A Few Random Shots

My ponderings, if such they be, here over the last few weeks seem to have been rather all over the place, and so I think I will take the liberty of this post to try to sum them up a bit and forge such links as there may be between them.

Mostly, I have been considering history, in its application to wargaming. This has taken the form, more or less, of initially considering the historian and her work. More or less, we have to come to the conclusion that the historian approaches history through the lenses of his or her own time. Thus, in Peter Wilson’s tome on the Thirty Years War he observes that CV Wedgewood, in her volume on the war, was writing in the late 1930’s, and she may well have seen similarities between Hitler (an Austrian dictator) and Ferdinand. Certainly she is not very sympathetic to the latter. Of course, similar claims could also be for, say, Franco and Philip IV of Spain, but I do not think Wedgewood made such. Similarly, Wilson observes, post war Eastern European historians saw the war in terms of class conflict and economic issues. Being under a Marxist system they could scarcely see it any other way. In fact, it is quite possible that the histories written by such historians tells us more about the time of writing than the time written about.

So much, perhaps, for historiography, which as a subject I have never much liked. But the point is germane. Each historical age writes the history that it is interested in. Perhaps that is why it is quite difficult to move in the classics these days for studies in homosexuality in the Ancient World. It could be argued that the modern world is so interested in sex generally, and, perhaps, homosexuality in particular, that future historians are going to define our own societies as obsessed with the subject.  Nevertheless, this is the history that we, as wargamers, are presented with by professional historians and the academy.

Now, it could, I suppose, be argued that we can do the same for military history. For example, the current arguments about the First World War could be arguments about whether it is right to go to war at all. The Germans always accused the British that they went to war over a piece of paper – the paper in question being the guarantee of Belgian neutrality. The British response was that Germany was a threat to civilisation. The ins and outs of this argument are really neither here nor there. But, given the present difficulties about military expenditure and military expeditions and the rights and wrongs of them, it is not, surely, a major step to suggest that arguments about WW1 fit in there, somewhere.

Do these sorts of arguments affect or inform wargaming at all? Insofar as a number of manufacturers are putting WW1 ranges out there, of course, the general interest in the topic does affect us. More models of the subjects, more rules, and so on probably means that more people wargame it, possibly read more about it and even, in some way, inform the public debate about the war. Perhaps too, although this would be incredibly difficult to prove, wargaming the war could inform us about how difficult it was to control a battle, to even find a way to advance in trench warfare on the Western front.

That suggestion brings us to another thread running through recent posts, which is something about what historians do when they research and write and, by analogy, what wargamers do when they wargame. It can be suggested that the job of the historian is to recreate in their own minds what happened in the period that they are researching, and to write it down to do a similar job in the reader’s minds. This is tricky and somewhat controversial (as far as anything in the philosophy of history is such), but I think it is possible to see what the argument shape is. In Thomist terms, the historian, through reading and imagination, creates in his own mind the phantasm of past, which is then available to him to have an insight into the past. Having thus examined it and judged it to be a true image of the past, it is then the historian’s task to pass that insight on.

So what about wargaming? Wargaming actually gives a physical model of a past event (given that the battle happened). Through it, as I am sure I have probably said before, we can try to obtain insights into how the battle went, or could have gone, something about the manifold of possibility available to the original participants.

Now, of course, wargaming is a fairly indirect method of trying to obtain historical insight, although it is probably no worse than some other methods of doing so. For example, writing a set of wargame rules forces the author to try to gather a full set of data about the troops, and to make reasonable assumption when this is not available. Now, this process could easily be accused of going beyond the historically known, but, on the other hand, it also highlights the fact that some things cannot be known but are, nevertheless, important to our understanding of a historical event.  Knowing that we are ignorant is probably better than not knowing.

