Sobering thoughts at the Tower of London and Wargame Bloggers Quarterly

The Legatus was in the City yesterday, getting a long overdue haircut from the lovely Tracy.  It had been raining for most of the time during my meeting and lunch with Peruvian contractors but as I came out of the hairdressers at the base of the NatWest Tower (yes, I know it's not called that any more but it's the same with Debenhams in Staines which I still think of as Kennards, although it hasn't been called that for forty years) the sun came out.  Tracy had asked if I had been to the Tower of London to see the ceramic poppy display commemorating the centenary of the Great War.  I had not, so set off there before the light faded.  As I wandered down Eastcheap it was apparent that a veritable pilgrimage was in progress.  Lots of non-City types were heading east as well, in a road not known for its pedestrian traffic.  I had expected some tourists there but not the crowd around the whole perimeter of the Tower.

For all those who play the game of war the visual impact of all those poppies, each representing a person, was a solemn reminder that all the miniature people we move around our toy battlefields are there to mark, in many cases, the existence of real people who lived and died in the past.  Now the Legatus is not a deep thinker and as long as he has access to cold wine, hot food and warm women is pretty much happy but this brilliant display says more about the impact on Britain of the War than any book or documentary can.  The latter have, by their very nature, to look at wider issues of politics and strategy on the whole and, apart from some notable exceptions looking at the lives of soldiers, miss what this display conveys so well: That war is about individual people dying, violently and often in great numbers

Now I am not a pacifist and neither am I an isolationist - some threats to civilisation do need people to make a stand - a military stand (whether the Great War was one of these is a matter of debate) but it would be a good thing if sabre-rattling politicians could be made to spend fifteen minutes at this site (yes, Mr Putin) and think, for once.  Great Britain's losses in the Great War amounted to about 2% of the population or one in fifty people and this in a country which was not, unlike France (4%) in the combat zone.

Now last week I was invited to Eric the Shed's again for another game of Warmaster as our Imperial forces took the field against massed orcs and goblins again, in a larger game than last time.  I even remembered some of the rules and deployed some rudimentary tactics.  I have, like many historical wargamers, slightly looked down on fantasy wargames because my interest in recreating conflicts of the past stems from an interest in history, not gaming.  However, in retrospect, there is an argument that fantasy wargaming, which does not turn brutal conflict of the past into a recreational pursuit, is, perhaps, more ethically defensible than historical wargaming.  No real goblins, orcs, dwarves, men of Rohan or Empire handgunners were slaughtered to provide a setting for a game.  As my new lady friend, A, ventured (deliberately provocatively - she is a provocative woman) recently, isn't wargaming like playing a game about rape?  Can any acts of violence, defensibly, form the basis for a game?  Is the personal violation of rape any different from having your body violated by a musket ball?  There have been attempts in the past to protest against wargames.  The show that is now called Colours and takes place (sadly, not this year) at Newbury racecourse used to be called Armageddon and, as such was picketed by, amongst others, Greenham Common Peace protestors (and one of my ex-girlfriends became a Greenham Common woman so I know something of their mindset), forcing a name change to its less offensive current title.

I am uneasy about playing wargames set in the recent past but there are other games that unsettle me too.  When Wargames Soldiers and Strategy re-launched, a few years ago, it carried an article about a game concerning the assassination of Caligula.  I rarely get incensed enough by anything I read in the press to write to the editor (I did once when The Daily Mirror wrote a sneeringly disparaging article about an ex-girlfriend) but this nearly did it.  The scenario was about a small group of assassins breaking into the palace to kill the emperor.  This made me queasy enough, even if Caligula was a certifiable loon, but the author, Mark Backhouse, offered the following variant: "A second group of assassins start in the Palace complex at the same time with the objective of killing Caligula's wife Caesonia and daughter Drusilla".  I'm sorry, this isn't a wargame in my opinion it's trivialising the murder of women and children.  Nasty!

Now, of course, I am not going to suddenly stop painting my World War 1 British infantry and switch to Warhammer but just pausing to think to reflect on the personal consequences of wars of the past is not a bad thing and Paul Cummins Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, to give the Tower installation its proper name, has certainly succeeded in this.

