Sing Yer Hearts Out - A Tale of Two Footballing Weekends

The weekend of July 23/24th saw two highlights for me. The second, on the Sunday, was the epic Command and Colors Austerlitz game already described in these pages. The first, the previous day, was a trip down to Chichester to meet up with family, have a jolly nice meal at the Minerva brasserie and see a play at the attached Minerva Theatre. The play in question was Sing Yer Heart out for the Lads, a gritty story about racism and xenophobia in the context of English football so very much a story for our times. 

My wife and I go to see plays very rarely and we are really not au fait with dramatic conventions in the way some of our family are – my nephew, for example, is a regular theatre-goer and reviewer known in the Blogosphere as The Real Chrisparkle so his blog is probably the best place to start for a fuller review of the performance. What I can say is that it was not only an interesting experience – interesting rather than enjoyable – but it also provided a thought-provoking contrast with the footballing extravaganza of the following weekend. 

The play is set in a scruffy London boozer – very realistically staged, to the extent that it was tempting to go and get a beer from the functioning beer pumps when the interval came – during the October 2000 World Cup qualifying match between England and Germany at the old Wembley. (Anyone not wanting to know the result should look away now. It was 1-0 to Germany, the last goal at the old Wembley Stadium being scored by Liverpool midfielder Dietmar Hamann). A group of fans settle in to watch the game but frustration at the England performance soon gives rise to aggressive expressions of racism and other hate speech, with ultimately tragic results.

Not looking too good for England; tensions starting to simmer in Sing Yer Heart Out For The Lads

It's an earnest cautionary tale that feels like one worth telling. Racism is bad, footy has a problem with it, English footy in particular has a problem with it, the toxic mix of footy and racial violence part of a wider culture in which issues of racism, xenophobia and the loss of status and Empire have never been satisfactorily resolved. For me, as for Chrisparkle, the play didn’t really go anywhere dramatically beyond horrible racist people being horrible and racist. The heart of the second act, in which Alan, a well-read Enoch Powell quoting racist, plays pool with Mark, one of the black characters, while calmly outlining his racial philosophy and telling Mark why he does not belong in the UK, should feel tense but does not, as it feels as though both characters are effectively just being used as mouthpieces for opposing worldviews. 

(It was perhaps unwise to have the actual footy game playing on a TV in the background. There were periods of the play when I found myself distractedly following that old 2000 game instead of listening to what was being said onstage and I’m sure there were others in the audience who did the same). 

I also found the characters tended to be caricatures…the calm and sinister Alan, a cerebral, ideological racist who has read all of his books and is more in favour of persuasion and considered action than undirected violence; the thuggish Lawrie, clearly in awe of Alan’s superior learning but hot-headed, impatient and constantly close to losing all restraint; Mark, a black man recently out of the Army and disillusioned at the failure of English society to fully accept him despite his best efforts to fit in. 

But then, this sense of caricature comes from the fact that these are real figures with whom I think we are all familiar in real life. We know people like Alan who are smart and have read all the books and managed to learn all the wrong things from them. He reminded me mostly of a boy I remembered from the Sixth Form in Liverpool who, having expressed the most appalling views on race, calmly informed me that he preferred to be regarded as a racialist than a racist. We also know people like Lawrie. Thuggishness in English football is never very far below the surface. The pub portrayed in Sing Yer Heart Out feels familiar, down to the moth-eaten taped-down carpets and the perfunctory St Georges Cross bunting; and if I had been out and about looking for somewhere to watch that match back in 2000 and had come across that pub I would have recognized it for what it was and carried on walking. 

Fast forward a week and there could scarcely be a more striking contrast with the football offering of the following weekend: *that* European Championship Final between the English and German womens’ teams that ended – against all expectations, surely, this being England-Germany – with the England women dancing around the pitch with the trophy while a nation cried and yelled itself hoarse.

Much has been written about the utter joyousness of the Womens’ Euros and it is certainly a novel experience for an England supporter to be able to just enjoy a football tournament without any of the usual accompanying baggage. On the pitch, none of the usual huffing and puffing as a team of overpaid prima donnas gives another lacklustre performance and goes out to a team of part-timers from a country nobody even knew had a team – or, just as badly, going out on penalties to an infuriatingly efficient Germany for the three hundred thousandth time. Off the pitch, none of the spectacles associated with England football supporter culture: drunken, sunburned, topless men with enormous beer-bellies brawling outside stadia or using any nearby street furniture as a public urinal. None of the hate, or the ugliness, or the gloomy soul-searching amidst the ruins when it is all over. 

I’m not quite sure why this is so. Is it the case that most of the appalling behaviour is down to a relatively small number of toxic males who are exactly the sort of men who would regard it as beneath their dignity to turn out for a team of girls? Or is it that with the womens’ game hitherto attracting much less coverage and lower advertising revenues than the mens’ it was felt that the result was much less consequential, that there was therefore less ‘pride’ on the line as a nation? I recall a chant featured in Sing Yer Hearts Out that went ‘Stand up if you won the War’ (to the tune of Go West, of course), and this strange and strangely English conflation of football and bad World War II history might perhaps seem even more tenuous than normal when the players are female. 

As someone who has watched and enjoyed womens’ football in the past (notably the epochal 2019 World Cup where the England women started to become household names) it’s interesting to note a certain concern on the part of some commentators that the womens’ game is becoming in some ways more like the mens’, and that we are in danger of going down the same ill-advised path. The arguably cynical play of the German players, playing a rough physical game against their opponents in hope of a reaction; the timewasting which when done by the English players was consistently described euphemistically as ‘game management’; even midfielder Liz Scott’s foul-mouthed reaction to a German challenge that you really didn’t have to be a very able lip-reader to pick up (how many at home must have cried out, with me, ‘Hey, she just told that German player to **** off!’); the assumption is that women should be above all this and should conduct themselves elegantly and demurely on the pitch and off it. 

