Hooptedoodle #132 - The Third Light

Reckless behaviour

A long time ago, I worked in Edinburgh with a fierce old Aberdonian named Ken.

Ken was a heavy smoker, which killed him in the end, sadly, and once, in a pub session (during which smokers used to take a religious pride in making things as uncomfortable as possible for non-smokers in those days), he suddenly blew out a match offered to him, shouting "Third light!".

When I asked about this, he explained that it was very unlucky to be the third person lighting a cigarette from the same match, and that he always took this very seriously. He believed it dated from the First World War, when it was considered that the time taken to light a third cigarette gave an enemy sniper a chance to draw a bead on the third man. I imagine that no-one in the trenches was prepared to go to any lengths to disprove this practical guideline, so it became a law. Ken - and many others, apparently - were convinced that bad luck would still come to anyone accepting a Third Light, though WW1 was long gone, and there were very few snipers around in Rose Street on a Friday lunchtime in the late Seventies.

Putting the theory to the test

I have always been intrigued by pieces of folklore and common-use idioms which come from a military background. This probably comes from a time in my childhood (in Liverpool) when I suddenly realised that our everyday language and school slang involved many words and phrases which were, on the face of it, meaningless, but which on further investigation turned out to come from the merchant seaman's lexicon or from the British army in India.

An obvious attempt at suicide

OK - back to Ken. My interest in this subject is very casual, but I understand that it is likely that the origins of the Third Light superstition - also known as "Three on a Match" - are older than WW1, and may come from the Crimean War. Idly, I find myself wondering if they had snipers operating in the Crimea (I know they had them in the ACW), and just when it was that smoking became universal in the British army. In the Peninsular War, I believe that the widespread smoking habit of the Spanish was regarded as something rather peculiar by their British allies.

Anyone have any views on this? Just idle curiosity on my part.

Touching & Retouching - Sows' Ears & Silk Purses

There are a few real life distractions going on at present, and I’m recovering from a major refurb effort on some bought-in ECW figures. As a result I have been doing very little painting for a few weeks, and have only just started on another retouching job, which I can pick up or put down as time permits in the evenings.

This time it is a French Napoleonic light infantry battalion. I didn’t need or expect to have another of these, but they were on eBay, and they looked quite nice…

I should have them finished in a few days, but at present they are progressing more slowly than I had hoped, and – a recurring theme for the past 15 years or so – yet again I find that I am surprised by the manner in which simple refurb jobs never turn out to be what you thought they were going to be. You would think I would get the hang of this – it isn’t a problem, but constantly being surprised by the same phenomenon is worth thinking about, at least. My grandmother used to maintain that every day you learn something, but that it is not good if it is always the same thing.

The starting point for buying old figures always involves the same decision point – the figures are suitable, and either

(A) they are cheap enough – or rare enough – to justify a full strip-and-start-again job, or

(B) they are nice enough as they are to fit in with just a little touch-up and some new bases

...and it goes wrong immediately from that point.

I am the man who once bought some really pretty Nassau infantry from eBay, and had them in the Nitromors within a day when I saw what the paint job was really like close up. I am also the man who stripped and repainted a fairly expensive pre-owned cavalry unit when I realized that the paint had been “professionally” applied to castings which still had the original flash on them. There are many tales like this – in fact almost all of my repainted units involved a post-delivery reclassification from (B) to (A) to some extent or other.

The present battalion of Frenchies are typical. They looked super on eBay – Les Higgins figures, painted in a plain, old-fashioned style similar to mine own – they would fit right in. A bit of an indulgence to add yet another unit of lights, but hey. There was an early setback when it came to light that the seller had counted them incorrectly, and the batch was 3 figures smaller than advertised. OK – we sorted that out. So I had 15 chasseurs (they even had their bayonets) plus an officer, all painted. My bold friend and ally Iain came up with another 3 unpainted figures to provide some carabiniers, I added a charging officer and a hornist (both by Qualiticast) from the spares box, a mounted colonel by Kennington and an improvised eagle bearer, really a Falcata Spaniard. Bingo – a battalion, as defined by the house standards. More painting than I had had in mind, but fine.

