Solo Campaign - The Quarries of Malpartida

On Saturday 9th May 1812, Maj.Gen Karl, Graf von Alten - a Hanoverian in the British service, fought a defensive action at Malpartida, between the Portuguese-Spanish border and the fortress of Almeida. His little army consisted of his own Light Division - an elite force which had not thus far been involved in combat in the 1812 campaign - with support from a brigade of light cavalry, plus a battalion of militia and a howitzer battery seconded from the Almeida garrison. His force totalled some 5700 men, with 12 guns. The cavalry commander was his brother, Viktor, and one of the cavalry regiments, the Brunswick-Oels Hussars, had ridden a remarkable distance from Elvas to join him, but - since the cavalry played no part in the day's business - we shall not mention them again.

 

Initial situation, French on the left

His opponent was Bertrand Clauzel, with his own (2nd) Division of the Armee de Portugal, plus a brigade of dragoons and two batteries from the reserve of the AdP. Since these troops had already been involved in some of the heaviest fighting, Clauzel was forced to assemble some small units into provisional units to give them a useful combat capability. In all, Clauzel had rather more than 6600 men, with 24 guns.

[Though I gave serious thought to using some different rules for ths action, I used CCN again. 5 cards each, French to move first, 6 Victory Banners to decide matters.]

Von Alten took advantage of two ancient quarries (of Sant Iago and San Rafael) near the village - his troops were laid out with painstaking care, with riflemen in the two quarries, a horse artillery unit between them and reserves in support (notably the 43rd Foot). Vandeleur's brigade was placed on the left flank, an area where woods and the village would ensure a difficult assault for the French. Overlapping fields of fire were carefully worked out, and a frontal attack against the area around the quarry pits would be a hazardous undertaking indeed, across an open, stony area.

Clauzel placed Berlier's veteran brigade opposite the quarries, and Pinoteau's (formerly Barbot's) brigade on the right, where they were prepared for a long, difficult day, attempting to root Vandeleur's men out of the woods around Malpartida itself.

The action produced a quick and rather surprising result, in a game lasting a little over an hour. Clauzel opened with a Bombard card, which gave his artillery (heavier, longer-ranged and more numerous than the Allied) a further bonus, and in the first turn reduced the two Allied batteries to a very weak state. Von Alten's defence was not looking as strong as it had, but he prepared for the French to come on "in the same old way".

They did not disappoint him - on Turn 2, Clauzel played a Grande Manoeuvre card, and sent Berlier's troops in against the quarries. They covered the open ground quickly - a Grande Manoeuvre lets the troops get there quickly, but they have to wait until next turn to fight. The Allies, of course, let them have everything they had available (which wasn't helped by very poor cards for the Centre sector) - Berlier took some losses, as expected, and the 2/27e Ligne were driven back by rifle fire from San Rafael, but the remainder of the attacking force had reached the British lines in far better shape than Von Alten might have hoped for.

Then things happened very quickly - the 43rd Foot were routed and eliminated, the 3/95th Rifles were reduced, in their quarry, to a single "block" (at which strength they were unable to fight back), the 1/95th, in their own quarry, were driven out very easily, failing disastrously to re-take the position, Col Barnard, the brigade commander, was critically wounded, and men from the 25e Leger overran the remnants of Ross's Troop of the horse artillery. In desperation, Von Alten brought up the Thomar battalion of Portuguese militia - previously untried, and there only as emergency secondments from garrison duties at Almeida - and - unbelievably - they defeated the exhausted veterans of the 1/25e Leger and took back the Sant Iago quarry. But it was all in vain, the sixth Victory Banner was on the table. The cavalry, the complicated operations around Malpartida were completely irrelevant - a preliminary artillery bombardment and a rather crude frontal charge carried the day.