Chloe Kelly celebrates scoring the winner against Germany; I say, there's a half naked woman on the pitch.

An unreasonable expectation surely. Given that these women are consumers of the same footballing culture as the rest of us it is absurd to regard this time as one of the loss of innocence. Maybe it is just that the simian male culture surrounding football has been so unpleasant for so long that when the reasonable behaviour of a group of reasonable people is suddenly inserted it feels somehow unnatural and hence fragile. 

I’m just thankful for all the great football of the last few weeks, for goals like Georgia Stanway’s rocket against Spain that stand alongside such beautiful pieces of work as that Paul Gascoigne goal against Scotland at Wembley in 1996, or Russo's cheeky backheel against Sweden; grateful also for the experience of being able to cheer on an England team without the slightly uncomfortable feeling that I’m participating in something a bit dodgy. Only time will tell if this really is a defining moment for the womens' game for all the wrong reasons, whether its ever higher profile and the dizzying amount of money likely to be poured into the game will result in its corruption. All I know is that I am much more tempted to tune in to the womens' world cup next year than to the bloodsoaked money making exercise scheduled for Qatar in November, cynical even by FIFA standards. And I’ll leave the final word to David Squires of the Guardian: "Sod it, I’m a 47-year-old man with a creaking hip and a BMI so-called GPs would describe as ‘troubling’, but even I harbour dreams of being Fran Kirby when I grow up".

Four Go Mad At Austerlitz

Back from an extended hiatus from serious gaming with a bit of a bang this week so it would be shame not to report the event in excruciating detail in the old blog.

I have long been a fan of the old Command & Colors:Napoleonic system and own all the expansions. I'm not remotely convinced that it models Napoleonic warfare in any meaningful sense but it has always scratched a strong Napoleonic itch of mine. It's nice to be moving blocks that represent real Napoleonic unit types around on a map and make them do real Napoleonic things like fire, melee, form squares, make combined arms attack, all that malarkey; nicer still to be able to do this using a system so simple that it feels effortless and enables you to chat and enjoy your opponents' company while you play, as opposed to endlessly looking things up in overly long dense rule books or checking combat result tables. It's also a system that never fails to produce strong and memorable narratives, which to me are one of the greatest pleasures of wargaming generally.

The one expansion I have never yet managed to get to the table is the Epics expansion which provides rules that enable players to fight larger scale actions of the wars. So, I finally got round to setting up an Epics session in the summer house so recently freed from the ongoing depredations of my teenage son and his friends. There were four of us present for the occasion, exalted company indeed which included my local mate Roger, Nundanket of the Horse and Musket Gaming blog and David In Suffolk of the Ragged Soldier blog. Because it seemed such an auspicious occasion I chose a suitably ambitious scenario - Austerlitz, the whole shebang. This is the biggest of the Epic scenarios that come with the expansion and just setting it up took well over an hour, having to get units out from the French, Austrian and Russian sets, not to mention all that terrain. In retrospect it was perhaps too ambitious a choice for four players of whom none had played the Epic game, but what the heck, it was always going to be fun.

Opening positions (before I remembered to add the Russian leaders!) viewed from the French side. Denuded French right is visible, with Davout's hard-marching foot cavalry yet to reach the field. In the centre the French seem well poised for an early strike at the Pratzen Heights.

Same view, opposite side.

Those fearsome Russian Heavy Guard Cavalry will have their own story to tell of this day.

Several house rules were adopted prior to kick off. In the basic C&C rules we always felt that cavalry was too effective against infantry in square, battling with just one dice but with a 2/3 chance of causing damage with that dice, so we reined that in a little by allowing the cavalry to only hit on infantry symbols, halving its chance of reducing the square. For a second house rule I am indebted to MS Foy at Prometheus in Aspic, whose custom C&C rules include a way of making ranged musketry combat less lethal. In the original rules it was possible for a unit to completely destroy another two hexes (several hundred yards at least) away with one roll of the dice without ever becoming engaged, which given the very limited effectiveness of Napoleonic era muskets never felt quite right either. Both rules that perhaps threatened to extend the game somewhat by slowing down the rate of loss but which just felt right.

We felt the game mechanics needed a slight tweak also. In the 4-player Epic rules one player on each side is the C-in-C and the other their subordinate. Every turn the C-in-C plays one card out of their Command deck and places it in front of them to order specified units. They then select a card from the Courier rack and pass it to their subordinate to play. The rules are not specific as to how much communication accompanies this procedure but the implication is that the subordinate plays what they are given without any consultation, following what they see as a direct order from above. As this seemed to be a bit limiting for the subordinates we decided to make it more of a team event with both players on a side involved in deciding what cards to play and how; again, another rule that would clearly slow down play - although how much only became apparent after we started playing! Chris and I took the role of the French, Roger and Dave that of the Allies.

So there we were, house rules in place, ready to go. And looking at the starting positions it felt like it could not be a very long game. A whopping 19 victory tokens are required for victory in this scenario, and session reports on BoardGameGeek mention 4, 5, 6-hour playtimes, but the units all looked so close together on that map that it seemed it would take no time at all for them to close to melee distance and once they did the killing would be swift and those victory tokens would start to mount up in no time.