Finally, I think I am still trying to get a handle on the relationship between history and wargaming in, as it were, the round. Possibly I am looking in the wrong place. If all (or almost all) history is based around present assumptions and preoccupations, then perhaps we should look at those to understand our wargaming. As a brief example, consider the recent movement away from individually based model soldiers to grouped ones. Could this be, in some way, representative of a shift away from the individualism of the late Enlightenment to a postmodern acknowledgement of the relatedness of all humans to each other?

I do not intend, by the way, to try to answer that question any time soon, but do feel free to contribute your own suggestions.

Neostoicism and Military Revolution

The name Justus Lipsius is not one on most people’s lips. It is not even one on most philosopher’s lips, nor on military historian’s. I doubt if there are many wargamers who have heard the name, either. As I hope to demonstrate, this is a bit of a shame, and he could probably be usefully more widely known.

As a quick Google search will show you, Lipsius was born in the Low Country in 1547 and died in 1606, having spent his life as a humanist scholar in various institutions, both Catholic and Protestant. Aside from being caught up in the Reformation, Counter-Reformation and the Dutch Revolt, his main claim to fame is the revival of Stoicism as a viable intellectual approach to the problems of his own day. He also had some influence on the way in which we think about ourselves, which had a knock on effect on the state and how it works.

Of course, Lipsius did not work alone. There was a good deal of intellectual and theological ferment at the time. By the 1590’s, the Dutch (along with other states) had a real problem. The nature of the war against Spain was such that cities needed permanent garrisons and, as these cities were also the paymasters, they needed to get along, more or less, with the civic authorities. This, however, was not the way of life of the usual sorts of mercenaries and adventurers (and, for that matter, the young gentlemen for who a bit of military service was the completion of their education).

The intellectual movement of humanism, and the Renaissance generally, had brought the works of the classical world back into circulation. The Roman army held particular fascination for some humanists, and it was only a matter of time before they started to propose Roman methods for the armed forces. The first writer, apparently, to suggest something specific, at least to Dutch ears, was William Lodewijk, who proposed volley tactics based on Roman methods of javelin throwing.

The use of Roman tactics, however, required a bit of a change in military training. Before this, such training had consisted of individual weapon training, and perhaps the ability to march in assorted directions. What, perhaps, was somewhat lacking was exacting training of the soldiers as a unit. The counter-march method of discharging muskets in the general direction of the enemy required a higher discipline than was generally seen and, along with the issues around fixed garrisons started to demand some degree of standardisation.

This standardisation focussed around weaponry and ammunition, where the Dutch rapidly became suppliers to the world, and also in drills for the troops. Thus we get, for example, the drill books, most notably of Jacob de Gheyn. I am sure you know the one I mean, or at least its illustrations of musket and pike drill. It turns up in all sorts of seventeenth century texts.

Lipsius was a leading scholar in the middle of all this, translating Seneca. His own work draws heavily on Seneca and the Stoics, as well as Tacitus. Lipsius, for example, argued that the Stoics, and Seneca in particular, were practically Christians. This is not quite as silly as it sounds. It has been quite seriously suggested that Seneca and St Paul met when the latter was incarcerated in Rome, and letters between them have been circulated (although they were forgeries, of course). Nevertheless, the Stoics were part of the intellectual Hellenic background against which Seneca and St Paul moved, and some bits of Stoic style thinking have been detected in Acts and some of the letters.

The Stoic doctrine of self-discipline, however, is the most interesting from this point of view. Lipsius argued, via Seneca, that steadfastness is the vital personal quality or virtue required in an age where everything is chaos. This requires the disciplining of the self to treat whatever happens outside the soul as irrelevant, the energy of the self being directed to maintaining peace and tranquillity.  The parallels between this and some of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius are reasonably striking.

These cross-currents, therefore, came together in the changes we do see in the Dutch military system in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Discipline was increased, along with more regular payment of troops. There were changes in tactics, although their efficacy could be disputed. However, the reforms were adopted quite widely over the next fifty years or so, as the influence of them spread via Germany to Sweden, although it should be noted that the Spanish troops in the southern Low Countries also had to adapt to similar conditions, and found similar solutions.

