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…..

Reflections on Reactions

 It is a very strange thing to have written a book. You sort of wait for some sort of reaction, hoping that they will be positive, fearing that they will not be so, and despairing over the possibility of simply being ignored. So it is with similarly mixed feelings that I am attempting to write about it.

Some people, probably the majority, will ignore me. Fair enough. Most folk only have so many hours in the week to wargame, and why listen (or read) someone else? I am not going to argue that I should be given special attention. Others might agree with most of what I say, which is quite gratifying, of course. For some people, according to he reviews, I hit the nail while discussing solo wargaming.

Other reactions have been mixed, some of them slightly amusing, like the person on Facebook who said that the title made me sound about 150. I am old, but not quite that old, although think how much gaming I could fit in if I did live that long. One or two have been patronizing, not about me, but about solo wargamers generally, with one comment along the lines of ‘Isn’t it great that they [solo wargamers] bother to paint their toys and put out decent terrain.’ I’m not quite sure how to react to that, except to politely observe that solo wargamers do not need sympathy from anyone.

Still, the most frequent response has puzzled me, and I am wondering if anyone can help me understand what is being said. The response is along the lines that the book is not very useful because it does not contain any mechanisms for solo wargaming. Someone even went so far as to comment that the book contains lots of ideas but no mechanics, and was therefore not useful.

I confess I am sitting, even now, scratching my head and wondering what exactly this means. Mechanics, after all, or at least, it seems to me, are ten a penny. I do not have any problems, at least, dreaming up mechanisms for solo wargaming. It is usually a pretty simple issue of moving counters or pins on a map, or toy soldiers around a table, and rolling a few dice to decide what happens. I do not really think that deciding on the outcomes needs a great pile of rule mechanisms and mechanics. It just, well, flows.

Maybe, I am starting to think, this relates back to my previous post about the left and right hemispheres of the brain. The left hemisphere is the one that does logic, language, manipulation, and grasping things in the world. The right hemisphere is open to new things, intuitive, and deals with narrative and things like metaphor and poetry.

The book talks a lot about narrative. The attentive reader of this blog will have realized by now that I think that story-telling is important in wargaming. In fact, I think that wargaming is sustained by narrative, by stories about the battles and campaigns that we run. At least, that is what I see, mostly, on blogs around the place. They tell stories about battles, or at least, mine do, and that is how I read other blogs.

But I suspect that we are running into something of a problem as wargamers. Increasingly I see around the place re-fights of well-known battles, either historical or fictional. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this, of course, and I do it myself – Marathon has been run on my table half a dozen times or so. But what I am struggling to find in the wargaming world are those works of imagination that spark a new angle, a new set of problems to be solved.

Maybe I am missing it. There is not enough time to read the whole wargaming internet, of course. But a lot of wargaming that I do see, hear, and wonder about seems to be heading towards the more formulaic, where, you have guessed it by now, mechanics become important, as opposed to the storyline. This is not universal, of course, and I am not pointing the finger at any wargamer in particular. It is, after all, a diverse hobby, and anyone who wargames is welcome.

But it does make me wonder about how wargaming reflects society. If McGilchrist is right, then we are becoming more left-hemisphere-driven as a society. Everything is increasingly driven by logic, processes, new tools to be exploited, and so on. In short, the world is becoming mechanical, full of mechanisms for doing what we want, be that building cars or wargaming. The other hemisphere and its activities, the intuitive, dreamy one that does not rely on exact data and precise measurement, gets squeezed out.

I am old enough to remember arguments about whether wargamers should use army lists or do their own research. As it happens the army list has conquered the world, as it were. I use them myself, although I do not think they are, or should be, as definitive as I recall some wargamers thinking they were. But the nailing down of the troops we may use for a given army seems to me a product of our left hemispheres, even at the expense of the historical flow of the narrative.

I suggest that this gradual squeezing out of the intuitive side of wargaming is probably not a good thing, as it is not in society. The world needs both bits acting in harmony rather than the domination of one side or the other. The drift in society is slow and largely unnoticeable, as it is in wargaming, but I do see more ‘off the shelf’ wargaming and, without wishing to point the finger at anyone at all, less wargames of ‘pure imagination’ (to quote Willy Wonka).

Maybe I am worrying unnecessarily, but when I started wargaming there was a propensity for the large-scale imaginary world. Now, there seems to be more interest in the small-scale skirmish. It seems to me possible that we have lost something along the way. What do you think?  

Alexander in Italy

‘Now Alex, I have got you a nice, shiny, new army to play with.’

‘Thank you, mummy.’

‘But you must understand, dear, that I’m not made of armies, and if you break this one, I won’t give you another one. You’ve had two already, so you need to be really careful with this one.’

‘Yes, mummy.’

‘Now, I understand the local Greeks are not happy about us being here, especially with an army, so they are gathering to fight us. So you must lead the army bravely into action, but not damage it at all.’

‘No, mummy.’

‘Hm, well, I’m not sure about this at all. I suppose I had better come with you and make sure you do it properly this time.’

‘Yes, mummy. Thank you, mummy.’

