Josephine and the very apparent fertility of Maria Valewska and a number of other spectacular young ladies kept us all gripped, and Fouché and Talleyrand skulked around and explained the subplots - boo, hiss! About an hour into my session last night, Jean Lannes died, and in his death scene made a very impressive speech about his love for the Emperor, and his fears concerning the long term implications of His Majesty's foreign policy. All authentically quoted from Max Gallo's novel. At this point I was starting to doze off, but I'll be getting back to it to see what happens next.

Napoleon is definitely not a man to trust too much - I'm beginning to have real misgivings about him - but he is certainly more trustworthy than his immediate family, especially that Mme Murat. Very entertaining - I would not recommend it as educational material, but it's excellent fun throughout. The interior sets are really stunning - at one point Talleyrand is summoned to Napoleon's study, which is about the same size as the Parc des Princes, and has to look around to find him. Maybe 25mm scale buildings would not be oversized on the tabletop after all?

More soon.

Hooptedoodle #39 - Do Not Anger the Gods

Bit stormy last night - Britain is a gentle place as far as weather goes, normally, but it's definitely been windy recently.

Being of a nervous disposition, I have safely stored away the garden furniture in the garage for the Winter, but we have a dirty great teak 6-seater table which is so heavy that we can hardly shift it, so I had pushed that to a sheltered part of the garden. This morning I find that the wind has flung it right across the terrace into a stone wall, and it is, as you see, looking a bit secondhand. Distressed, even.

I am very pleased that the wind did not decide to throw it through the French windows, but it is still a sobering thing to witness. The table has a slatted top, which you would expect to cut down on wind-lift, and is designed to be heavy enough to be left out in all weathers - I would struggle to overturn it unaided, and it would take a sledgehammer to do that kind of damage.

The photo is for the insurers, but it seemed a pity not to share it.

Hooptedoodle #38 - Shoot the Messenger

I tell this tale without anger or malice. I feel that the attention to detail and level of customer service I describe here should be more widely known.

I live on a farm, miles from the nearest street light, and I've become aware recently that the steps at the bottom of our front path are potentially pretty dangerous when it gets dark. We have had some elderly visitors over the holiday period and, naturally, I am concerned that someone might fall and hurt themselves. It could even be me, for goodness sake. Our solution was to order up some solar-powered spot lights, which should be bright enough, even with the limited charge they get during the short days, to help make the steps visible. I ordered them online and, since we were getting close to New Year, paid the extra whack for guaranteed next day courier delivery.

It all looked very promising. I got a series of emails from the courier, DPD, which gradually built up the story of the progress of my package. I could see when it arrived at DPD's Birmingham "hub", then the following morning when it reached their Edinburgh depot. Then a note to say that the package was on the van, and would be delivered between 14:25 and 16:25, and could we please make sure someone would be in to sign for it.

Then around 14:10 there was an additional note which said they had attempted to deliver the parcel, got no answer, and left a "You Were Out" card - would I please contact them to arrange to collect the package from their depot (40 miles away) or to arrange re-delivery. It goes without saying that they had not been here - you can see a good way down the farm lane toward the public road from our windows, and there had been no sign of a courier. I phoned the seller of the lights - they were very sympathetic, said that there had been a number of similar complaints, and that they would chase it up and someone would phone me back. They did. The card had been left "at a brown door" and DPD would contact me to arrange delivery. No brown doors here, I said, and - since we were likely to be out the following day, could the driver please leave the package in the woodshed behind the garage?

We heard nothing from DPD. Next day, I came home in torrential rain to find the box had been left on the front doorstep and was rapidly dissolving. No damage done, these are outside lights and weatherproof, but it might have been a delivery of books, and we might have gone to Florida for the Winter. Anyway, I have my lamps, with which I am pleased, and I have abandoned any hope of getting a refund of the extra shipping charge, but it wasn't very much, and they probably need the money, poor souls. It is a bit depressing though, isn't it?

In keeping with this general theme of the convenience of home delivery, here is a celebrated CCTV clip from YouTube of a FedEx driver delivering/breaking a computer monitor. Heart-warming.

The Stripper

All right - calm down, calm down. During odd moments over the last month or so I have been doing a stock-take of what is still to be painted, and found 3 battalions which I bought in via eBay, supposedly painted to a fairly decent standard. I reckoned that retouching them a little and adding the odd missing command figure would be an ideal, lightweight painting project to get me started off in January.