Von Alten withdrew his men, placed Vandeleur and the cavalry as a rearguard, and headed off towards Abrantes. Clauzel's next task was to mask the fortress at Almeida, so the Light Division were left to retire without further harrassment. Riflemen in quarries? - piff! French won 6-1.

OOBs

French Force - Gen de Divn Bertrand Clauzel

Second Divn, Armee de Portugal (Clauzel)

            Brigade Berlier: 25e Leger & 27e Ligne (5 Bns)

            Brigade Pinoteau: 50e & 59e Ligne (4 Bns)

Brigade Picquet: 6e & 11e Dragons (4 Sqns)

15/3e Art a Pied (Capt Pajot)

10/3e Art a Pied (Capt Dyvincourt)

19/3e Art a Pied (Capt Gariel)

Losses - approx 800 men k/w

Allied Force - Maj.Gen Karl, Graf Von Alten

Light Division (K von Alten)

            Barnard's brigade: 1/43rd, 1/95th, 3/95th, 1st Cacadores

            Vandeleur's brigade: 1/52nd, 2/95th, 3rd Cacadores

Troop 'I', RHA (Maj Ross)

Cavalry (Maj.Gen V von Alten): 1st Hussars KGL, Brunswick Hussars

Attached (from Almeida garrison): Thomar militia & howitzer battery (4th Ptgse Art)

Losses - approx 1600 men k/w/t, 10 guns destroyed or taken, Col Barnard gravely wounded and captured.

Von Alten's "Hornet's Nest" - Ha!

 

3/95th in the quarry of Sant Iago

 

Opening bombardment - pretty much ruined the Allied batteries

 

Grande Manoeuvre charge by Berlier - crude but effective

  

...and suddenly the hornets had gone

  

Unlikely heroes - the Thomar militia briefly won back one of the quarries,
though it didn't affect the outcome

Hooptedoodle #55 - An Unfamiliar Bug

Just another from my occasional series of dumb observations on Nature. We've had a little excitement last week since we've had siskins on the garden nut feeders, which is very unusual here in the Land of Mud, but today I saw something I've just never seen before. Here he is - about 3mm across, round and very flat, with some little spidery legs at the front. He was walking on the curtains in our attic. Anyone ever seen anything like this before? - it is suggested that it may be some kind of tick - I really wouldn't know.

If these are commonplace, and everyone knows what they are - if there are likely to be specimens living in my navel, for example - then I shall express amused surprise and move lightly on, having learned something, but it's certainly not anything I've seen before.

In case anyone is anxious, we released it carefully and gently in the garden, of course, so I certainly hope it's not dangerous...

Solo Campaign - the Battle of Allariz

The Battle of Allariz, Friday 8th May 1812

Nicolas Guye (waving his hat) with the King's Guard at Allariz

Sir Thomas Graham, with the First and Seventh Divisions of the Allied army, plus the cavalry brigades of Von Bock (KGL Dragoons) and Col Otway (Portuguese), defended a position near the village of Allariz, close to the Portuguese border, on the road between Orense and Braga. He had a total of some 11500 men with 12 guns, and he also had available the support of a small Spanish force of good quality troops under the command of the Conde de Espana, a further 6000 men with 10 guns. Espana's troops were quartered some distance from Allariz, at Arabaldo on the River Minho, and had to march to the field to join the Anglo-Portuguese army.

In this campaign, whenever an Anglo-Portuguese force is to collaborate with a Spanish force in battle, a dice is thrown to test the level of co-ordination between the commanders. In this instance, given the distance travelled, it was determined that from the 7th turn onward, a dice would be thrown to test for the arrival of Espana. A throw of 6 would be successful arrival, and the position of arrival (left, centre, right) would also be diced for - thereafter Spanish units may be called onto the table in the requisite sector as Command Cards allowed - generals can arrive on the table attached to units.

The opposition included contingents from the Armee de Portugal (AdP), Armee du Centre (AdC) and Armee du Nord (AdN), all under the command of Marshal Marmont - a total of approximately 17850 men with 24 guns. The French were greatly superior in both cavalry and artillery. The forces met at approximately 10 o'clock, on a fine, clear morning.