And then you sit down with the painting glasses and the bright lights, and line up the selected paint pots in the right order, and get fresh water pots, and a good coffee, and put on the music (Debussy and Sarah Vaughan and Steely Dan, this week…) and take a deep breath, and then the truth starts to filter through.

It’s pointless to analyze absolutely everything, but I think I retouch things for a number of reasons:

(1) The paint is damaged

(2) The uniform details are incorrect

(3) The paintwork does not please me, for any reason at all (it’s easier to change them now than live for years with the wish that I had changed them)

(4) Wow – now that I get a good look, that white paint is pretty yellow – better sort that out

(5) …and those red plumes have faded very badly…

(6) …and any combination of the above…

These Vallejo paints are much better...

This particular batch have failed on points (2) to (4), and it is now clear that they were once expertly painted, but subsequently touched up by a less skilled artist. In the list of ouches there is a classic bad decision – the later painter decided to improve things by applying white piping to the edges of the dark blue turnbacks (on dark blue coats). Mistake. Inaccurate contrasting piping sticks out like a sore thumb – spoils the whole thing. I probably could not have done any better myself, but I wouldn’t have attempted it. I firmly believe that no piping at all looks superior to bad piping – I shall ensure that the prominent piping around the lapels is done as well as I can, but in an inconspicuous spot such as the turnbacks (and these are 20mm figures, in modern terms) it is better not to bother. I have now obliterated the piping – anyone who knows it should be there will see it anyway…

They’ll be ready soon – I’m so unprepared that I’ll have to find a suitable identity for them, so they can have a proper flag. Great stuff, but will I have learned anything? – probably not.

The Spaniards of 1809

This is all a bit of an about-face, since I have previously decided – and justified – that I would use an unexpected supply of bicorned Spanish infantry to provide units of Urban Militia to supplement my post-1811 army, rather than starting to tinker with adding battalions of white-uniformed chaps from 1809, however attractive they might be.

The decision was fairly easy, since I couldn’t possibly expect to collect enough figures to make a decent 1809 army, and since the earlier and later versions of the Spanish army don’t really mix very comfortably. Well, not for me.

Since then I have very quickly obtained a pile of figures – remainder stocks of NapoleoN and Falcata still existed, if you ferreted about a bit, and someone unloaded a stack of unpainted figures on eBay. Suddenly – to my considerable surprise – a proper 1809 army is a real possibility. Amazing what you can achieve when (because?) you are not really trying. OK – let’s be honest – they may not be much of a prospect for winning battles, but they should be beautiful. The white uniform introduced in 1805 is a great favourite of mine.

At present I have enough figures for some 18 battalions of line infantry, 4 of light, 4 of grenadiers, plus an adequate supply of generals, command figures and some very natty sappers. Some of my existing (post 1811) army will slot right in – particularly the light cavalry and the voluntarios in round hats. I am negotiating (haltingly) with a supplier in Spain for some 1809 artillery and cavalry, and am looking very seriously at the Kennington Spaniards – these last are just a tad small compared with the NapoleoN and Falcata boys, but self-contained units from a single manufacturer will be fine; Kennington do very nice artillery crews and line infantry. All sorts of possibilities are shaping up.

Thus far I’ve sent two 2-battalion regiments of infantry to be painted (Africa and Reina), but it now behoves me to sit down with the order of battle for the real Army of the Centre from early 1809 (which I have managed to correct and re-engineer by painstaking comparison of various sources) and plan exactly which bits of it will make up my new army.

The idea – to start with – will be to have infantry divisions each containing (typically) 2 x 2 battalion regiments of line (or guard), 2 or 3 battalions of lights, 2 battalions  of provinciales (dressed in white like the line, but all with red facings), 1 combined battalion of grenadiers and a foot battery. How many such divisions is possible or even sensible I have yet to decide – 3 might be a decent effort – I’d like 4, but that’s not feasible at present, so I’ll maybe go for a Vanguard Divn, a Reserve (with the guards in) and a Line Divn.