So what is the point of all this, and why write about it on a wargaming blog?

Firstly, I think it is important to note that, while Lipsius was not a soldier, his writings did have influence on how soldiers thought about their craft, and also on how rulers considered their state and what it should do. Thus soldiers started to become employees of the state, rather than employees of a mercenary captain who was hired by the state.

Secondly, it starts me wondering about how troops behaved before the sort of discipline described above had these classical underpinnings. While Roman soldiers may well have been bred as Stoics, the intervening thousand years or so was not a hotbed of intellectual activity (although not as intellectually arid as might be thought).

Now, I am sure that the reforms did not happen overnight, and did not spring from nowhere, but I have written before about our toy soldiers being the perfect Stoic warriors, putting themselves on the line time after time, no complaining, no widows and orphans making claims, and so on. I suspect that many of our sets of rules are written in the same vein. This is how we expect troops to behave and react, stoically.

Now this may very well be true, but what happens to our rules and wargames if it is not? We like to speak of units, even when the only unit might be a lance of mixed cavalry and infantry, who may have marched, camped and even trained together, but in battle was split up into single arms units. What if these people were trained, not in Stoic virtues, but in either chivalry or some sort of hierarchical obedience? And what happens if that hierarchy is disrupted?

I am not saying that our rules, our views of medieval battle and armies are necessarily wrong, but maybe we have been looking at them through Stoic glasses.

History and Wargaming

I think it is probably an unassailable fact that history and, at least, historical wargaming are linked. But what is this link, exactly? Why, for example, should people get hot under the collar (even just mildly) over the representation of the First World War? After all, we do not need to take a position on whether the British Army consisted of Lions Lead by Donkeys, or upper class twits cheering the plebeians on to slaughter, or whatever in order to represent the tactics adopted on the Western Front.

Nevertheless, the fact that such arguments can happen suggests that history, or at least perceived historical memory and understanding, does make a difference. World War One is a political hot potato at present, in the UK at least, because it is the centenary, and because it has become a bone of contention about the teaching and interpretation of history. Whether the political and elite classes in Britain were as stupid as portrayed in, say, Blackadder Goes Forth or not seems to be important, not least to the current political elite.

Obviously, this does have an impact on wargaming, albeit an indirect one. But how this comes about is an interesting question. We can all be amateur historians, and, perhaps, some of us are professional ones. We can all read the original sources and make interpretations of them. We can also read secondary sources and agree with them, or not, as the case may be. It is not usually the “facts” which are disputed here, but it is the interpretations of those facts which are argued over.

As I have probably mentioned before, as wargamers we cannot just leave the disputes to one side and carry on. If I were writing a set of wargame rules for the First World War (and, let me hasten to add, I am not), then the issue of command and control would inevitably arise. How is this to be represented? Were the Germans at a tactical level better and more flexible? Were the British really lions lead by donkeys, in which case they fight bravely but are badly directed? Are these just stereotypes, driven by, say, the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon? How heavily influenced is the rule writer by Oh What a Lovely War! Goodbye to All That and All Quiet on the Western Front?

The problem seems to be that when a historical spat gets going, the two sides get entrenched (no pun intended) and that leaves us, poor wargamers and rule writers, with a problem. Do we self-consciously come down on one side (described in WW1 spat terms as ‘the left’, meaning the lions led by donkeys team) or the other (the right, meaning the jolly well done all round because we won). And, anyway, how much of the spat is related to present day politics. Education, after all, has become a political football, and teaching history even more so, largely, I suspect, because it is regarded as being a subject which does little for the economy.

But before I digress too far, or start to turn this into a political blog post, the problem for the wargamer is, I suspect, similar to the problem for a historian writing a book. What are we actually trying to do?

A wargamer, perhaps, would have a satisfactory game if they enjoyed it. A reader of a history book would have a similar experience. But what if you then read another book, or played another game (under different rules) which contradicted the first experience. Would you feel short changed?

