Not a THIRD Battalion, Surely?

My Peninsular War Allied army has two battalions of the 95th, 6 companies of the 5/60th and two KGL light battalions, so I already have more little green men than you could shake a ramrod at. This last year, in fact, I have sold, given away and otherwise disposed of some dozens of unpainted Les Higgins riflemen from the spares department, since only a madman could possibly need any more than I already have.

Right.

Unexpectedly, from various sources I have now obtained enough of the excellent Qualiticast Rifles figures to make up another of my small rifle units, so here, gentlemen, we have the 3rd Battalion of the 95th, some of them wearing the very cool forage cap, in appropriately Sharpesque style. Of course, I might have used them to replace one of my existing Higgins units, but I couldn't bring myself to do this, so three battalions it is - which is historically correct for the late Peninsular War anyway, I hasten to add.

Tree Blight

For the scenic aspects of my wargaming I use - pretty much exclusively - very old Merit trees. These were made by J & L Randall Ltd, whose range of HO/OO railway accessories is legendary, and I have a lot of them, in the three known varieties, some dating back to the late 1950s, I would guess. Some of my oldest fir trees of this type were among the very earliest trackside scenic add-ons for my first model railway (if anyone cares, my first loco was the Hornby Dublo LMS "Duchess of Atholl", which was prehistoric even when I first got it).

The definitive posting on Merit is in Clive's wonderful Hinton Hunter blog, here. I love these trees. I'm not completely sure why - they don't look especially realistic, to be sure, but they are part of that old black-and-white tradition in Terry Wise's early books and elsewhere, they are clean and practical, and I have come to take them for granted as part of my own arrangements. I have also owned much more expensive and exotic trees from all sorts of specialist makers, and they have come and gone - literally - like the withering leaves. Storage is never satisfactory with the de-luxe jobs, and I have a lifelong hatred of foliage flock detritus - no doubt a symptom of a heavily anal upbringing, but also of the permanent need to have wargaming co-exist pleasantly and harmoniously with the other activities of formal dining-rooms etc. So all the fancy stuff has passed on, yet I still have the Merit trees, augmented now and then by finds on eBay and elsewhere. The prices have become a bit silly - especially for someone like me who doesn't even keep the original boxes.

Shock horror. My world is now threatened by the gradual deterioration of my trees. The plastic, over all this time, has started to change. The rot is uneven, but some of them now have the structural properties of spun sugar, and are extremely delicate. I try to glue damage as it occurs, but I can see that my HO/OO plastic ecosphere is showing signs of sliding into history. This is not a trivial matter - I really don't know what I shall do if I have to replace them. No-one has ever made a direct equivalent and - very sadly indeed - the re-issue of almost the entire Merit range by Modelscene has specifically excluded the trees. I gather that the moulds were beyond redemption, and it has been suggested to me that they are unlikely to reappear, since modern flocked trees are so good now, and only a crazed nostalgist would want the Merit items.

I can almost feel the tears welling up as I write this. I shall continue to look after the trees I have left, but this is beginning to feel like a real ecological issue - does no-one care if, along with the red squirrel, my silly old trees disappear? I have to stop now - can't go on...

CCN Practice Game - Supplementary

After the bird feeders were back in action, what Nick really wanted to do was design his own battlefield, of course, and - being 9 - he got a bit carried away, and built a monster town in the middle of the table, using just about all of of my available buildings.

Eventually, when the Theme Park was complete, we had to have another (small) CCN fight in it. Somewhat wearily, I set up about 6 infantry units a side, knowing full well that the game was going to be a disaster - unplayable.

I have news - it worked - it was not very interesting, but CCN can handle this without problems, which is a surprise to me. There are a few no-brainer things to remember - in particular, since the rule for fighting into a town/village hex requires deduction of 2 combat dice, units having (or having been reduced to) an entitlement of 2 dice or less are no use at all in street fighting, and have to be pulled out and replaced with a bigger hammer, but otherwise it works.

Since I am never likely to have a town of this size set up again for a CCN game, I took a couple of pics.

Santiago de los Infantes - CCN Practice Game

Since it is the last day of the school holidays, I agreed with my son (who is 9) that he could help me with a Napoleonic battle - partly to keep us both entertained, and partly to keep my hand in with the Commands & Colors rules. Nick is a useful participant, since he is enthusiastic (sometimes about rather obscure aspects of the game), and goes about commanding his army in the manner of a 9-year-old, which can produce some interesting situations which you wouldn't normally try out - we all know a suicide attack is not likely to work, for example, but you don't often get to see one.

The place is crawling with them

Clauzel bringing his boys forward (Art Miniaturen)

French tirailleurs (Falcata & Art Miniaturen)

Morschauser or what?