[CCN stuff: Because this battle is large by normal CCN standards, I did away with the additional "converged" light battalions which I normally field for each brigade, and adopted the normal CCN rule that all light regiments on both sides are classed as LT (I usually classify French legere units as Line). Both armies had units depleted by previous campaign action - I combined the single remaining subunit of the British 51st Foot (W Yorks LI) with one of the KGL light battalions. The nature of the field can be seen in the pictures - each side received 6 cards, the French moved first, and victory was set at 9 Victory Banners. The Allies, initially, have 5 designated Leaders - Graham, Henry Campbell, Hope, Halkett, Von Bock - and the French 5 - Marmont, Foy, Guye, Montbrun, Maupoint]

Graham placed his army on a line of hills - the First Division with the artillery on his right, the Seventh Division on his left. The Portuguese cavalry was held behind his centre, the German dragoons on the right flank. Col Halkett with the 1st Lt Bn of the KGL was placed in an advanced position in a wood on the right.

Marmont had Guye's Spanish Divn, including King Joseph's Guard, on his left, with Foy's Divn of the Armee de Portugal on the right. He placed Maupoint's light cavalry on the left end of his line, and Curto's brigade of light cavalry on the right, while Montbrun had personal command of the heavy cavalry in the centre.

Aware that De Espana's Spanish force was on the way, Marmont commenced a very vigorous attack on the Allied left (including a Bayonet Charge Command Card). Chemineau's brigade took heavy losses in this attack [and after 3 turns they were 3-1 down on Victory Banners], but eventually pushed Hope's men off the ridge [making good use of Combined Arms attacks using infantry with horse artillery]. While this was proceeding, Von Bock got involved in a bloody and unnecessary fight with the French cavalry on the opposite flank. The French 5e Chevauxlegers-Lanciers [who may not have existed in May 1812?] performed very poorly, and were resoundingly defeated in a single charge, but the two light units of the Duchy of Stralsund-Ruegen rescued the situation for the French, and after a long and fierce struggle they eliminated the KGL dragoons - Von Bock was mortally wounded during this action.

As the Allied left gave way, Montbrun attacked their centre with the bulk of the cavalry - this started badly, as the 13e Cuirassiers were shattered by fire from MacDonald's Troop of RHA, but the 25e Dragons, supported by Curto's light cavalry, routed Otway's Portuguese horse and swept round behind the end of the line of the Allied First Division. At this point, very belatedly, the Allies finally managed to roll a 6 to cue the Spanish reinforcements, and it transpired that De Espana's men would appear from behind Graham's right flank. Sadly, it was all too late - none of the Spanish troops made it onto the table before the French gained the requisite 9th Victory Banner, to give them a decisive win by 9-5. The Allied First Division, with the single exception of the 24th Foot, were never seriously engaged, neither were Guye's French Division, who opposed them - the action was decided elswhere. 

Graham, with no cavalry left, was left to withdraw as best he could - because of the disparity in cavalry strength, and the decisive result, the Allies were not allowed the customary "battlefield recovery" step, which allows a proportion of lost "blocks" to return to the ranks, so some of Graham's units were completely destroyed in the battle.

OOBs

French Army - Marshal Auguste Viesse de Marmont

Division Foy (AdP)

            Bde Chemineau: 6e Leger & 69e Ligne (5 Bns)

            Bde Desgraviers: 39e & 76e Ligne (4 Bns)

            3/2e Art a Cheval (Capt Guerrier)

            6/4e Art a Pied (Capt Braty)

Division Guye (AdC)

            Bde Merlin: King Joseph's Guard (5 Bns)

            Bde Casapalacios: 1e Leger (Castille), 2e Ligne (Toledo), Royal-Etranger (4 Bns)