Anyway, on a much lighter note the second edition of the superb Wargame Bloggers Quarterly is out today and you can download it here.  Even more exciting, it contains a piece by the Legatus on Poulet Marengo (I may not be very good at wargaming but I can cook!) the dish cobbled up, or so the story goes, for Napoleon after the Battle of Marengo in 1800.  I was pleased to see a piece by Scott too on his stunning Lord of the Rings Durin's Causeway board and am looking forward to the Sudan feature.  This really is a great initiative and if you haven't downloaded it yet then do so!

Today's music is a seasonal favourite: Sibelius' 3rd Symphony, in the (excellent) version by the Scottish National Orchestra under Sir Alexander Gibson.  For a number of reasons it reminds me of the sort of "crispy autumnal day" (as my former girlfriend SA used to call them) we have had today.  Autumn has been most peculiar in the South East of England this year; it was twenty two degrees on Friday when the monthly average for October is twelve.  Today, however we had our first cold, bright autumnal day.  SA used to live near Richmond Park and on autumnal days like this we used to go running there, as it was this time of the year that our previous friendship became rather more intimate.  I had bought this CD at about the same time so first played it in her flat after the good 12km whizz around the park's perimeter. We would come back feeling flushed with autumnal well-being, warmed by the exercise and the pale sun with the scent of leaves and dead ferns in our nostrils.  Just time for a horizontal warm-down before a lunch of spaghetti alla puttanesca!  Coincidentally, the story behind the creation of this dish is not dissimilar to that of Poulet Marengo in that it is a found ingredients dish created, it is said, in the nineteen fifties by Italian chef Sandro Petti who had to knock together a dish for some customers late one night when he was short of ingredients other than tomatoes, olives and capers.  The Legatus first had it in Rome cooked by our princess lady friend with, as is typical in the region, the addition of anchovies.  So I think I will cook it tonight as the autumnal weather and the Sibelius reminds me of the dish (not to mention SA and her thirty three inch inside leg measurement!).

A wargaming first, some Miniature Wargames articles, a fantastic prize and some splendid flags...

Well, not much progress on the painting front this week, other than a little bit of work on the Romans and a tentative start on my first Mars Attacks Martian.  My wargaming activities, however, continue apace thanks to the generous invitations of Eric the Shed.  This week, in the Shed, it was another new set of rules for me as we played Warmaster, the micro Warhammer game.  This was an interesting set of rules and for me, anyway, who is used to 28mm games, the amount of manouevre was rather liberating.  Although perhaps some of the permitted 180 degree turn sweeping manouevres were perhaps a little too extreme.  Still, I am gradually adapting to the concept of a game as opposed to a historical reenactment.  In fact, I realised, this was the first wargame I had ever played in anything other than 28mm!  It certainly made me happier about the big War and  Empire 15mm Kickstarter I have signed up for as maybe I will be able to play a game with mini figures!  Whether I'll be able to paint them is a different question.  Next week I have to decide which army to start with and I haven't got a clue yet! 

These were just our casualties

Eric and I were on the side of the Empire and our now quite regular other shed visitors played orcs and goblins.  In the end, after nearly three hours play, we had a draw; with both sides having lost half our units.  We played in quite a leisurely way until Eric, sensing a crushing defeat, went into blitzkrieg mode and ruthlessly selected enemy units to destroy to bring us back from the brink of disaster.  It's all about destroying whole units and I was spreading my attacks amongst multiple units, instead of wiping out one and moving to the next one, so my opponent scuttled off to a remote part of the board (and with 10mm figures you can have remote parts of the board) with several remnants of units which, however, did not contribute to our victory conditions. Something to remember next time!  I just don't have a gaming brain!

Some of my painted Battle of Five armies figures

I do have the GW Battle of Five Armies 10mm set which uses a version of the Warmaster rules, so maybe I need to get those out.  The only problem is that any extra figures now cost a fortune on eBay!  