This sort of dialectic is fairly normal in history. Someone says something, which is contradicted by someone else, to which a counter-argument is presented, to which a reply is given, and so on. There is, in the military history literature at present (and for the last few years) such an argument going on about whether the Schlieffen Plan was, in fact, a plan, or a series of ideas knocked together by the German supreme command, or something retrospectively invented to give the initial German moves in 1914 a degree of respectability.

This sort of thing is how the academy proceeds. A lot of work is actually done in putting together these arguments. For example, the status of Schlieffen Plan affects your view of the entry of the British Empire into the war. If the Schlieffen Plan was a plan, then the German High Command should have figured out that violating Belgian neutrality would have brought the British into the fight. If it was cobbled together at the last minute to try to create a knock-out blow before Christmas on the French, the detail of the 1830 treaty might have been missed.

So the interpretation of a “plan”, whatever its status, has a knock on effect on our understanding of the war. The documents, assuming nothing new is discovered, are the same; I doubt if any archive has ‘Schlieffen Plan’ written on a box-file, but the documents being argued about are known. What is at doubt is the interpretation of those documents as a coherent plan or not. And, in part, that interpretation depends on the interpreter’s location in time and space.

For example, at school I was told, quite clearly, that the Schlieffen Plan existed, that it had such and such characteristics. That it failed because the BEF fought so hard at Mons and the Parisian taxi drivers transferred the French army to the Marne before the Germans could get there, and so on. That is one interpretation, of course, but it is not the only one. It was probably given by the time of the teaching and the location: what interpretations were available in a former great power that had lost its empire and sense of direction?

But still, as wargamers, we need answers to the question of, as I suggested above, the utility of the British command and control personnel and structures. In the absence of us being able and willing to delve into the archives and make our own minds up, what do we do?

I suppose the answer, as a rule writer, is to write our rules to try to encompass both camps, but that may not always be possible. Otherwise, we may simply have to choose one alternative and stick to it. But at least we could make that decision consciously and explicitly.

Stubborn Questions in Wargaming

Firstly, we have to ask how historical is historical wargamng? Of course, the answer to this is “it depends”, but a bit of a deeper think throws up all sorts of questions. For example, what, exactly do we mean by the word ‘historical’. Does it actually have to have happened? Does it just have to be one of the might have been moments? Do the armies simply have to be based on historical prototypes?

If it is the latter, of course, a whole gamut of other questions are raised. For example, are Charles Grant’s Seven Years Wars states historical, because they are self-consciously based on historical prototypes? Are my Fuzigore campaigns historical because they use armies of Rome, Gauls, and so on?  So a question is then asked of what we mean by historical.

Of course, it is slightly worse than that, given that history itself is not a coherent object. Each generation, probably each historian, approaches history with different questions in mind and, as I think I mentioned recently, different presuppositions. This means that different data is selected, different historical narratives are written and presented and so we, as wargamers, land up, well, possibly confused when we start to ask for historical accuracy.

We could argue that all wargaming is a form of fantasy. The relations between the real battles, the real terrain, the real problems and outlooks of the commanders, cannot be reproduced on a wargame table. I have commented before about the distortions of space that our figures and terrain, and the rules make. This is probably also true of time. Would it not be better simply to give up on this complex history thing and just play the game?

Naturally, many people simply do this. And that raises other questions. For example, can someone switch from say, commanding a World War Two Panzer company to commanding the chariots of a Sumerian army without one affecting the other? If it is fantasy anyway, does it matter if they can, or if they cannot? If they attempt to use the chariots as Tiger tanks, what sorts of issues does this raise, and why?

To some extent, these sorts of questions come down to whether we are historical minimalists or maximalists. Do we assume that our historical accounts are full and exhaustive, or that they only give a bare bones account, and lots of other stuff might have happened. If the former, then our rules presumably should permit only those events, those outcomes. If the latter, then the limit is only the imagination of the players.

