Fnurban #19: If Books Could Talk

 Real life -  albeit some pleasant stuff related to birthdays  -  has been getting in the way of hobbies recently, hence my second attempt at 'Kirchendorf'/Cheriton has not been played yet. But in the meantime an interesting little bookshop find came up.  I happened to be in Muswell Hill, London,  looked in at the Oxfam bookshop there, and chanced upon this :

 

 

Professor Sir Charles Oman's 1929 Studies in the Napoleonic Wars - a set of essays on various aspects of the period. Presumably not particularly rare or collectable but it looked interesting, and a nice old-looking edition in reasonable condition - so I paid the princely sum of £3 and took it home. 

On closer insprection, the volume  turned out to be a first edition from 1929, and there was a small label stuck to the inside of the cover, presumably denoting a former owner :  'Mr. L.K.J. Cooke,  Pembroke College, Oxford'.

 

Well, that was intriguing - I wonder who he was?  Not so many years ago, that would be the end of the story - but now we have the world wide web, and search engines...

With just a few minutes searching, I came up with a couple of interesting documents : first the King Edward's School Chronicle of June 1972.  It seems King Edward's was a prominent boys' Grammar School in Birmingham, and the  'Chronicle' looks to be the school magazine. It records the retirement of Mr.  L.K.J. Cooke after a splendid 28 years on the school staff, since 1944, and it confirms He was educated at Emmanuel School and Pembroke College, Oxford , where he took a second class honours degree in modern history in 1934.   Bingo!  We have our man.  

There follows a nice little sketch of the personality of the man ( the 'L' was for Leslie ). It states that  he was very much a military figure, always immaculately dressed and groomed in the style of an army officer wearing " civvies."  He also commanded the school's C.C.F. ( Combined Cadet Force )  contingent, and was awarded the OBE for his services. Indeed, later in the magazine there appears an article on the history of the school's C.C.F, the author signing themself 'L.K.J.C.'   He clearly had a  head for business, and for his 'retirement' he had bought a preparatory school in Brentwood, which he would presumably have planned to run himself.  I assume that if he gained his degree in 1934, he would have been born around 1913, and by 1972 be aged about 60.   Presumably long gone now, of course - or he'd be 110 by now! 

If anyone fancies to read the whole article - or indeed the whole magazine, and be transported back to the doings of an English Grammar School 50 years ago, it is here.   I have not read it all myself, so I can't guarantee that the content will meet what might be called 'current attitudes and values'. The past is, indeed, another country.. 

And there's more - a further search turned up a personal memoir website by one Robert Darlaston, who was a pupil at King Edward's school in the 1950s, and has written  ( in about 2009 ) quite a long entry on his time there, 1951-1959, and a postscript relating a visit to the school 50 years on. Of course his time there coincided with that of 'LKJC' , and there are indeed some mentions of our man: Our form master in Shell ‘C’ was Mr L.K.J. Cooke, a kindly man with a velvet toned voice and a leisurely speech delivery.   In consequence, unkind schoolboys had nicknamed him “Slimy”, but he was an expert at easing new boys into school life.  There's a short passage and photo concerning the C.C.F. - but it's the RAF section and their attmempts to fly a glider, which do not seem to to have involved LKJC. But there is one final lovely nugget of pure gold - a detail from the 1959 school photograph :

 

This picture evokes some fond memories,for those of us who took part in similar exercises - I still have a copy of an  equivalent picture from 1977, marking the centenary, no less, of my school ( a much less grand institution than King Edward's, I should say ), and I'm sure everyone knew the story that it should be possible to appear twice in the picture, by standing at one end and then running around the back to the other end, as the panoramic camera swivelled on its tripod. Whether that was actually possible, and if so whether anyone achieved it without also achieving a spell in detention,  I don't know.    

The caption states that LKJC is 3rd from right among the masters, so I think we have him :

 

He looks a decent chap, doesn't he? Not a tyrant, I hope, and clearly a man with an abiding interest in  matters military. It occurs that as a student at Oxford in the early 1930s, he may even have attended lectures by Sir Charles  Oman, who was the pre-eminent military historian of the day, and had been a professor of Modern History at Oxford since 1905 - though he was also the MP for the University of Oxford constituency from 1919 to 1935, which may have limited his academic work. All the same, it's nice to imagine the possible link. 