Our battle was deliberately a big one - towards the upper end of what I think the normal CCN rules will handle. I won't attempt to dignify the game with any kind of report, but a few things and thoughts cropped up which I thought were worth noting.

(1) The action had 30-odd French units (mostly infantry) attacking a similar force of 20-odd Anglo-Portuguese - Bertrand Clauzel, with his own and Maucune's divisions of the Armée de Portugal and some cavalry support, attacking Picton's Allied 3rd Division, again with a little cavalry added. This is a fair old table-load, and again I am struck by the fact that lots of units lined up on a gridded table always looks like Morschauser.

(2) Mostly because I would normally avoid the situation, we placed a fordable river across half the middle ground to see what happens. Man, what a pain. Trying to shift a largish infantry force to stage a proper attack needs some very favourable Command cards at the best of times, and the additional delay caused by the stream makes it awful slow going. The French attack across the stream never got any momentum at all.

(3) Light infantry ducking in and out of woods are handy chaps, and they can fight as soon as they get in there, unlike the line, who have to spend a turn organising before they can carry out any combat when entering a wood.

(4) At one stage, I wasted a serious lot of time trying to defeat a single Portuguese battalion in square - I had two dragoon units nagging away at them, and it was pretty much a stalemate. Some horse artillery would have been a real boon.

(5) The amazing Flying Foot Artillery - at one point, Nick played the dreaded Grande Manoeuvre card, which allows you to move a bunch of units a long way in a hurry, and he took the mad step of advancing a battery of foot artillery onto a bridge over the stream. I wouldn't have done that, but it has to be said that they blew away allcomers for the rest of the battle, and were still there at the end. The point is duly noted.

(6) The main lesson of the session was probably that this size of a battle results in large clusters of units trying to get into action. Unless you are very lucky with the cards, or spend a long time collecting a good hand, the attacker can spend a long, frustrating while trying to trickle everyone into position by twos and threes. Defending becomes a much easier choice. An option, short of switching to my Grand Tactical variant (which would produce a very small game in this case), is maybe to inflate the numbers of units allowed to be ordered by the cards - double would be interesting.

(7) It was still very good fun. Nick enjoyed the CD of Napoleonic marches in the background, which the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children may be surprised to learn, and we finished comfortably in a little over 2 hours, which is remarkable considering the size of the action and the need to explain everything (no - it was me doing the explaining...).

We have to go and fill the bird-feeders now, and then we'll tidy up the battle, and Nick wants to try another one. Good so far.

Hooptedoodle #40a – Napoleon’s Last Words

Definitely not tonight, Josephine

Well, with thanks to super-sleuth Metal Detector, I revisited the death-bed scene in the Clavier film, this time with the Danish subtitles switched on. I still can’t make out what he says but, according to the subtitles, he says “Helvedet... Arméen...”, which Google Translate reckons means something like “Hell... army...”, which might be a nice reference to Jean Lanne’s earlier dying words, in which he maintained that he was going to Hell, because that is what happens to people like him, and that he would meet Napoleon there.

I was sort of comfortable with that, but I find that a more official record of Napoleon’s last words says that he said “tête d’armée...” and then “Josephine...”. I guess he just mumbled, and no-one really knows. Please feel free to make up your own version. That is my own Last Word on the subject.

In the wider world of last words and epitaphs, there are some great classics, of course. Two of my personal favourites are Spike Milligan’s proposed epitaph, “I TOLD YOU I WAS ILL”, and the reported last words of Buddy Rich, the noted jazz drummer and psychopath – as he went in for his final (unsuccessful) heart operation, he was asked if he was allergic to anything, and replied “Country & Western music”.

Hooptedoodle #40 - The Maxims of Ernie's Dad

Now this really is a silly one. I had another go at trying to hear what Napoleon's last words are in the Christian Clavier film, and I still can't make it out. For a moment I thought how weird it would be if he said "Rosebud", and then I remembered Ernie's dad. The connection is, at best, tenuous - all right - there is no connection - it's just something to do with the humour implicit in trying to find deep philosophical meaning in something which is actually meaningless. Analysts of Beatles' lyrics used to excel in this field.

My old friend Ernie - alas no longer with us - was Welsh, and his dad was a fearsome ex-miner with a devotion to Chapel and to strong drink. When Ernie left home at 16 to become a naval cadet, his father made one of the longest speeches of his life. He said, "Always remember to trust in the Lord, Ernie, and never forget that what you keep in your pocket will strike no sparks".

Ernie promised that he would remember it, and for years afterwards he wondered what on earth it meant. When his dad became old and infirm and went into a nursing home, Ernie went to visit him, and decided to ask him about it. His dad said, "Did I say that? Can't remember anything about it - it makes no sense at all to me", and the subject was never mentioned again. Having fretted about it for years, Ernie was understandably disappointed.

If you were hoping that, in spite of everything, there might be some point to this story, you have my apologies.

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.