Well, actually, when I sat down with the bright light and the magnifying specs I was in for a disappointment. Not only was the painting worse than I remembered, but there was a variety of other minor irritations such as base-flock in the varnish, some shades I cannot match properly, and evidence of original casting flash which had never been removed before painting. One thing I have learned is that you never get happier about a paint job you don't like much to start with. I see no point in investing effort into painting up a unit which is never going to be very pleasing, so I decided to strip the entire 3 battalions and start again.

As luck would have it, we just had enough thick bleach to do the job, so I did the whole lot over a single night - laid them out carefully in one of my trusty ice cream tubs, covered them up in bleach, put the top on the tub and left them overnight.

I am a bit of a born-again bleach user. I came to believe in it only fairly recently, and I owe everything I know to a very useful post in Ian's Hinton Hunt blog [thanks again, Captain]. The secret is to get the soak time just right. Too short and it's not effective - too long and you get some kind of deterioration of the surface of the casting metal. My current "best practice" guideline is 12 hours.

The figures came up well. Toothbrushing and picking off the remaining shreds of paint wth a penknife is a messy, long-winded business, so I set myself up in the kitchen with appropriate amounts of coffee and the Celtic vs Rangers game on BBC Radio 5, and just fussed away at it. One final rinse to make sure everything was clean and chemically inert and things were ready for the next stage. When I take a look at the castings, I realise that this will involve removal of 30-year-old flash and filing bases flat and then I'll ship them off to David the Painter. So it's time and expense I hadn't planned for, but I'm comfortable that it's the right way to go. There will, of course, be a bit of an extra delay before the units are ready for The Cupboard, but hey.

A couple of final thoughts

(1) It sometimes surprises me how poorly some figures are painted - this is not snobbery, or because my own standards are unusually high, it is simply that it is only a bit more effort to make a decent job of it, metal wargame figures have never been cheap and it hardly seems worth the work involved in doing something half-baked.

(2) Interesting things happen in the bleach - some colours and some paints are much more resistant than others. Gold metallic paint seems to be tough, and flesh-colour is notoriously stubborn for some reason. Black gloss is also hard to shift, and this time I had some figures which had their shako pompoms finished in a sky blue paint which came out of the bleach almost exactly as it went in! I must find out what that paint was, and do my shed with it.

(3) You have to be very careful that any resident midnight ice cream fanciers do not get a nasty surprise. My tub usually has a skull and cross-bones post-it in place, though I can see that this might still cause problems for pirates who like ice cream.

Anyway, they're all done now and will go for painting once I've cleaned the castings up. Happy New Year to anyone reading this - I hope to get some more posts on the forthcoming campaign over the next few weeks. I also note - in passing - that the rules for Commands & Colors: Napoleonics new Spanish expansion include some things which I had already improvised for my own Spanish armies - double retreats for a start - so I am pleased that GMT got it right!

History as Farce - [look behind you!]

A few years ago, I spent a good while pondering the dreadful reviews of the 2002 French TV mini-series Napoleon, and decided that I should give it a miss. Eventually, a very cheap new copy turned up on eBay and - of course - I bought it. Since then I have managed to find lots of other things to do, so have avoided having to pluck up the courage to watch it. Last couple of days I thought it was probably time to give it a go, as the Christmas visitors have gone home and the New Year visitors have not yet arrived, so I have watched the first 2 instalments. My oh my.

The Ill-Tempered Clavier?

First thing I was dreading was the rumour I heard that the dialogue is badly overdubbed into English - you know the sort of thing - the young heroine's lips move rapidly and vehemently for 2 minutes, and the voice of an elderly American actress is heard to say "No way!". I had spent some little time trying to get a French-language version with English subtitles, but in fact it was a false rumour - the actors do speak English lines (so presumably there are different versions), though it is clear that on occasions they do not necessarily understand what they are saying. That's fine - you can get the hang of that. Oh yes - and my DVD, unless you do something about it, has Danish subtitles, which is probably why I got it cheap. OK - suppress the subtitles. Relax. Enjoy.

Christian Clavier - who certainly has commendable charisma - plays Napoleon as a pantomime character [oh yes he does!]. He is also, to put it bluntly, a very short, middle aged man with a comedic appearance - and no amount of his staring at the horizon changes that. The make-up applied to make him into Young Napoleon is a hoot, in fact all romantic scenes (and there are a great many) are a bit of a hoot, since his ladies are all, to a man(?), maybe a foot taller than he is. which makes staring into each other's eyes hazardous.