Having made some token show of top-down planning, I can now get back to the fun business of drooling over which uniforms I fancy! My sketch OOB includes 2 battalions of the Guarda Real, 1 of the Walloon Guards and 1 of the Regimiento Irlanda, this last in their sky blue with yellow facings, so that should all be a good colourful addition. The grenadier battalions will mostly be converged from the relevant companies of all the regiments in a division, so mixed facings will be the order of the day. I am contemplating the painting of the ornately embroidered bags on the grenadiers’ bearskins with a little alarm…

There’s no rush – I’ll just work away at building the army, and when they reach some kind of critical mass they can start doing some fighting. Pictures will appear here from time to time as parts are completed.

Cavalry is interesting – I have 2 regiments of light cavalry from my existing Spanish army who will be perfectly fine in the earlier period, and two regiments of irregular lancers, just right for Baylen. My friend Goyo is working to get me some cavalry figures which will work well as Line Cavalry (in blue) or dragoons (in yellow – I always wanted some yellow dragoons!).

Just a labour of love, really.

Hooptedoodle #131 - Not in My Back Yard (NIMBY)

We love the things to bits - Roe Deer - it's marvellous to think that wild creatures as big as these live in the forests around our home, but we have a little problem this week.

They have been coming into our garden and nibbling at the young growth on my wife's plants. The strawberries are wrecked, and a number of other promising specimens have been chewed down to ground level. I'm very sorry, but this won't do at all. I have still to have a chat with the farm's ghillie (gamekeeper) about what we can do, but I have been looking on the internet for discussion of solutions for such a problem. As ever, most of the suggestions are worthless, but there are some ideas out there.

Little machines which are triggered by infrared, and then produce strobe lights and sounds, ranging from dogs barking to ultrasonic things. Interesting, in a wacky way - expensive, too. Bags of human hair sprinkled in the woods. Things which smell of dog, or coyote, or lions (!) are reputed to discourage deer. Dried blood, I read somewhere - but this is getting a bit dark.

We are going to try our variation on a recommendation from a man in Maryland, no less. Set up a barrier about 20 feet back into the woods from the bottom of the garden, consisting of two strands of fishing line (15lb strength, so as not to hurt or entangle the animals), wound around the trees and stretching between them at about 18 inches and 2 feet from the ground, which will be adorned (if such be the word) with fishing rod bite alarms, which are little jingly bells, officially made of plastic and alloy, and thus non-rusting. That is the theory.

All sorts of comic visions present themselves - the place could sound like Santa's sleigh at night, or the deer might walk straight through them, or bring all their mates to laugh at them. The deer might even pinch them. We have a little time to think about this - assuming we still have some plants to protect, the bite alarms are coming from China, and - of course - I still have to consult the ghillie. Here's an encouraging glimpse of the jingle bells, with appropriately soothing and deer-free music.

And remember, kids - you're not really supposed to put them on your finger.

Hooptedoodle #130 – Technology Advances at Chateau Foy

I live in a very rural spot of South East Scotland, as I have mentioned here previously. We are not isolated in the sense that Canadians or Australians would recognise the term, but we are some miles from the nearest village (pubs, shops, post office) and we have so few neighbours that our immediate area is always well down any priority lists for infrastructure improvement. The nearest piped gas supply stops about 4 miles away, our broadband speed is so slow that it even surprises the local engineers, our electricity arrives via overhead cables, which run some miles across the farm fields and through gaps cut in the woods, and there is no mobile phone service here. By the standards of mainland Britain, this is a backwater.

The location suits us, and there are obviously a number of considerable advantages in living out here, but it is the last two of these small technical matters that this morning’s Blethering Sunday hooptedoodle will focus upon.

Rural charm

Subject 1 – Up the Pole

The oldest part of our house was originally a dairyman’s cottage, and was built around 1960. The area which is now our side garden (which, confusingly, is where the front door is) was originally the “drying green” for the little hamlet of farm cottages. We have a hefty wooden pole in the middle of the side lawn, which brings the electric power to the house. The garden has had new boundaries and been landscaped over the years, but I see no reason to suppose that the pole has ever been replaced since 1960.