In turn, this then means that the more maximalist our reading of history, the more restrictive our rules have to be. I am not arguing that any given rule set is at either extreme of this spectrum, but there is a continuum between them and a rule set has to sit somewhere on it, even if the author has not consciously considered their view of the history.

Another stubborn question is one which I have discussed several times here already, so I shall try to be brief. This is the relationship between chance and necessity. It seems to me that this is not as straightforward as we might like to think. Our dice rolls limit the immediate options to, say, six, or thirty six, or ten, or one hundred, or whatever we might like to create from our different shaped dice. These then may (but do not have to) limit our ‘black swan’ events and, also, might make some historical outcomes either highly unlikely or too probable for comfort.

A related issue is that we cannot calculate the probability for a rare event on the battlefield. We can, though some sources and recreation, have a reasonable guess at how many hits of a unit sized target a musket volley might obtain, but we have a good deal more difficulty guessing the probability of a cavalry unit routing a formed square of steady troops. A maximalist would, conceivably, argue that this must be covered in our rules. A minimalist might argue that it was so rare as to be discounted. Most rules would probably try to accommodate small possibility, but then we are back to the granularity which our event resolution process (rolling dice) creates.

Following on from that, of course, is the whole issue of emergent probability. One thing leads, inexorably, to another, but only one other thing follows. There is a system of cause and effect, but a given cause can create a whole manifold of effects, but only one is selected by the process of resolution, whether that be firing a cannon or rolling some dice. This seems to me to imply that there is an irreducible narrative to a wargame. Cause and effect is writ big, but we like our effects to be proportionate to the causes, even if real life does not quite work like that.

A final, fairly stubborn question is the one that is often at the back of my mind as I write these posts: what are we doing when we are wargaming? I imagine that I have written enough over the last few years to prove the point that wargaming is a complex cultural phenomenon and, thus, there is no single or simple answer to that question. Nevertheless, I do think (of course!) that it is a question worth asking.

One answer is that we are simply taking part in a pleasurable hobby, a bit of light escapism which just happens to have some sort of historically conditioned basis. Another is that we are some sort of amateur historians, attempting to recreate in our imaginations an event from the past, so it becomes intelligible and we can thus have an attempt at obtaining a deeper understanding of it. In the latter case we are, possibly, approaching what a professional historian might be doing when they settle down to write about their research.

Again, the escapism – recreation axis is a continuous one, and we may not actually stay in any one place on it. But it does seem to be a question about wargaming that will not go away, from my mind at least.

The Two Blades

In the philosophy of science, there is a concept of having two blades to attack any given problem with. The first blade, normally considered to be the lower one, is empirical data. By this we mean the stuff experimenters generate. The upper blade is theory, the results of what Galileo described as the ‘mathematization of nature’ (I am sure it is more elegant in Latin).

So, for example, the concept of the Higgs boson was from the upper blade, that is, it was a theoretical construct, derived from a mathematical model of the universe, or some small (or very small, in this case) part of it. The lower blade required the construction of an extremely large, expensive and complex experiment at CERN, the efforts of hundreds of scientists and engineers and a good deal of media coverage.

Fortunately for all involved, the two blades met and a bit of the model of the universe was verified, to cheers and mutual backslapping all around and the dishing out of Nobel prizes to everyone.

Science, however, is a bit more complex than that. For example, the derivation of the theoretical model of the Higgs boson was based on the standard model of sub-atomic particles, which had been experimentally verified, in smaller but still hugely complex experiments, which were based on theories which in turn were based on experiments. And so on, back to Aristotle dropping stones and noting that they all fell downwards.

Of course, there are oddities and unexplained phenomena abounding in science. The fact is that these anomalies tend to be parked on a shelf until there is the interest and resource available to investigate them. I am, in fact, the proud possessor of such an anomaly, although I do not expect that anyone is going to be interested enough to try to resolve it in the next century or so. However, it is still there, in the literature, should anyone be interested enough to give it a go.