From that point of view the battlefield had more of a feeling of Borodino than Austerlitz perhaps. But on closer inspection the starting positions of the armies do seem to broadly model those at Austerlitz despite the squashing of the battlefield resulting from the 11-hex board depth. The French right around Telnitz and Sokolnitz is pretty bare up front, as opposed to the mass of white and green facing them across the Goldbach stream. Davout's Corps is present but sitting back on the baseline as opposed to furiously marching up from Vienna. C&C has no concept of units entering mid battle so this was the only way of representing a formation that might or might not be able to engage. So initially the French right seems highly vulnerable, as it did back on the day.

In the centre the French are stronger and the Allies weaker. This, combined with the fact that 4 victory tokens can be had for having a commanding presence on the two sides of the Pratzen Heights, meant that this was always likely to be where the French team would concentrate their efforts, again just like in the actual battle. An interesting example of how game systems can use victory conditons to impose a 'historical' pattern on a simple game like C&C which is always otherwise prone to deteriorating into a low-level slugfest as players try to pick off already weakened units in the hope of obtaining the victory tokens for their elimination.

But, on to the battle itself. The Allies have fewer cards than the French, 4 as opposed to 6, but move first. Initially both sides concentrated on bringing their units forward, in the centre and on the French left. There was little movement on the other side of the board and this set a pattern that would be followed for the rest of the game. The Allies hardly moved their left at all, and in response the French, after expending a few cards starting to move Davout's Corps up to support Legrand's men on the Goldbach, pretty much gave up on that too and Davout's men stayed where they were and became distant spectators to the battle. I think only one or two blocks were removed from the board on that flank during the whole day, as a result of artillery bombardment.

The first fighting occurred on the Allied right, where a lone unit of lancers was sent on what appeared to be a death ride against two units of French cavalry, one of them heavy. But this was where a second pattern of the day quickly became visible - the woefully poor die-rolling that would bedevil the French all day. The Russian lancers decimated the French Lights and sent them fleeing for safety; a French counter attack by a beefy heavy cavalry unit, did little but drive the lancers back to the shelter of the town of Blasowitz, whereas significant damage to the unit was expected by all concerned. 

Early actions on the French left. The Russian Lancers are recovering from their death ride in the village of Blasowitz, top centre, while the unfortunate French Light cavalry who bore the brunt of their attack are loitering by the river at bottom and will take no further part in the battle

After this charge of the Light brigade the Allies concentrated on getting as many of their units in this sector as possible up to the front. This included the Guard, and in particular the largest and most powerful unit on the board, the feared Heavy Guard Cavalry, six blocks strong and seven dice worth of melee power, who started moving up ominously from the back. The two Guard artillery units were brought up to form a grand battery to the north of Blasowitz, and this made the corridoor of low ground to the north and west of Blasowitz a bit of a killing ground where it was perilous for the French to move. The French, perhaps less wisely, instead of moving their reserves up, chose to use what units they had readily to hand. Initially they enjoyed some success, forcing the Russian Light cavalry out of Blasowitz, but ultimately this would lead to a situation where effectively they lost the initiative on this side of the field.

A few turns in, the French decided to make what turned out to be a premature assault in the centre, having drawn a card that allowed them to move all infantry units in one section of the board. Forward came Vandamme and Bernadotte's units in what seemed to be an effective attack. The town of Pratzen fell, the Russian Line Infantry in there destroyed, and the French followed up by storming the heights of Stare Vinohrady behind, destroying the Austrian artillery stationed there in the process. They also occupied the adjacent orchard, and the Allies were concerned that this might be an early breakthrough for the French. The sun of Austerlitz was breaking through the clouds.

The French assault in the centre - I. The Russian line infantry in Pratzen resisted an initial assault by the French Line and inflicted some casualties, but were destroyed by the Light Infantry following up, who have now occupied the town.

The French assault in the centre - II. In fact, the high water mark of the French effort for the day. The French are on the heights having destroyed the Austrian artillery that faced them, and in the orchard. While the garrison of Pratzen have suffered losses, on the left the French have destroyed the Russian lancers who were in Blasowitz. They do not occupy the village as that would bring them in range of the Russian batteries.

But it was not to be. The French attack ran out of steam for reasons familiar to anyone who has played Command and Colors: the French no longer had access to any cards that would allow them to develop their position in the centre, either in their hand or in the Courier rack. At this point the Allies got the benefit of better cards to go along with that of their better die-rolling. A frustrating number of Probe/Attack/Assault Right cards which were less useful to the French, who could only use them to bring up Davout or take long range shots across the Goldbach, than they were to the Allies, who could use them to get their powerful Guard units into the battle. 

This was entirely the fault of the French of course. When preparing an attack even in the basic C&C:N scenarios it pays to wait until you have multiple cards that you can use rather than opportunistically using one very powerful card with nothing to back it up. The game is unforgiving of unsupported attacks in a way that feels very realistic. We were about to learn the full wisdom of this as we suddenly lost the initiative in the centre as well as on our left.

The Allies had the luxury of being able to bring up their reserves in the centre, and they were able to use their cavalry and infantry effectively and lethally together; forcing French units into square - the French have little cavalry in the centre and had nothing close enough to support the infantry - and then unleashing the big Austrian Line units against them. They soon had the Stare Vinohrady heights back under their control, and though a late attack by the French enjoyed some success they were never again able to achieve local superiority there.