A fiercely contested hill

I have only played one game of Warhammer; about seven or eight years ago at Guildford. I have embarked on collecting Warhammer armies several times for the full scale version (Dwarves, Empire and Dark Elves) but always got rid of them, reasoning that Lord of the Rings was enough for fantasy games for me.  Still, it is a shame that Games Workshop has stopped supporting Warmaster, as it was a fun way to play in the Warhammer universe without the incredibly time consuming painting their larger figures now need. I do wonder whether the increasing detail on these figures, and subsequent longer painting time, contributes somewhat to a loss of interest from teenagers.  Maybe a simpler, cleaner sculptural approach like Mike Owen's would work better and encourage more painted armies.  

Apropos to this subject, this month's Miniature Wargames contains one of those 'wargaming is dying' articles.  These are rather like the articles about hypersonic planes flying from London to Sydney in ninety minutes; I am sure I have been reading them for thirty years now.  Mr Barry Hilton bangs on about how all wargamers are middle aged and no youngsters are coming into the hobby.  Sound familiar?  My theory on this is that wargaming is, mostly, a middle aged man's hobby, always has been and always will be.  I played as a teenager and then stopped and didn't resume until I was in my early forties.  As I get older I get more nostalgic for things from my past (probably why I bought a book on Captain Scarlet yesterday) and I suspect others come back to wargaming, or even start it anew, when they are older.  So I suspect that those who give up on Warhammer 40K at the age of sixteen (or whenever else they discover girls) will reappear as historical wargamers twenty-five years later.  

Henry Hyde, the otherwise estimable editor of the magazine, has been trying to get his readers to sign up to Twitter (has anything been so aptly named?) and this month explained how to retweet something.  I have to say I didn't understand a word of this piece and it wasn't helped by being illustrated using text that was so small that even with my glasses I was struggling to read it.  The core of his argument was "the more people who retweet us, the more widely our posts are seen and the more followers we get".  This, to me is where I fundamentally fail to understand this aspect of social media.  I enjoy writing my various blogs but almost solely for the pleasure of writing about something other than infrastructure projects.  I enjoy the bits of research I do and taking, locating and formatting pictures.  I do this for myself and am constantly amazed that anyone else wants to read my ramblings.  With Twitter and Facebook, however, the prime motivation  seems to be to collect friends, followers or likes; like Red Indians collecting scalps.  I am pleased that I have some followers who regularly take time to comment on my blogs but the bizarre Twitter and Facebook system seems to venerate the acquisition of quantity of followers and is not concerned, for example,  with any inherent quality of content.  It's not, "how interesting are my thoughts" but "how many people like them".  Tragic.

Anyway, much more positive news this week with the arrival of two books from Mr Daniel Mersey, author of Dux Bellorum.  He had a competition on his blog to win a copy of his new medieval rules, Lion Rampant.  Much to my surprise he kindly selected me as the winner and yesterday I took delivery of Lion Rampant and his book on King Arthur plus some roster cards..  Both of these were on my shopping list so I was surprised and delighted to win them.  These look ideal to sort out the issue I have of a number of late dark ages/early medieval periods I have been thinking about for some time.  I am initially thinking of, perhaps, Normans and Byzantines or El Cid or, indeed, Wars of the Roses.  ALl of which I have some painted figures for.  I am also very taken by the work Dalauppror has been doing on some Scandinavian forces and am very tempted by that too.  Also, there are the new Perry plastic Hundred Years War figures which give me thoughts of small encounters in France, without having to build full sized armies for Agincourt. Then of course there is Robin Hood!   Lots of options!   I'll do a more in-depth post on the rules another day but 24 to 60 figures a side sounds perfect for me!

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Another splendid fellow came to my rescue as regards flags for my recently completed Afghans.  Someone was asking on TMP (yes, I am still going there) about Afghan flags as well and Mr Patrick Wilson of that excellent site The Virtual Armchair General said he had got some he would email for free, as they were something of a work in progress.  Well, I thought, a work in progress is better than nothing at all so I sent him an email and he sent the lovely flags back by return.  I have bought his flags for the Sudan in the past and they are excellent.  I plan to give my Afghan standard bearer something to wave this weekend!