History, too, could be suggested to have this twin blade effect. We do have historical data, in the forms of documents and artefacts from past times. For example, we have Herodotus’ account of the Battle of Marathon. We also have some archaeology from the site of the battle, we have some bits of accounts of the paintings in Athens of the battle, possible a few Persian like objects from Delphi, and so on. Data is in existence, it just is not very complete.

We also have a set of expectations about humanity in general. We know, for example, that soldiers need to eat, and so some provision needs to be made for this. We also know that horses need feeding as well, and are rather less good at not eating for a cause than humans are. Thus, theoretically, we have our upper blade. The Persian army at Marathon needed feeding, as did the cavalry which was present. This leads to constraints on the numbers of horses that could be present, and also on where the cavalry camp was positioned in order to provide grazing. Furthermore, of course, humans can carry their own water; it is better if horses are led to it.

Thus, the two blades of history start to close a bit. The data gives us, working upwards, as set of possibilities for what happened. How we interpret this data is constrained by how reliable we think the writer is, how close to the action, how likely to be misinformed, and so on. Similarly, artefacts, while useful, can be misleading. However, these items form the lower blade. The upper one is constrained by our outlooks as historians. So, for example, I mentioned before Christopher Hill who would have us believe that the English Civil War was a result of class conflict. Well, maybe, but if that is our perspective as a historian, it will colour how the data lands up in our writing. Not that I am accusing anyone of dishonesty, it is just that a given perspective will inform how the data is interpreted.

Of course, as wargamers, we are not quite so interested in how history is done. We would like historians to give us orders of battle for different armies, detailed investigations about weapons and so on. Unfortunately, we are more likely to get another article about homosexuality in Greek antiquity than Alexander’s campaigns in India. The Academy simply is not interested in the nuts and bolts of warfare.

As rules writers and consumers, of course, this gives us a bit of a dilemma. We have some older works, the upper blade of which is assumptions common to the time about history, imperialism, civilisation and so on. The lower blade is pretty much what we have, barring a few manuscripts and archaeological finds.

Thus, while we can make our rules on this basis, some of the core interpretations might not square well with modern interpretations of what happened. Our rules might reflect some of the older assumptions, such as the Romans were the good guys and brought civilisation to much of Europe, or even that the pilum was a super weapon, a cross between a longbow and a machine gun.

So, as wargamers and wargame rule writers, we are forced back towards examining our own assumptions about history, and how they might form the upper blade of our historical analysis. To be sure, so single synthesis will cover all the historical contingencies of the real world. Some bits, as with some results of science, will simply have to be shelved until the next new concept comes along to provide an interpretation. But, in the world of wargamers in Western liberal democracies we need to examine some of the assumptions that underlie our own worldview.

Just as an example, it is common in history just now to talk more about the common people and their experience than the elite. In wargaming terms, does this mean that the rabble is given more power than the historical record allows, because we have picked up a prejudice in their favour? The original writers of chronicles and accounts would have been elite, after all, and biased against the rabble. Have we over compensated?

Communities of Wargamers

It is actually quite interesting to ponder the various communities of wargaming. At least, I find it so, and as I am the one writing the blog, the rest of you will simply have to put up with it. But the Fact is that communities of practice come with histories and those histories are, by the nature of the world, contingent. Things could have been different.

Now, I am not about to launch on a history of wargaming. I do not have the time, skills or, to be perfectly honest, that much interest in it. Wargaming is a hobby; it might be of interest to sociologists or social historians, but I am, in fact, a wargamer. Such sociological studies or histories may be of some peripheral interest to me, but I am not the one to create them.

Nevertheless, a quick perusal of wargame blogs do show some pervasive influences. The influence of, say, Don Featherstone is widespread. Most blogs mention him at some point, or one of his books. And that was the case even before he died.