One of the stories of the day was the experience of that terrifying Russian Heavy Guard Cavalry unit, the most glamorous scions of the Russian aristocracy. They came galloping up from the rear and soon proved their worth in a brief period of bloody fighting just to the south of Blasowitz. The French cuirassiers destroyed a unit of Russian lights and, their blood up, went on to charge the Heavy Guard Cavalry. This might have seemed foolhardy but it seemed likely that the Russian Guard would attack us next anyway; with five melee dice the cuirassiers could at least reasonably hope to do serious damage to their opponents and reduce their potential lethalness. In the event the French die roll failed miserably again - a single hit and a retreat flag that the Russians could ignore - and the Russian counter attack completely destroyed the cuirassiers; that was a hard blow to bear.

The Russians continued to make themselves a thorn in the side of the French, helping to push a French infantry unit in the centre into square so it could be finished off by the Austrian Line. As French C-in-C I developed an irrational hatred of these Russian dandies and was determined that if nothing else I would destroy them this day. As they milled around to the south of Blasowitz the French infantry in the town launched a sortie against them. The Russians might have retired and saved some casualties, but really, when did the cream of the Russian army retire before the low-bred scum of the French line? They stood their ground and the French infantry hit hard, reducing the Russians down from 5 blocks to 2. The French were able to follow this up on the very next turn with a final desparate charge by a half-strength unit of Heavy cavalry, which finally destroyed the Russian unit and sent their commander, the Grand Duke Constantine, scurrying away to the shelter of the nearest infantry unit. I was able at last to comment, as Napoleon did on the day 'many fine ladies of St Petersburg will lament this day'.

At this point it was approaching 6pm and we had been playing for over 5 hours including a leisurely break for lunch, so it was unfortunately time to bring the fighting to a close. The score stood at 10 victory tokens apiece; the Allies had 4 tokens for control of the heights and had eliminated 6 French units, while the French had 3 tokens for control of most of the towns across the middle of the board from Bosnitz on the left to Telnitz on the right, and had eliminated 7 Allied units/leaders. The latter included Feldmarschal Kollowrat who fell while gallantly leading his unit in the reconquest of the Stare Vinohrady heights.

Final position on the French left. It's been bloody for the French but several full strength units are visible and there are several Guard units out of shot on the baseline. The cuirassiers in front of Blasowitz are the heroes who have finally seen off the Russian Guard Heavy Cavalry.

Final position in the centre, from the Allied side. Again, despite heavy losses (see the huge pile of blocks in the background!) the French are still in this.

Final position on the French right. There is a weakened Russian unit visible top right of centre, and they were the only casualties on this side of the field.

The parity in victory tokens belies the fact that the French had suffered much greater casualties in terms of blocks lost, and many of their surviving units were severely reduced. It felt as though we had been given a kicking. That said, both sides had a number of powerful units still on the field - even in the centre where the French had suffered badly they still had a number of full strength infantry units uncommited. On the left the French enjoyed some late success. As well as the elimination of the Russian Guard Heavies a French attack on the Russian Light infantry in front of Bosnitz had almost destroyed them without any counter attack; while a bombardment of the Russian Guard Horse Artillery had inflicted losses, forcing them to limber up and gallop off to a more respectful distance and breaking up the Russian grand battery. And nothing had happened on the French right as yet, so despite the heavy French losses there was still everything to play for. A draw was perhaps the correct result for the day's fighting thus far.

It was a fun and interesting day. With the constant discussions within the teams it felt perhaps a little overthought for C&C, a game whose primary virtue is simplicity and speed of play. It might have been better to adopt the simple command mechanics implied in the rules and find another way to make it more interesting for the subordinate - alternating command perhaps? This would also have had the virtue of making the game play faster and we may have completed the battle in the time available.

It was hard not to feel aggrieved as the French, what with our terrible die-rolling and our indifferent command cards. That said, the Allies played the cards they had very effectively, especially the way they used combined arms attacks to inflict lethal losses on exposed French infantry units. The French paid the price of launching their main attack too early on before they had collected the cards needed to keep it going. The Allies were better able to react to the crisis in the centre than the French were to develop it, and from that point on heavy French losses were guaranteed.

There was also an element of karma to the French ordeal. A few months ago Dave and I played a game of the Battle of Kilsyth which was kindly hosted by MS Foy, and I my luck was outrageously good, effortlessly destroying whole units with a single die-roll. In a way this felt like the Universe righting itself at last.

So, a grand day all in all and a big thank you for my guests for playing and for being so patient with my many misunderstandings of the rules. Hope to arrange another session of something in due course!

Survivors photo taken by Dave the Ragged Soldier. A rogues' gallery if ever there was one.

A Spell with the Black Dog and a Couple of Quick Reviews

First blog post after a bit of a hiatus, on this occasion the result of a relatively minor depressive episode. Those who know me well know that I have been prone to depression for pretty much my whole life and that I have at times found myself in some very uncomfortable places as a result. This time the trigger was a period of intense stress both at home, where I care for a wife with young-onset Alzheimers and a son with autism, and at work.

I don’t want to come across as remotely self-pitying, I know many people with heavier burdens than mine to bear, including both my wife and son. It is merely an observation that might help readers to understand where I am coming from sometimes.

An upside of decades of depressive illness, combined with a tendency for self-analysis, is that you develop a close familiarity with your own emotional and cognitive processes, and an intense sensitivity to looming crises and what is likely to trigger or to soften them. I tend to recognise almost to the minute the point at which I am starting to unravel, and my excellent GP is always happy to work with me to identify a solution. Which leads to another upside of decades of depressive illness: that moment when you feel the cloud begin to lift. You go through hell to get there, but it’s one of the sweetest feelings you’re ever likely to get. It’s like making up with a partner after an ugly row, or the sudden coming of spring after a hard winter – it takes you by surprise to realise that life can be good.