*

I seem to have been revisiting some of my more narrative campaigns recently. This indicates either desperation orthe rekindling of my imagination after writing a book. I am not sure which. But the dialogue above indicates the rebirth of the Anabasis of Alexander IV. You can catch up with the detail from the link to the right, but briefly Alexander II of Macedonia’s son, Alex IV, is furthering his father’s plans for the conquest of the Western Mediterranean. Having managed to land at Carthage he defeated a Carthaginian army, and moved on to the Moors, but lost. He then retreated to Ibiza where a relief expedition was defeated by the local Spanish cities. The only option then was a retreat to Italy where he was reunited with his mother, Roxane, after another bit of a sea battle. Now, the locals have banded together to resist the unwelcome intruders, and so we have the next battle in the tale, Macedonians against Italian Greeks.

The photograph shows the battlefield. The Greeks are at the far end, with their hoplites drawn up on a low ridge. I thought that would give them a good defensive bonus against the pikes. Between the ridge and the sea, their light forces are deployed, except a base of peltasts on their left. In reserve are another 4 bases of hoplites and the cavalry.

In the foreground the Macedonians are in two columns, on, on the left, led by Alex IV, while the right hand one is led by his mother. They have to cross the river by the ford, so the plan is that Alex with cross first with the cavalry, while Roxanne follows with the light troops and then the phalanx. While Alex secures the crossing and makes room, Roxanne will order the phalanx. Then, when everything is ready, Alex will take the Companion cavalry to the left, sweep around the flank between the wood and the sea, and triumphantly win the battle, while Roxanne has tied up the rest of the Greeks with the pike phalanx.

There was the awful possibility of the Macedonians getting pinned against the river and destroyed, but I decided that it was better, for the Greeks, to hold their defensive position. Some frantic calculation and consultation of the rules suggested that two deep and uphill, and in a broader formation than the pikes, the hoplites should be able to hold. Meanwhile, the light troops can dispute and disrupt the advancing Macedonians.

The picture above shows the Macedonian plan unfolding. Alex has crossed the river and deployed the light cavalry and some supporting light infantry from Roxanne’s column to cover the Companions and phalanx deploying once they have crossed the river. Roxanne has started to deploy her own troops and has taken control of Alexander’s pikemen as well, the last of the army to ford the river. The skirmishing has damaged some of the light cavalry on each side, but the Macedonian slingers have just started to hit the Tarantine light horse quite hard in the foreground. On the right of the picture, just in front of the phalanx, the Macedonian peltasts have been redirected to the right wing by Roxanne, which will become a little bit more significant than it appears at the moment.

What happened next is reasonably hard to describe, even with pictures. Alex led the Companions forward, aiming to outflank the Greeks. He personally led a base in a charge against the interfering light horse and routed them. I thought he had lost it at that point, but he managed to rally the Companions quickly. Meanwhile, the watchful Greek commander had moved their cavalry into the gap between the end of the phalanx (now reinforced by the reserve hoplites) and the wood and, when opportunity offered, charged the Companions. This was not good, in my view, as Alex had squandered his cavalry advantage and had to fight 2 bases against 2, rather than 4-2 which had been the plan. Still, after the initial shock, the Companions actually prevailed, routing their foes. On the other wing, Roxanne’s peltasts stormed the hill at its steepest part and routed, with the help of a base of light horse, the Greek wing protection. The Greeks had redirected their other base of peltasts to reinforce their left, but they were only halfway there when their compatriots routed.

And then the pike phalanx arrived. Roxanne had kept Alex’s pikemen in a four-deep formation and they ploughed into the Greek hoplites on the ridge. The shock was massive and the dice rolling impressive, and they routed their opponents, including one of the Greek generals. On the Macedonian right edge of the phalanx, a two-deep block of pike hit the end of the hoplites on the hill and, again with impressive dice rolling, routed them.

With both flanks gone and the phalanx penetrated, the Greeks had had enough and decided to withdraw. The picture shows the final position. On the far right the Companions are actually behind the line of the phalanx, although they have, as yet, refused to charge its flank. You can see the hole ripped in the hoplites a bit further left, and at the far left you can see the vaporisation of the Greek right.

I enjoyed that – it was interesting having to deploy the pikes into a phalanx after crossing the river, and actually the timings did not really work as the different components did not hit the Greek lines at the same time. The decent dice rolling and Roxanne’s generalship meant that it did not matter too much. Similarly, Alex got lucky with the Companions on the Macedonian left – they managed to withstand the Greek cavalry charge and then defeat them, so Alex achieved his part of the plan although without the broad flanking maneuver. Overall, as well, the Macedonians did not lose a base in the process. They were, as the scribes recorded, a bit lucky.

*

‘We won, mummy.’

‘You did very well, Alex, dear. Just don’t run off like that again.’

‘But we did win, mummy.’

‘Yes, we did.’

‘And look at this town mummy! Its got an agora, a gymnasium, and baths and everything. It’s civilized! I shall call it Alexville.’

‘Yes, dear. Now go and have a bath. The day’s exertions have made you a bit… rich. Run along, dear.’

The Cataphract Operation

‘Brother, you must give me my money back.’