            Guard Horse Battery (Capt Desert)

Division Montbrun (AdP)

            Bde Boyer: 15e & 25e Dragons (4 Sqns)

            Bde Curto: 3e Hussards & 22e Chasseurs a Cheval (6 Sqns)

            Bde Vial: 13e & 26e Chasseurs a Cheval (6 Sqns)

            5/5e Art a Cheval (Capt Graillat)

Division Maupoint (AdN)

            Bde ??: 13e Cuirassiers, 5e Chevauxlegers-Lanciers (6 Sqns)

            Bde Kleinwinkel: 1e & 2e Chev-Leg (Stralsund-Ruegen)

Total casualties - approx 1000 infantry, 600 cavalry.

Allied Army - Lt.Gen Sir Thomas Graham

First Division (Maj.Gen H Campbell)

            H Campbell's Bde: 1/Coldstream & 1/3rd Ft Gds

            Blantyre's Bde: 2/24th, 1/42nd, 2/58th & 1/79th

            Von Low's Bde: 1st, 2nd & 5th Line Bns, KGL

            Gardner's Battery, RA

Seventh Division (Lt.Gen Sir John Hope)

            Halkett's Bde: 1st & 2nd Lt Bns KGL & Brunswick-Oels Jaegers

            Von Bernewitz's Bde: 51st & 68th & Chasseurs-Britanniques

            McDonald's Troop, RHA

Cavalry (Maj.Gen Von Bock)

            Von Bock's Bde: 1st & 2nd Dragoons, KGL

            Otway's Bde: 1st & 11th Portuguese Cavalry

Total casualties - approx 2800 infantry, 1300 cavalry, 5 guns lost.


The pictures, as last time, owe much to my son Nick's efforts - any good shots here are almost certainly his:

General view of the battlefield at the outset, French on the right

French left flank - the lancers were very poor

French centre and right - Foy's boys at the far end

The French position seen from their right flank

Forlorn Hope? - Sir John with the Seventh Divn

The heavy end of the Allied line - the First Divn on the right

Marmont in the farmyard

French horse artillery contributed well to the attacks

Colin Halkett in the woods with the KGL Lights

Chemineau's brigade go in with the bayonet

Brunswickers in action

KGL Line Infantry

58th (Rutlandshire) and 79th (Camerons)

King Joseph's Guard Horse Artillery

The beginning of the end - the French roll up the Allied left

3eme Hussards mean business

The Result - not a big help for Wellington?

     

Magnetic Spaniards - and beyond....?

 

The Sideways Spaniards

Some months ago, I suddenly realised the usefulness of magnetic sheet for storing figures safely. The Cupboard had run out of space, and I decided to rehouse my artillery and support vehicles in A4 box files, lined with steel paper - much like everyone else does, in fact. My units are all based with rigid plywood or MDF, and applying self-adhesive mag sheet to the undersides was a lot easier than I had expected. So I now have 6 boxes full of guns and limbers and pontoon trains and wagons and all that stuff, and the magnets stick so powerfully that on occasion (and it makes me a little faint to think of it) I have shown off by slowly standing the odd box file vertical, so show that the pieces stay firmly attached. I have, I hasten to add, laid them flat again before the applause died away.

I have been very pleased with this exciting new departure (for me - I don't get out much), and, as The Cupboard determinedly continues to shrink, I have come to accept that I need to adopt the same approach for some other units, to free up more space. Next in the queue, I decided, is my Spanish Nationalist army, so I bought smart blue files for them from Tesco, ordered up some mag sheet and steel paper from the most excellent Trevor at Magnetic Displays, and spent an interesting evening preparing the files and applying the mag sheet to the subunit bases. And in the files they go. Excellent.