While plodding through the murk I found that, while I wasn’t quite feeling sociable enough for much gaming activity, I did recently get to read a couple of decent books so thought I would share some details here.

For the first, Chris Carey’s Thermopylae, I have to immediately add a disclaimer and say that the author is my elder brother so I am biased. That said, being a Professor of Classics most of his output to date has been academic works that, even if they were about subjects of more interest to me, I would have struggled to read, or at least to understand more than one word in ten. This book, which he was invited by the Oxford University Press to write as one of their Great Battles series, is his first foray into more popular history and he has told me that it is the book he has enjoyed writing the most. Because ancient warfare has always had slightly less interest for me than modern, it took me far longer than it should have done for me to read the free copy that I was given, with other books pressing for my attention.

Why did they always fight naked? That is never going to end well.

It’s a very good read though. What I liked most about it is that it was not in the least what I was expecting, which was a straightforward narrative of the battle. In fact the details of the fighting take up only a few pages out of more than 200. Most of it is more investigative or analytical writing about such topics as the reliability or otherwise of our sources, where the battle took place, the motives and aims of the antagonists, what the battle represented to contemporaries, and its lasting significance to ancients and to moderns. As a classical scholar of many decades and an expert in Herodotus Chris was certainly the man for the task, and the scholarship on display is seriously impressive. He also had a blast when researching the book, following the path of the Great King’s army from Western Turkey across the Hellespont and down through Greece to the fateful pass, there mapping and following all the possible routes along which the treacherous Ephialtes might have lead the Persian host to fall upon the Greek rear. The enjoyment he had in researching and writing the book, along with his sheer enthusiasm for the subject, comes through in the style, which is engaging and witty.

I find I am curious now to look at other books in the series to see if they take a similar approach to their subject. I see that so far the OUP have published volumes on Agincourt, Lutzen, Culloden, Waterloo, Rorke’s Drift/Isandhlwana and El Alamein.

The second book I read was an older one that I first read back when it was first published in the 1980’s and is more social history than military: The Old Lie : The Great War and the Public School Ethos by Peter Parker (yes, when I first saw it I thought of Spider Man too). The theme of the book is how the public school culture that grew up in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century – athletic, anti-intellectual, deeply male-oriented, with its emphases on honour, fair play, intense emotional attachment to school and ones peers there – was instrumental in creating a generation with the exact mindset that was required to fulfil its tragic destiny as cannon fodder in the trenches of the Great War. The more so since the public schools were so evangelical and their ethos spread by school stories and magazines, as well as the missions that the schools set up in inner city areas to bring their culture to the benighted masses there.

No, not that Peter Parker

Parker follows the history of the schools from the barbaric bear-pits of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century when boys were subject to physical and sexual abuse at the hands of all-powerful prefects and there were school riots that necessitated calling out the militia (Floreat Seditio was scrawled on the walls of Eton during one ruck at the time of the French Revolution); through the first steps of reform initiated by the revered Dr Arnold of Tom Brown’s Schooldays fame, and then the more profound reforms of the Clarendon Commission of 1861-6, to the schools’ heyday of the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries.

When war broke out in 1914 and the British Army needed a sudden and dramatic increase in numbers, the only ready source of officers was the OTCs of the public schools. The response was overwhelming, as evidenced by the appalling casualty lists that all the schools had to show on the memorials that were built post-war. The poignancy of all these young officers, imbued with that ethos of honour and service and swearing, bizarrely as it seems to us now, to die for their schools as readily as for King and country, marching off to perish miserably in the mud and horror of the western front, makes the book quite a sobering read. The theme of loss of innocence is a strong one, but there is an underlying anger to the book, at a culture that was ready to so mindlessly condone and encourage such a sacrifice. That the image of young men dribbling a football across a blasted muddy wasteland before being mown down could be seen as something rather sporting, to celebrate (‘True to the land that bore them, the Surreys played the game’) as opposed to something quite grotesque is a reminder of quite how foreign the past can be.

Again, a good read (although possibly not the best choice for an already low mood!), especially if, like me, an interest in things military co-exists with a nostalgic fascination for old public school stories (another disclaimer: I love the Greyfriars/Billy Bunter stories and have a huge and unwieldy collection of Magnet reprints that I can sadly hardly read anymore because the print is so small!).

Perhaps not the most coherent blog post but it's been a funny old month or so, hopefully what counts as normal service will be resumed soon! Hope all are well.

What makes us uncomfortable?

A recent cartoon on the Ragged Soldier blog, to which I gave an inchoate (and in fact largely alcohol-fueled) reply, reminded me of a subject that has always been of some interest to me, and which in fact was one of the topics I had in mind for an early entry when I created the blog. That is, the entire subject of what is considered unacceptable, or at least what we tend to feel less than comfortable with, in our wargaming.

Of course to some outside the wargaming community the hobby itself is often seen as odd at best and positively shameful at worst. I have heard of wargamers being challenged on why they should find this regrettable aspect of human history to be something of interest; to read about war is bad enough, but to play games about war is seen to be celebrating it, almost to relish the horrors that have always ensued when wars are fought.

While I have no qualms about my interest in things military, and while I regard myself as one of the most peaceable of chaps – a regard I extend to every wargamer I have ever met – I am still not exactly sure what defence I would make to such a challenge. War is hideous and always has been. If the military history books we read present an honest account of the wars they describe, complete with all the eye witness accounts of the suffering and the maiming and the misery, then there are grounds for the accusation that we are taking a ghoulish delight in such details; if the accounts are higher level or more academic, then we can be accused of glossing over the gory details and trying to distance ourselves from the realities of our subject. I would certainly have to admit that my interest in war started with an excitement at the spectacle (all those big blocks of brightly coloured soldiers in Waterloo or the row of gleaming white pith helmets lined up along the top of the mealie bags in Zulu!) and a part of that will always remain despite more sobering thoughts of the pity of war. As Thomas Hardy says, ‘War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading’. The fact that I have since those days developed a more cerebral interest in the theory and practice of war both in itself and in its political and social implications hardly seems to make my fascination any the less immature.