‘Cousin, it is not your money. You gave it to me.’

‘But the Romans had given it to me, so it is my money.’

‘They gave it to you so you would fight me. Then you changed sides and gave it to me to apologise for attempting to oppose your brethren, so it is not your money at all. You cannot decide what happens to a gift you gave.’

‘It is my money, and the Romans want it back, so you need to give it to me before we both get in trouble.’

‘Ah, cousin, I cannot. I paid the Dacians with it. The money is safe in their stronghold of Temeshvekovar, and not even the Romans can extract it.’

‘Then you must retrieve it.’

‘I cannot and I will not. My allies the Dacians fought hard for it. Doublwhiskos is an honourable man. I will not do the dirty on him.’

‘Unless you are forced, brother. I will make you.’

‘You and whose army, cousin?’

‘Mine.’

*

It is quite nice to pick up an old, unresolved, campaign again, I have found. The Sarmatian Nation campaign can be found on the page listed on the right, which has been updated to include the most recent action, which seems to have been in February 2023. There was still an outstanding wargame to go, however, which is hinted at above. Vodkaschanapps, the Sarmatian leader, has, indeed, paid off the Dacians for assisting him in storming a Roman fort, using the money he got from the other Sarmatian leader, Vodkaredbull, who is probably related somehow, but who, really, knows. Anyway, Vodkaredbull got the money from the Romans who had realised that they needed some heavy cavalry to assist their armies against Sarmatian cavalry, and who better than some more Sarmatians. Unfortunately, Vodkaredbull changed sides when the Dacians and Vodkaschnapps’ troops attacked the fort. Vodkaschnapps used the money given to him by Vodkaredbull to pay the Dacians. The Romans, being Romans, have decided that the money is still theirs, but have failed twice to capture the Dacian stronghold. But now Vodkaredbull has decided that he needs to reclaim the money and return it to the Romans, or find himself at the tail end of a triumph in Rome. Vodkaschnapps has refused, and the battle lines are drawn.

In the picture Vodkaschnapps’ troops (Sarmatians A in game speak) are on the right, while Vodkaredbull is to the left. The terrain has not been kind to Sarmatian B with a stream and a rive bisecting the field, which they need to cross before facing Sarmatian A, who are, of course, the defenders. There is quite a lot of heavy cavalry on the table, as you can see. Each side has 18 bases of cataphracts and two light horse.

Vodkaredbull’s plan is to cross the stream as quickly as possible with one column and reorganise it to hold off the enemy, while crossing the river at the ford with another. This column will be less disorganised and hopefully manage to deploy before Vodkaschnapps’ men approach. The third column will cross the stream further up and hope to outflank to opposition.

The Sarmatian B plan nearly worked. The picture shows the central column has crossed the stream, disorganised but well out of range of any opposition. Their right column (under Vodkaredbull himself) has crossed the river and turned sharp right to try to avoid the oncoming cataphracts. Meanwhile the outflanking column, nearest the camera, is crossing the stream itself, although the attempt to outflank seems to have failed and the Sarmatian A reserve is moving up to counter them.

This being a cavalry battle it all moved quite quickly. The picture shows that Vodkaredbull’s troops have been forced to deploy with their backs to the river and slightly disorganised still from the ford. The central column, however, has rallied from their recursion in aquatic warfare and are ready to deploy, while the outflankers have also crossed the stream and deployed, hoping to rally from the disorganisation before the enemy arrive.

Alas, it was not to be. Vodkaschnapps led his men in a wild charge against Vodkaredbull’s column before they had a chance to rally properly. While the light horse on Vodkaredbull’s left held up some of the opposition briefly, the result of the charge was disastrous for Sarmatian B.

The picture shows the remnants of Vodkaredbull’s command fleeing in the top left. In the foreground the outflanking command has successfully fended off their opposition, but at some cost, while the central column is facing off the rest of Sarmatian A. It got complicated, as the casualties inflicted on Vodkaredbull’s command meant that Sarmantian B’s morale dropped to fall back. This meant that the remaining troops there, unable to fall back due to an impassable river, simply picked up more terrain shaken and hence lost all the remaining combats. In the foreground, the outflanking column fell back to and across the stream, picking up more terrain shaken disorder (I ran out of markers for it at this point) and leaving some troops exposed on the far side of the water. This did not end well, of course, and the Sarmatian B army was soon fleeing.

Well, that was an interesting, unusual and rather quick battle. I do not think I have had so many cavalry bases on the table at once, and I miscalculated the distances they could travel more than once, which led to some of the debacles of getting trapped against water features which the above tries to describe. Still, Vodkaschnapps lives to fight again.

*

‘Brother.’

‘Now, cousin, do you accept that the money is mine?’

‘You have earned it, cousin. I will let you enjoy it in peace.’

‘Just as well. You hardly have an army to reclaim it with now.’

‘Peace, brother. I declare eternal peace between us.’

‘And no sneaking off to the Romans to complain now and try to get them to attack me.’

‘Brother! The very thought of it! That had never crossed my mind. How dare you impute such ideas to me!’

‘Hm. We will see, won’t we?’