It is part of the character of the place, and in Provence or somewhere it would seem quite charming to have overhead power cables, but our pole is not a source of pleasure in that way. Since a large neighbouring tree was removed a few years ago, the pole now dominates the garden, and it is not without some dangers. Kites are a very bad idea, water sprayers and hosepipes have to be kept out of the hands of children (in case they fry themselves), and there are numerous local stories of tree surgeons and roofers being killed by discharges arcing from these old cables. We cannot use a pressure spray to take moss off the roof, for example, for fear that the spray makes the God of the Pole angry, and he literally strikes us down. Thus all roof cleaning and repair has to be done with a lot of hand scraping and rather hushed conversation – to be on the safe side.

The ancient pole itself is rotting – on a summer afternoon, if there is no wind, you can hear the wasps munching away at it, deep in the cracks. Our chums at Scottish Power have occasionally come and looked at it, and promised that it will be replaced, but mostly their visits have been notable for fresh applications of very unsightly barbed wire – on the pole and on its anchor-stay – to frustrate our obvious enthusiasm to shin up the 20 feet or so and place a wet finger on the wires, to see what happens. Each time they go away, I take the law into my own hands and remove the barbed wire – if I wish to electrocute myself, I have no desire to hurt myself on the wire on the way up, and I certainly don't want to look at the stuff on a regular basis.

When the pole was last inspected in 2012, the young fellow from Scottish Power said it would be replaced very soon. I asked him was there any chance of the new pole being re-sited in the lane outside our garden, which would give a straighter run for the cabling, would move the wires to a new location, away from our front steps (so the pigeons could no longer sit in a row and defecate on visitors), and would improve the safety of the place quite a bit and the appearance very considerably. The SP man peered at me from beneath his yellow hardhat with the sort of nervous look which is correctly used when dealing with dangerous lunatics (I believe it is part of their training), and mumbled something about regulations and cable spans and planning permission – then he left.

They have returned. A much older man arrived last month, announced that the replacement of the pole was imminent, and – with hardly any prompting from us – suggested that it would be much better to place the new pole outside in the lane (exactly where we wanted it) and, provided the farmer didn’t object, they would be back to carry out the work in April.

Well, the days are accomplished. The pole has been installed. The cables have not been attached yet, but we are booked for a day without electricity on Wednesday, when the cables will be replaced with modern ones. This is such an unexpected stroke of good fortune that we are still expecting something to go wrong, but the pole is here, and it’s standing up, and I can’t see SP wasting their time and money to change it again. All being well, our hated pole will be gone by next weekend. The only people who will not be pleased are the family of sparrows who are living in an illegal nesting box (above the barbed wire line) on the pole itself, but there must always be a little collateral damage.

Good – we’ll give this a very large tick. The sparrows will have more babies in future years.

All right - no laughter, please...

Subject 2 – The Dreaded Smart-Phone

I have a very ancient mobile phone – it is so old, in fact, that the sales assistant in Phones4U burst out laughing when he saw it yesterday. I was not embarrassed – I was quite proud of it. I should have done something about my mobile years ago, but I hardly use it, and I am currently paying my network supplier some £18 a month for something which gives me hardly any benefit at all. How stupid is that?

As mentioned earlier, my home is a dead spot on the mobile networks – no service at all. When I was running my little publishing business, and travelling around a bit, I used my mobile a lot, and could not have managed without it. Without that context, my phone is now an expensive nuisance for most of the time. It is useful when I go away, or out in the car, but I only really need to make the occasional call and send the odd text – I have been known to take photos, but rarely.

The rest of the world, of course, cannot understand this. Despite my requests that they should not use my mobile number, friends and businesses constantly make calls which I do not receive. Courier deliveries and internet banking security procedures now do not work properly if you do not have a working mobile. Service engineers for utilities and domestic hardware will request a mobile number, so they can text and tell us when they are likely to arrive. If you do not have a working mobile, pal, you are not a citizen.

There is a whiff of comedy when I drive away from home, up the lane and off the farm. There is a sound like a genteel fire alarm, which is the accumulated urgent text messages from the last couple of days chiming through as I head towards the real world. By the time I get to the public road – maybe a mile away – the display shows a handsome network service, ready to meet all my demands. The thing which really niggles is that I am paying £18 per month for this joke, and it is all my own fault, since I have not done anything about it before now.