The realities of colonial warfare in the movies; war as spectacle

I mentioned in my comment on the Ragged Soldier blog the example of King Philip’s War, a game of colonial warfare in seventeenth century New England, which was published in 2010. Colonial warfare, with its often genocidal results, is always going to be a sensitive subject, and rightly so, so it is no surprise that the game aroused a degree of controversy when it was released. And, as most of the debates I saw were on the internet, it goes without saying that any sense of restraint or civility tended to disappear very quickly. That said, the communications I read between the game designer, John Poniske, and Native American representatives of the Wampanoag people who took part in the rising, were civil and dignified on both sides, and what mostly came through to me was an understandable misunderstanding of the word game. When most people think of games – that are not computer games – they think of the likes of Monopoly or Cluedo, and from that point of view a game about a colonial war might indeed be seen as trivialising the conflict. But for most wargamers that is not how we tend to approach the word. We would tend to regard our games as simulations and studies as much as ‘games’ in the traditional sense, and from that point of view designing a game about a subject such as King Philip’s War is a pretty serious undertaking.

The realities of colonial warfare as represented by King Philip's War; war as study

I would contend that from this point of view a thoughtfully designed wargame like King Philip’s War seems much less a trivialisation of something unpleasant than non-wargames that are set in the past and include contemporary institutions without making any comment upon them. Yet the potential for causing offence of such games never seems to make it onto the radar, presumably because in most cases they are not really intended to closely model any historical reality and most historical details that do appear in the game are more ‘chrome’ than anything.

Within the wargaming community itself there are often questions about whether certain nations or armies are ‘ok’ to play. Many players don’t like to play Second World War Germans or Soviets, or American Civil War Confederates. Again, while all we are doing is pushing around counters on a map, there is a slightly queasy awareness of what the counters represented in real life. Those SS counters we blithely move across the map of Russia were in reality groups of very unpleasant men committing all sorts of hideous atrocities as they went. It has never bothered me personally commanding those armies in games, but that might just be because, without any personal link to the events, I am able to establish a certain distance – my father served in the Merchant Navy during the Second World War, and if you were to invite me to play a game in which I am a German U-Boat commander trying to sink a convoy in the North Atlantic, I am honestly not sure about how comfortable I would feel doing that. I suspect a part of me would envisage my Dad looking over my shoulder and being slightly aghast at what was going on. This unwillingness to play in a role that was in real life something that posed a lethal threat to a parent or grandparent seems not unusual.

That said, here we must acknowledge the nuances of history and the simple fact that nobody is innocent. The glorious Second World War allies of course included Stalin, so when we fight that Barbarossa game we can be sure that those red counters are guilty of just as many horrors as the grey. Similarly, those khaki counters we play with such enthusiasm…well, they were the colonial power of course, often the same khaki-clad chaps who committed such atrocities in peacekeeping operations from Malaya to Kenya after the war ended. Similarly, insisting that we always fight as the Union against the Confederacy perhaps seems politically naïve when one considers the actions of Federal troops against the Plains Indians. There has never been a nation or a tribe wholly innocent of the blood of others, nor an army that has always spared the innocent and harmed only those in arms against it.

There are also those who would argue that certain conflicts should not be gamed. We have seen this in the case of King Philip’s War, and colonial conflicts are always at the top of lists of games that some find unsettling. Others feel that the acceptability of a game is related more to its freshness in time. Is it ok to game a conflict that is still unresolved and in which people are still dying even as we roll the dice? Playing a game about the insurgency in Iraq, for example, when car bombs were going off in the streets of Baghdad with hideous consequences, would certainly seem indecent to some.

How recent does a war have to be to be acceptable as a game...

...and is it ok to put a humorous slant on contemporary atrocities?

I started this post with a distinct idea that I was going to reach a conclusion and I find I have failed to do so. I have just ended up going round a bit rather, which is fine, I often find myself doing that. It is certainly a subject that arouses passions on both sides of the argument. On the BoardGameGeek website it is often the case that even to suggest that playing some sides might make one feel uncomfortable, or that a certain game about colonial conflict in Africa is lacking in conscience because it downplays the role of the native population, quickly gives rise to accusations of being ‘woke’ (hate that damned word! Were previous generations all supposed to have been asleep up to this point?) or being a SJW (pretty much hate that too). People become defensive pretty quickly, this defensiveness often takes the form of lashing out and so is in turn seen as offensive and it is often difficult to get an honest and unimpassioned statement of how people really feel about these things. My own feelings tend to be fairly muddled, predictably; I generally don’t get offended by wargames but I can’t say why, and I can’t but feel some sympathy for those who question some of the games we play. Maybe, as in so many other areas of my life, I am just overthinking things. But it is to me yet another of the interesting aspects of an always interesting hobby.

Wheels and Wargames II - A Kind Gesture

Just a brief addendum to a post I made a week or two ago about my longstanding fascination with public transport and my perceived overlap of this fascination with an interest in things military.

