Times of Dearth

After the canter through a number of games in recent weeks, it might surprise you to know that actually the quantity of wargaming undertaken in the last six weeks approximates zero. No dice rolling. No painting. Not even any thinking about wargames. Not much reading of history, either, although I have managed to read last month’s (i.e. October 2024 – no one has ever explained why monthly periodicals seem to run nearly a month ahead) History Today, which has an interesting article on the French Resistance. I also managed to read a tiny bit of The Personal Rule of Charles I, but as that is a monster book, and I doubt if the inner workings of local government in Stuart England are of much interest to my implied audience, I shall keep quiet about that, at least for a while (that is, until I have finished the beast, which will not be, I should think, until Christmas, at least).

So, you might ask, what have you been doing if not something useful like wargaming? That is a fine question and brings us back to the French Resistance. Do not be concerned, dear reader, I have not lost my head and joined the Resistance. Nor am I about to start speaking in a strange accent, and quoting ‘I shall say this only once’, or anything like that. But I did run across something that gave me pause for thought, anyway, but I shall have to explain.

Firstly, I have been doing some studying. My parents always thought that I would be an eternal student, and they were right. In the past six weeks or so I have been undertaking two different courses, one on the philosophy or reality (or ‘ontology’ for the Greek lovers around here) and the other on the French philosopher Simone Weil. It is that latter who wrote the thing I want to quote to you, but we will start, obviously enough, with reality. Just building some dramatic tension, you understand.

Reality is not, obviously, that straightforward. If it were, there would be no course. Over five weeks we ranged over the full gamut of philosophers and what they wrote about reality from the pre-Socratics to Wittgenstein and beyond. I confess it was fascinating, and good to be discussing stuff with other, um, real, people, at least, real insofar as they were on Zoom. Part of the purpose of undertaking the course was to hone my faculties and get some direction back into my writing. This is not a threat, by the way; most of my writing does not concern wargaming.

Still, it was interesting that some themes did emerge from 2,500 years of mainly rich males pontificating about what was real. One was the difference between static and dynamic views of the world, which might, now I come to think of it, have a wargaming application: a move in a game is a snapshot of the game world. A real battle is a continuous event. Discuss – answers on a postcard, please.

As I mentioned before (quite a long time ago) I do like to test these abstract ideas against wargaming. Wargaming is part of the world, after all, and if the idea or concept does not work there, we might be a bit suspicious that it will not work at all. I have had difficulty with Simone Weil, however, in finding a point of contact with wargaming.

In case you did not already know, Weil (1909 – 43) was French, and she died of malnutrition and tuberculosis in Kent in August 1943. In spite of the fact that she did not live very long, and most of her writing was between 1931 and 1943, she produced a truly scary quantity of text. I have only scratched the surface, even though the reading for the course has been the main cause of no wargaming taking place in the last month or so. Actually, a whole load of stuff, including a lengthy book (The Need for Roots - 230 pages in the English translation) was written between her arrival from New York in December 1942 and her death. It is quite possible, in my head, anyway, that she died of malnutrition because she did not have time to eat, being too busy writing.

Anyway, at the end of the course the tutor, who had avoided any and every attempt to put Weil into the context of her life and what was going on around her, finally read out a bit from The Need for Roots, and it was, well, I am not sure exactly which word to use. Prophetic, perhaps? Remember, this was written in 1943. Weil was Jewish, of a non-practising family, by the way. They fled Paris in 1940, and then left Marseilles for New York in 1942.

People speak of punishing Hitler. But he cannot be punished. He wanted just one thing and he has it: and that is to go down in history. Whether he is killed, tortured, locked up or humiliated, history will always be there to protect his spirit against the ravages of suffering and death. What will be inflicted on him will inevitably be historical death, historical ravages, in fact, history. Just as, for the person who has attained the perfect love of God, any event is good coming from God, so it is for the idolater of history; everything that comes from history must be good. What is more, he has a far greater advantage because the pure love of God resides in the centre of the soul; it leaves the person’s sensibility exposed to blows; it is not a suit of armour. Idolatory is an armour; it stops pain from entering the soul. Whatever is inflicted on Hitler, it will not stop him from feeling that he is a glorious being. Above all, it will not prevent, in twenty, fifty, one hundred or two hundred years, a solitary, starstruck little boy – German or otherwise – from thinking that Hitler was a glorious being who had from beginning to end a grand destiny, and from wishing with all his heart for a similar destiny. In that case, woe betide his contemporaries.

(Weil, S., The Need for Roots, trans. Kirkpatrick K., London, Penguin, 2023)

If anyone wants me, I’m just nipping down to the bomb shelter…..