As far as the military stuff goes, we obviously have to cut them a fair amount of slack - a great deal of money was spent, and they really tried very hard, so it would not be reasonable to carp on about detail errors in uniforms or about the impossibility of doing a convincing full-scale reproduction of Austerlitz in a film (though, come to think of it, Bondarchuk did a good job of exactly that, but he had advantages of cheap manpower). It is attractive to watch - it is, after all, a fairy tale. There is a point where NB says "I have an army of 150,000 men with which I can conquer Europe!", and shortly (sorry - I mean quite soon) afterwards we see his army in action, and we manage to avoid thinking "so where are the other 149,875?".

I'm actually enjoying it a lot, though it has required a little adjustment to achieve this. It is soap opera, and not very high grade soap, at that. Empire-dale Farm, maybe? The Imperial family sitting in a semi-circle, taking turns to speak, is in the best traditions of high school drama groups the world over. The small Boy Scout camp which houses the army of invasion at Boulogne raises only a slight smirk once you have entered into the spirit of the thing. The history is a little odd, maybe - astonishing omissions and some surprising amounts of time given to what I would have dismissed as trivia, which just goes to show what a good thing it is for everybody that I don't work in television. It is pretty clear that the director (Yves Simoneau) has taken some major liberties with Max Gallo's novels (on which the films are based), and I leave it to someone who has read them to offer an opinion about the liberties that Mr Gallo had already taken with history-as-we-know-it. Not to worry - we have a gripping story, we have some colourful characters, we have a context which is close to my heart, and it is beautifully filmed. Pass the chocolates and get me another brandy and I am a happy bunny.

Nah - something jars.

It is very like the feeling I got watching the old Sherlock Holmes movies - I used to wonder why Dr Watson never told Holmes what a patronising, appallingly boring oaf he was - what a total lack of interpersonal skills he was cursed with, what a tragic shortage he had of compassion, or humility, or any other redeeming qualities - and hit him very hard with his umbrella. Or a large haddock would have done the trick. I would have stood and cheered - and no doubt would have been banned from the cinema.

Yes - it's the Alimentary Watson Effect. Napoleon utters his great plan for Austerlitz - "we will retreat a little, and when they follow us down the hill, we will charge back and kick the sheet out of them" (or something like that), and I swear the assembled General Staff all go "ooooooh!". Every line he speaks comes straight out of Napoleon's Quotations [the Concise Edition], and is delivered with the same, sneering, wide eyed expression of crazed over-confidence. I suspect that he will get his come-uppens in later instalments - history suggests that there may be a little of that. In the meantime, as well as the choccies and the armagnac, I intend to keep a large haddock handy.

Then I can relax and enjoy it fully.

Big Shiny Wargames Rules Books - and the occasional nugget

Every now and then I thin out my collection of wargames rules, and each time the process is roughly the same.

(1) I cannot find something that I know is in the bookcase somewhere - perhaps it's in the overflow area - well, maybe it's in the overflow area for the overflow area...

(2) What on earth is this? - I didn't know I had this rule set - when did I buy/download this? Let's have a cup of coffee and a browse for a minute.

(3) Hmmm - nicely put together, but I'm never going to use these. Put them in the OUT pile...

(4) Now - where was I?

In this way, I have had most of the Napoleonic rules you can think of at some time or other. The life-cycle is obscure - usually I can't remember buying them - they sneak in under the radar from somewhere, often via eBay, I guess - I have a preliminary read when they arrive, get bored or alienated part-way through and then forget all about them. I am constantly reminded, as I have discussed here before, how fashions change. There was a time when rules came in stapled booklets, sometimes with a few card pull-outs for templates and key tables, and the cover illustration would be done by someone who knew the uniforms but couldn't draw for toffee - the sort of artwork now found only on Odemars boxes.

However, at present there are a lot of big, very impressive hardback rules volumes on sale - I just did a quick scan of Amazon, and found all sorts - often retailing at around the £30 mark, usually around 200 pages, and copiously illustrated. The cost puts me off most of them anyway, but also many seem to be picture books about the whole subject of wargaming. They are attractive, and I quite enjoy looking at this sort of thing (though I probably wouldn't choose to own many), but often they appear to be written for newcomers to the hobby. Field of Glory looks nice (though anything published by someone called Slitherine somehow puts me on my guard - someone may think it's trendy and now, but it puts me in mind of a period many years ago when I used to have to try to take seriously commercial software companies with names like Shadowfax). I haven't read the Black Powder book (books?), but it looks (they look?) terrific. And then there's the Neil Thomas books, which seem to get a mixed press - all potentially of interest. Anything which promotes the hobby and attracts new people to it is to be welcomed, I suppose, but we have to be sure to remember why we are buying what we are buying.