On reading my post a friend made an extraordinarily kind gesture and gave me his collection of 1/76 scale buses, a collection he had been accumulating for some years but had never seen the light of day. He thought the buses deserved a measure of love and admiration that he felt unable to provide, and I was happy to be able to assure him with the utmost confidence that they would receive this chez moi. They are now indeed occupying a shelf with pride of place in my lounge, although for the moment they are having to share it with some incongruities. That Pharoah’s head will have to go elsewhere I think, and ditto those protective dragons from Hong Kong, although I fear the consequences of invoking their ire by anything that might be seen as a demotion.

There were no fewer than sixteen vehicles in the collection but I have included only a sample of them in the photographs I have inserted here; those uninterested in such things would hardly want more, while those who do share that passion…well, I wouldn’t want to set too many hearts a flutter.

The buses will make me a collector again in a small way. I plan to expand their number, and, again with a nod to the donor, the plan is to acquire vehicles from fleets that represent places in which I have spent time of some significance, whether in the UK or abroad. I rather like the idea of a memoir written in buses. New acquisitions will almost certainly find their way into a blog post from time to time, quite possibly along with some very self-indulgent description of their significance, so you have been warned.

So, many thanks again to the donor if he is reading; it only goes to show what thoroughly kind and thoughtful people one meets among the wargaming community.

Marlbrough s'en va-t-en guerre

 So, Friday Night was Vassal Night. (Yes, this is a very delayed entry I’m afraid, blame my ever-hectic social schedule. Actually, don’t)

I have always been a bit ambivalent about Vassal. It’s a boon to those gamers lacking real life opponents and pretty much a Godsend during the Covid lockdowns, and some of its modules – presumably those that model the more popular games – work extremely well. In fact, in a real-time game, I have found that most of the modules I have tried have been reasonably clear and intuitive. I always found the PBEM version much less satisfying – having to step through an opponent’s log file and watch their moves and hope they didn’t make any mistakes before starting your own log file and hoping you don’t make any mistakes just felt like a chore. This was amplified to the nth power for multiplayer games…all of a sudden you had three or four other player turns to step through to get round to your own and the whole thing became an almighty pain…

Anyhoo. It was nice just to be doing a bit of real-time gaming online or otherwise. Our Vassal game on this occasion was another stab, after some years, at Compass Games’ No Peace Without Spain!, one of those games with an exclamation mark in the title (The only other example in my collection being the WWII ETO game Unconditional Surrender!)! As the title indicates the game is all about the War of the Spanish Succession with one player as the Bourbons (France, Spain, Bavaria and, initially, Savoy) and the other as the anti_Bourbon Alliance (Britain, the United Provinces, the Empire, latterly Savoy, Portugal and potentially Hapsburg Spain).

Marlborough s'en va-t-en guerre-ing. That's never a real horse.

The game is card-driven; after an initial drawing of Event cards that introduce random events that can benefit either party, the meat of the game is the alternate play of cards with numerical values of 1-3. The values represent points that can be used to activate armies to move or make siege attempts, to rally troops demoralised by earlier defeat or to bring up to full strength corps that have suffered losses. Battles are pretty much uncomplicated dice-fests: half a die for each half-strength corps, one die for each full-strength corps and a number of dice for each engaged general equal to their Tactical Rating, with each die hitting on a roll of 5 or 6.

The stately pace of early eighteenth century warfare is enforced by a very simple rule. No army can move into an enemy-controlled space unless they are moving out of a friendly-controlled one. The only way to control a fortress space is to capture the fortress; so, as every space in the UP and Spanish Netherlands is a fortress space, the only way one of the armies can move forward is by taking in siege every space along the way. A turn represents a year and each side has only five cards to play during that time, so given the strength of the fortresses it is unlikely that more than one major fortress will fall to either side during the course of a year.

One nice touch is that a sufficiently overwhelming victory results in a Famous Victory marker being placed in the space, and this has beneficial results for the siege die rolls of the victorious player in adjacent spaces for the rest of the year. They say it was a shocking sight, and all that.

The game mostly does the job. There is a strong element of luck in the sense that if one side happens to draw a hand of 3-strength cards while the other has all 1-strength the former is going to have many more actions available and therefore a very strong advantage, while the absence of die-roll modifiers means that the results of most battles tend to be largely fortuitous – having Marlborough and Eugene in the lineup is a significant advantage but not one that cannot be overturned just by having a slightly larger French army.

We managed to play the years 1702 and 1703, during which, as the Allies, I managed to defeat the French outside Antwerp and reduce the city, at some loss. This gain was balanced in Germany by the loss of Coblenz to superior French forces and the fall of Linz to the Bavarians, posing a direct threat to Vienna, the fall of which would end the game with an automatic Bourbon Victory. At this point I am not sure how likely it is that I will be able to reproduce Marlborough’s famous march to the Danube, and of course even if I do it will be obvious to the Bourbon player so unlikely to have quite the same impact it did in real life. And of course if I get a load of 1-strength cards and the Bourbons get a stack of 3’s Vienna is probably toast.

Marlborough looking good in Antwerp.

Vienna not looking very safe though.

One thing that soured me slightly against Compass Games was their follow-up game of the Nine Years War (what at school we used to call the War of the League of Augsburg, 1688-1697, a dress rehearsal for the WSS). It’s good for such a little-covered war to get any outing at all, but the game was published with a virtually identical system, and a virtually identical map, to this one. I have never played it but I feel instinctively that it might have been a scenario in this one as opposed to a separate game, so I doubt it is a game I will ever feel the need to own.

The decision to play the game led me to some idle reading around the period, which led me to reading about the folk song referenced in the title. Apparently it was a tune that had its origin in a false report of the death of Marlborough at the bloody Battle of Malplaquet in 1709 and I was vaguely aware from my Napoleonic readings that Le Petit Caporal was fond of humming it. I never knew it provided the tune for ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’, so you learn something new every day.