The network provider keeps urging me to upgrade my phone, which hardly seems worthwhile if I don’t use it. Thus my wife and all the sensible people have moved on, and bought modern phones, while I still live in a bygone age. A friend of mine visited recently, and – of course – his mobile didn’t work, but he has an app installed on his iPhone which enables him to register with my house wi-fi, and he could then receive and make calls through the internet quite satisfactorily.

Aha.

The rest of the world almost certainly is aware of all this and uses it every day, but it had eluded me until now. Yesterday I travelled to Edinburgh (on the train, with a loaf of bread and my old phone in a knotted handkerchief, on a stick over my shoulder) and went to talk to the nice people in the phone shops. Goodness, what a lot of them there are…

I had to get someone to talk me out of this loop – don’t want a smartphone since no service at home and not worth the expense, but only way to get a decent service at home is with a smartphone. I think I now have a way ahead. I can change my contract so that the monthly allowances are so much better I can hardly believe it, and they will provide me with a posh new phone so that I can use them, and the monthly payment will go down to three-quarters of what it is now. If I provide my own phone it will be even cheaper – about half. It all hinges on whether the mobile actually works at my house under this new arrangement. The sales guy at EE (I am an Orange customer) reckons it will, but then he has the faith, which I do not.

They have offered to lend me a SIM card for a fortnight so I can try it out. Seems sensible.

So I am approaching a big decision point – if it works, I will join the ranks of the detestable smartphone users, and my life will change forever (aaargh!); if it doesn’t, I shall probably hang on to my existing museum-exhibit and switch to a cheap, pay-as-you-go arrangement which suits my minimal usage.

I had a trial play with my wife’s iPhone yesterday – it seems very good – I quite fancy that. The only hang-ups I have are

(1) the cost of the phone

(2) the fact that it offers a vast array of features, games, music, ridiculous apps and so on that I am not the slightest bit interested in

(3) I have to rise above my virulent dislike of smartphones, and the very serious damage they have done to education, literacy, the workings of society and a number of other trifling areas

Yesterday I sat on the train into Edinburgh and it was almost silent. Nobody speaks, so as you would notice. Everyone is texting, so presumably they must have some friends somewhere else – unless, of course they were texting the person in the next seat. The other day, I sat in a coffee bar in a bookshop in Haddington, reading, when three ladies arrived at the next table – greeted each other warmly, ordered coffee and cakes, and then got out their iPhones and ignored each other for the next 20 minutes. Terrific – I don’t want to get like that – even a bit. The fact that I have no mates might help out a lot here.

How can we have such an overkill of communications technology, when hardly anyone has anything worthwhile to say? How can we have such an overprovision of phone apps which we do not really need and which waste more time than anyone can sensibly afford? How can anyone ever get any peace, or have a worthwhile idea, if they spend their lives with their heads jammed up their backsides?

Don’t tell me how busy you are if you spend a quarter of your day gawping at crap online, or sending non-messages to your pals. If you choose to do it, then no problem, but it is a choice – you are not really busy. Get a life. And do not answer your phone or check your texts while you are speaking to me, or I shall throw the thing into the nearest pond.

LOL

Spanish Drummers - some dubiety

As far as I can tell, the drummers didn't dress like this

The next unit of my 1809 Spanish army up for painting is the Regimiento de la Reina, whose uniform is well documented, but I have had a bit of a goose chase trying to identify what their drummers wore.

It seems likely that the Spanish line infantry would have worn a mix of uniforms by 1809, with some units still wearing the blue 1802 kit, most wearing the 1805 white coats, and a proportion of makeshift outfits using the ubiquitous local brown cloth, but I'm trying for something very close to the official appearance for Reina. Drummers? - don't ask. A lot of vagueness abounds - a couple of sources state that the drummers wore anything the colonel fancied, which may or may not be true, but doesn't help much. I've recently obtained a French book about the Battle of Ocana, which includes some very nice uniform plates by Peter Bunde, and I've also done some study of the Spanish items in Bunde's catalogue, and it seems that drummers had a standard uniform - dark blue with red facings - regardless of the unit's facing colour.