Another unsung hero of the hobby is whoever invented the six sided die. Without such a tool how on earth could we actually wargame. I know that several rule sets use more esoteric die shapes, often imported from the world of role playing games, but the six sided die is, as it were, the workhorse. Many rules use only those die.

What is, then, the influence over the game of the shape of the die? It does limit, in some way, the possible outcomes of the question which is put to it. I mean, a simple sort of question would be ‘hit or miss’? You have six options to map onto these two, on a single D6 roll. Of course, you can throw two dice and increase the options, or you can throw matched pairs of dice and subtract one from the other. By these options you massively increase you range of outcomes, but those outcomes are still dictated by the shape of the dice.

It is an interesting question as to how we actually arrived at this point. My guess is that early wargames (or rather wargamers) simply purloined six sided dice from, say, Monopoly games or similar. The six sided die is pervasive because it was available. It is, of course, so widely available because it is easy to make, I suppose.

Similarly, the early wargames were often made up of Airfix figures. I started with such, and recall my surprise when I encountered in, I think, Tony Bath’s Battles With Model Soldiers an Airfix Plains Indian chieftain figure on a horse masquerading as Carthaginian light cavalry. Charles Grant’s Battle was full of Airfix WWII figures, and so on. I confess to having been somewhat startled recently at my local gardening emporium to discover they have started to stock Airfix kits and figures again. I was sorely tempted, of course, but I have quite sufficient wargame projects going n at the moment, however.

Clearly, though, even the “big names” of early wargaming were not above pressing suitable (or even marginally suitable) figures into use. Without Airfix plastic figures could wargaming have got the boost it did? I am not going to attempt to answer that question, but it might be worth pondering. Furthermore, if, for example, Airfix had actually managed to produce, say, English Civil War figures, might the relative popularity of the period be greater than it is now?

All of these factors, and many more besides, all feed into the history of the wargaming community (or communities) as they are now. We do, as a hobby, have a history. As a result, we have some aspects of the hobby which are, to use a rather charged word, rituals. Again, a swift perusal around the blogs indicates that the ritual of attending a wargame show is quite common. I confess, I hardly go to shows these days, because living next door to nowhere rather precludes attending, but when I lived nearer to civilisation I did usually go to one or two a year.

But why?

I suggested above that wargame shows are something of a ritual, and I think they are. You get to meet people. You get to put faces to traders and, in modern times, faces to bloggers. You see the latest trends, the latest releases, try out some games for yourself, and, of course, see what is becoming trendy. The overlap of this and, say, scientific conferences that I used to attend is quite significant, I think. It is about creating and maintaining a wargaming community, probably inducting new members into it as well.

Some of the blog reports of shows I have seen bear a startling literary resemblance to Pilgrim’s Progress – a group set out, have adventures on the way, tell each other tall stories and arrive at the destination. At that point, of course, the tall stories carry on, and lots of purchases are made. Mind you, judging by the quantity of pilgrim badges you could buy in medieval Canterbury, some things clearly do not change that much.

The point, if point there be, of this ramble is that the community of wargamers, in its broad sense, is informed by this sort of history. I have only picked out a few bits and pieces, more or less at random, to indicate the sorts of contingencies which make up the hobby as we know it today. But the claim I would make is that it could have been a different hobby, if things had turned out differently.

Thus, I would claim that wargaming has a history, which is contingent, and which shapes the sort of thing that wargaming in the present is. This does not mean that wargaming in the future is not going to evolve, or even take some startling jumps in content and process, but that it will still, in all likelihood, be within the contingent history which will remain behind it.

History, Wargames and Ethics

It has been a while since I have written anything about ethics, possibly because I have run out of thing to say about it. But I think it is worth having another go because I have noticed recently that even writing history is an ethical process, in so far as the historian has to make some decisions about what counts as history for them and what does not.

To try and show what I mean, consider that you are a historian, however amateur, and you are investigating a battle. It would also help if you had a large quantity of time available, which is not normally the case for most of us, but let us pretend that you do.