Wheels and Wargames; Converging Passions

I’m pretty sure I am not imagining this – there is a definite correlation between an interest in military history and a fascination for public transport and I have often puzzled over why this is so.

My own interest in buses, trams and trains, I think, preceded my obsession with things military by about a year. Beginning some time in about 1975 my best mate Carl – similarly obsessed – and I used to get up on a Saturday morning and immediately after breakfast we would take the bus into the Pier Head on the Liverpool waterfront for a day of bus spotting.

Buses at the Pier Head in the 1970s; hideous building, but you know I quite miss it

There were several angles to our bus passion. Like most spotters we had a thing for the livery and model of the bus itself. That racing green that the MPTE* used on its buses - or oftentimes a lighter green with a yellow stripe running along the middle – was a thing handsome enough; but when there was a change in the livery due to promotion or advertisement, well, that was enough to excite us beyond measure. One of these promotions I remember particularly well - the Old Higsonians series which was run alongside adverts in the Liverpool Echo and even (I think) on Granada TV for the watery local brew, Higsons, and featuring legendary Merseysiders like Ann Field, Doc Road, Phil O’Monic, Rock Ferry, Count Erode and of course Pierre Head. You had to be there…

Some of the Old Higsonians; how we laughed.

If changes in livery left us entranced, changes in model left us scarcely coherent. At times of heavy usage the MPTE would blow the dust off some of its older stock and instead of the usual 1970s workhorse the Atlantean we would suddenly get an old open-platformed Routemaster roll into view as we waited at the bus stop. The other kids probably watched us with a mixture of amusement and pity as we jabbered excitedly over this unexpected treat. Thankfully Carl was hard enough to deter most physical manifestations of our peers’ amusement; on my own I would probably have been bounced off said bus repeatedly until a Dave-shaped dent gave it an additional rarity value.

What I think distinguished us from other spotters though was the sense of the exotic with which we regarded those buses on a Saturday morning. Taking up position right at the top of Water Street, where the street opened up onto the broad space in front of the river, we would watch the buses debouch from the narrow street like an invading army (you see what I did there?). Water Street was the only inbound route for buses to the Pier Head and at the time there were well in excess of 100 routes terminating there, which meant that there was a constant flow of buses to be seen coming up in that green and yellow stream, from all over the city. Some of the route numbers I remember even now, over 40 years later – 72 from Hunts Cross, 78 from Halewood, 17C from Fazakerley. Despite the fact that none of these places must have been more than a few miles from where we lived, the lack of any reason – or any easy route – to get there made them seem places far distant; so limited were our horizons that Speke or Garston might as well have been on the moon.

Bizarrely, we always romanticised one route in particular – the 12C to Cantril Farm. Cantril Farm sounded to us like some untouched bucolic quarter of Liverpool, silent but for the birdsong and the lowing of cattle and the occasional rumble of the 12C bus. It wasn’t until later that I discovered it was a recent overspill development that in the decade or so since its creation in the 1960s had already become a byword for inner city decline – it was interesting and instructive to read Red Dwarf’s Craig Charles’ memories of growing up there.

The 12C; they must have just finished cleaning the straw off it.

From hanging around the hideously ugly 1970’s Pier Head bus terminus lusting over the buses we graduated to hunting down books about trams and trains and – for my wealthier mate Carl at least – acquiring gorgeous Hornby train sets that he would set up in his grandad’s old shop. As always the key was in part the visual kick – I defy anyone to set eyes on a 1930’s period Liverpool Corporation Streamliner tram and not lose their heart completely to its luscious curves - and that always faintly exotic sense of the far-flung routes along which these lovely creatures actually ran. There’s something about a bus or train ride for me even now that will always carry some echo of the starry-eyed trips of my boyhood.

A 1930’s period Liverpool Corporation Streamliner tram...Mmmmm...

The thing is though that I thought this transport/war thing was just us, and I don’t think it is really. As I grew older I became used to seeing military and transport on neighbouring shelves not only in budget book shops but in W H Smiths. And there are also bookshops that cater explicitly to that happy mix of interests – for example the Ian Allan Book and Model shop in London’s Waterloo, where basically half of the shop is books about buses, trams and trains and the other is military books and models. The Pen and Sword publisher list also shows a very pointed blend of military and transport, only more recently branching out into other historical themes.

I guess the clue might be in the word ‘model’. Most of us wargamers will at least go through a phase where we are as concerned with modelling as with gaming, whether it’s gently removing the decals for our dogfight doubles in that little bowl of warm water, or producing the gorgeously detailed armies I see so often in the wargame blogs I follow (there but for a shakey hand and dodgy eyesight…) Similarly public transport is a mecca for the modeller, from those big elaborate Hornby train sets to the stunning – and correspondingly expensive – new tram model kits available from the Spanish company Occre. But still, not all bus- or train- enthusiasts are modellers, and nor are all military history enthusiasts.

Is it just about the passion for detail? Is it the same impulse for correct detail that makes someone wary of identifying the wrong tank on a Normandy battlefield or the wrong regiment on a Peninsula one, that potentially makes them also keen to understand the differences between an Altona and a Ringbahn single deck Liverpool tram?

What am I missing? Or am I missing anything – maybe this military-transport overlap is something I have made up and similar links can just as easily be found to other interests. I would be interested in anyone else’s thoughts.

 

*The Merseyside Passenger Transport Executive set up at the end of the 1960’s to replace the Liverpool Corporation Passenger Transport – the ‘Corpy’.