So it came as a surprise to find I have no less than 3 big shiny books which I haven't read yet. Since they all finish up in the same end of the Tall Books shelf, their threeness was made even more obvious. In the kind of phoney war period just before Christmas, when the visitors haven't come yet but I have put away my paints in readiness, I got the Big Three down and had a look.

I have the Wargames Foundry Napoleon book by Matthew Fletcher - I have it because it was on a half-price offer and they were offering free shipping on paints if you bought a book. Ker-ching. The book is fun - it is exactly the sort of promotional view of Foundry's gnomish figures you would expect. The rules are wordy and quite Grand Manner-ish - laborious handling of skirmishers, for example - but they appear to boil down to a 2-page QRS - which you would have to photocopy if you wanted to make use of it. The rest is a hotch-potch of history, painting guides, pictures and more pictures - only some of which are relevant to the text. I enjoyed looking at the book, but will never refer to it again, will never attempt to read it right through, and am left thinking that it falls between two stools - it is too padded to be a useful presentation of a rule set, but the tables and so on make it far too fiddly a read for someone looking for a general introduction. Nice though...

Next to it is Lasalle, from Sam Mustafa's Honour series. Now I'm not going to say anything critical about Lasalle - it has a lot of enthusiastic followers, and looks like a good game, though I'm not crazy about the Command rules. I also have a faint concern that Mustafa - not noted for accepting the views of others - might arrange for a horse's head to be placed in my bed if I make any dissenting noises. I am actually a fan - I have played Grande Armée, and I liked Fast Play Grande Armée (which really only existed in unpublished, beta-test form), though eventually I was disillusioned when the Command rules did not provide the degree of Fast Play I was looking for. My main gripe against Prof Mustafa is that he seems to have given up on Bluecher - the grand tactical bit of the Honour series which was the one I was really waiting for - but his credentials are well established - his games are played by many experienced people, and I am sure they work well. I am disappointed that my (second hand) copy of Lasalle shows signs of splitting down the spine - this is not a cheap production - but it is all there, including a heavy duty pull-out QRS. Looks good, actually - I have decided I will have a serious go at Lasalle sometime soon.

The most surprising one of the three is the rule book for Napoleon at War, which is the new figures-&-rules-&-concept-&-packaging move from the man who brought us NapoleoN Miniatures. The figures are 18mm - I have only seen pictures - and I have no intention of buying any, but I bought the book for old time's sake. It is clearly related to the old NapoleoN rules - the hexes are gone, but the interesting rule whereby moving and manoeuvring is slower and more difficult when close to the enemy is still there, overall the game looks sensible and well thought out and the translation into English is a lot smoother. For me, it does have the advantage of being aimed at the sort of big battle I enjoy most. There is a little bit of the rules which I took a great liking to - it is maybe not that significant - it may not even be original (some of the NapoleoN systems were said to be borrowed from Flames of War, for example, which is a noble tradition), but I liked the simplicity.

It is in the very basic area of casualty calculation. Personally I cannot be bothered keeping written rosters, I don't care for casualty markers or miniature dice (though I have used them), and I don't want singly-based figures (too much hassle and too many broken bayonets) - I like my units to be either still in action or not - or at least to be disabled in big enough lumps to make the handling and the arithmetic easy and the level of attrition to be immediately visible. I like my casualties to come off in complete subunits or not at all. The NaW rules have infantry battalions which typically comprise 6 square bases each of 4 figures; the approach is buckets-of-dice - each base in the front row gets 2D6 when they fire (only 1D6 if they are moving, or being charged for less than a full move), and a 4 or better on each dice gets you a hit - there are further adjustments for cover and troop class and all that, but basically Peter Young would recognise this as a good standard approach. And then there is a Saving Throw - before you groan out loud, it is a Saving Throw such as I have not seen before, though you may have.

Each complete 4 hits removes a base, and any odd hits left over are the subject of a 1-dice Saving Throw (carried out by the owner of the target unit). If the dice comes up greater than the number of odd hits, then you forget them - if not, you lose another base. I like it - it is crude enough for me to be able to remember it, it gets the commander of the target unit involved in the firing process, and makes the "luck" element of the game lumpy enough to be entertaining. I do not use 4-man bases, but I do use 6-man bases, and it occurs to me that the same mechanism would work just as well for them. No doubt I'll forget I read this too, but - if only briefly - I did like it.