Now, of course, this requires me to separate the (sub)unit bases from the sabots on which they normally live, and it suddenly became very obvious that if I put a steel paper patch on each sabot, and re-painted them with baseboard green, my newly-magnetic Spaniards would sit very firmly thereupon when they came out of the boxes to fight. So another evening with ruler, pencil and scissors followed, and - by 'Eck - it works!

I was a bit worried that even a thin coat of baseboard paint would weaken the magnetic pull, but it is still fine. I was going to publish a picture of all the units standing on edge on their sabots but I chickened out. It does work, though - trust me – there is a single unit at a near-vertical angle in the photo.

And the point of this further step with the sabots? The point, gentlemen, is that I am a noted dropper of wargame soldiers. It may be the hated varifocals, it may be temporary changes in the Earth's gravitational pull, it is most likely connected with dementia in some form, but I live in constant dread of subunits sliding off their sabots because I have momentarily lost my artificial horizon. As the collection get older and more valuable, and as my own ability to repair or replace them decays, so cruel Nature has me always a little anxious about accidental damage on the battlefield - or on the floor not far from the battlefield. The magnets look like they could be the answer. Certainly I could still drop an entire unit in one go - I haven't thought of a solution for that one other than not playing with them - but with magnetized bases on a steel-paper-coated sabot they are very reassuringly solid.

Downsides? Not much, really - the mag sheet is 0.55mm thick, so the units stand just that much taller, but the bases are a mixture of 2mm and 3mm anyway, so I can't really notice - expecially since I am quite a lot taller than the troops, and tend rather to look down on them (so to speak). This is all so successful that I have now started pondering whether I should treat all the rest of my units the same way. The chaps who are still living in The Cupboard would be much easier to handle safely, and it would be possible to put them in prepared box files (or whatever) if I need to transport them - a facility I have never had before. There is the further problem that I have nowhere to transport them to, but that is a detail, and I might have some friends one day. You never know.

The real thing to think about is the cost and the labour involved. It also occurs to me that I have no idea how permanent the magnetic properties of the sheet are, or - more seriously, perhaps - what is the life expectancy of the self-adhesive coating. It would be a sad thing to invest a lot of time and beer money in converting my entire collection, and then find that the pads all dropped off as the adhesive perished. I could, of course, glue them back in place....

Stop it.

I'll continue to ponder this. There seem to be a lot of advantages, but I'll weigh it up. At present, not yet having worked out the cost, I am gently enthusiastic.

To end with something of a digression, my young son and I have a long-standing private joke about the Sideways People - this stems from a display that used to be in our local IKEA store, which had kitchen tables and desks and similar mounted on the wall, 90 degrees from the vertical, with dishes, cutlery, computers and so on attached to match. Our theory is that the Sideways People come in at night, and live their strange, 90-degrees-out-of-phase lives in IKEA when no-one else is around, though how they could pour milk into the cereal bowls has always been a puzzle. Anyway, my new enthusiasm for magnetic sheet enters into the Sideways People fantasy - in theory, it would be possible to fight a small battle on the fridge door, for example. Not sure I'll rush to try it, but the Sideways People themselves might see this as a further advantage. 

Hooptedoodle #54 - Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead

I have, in the past, made the occasional utterance about time lost to the antivirus software from McAfee which I pay for as part of my agreement with my Internet Service Provider.

Things have got so bad recently that I started having a look at a few of the support discussion threads for McAfee, and it seems that - though the originators swear it is now fixed - things went pear-shaped after an upgrade last September. All over the known world, McAfee's customers are becoming more and more stressed. At the start of this week, it took eight minutes for me to open a Word document which I had typed up and saved the previous day - McAfee was checking it. At various times in the day, even when I am not online, the desktop computer's fan has been switching on and - there it is - McAfee is suddenly using 90% of available CPU. No-one knows why, not even McAfee. On Tuesday we had a minor family problem and I had to find some things out and get stuff arranged quickly - no go. McAfee wouldn't let me do anything. It was busy.