Firstly, you have to accumulate the data. By this I mean you have to dig through the archives, find documents, track down other sources, go and view that battlefield and so on. You might also want to read some secondary sources, which will guide you in what other people, at least, have thought about the battle and which bits are important, and, hopefully, some more general works about the period, the general political, cultural and social parameters in which the protagonists operate and the structures of society and their development.

That is quite a sizeable chunk of work already, but now it starts to get harder. Firstly, of course, you need to read your sources. And you need to do more than just read them; you need to try to understand each source as a source on its own. What is the viewpoint of this eyewitness? As we have discussed before, this makes a significant difference to the weight we place on a given source and how we interpret it. You get a very different report of the battle of Balaclava if the eyewitness was with the 21^st Lancers or brewing tea on the heights.

You also have to try to treat each source on its merits, and not to discount one because of what you have read in another. It is likely that things in different accounts will contradict. At this stage, you cannot really worry about that. Simply, you have to park these concerns on the shelf until a bit later in the process. It is much like science, really; you often get results you do not understand, and have to leave them until you know more, have done more experiments, more theory, more reading, got more understanding.

Now you are hopefully in a position to check over the history of the interpretation of the battle. This might be very simple, because no one is really interested, or it might be very complex. Perhaps the battle is part of the foundational myths of a country; perhaps it is an obscure skirmish the in annals of distant history. Either way, you will, as a historian, have to come to a view of the history of the interpretation. At this stage you will, quite likely become aware of the different viewpoints of different historians. In part, this will be because of the sources they have access to. It is quite possible that new documents have been found, to add to the data pile, since they wrote. But it is certain that they will have particular social, cultural and, possibly, ideological points of view and axes to grind. For example, Dame Veronica Wedgewood is possibly a little biased towards the Royalists in her accounts of the English Civil War. On the other hand, Christopher Hill is the key historian for a Marxist interpretation of the same period. And so on. These issues cloud a historian’s judgement, necessarily.

There are other, more subtle, influences. In her book of essays History and Hope, Dame Veronica describes a trip to the battlefield of Rocroi. Her taxi driver is baffled as to the destination. There are plenty of more recent, more important battlefields nearby to visit. Why this one? But she was writing just after the upheavals of the Second World War. Did she edit the influences out immediately? Did the more recent struggles colour her view of, say, Oliver Cromwell’s regime? These are not questions we can directly answer, but we need to hold them in mind.

Having got so far, it is time for you, as a historian, to try to bring some order. You have a pile of interpreted accounts from the original data. You have also a pile of secondary sources, with some idea of what the historian is trying to say, and the influences and biases they might bring to their works. Now, it is your turn; it is here that ethics creeps in.

Even for a fairly small battle, you are probably going to have far more material than you could possibly fit into a book. There is the background to the war, the background to the campaign, the background to the specific battle. There are orders of battle, the combat histories of the units involved, the biographies of the commanders, assessments of the accuracy and utility of the arms and armour, and so on. You need to make choices as to what you are going to write about. You need to make judgements about what is important and what peripheral.

In these judgements, of course, you are making ethical decisions about what to leave in and what to leave out. To take a simple example, a history of the Second World War leaving out the atrocities would be rightly condemned. But, give the limits on the size of a book, how do you achieve a balanced view? Your ethical stance will be coloured by your social, cultural and political views. How do you make honest judgements and assessments? Finally, of course, your aim in writing comes to the fore. If you are writing a military history, how far do you go in describing the atrocities the units involved in the battle may have perpetrated?

I do not, of course, have any answers. But I can say that honesty is the best policy. You can read Hill on the ECW because he is well known to have a Marxist view and analysis. Allowances can be made; his sources can be checked. Arguments about how important the Levellers and Diggers were can be had, because we know why he has highlighted them.

Of course, as wargamers we then have to design our rules, create our scenarios paint our figures and organise our armies, which is another set of problems in itself.