That's what I'm going for at the moment - artwork here is taken from the Ocana book, featuring Bunde's plates. Any inside info on Spanish drummers will be most welcome - most of the illustrations of painted models on the internet (including catalogue pics from figure manufacturers) show infantry drummers dressed the same as the rest of the regiment - maybe some of them did?

Toygaming - some afterthoughts

Nothing childish here...

This additional post is merely a follow-up to the previous one, after the comments and some further emails (for which thanks to Martin and Louis) and a bit more reading of the Sabin book to which I referred last time. I propose to reproduce a couple of paragraphs from it which I found thought-provoking – I have no permission to quote these, but if they interest you then I recommend you purchase the book, which is Simulating War, by Philip Sabin, published by Bloomsbury Academic, so I can sort of justify it as promotional if pressed!

Philip Sabin is Professor of Strategic Studies in
the Department of War Studies at King's College, London, UK

The passages I chose are not because I have a particular axe to grind (well, no more than usual), simply things which I felt might stimulate some interest and fire up a few neurons. It must be borne in mind that the Professor is approaching his subject very largely from the point of view of education (both of academic students and of future generals), and thus his position might be regarded as a little rarified.

Firstly, on the subject of playability:

The fetish for wargame detail and complexity famously reached its greatest extreme in 1979 with The Campaign for North Africa, a multiplayer monster with five big mapsheets, 1800 counters, and nearly 200 pages of rules and charts that seemed to cover every conceivable logistic and tactical consideration. It is said that not even the designers themselves had time to complete the full campaign game. One later reviewer wrote that: ‘This game is just too involved to be played by a small wargame club with finite resources’, but that it might be ‘instructional to a graduate history seminar’. Nothing could better illustrate the growing disconnect between the dwindling band of traditional wargames enthusiasts and the rest of society over what ‘playability’ really means. There is a reason why a popular game such as chess has only 64 grid squares and only 32 pieces, of which each player may move only one per turn. That is quite enough to generate subtleties and complexities that have engaged the greatest minds for many generations. One does not need to go much beyond these parameters to produce wargames that offer challenging and thought-provoking simulations of real military campaigns. The great majority of published manual and computer wargames are, unfortunately, too complex, time consuming or unrealistic to be used directly in an academic context, but they do offer a mine of ideas on which one’s own more tailored designs may be based. Above all, it is crucial to remember that a simple wargame that is played will be more instructive than a detailed wargame that is not.

Now on the subject of the tension between games developed for military and hobby purposes (note that the games he refers to here will normally be board-type games):

The relationship between military and recreational wargaming over the past 50 years has been decidedly double-edged. On the one hand, professional wargamers, already sensitive to the negative connotations of the word ‘game’, have often been embarrassed by any link with hobbyists, especially given the blurred boundaries between recreational wargaming and playing with toy soldiers or the popular enthusiasm for fantasy gaming. As Allen reported: ‘“This is not Dungeons and Dragons we’re doing here,” a Pentagon officer indignantly told me in a discussion of what he called “serious modeling and simulation”.’ On the other hand, many professional wargamers themselves play recreational wargames in their spare time (Dunnigan reported that around 20% of hobbyists were in the military or related government jobs), and dissatisfaction with the cost and unwieldiness of official games has often prompted officers to investigate cheaper and more accessible commercial alternatives. Dunnigan himself has been an enthusiastic advocate of this approach, although he claims that: ‘[T]he existing government suppliers of wargame technology did what they could to discourage the purchase of these “toys” (commercial wargames), as the “toys” were a lot cheaper and more competitive than the multimillion-dollar military wargame projects that kept so many defense consultants (and many government employees) comfortably employed.’

Since I am on a bit of a roll here, regurgitating the wisdom of others, I'd like to end with a fine quote from CS Lewis, of which I was most kindly reminded by the Honourable Conrad Kinch. Since the word "childish" seems to appear in, or be implied by, most of the forms of disapproval to which wargamers of any shade react badly, it is worth remembering that it is a word which, most typically, is employed by children themselves. Children, lest we forget, are also noted for their ability to learn and take on new ideas, and for an innate creativity and sense of fun:

CS Lewis

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

Personally, I am not very interested in people who know everything, though I do seem to meet a great many.