The final straw was when I found a suggestion from a member of a support team on one of the discussion threads, which suggested that the person writing in with the problem should think about buying a more powerful computer, so they could live with the demands of their AV software.

As Descartes used to say at breakfast, "Un oeuf is enough". I am, as it happens, planning to upgrade my desktop machine in a month or two, but it certainly isn't going to be because McAfee forces me to do so. So I have uninstalled McAfee - it didn't go willingly, but it is gone. I am now paying for a licence which I am not using, but to hell with it. I have installed Microsoft Security Essentials, which is free, and which appears to work nicely and quietly in the background without drama. It did a full system scan yesterday in a little over 2 hours, which compares favourably with McAfee's recent record of 8 hours. When the new machine comes, I intend to put McA back in place, but I will remember that there is an alternative if I need it. In the meantime, I can get on with things and smile a little smug smile to myself.

There is a description of computer malware on one of the support sites I was reading, and part of it says:

"A virus's primary function is to take control of the computer's operating system and deny user access to communications and application software"

Seems strangely familiar - normally you don't have to pay for a licence for it, though. All together, now, please join in...

Viva Villaran - we need more heroes

Castillo las Cuevas, Cebolleros

As it happens, this is all Vive l'Empereur's fault. He suggested that I get some convincing photos of me doing a real siege in the back yard, to satisfy the non-believers and the realism prophets out there of my credentials and great wisdom. I thought it would be a great joke, ho-ho, to fake some pictures of something like the earthworks at Vicksburg and claim it was me.

The intended joke, and anything else I can think up, vanishes without trace - pales into invisibilty - compared with this, which I just came across by accident. If you haven't seen it before, I recommend you have a look. This is the solitary work of one Serafin Villaran, a welder from Burgos, who decided in 1977 to build a castle for himself, at Cebolleros, near Burgos. He died in 1998, before it was complete, but his family worked to finish it, and it has become a major tourist attraction locally.

What a monument. What an outrageous, heroic, bloody wonderful monstrosity. Apart from the size, the labour, the humbling devotion, the in-your-face refusal to conform to any known style of historical architecture, the whole thing has a delightfully unhinged quality which I just love.

Some thoughts, in no particular order:

(1) Wow.

(2) I want one.

(3) How did he get planning permission to build it?

(4) What are archeologists two thousand years from now going to make of it? 

Wanted: Time Machine - a Whiff of Foy's 10th Law

Following on from yesterday's posting on the Solo Campaign, and with particular reference to the second week of my Siege of Ciudad Rodrigo, I received a comment which bothered me a little more than I would have expected. For a start, it was something of a put-down - informative in a way which is clearly intended to demonstrate the superiority of the informer rather than to provide help. For another thing, it was anonymous, which I don't care for either, so I didn't publish it. So there.

I am reminded of my old Hooptedoodle note about Foy's Tenth Law, which you can find here if you are interested.

To clarify a point, I am aware that a siege was a complicated process, involving a series of formal, defined steps, a lot of science and received methodology, a load of back-breaking labour and in incredible amount of bravery. I'm certainly not an expert, but I've read enough to understand roughly how it worked. My nameless correspondent felt that my reducing something as "immense" as a siege to a series of "stupid dice rolls and a look-up table" was trivialising an "important and dingified" [sic?] aspect of warfare in a way which he considered to be pathetic. My own irritation is probably at least partly due to my recognising some truth in this(!), but sadly he did not go on to explain how I could have done a more satisfactory job of fitting open-ended sieges into a map campaign with a weekly order-cycle. If you're still out there, my friend, I'd be pleased to hear more.

All wargames are by definition artificial and unrealistic to an extent - a favourite hobbyhorse of mine - otherwise we would not survive them. What we really need, for complete realism, is to be transported back to the actual event and take part in it. I haven't any good ideas how to do that, either, but if Mr Anonymous has, I hope he will take the trouble to stand right on the top of the Great Breach during the height of the action.