This has been a thoroughly pleasant and interesting little diversion, and a great  example of the ability  of the internet to allow us to waste time, albeit  in a pleasurable  and rewarding way. Now I just have to read the book, and learn about Oman's ideas on 'British Line vs French Column' ( later de-bunked by wargaming's own Paddy Griffith, I am told? ),  and as I do so, I can try to picture its first reader, back in 1930s Oxford - I wonder what he would make of me?  And I wonder how it came to be in Oxfam, Muswell Hill, on a winter's afternoon  nearly 90 years later ? That's another story, presumably - if only books could talk. 

Next time, I hope to finally give an account of '2nd Kirchendorf' and my impressions of the Twilight of the Divine Right rules - until then, keep well, everyone.    

 

Return to Kirchendorf, by Twilight

Having used the introductory Cheriton scenario to put on a trial game using In Deo Veritas rules, it was very convenient to find that the same battle is also one of the introductory scenarios in the Twilight of the Divine Right rulebook. A great chance to compare and contrast the two systems!  (Fleurus, 1622 is also an introductory game in both sets - perhaps because they both involve fairly small forces and should be quite simple battles? Twilight was published in 2018 and IDV only in 2020, so perhaps the latter couldn't resist being 'inspired' by the former? ) . So, let's look at the battle  again, this time through  the Twilight lens. 

First thing to note is the much wider area of battlefield that is used - where IDV started with the armies close together and action imminent in a relatively small space, Twilight places them much further apart and with a commensurately wider field of action and much more terrain.  Here is the map they use  ( I photographed the page from the rulebook, if this breaks any copyright then I will be happy to remove if asked ):  

That's an awful lot of hills..

The previous game really only covered the Cheriton Wood and Middle Spur area in the centre, as you can see this is much wider.  The main armies start on baselines and behind ridges, so main bodies can't actually see each other at the start.  Parliament has an advance party of detached musketeers in Cheriton Wood ( top right ) , and the Royalists have a foot regiment on the highest ground, marked 'Lisle' in the centre of the map - so there should be some action pretty quickly as the respective main battles run into  those two parties. 

Ok, so how about trying to set up that table? One nice thing about the rules is that they use 'Base Widths' for measurement, and the size of the battlefield is given in Base Widths (BW)  too. That made it quite simple to scale the suggested 20BW by 20BW battlefield to my roughly 3 feet by 3 feet table - I have ended up with a 'Base Width' of 40mm as a result.    What was not so simple was finding all those hills and roads - it took almost every piece of 15mm  terrain I had!  Luckily I made a habit some years ago of picking up a few more hills from Total System Scenic ( TSS ) every time I went to the SELWG show at Crytal Palace - several of these were taken out of their stapled bags for the first time for this setup. 

I had just about enough terrain!

Note that the higher 'South Spur' is made by the time-honoured method  of placing CD cases under the cloth for the first contour,  then TSS hill pieces on top for the second contour.  Not so elegant, but effective.

Now for the opposing forces: as in the previous game, I have used my vintage 15mm Thirty Years War 'Imperialists'  to stand in for Parliament, and French as substitute Royalists. Given the 30YW setting, this will of course again be the imagined battle of Kirchendorf.  Forces as follows: 

The Imperialist / Parliamentary army..

First the Imperialists ( Parliament ), commanded by Waller ( shall we call him a Germanic-style  'Mauer' ? ), organised as follows: 

Infantry ( Waller / 'Mauer' ) 

     1 unit Detached Musketeers, Trained, 'M' ( Muskets only )

     3 units Trained, 'MX'  ( about 3:2 muskets to  pikes )

     1 unit Trained, 'MX'   ( London Trained Band ) 

     1 Field Gun,  Trained

Cavalry ( Balfour,  google translate suggests 'Balvier' ) 

    2  units Trained, Dutch style

    4 units Trained,  Dutch Style 

    1 unit Trained, Dragoons 

 

..and their French/Royalist opponents

Now the French ( Royalists ),  commanded jointly by Hopton and Forth, organised as follows:

Left Wing ( Hopton  - shall we call him Sautville [ hop' + 'town' ] in French? It has a ring to it..  ):

        Detached Musketeers : 1 unit Elite, Small, 'Assault Tactics', Musket only 

         2 units Infantry,  Trained, Small, 'MX'  

         1 Field Gun, Trained 

         2 units Cavalry, Trained, Large, Swedish style 

         2 units Cavalry, Trained, Swedish style 

Right Wing ( Forth - I'll go with Le Quatre, which is cheating, I know! ) :

        1 unit Infantry, Trained, Small, 'MH'  ( about 2:1 muskets to pikes ) 

        2 units Cavalry, Trained, Swedish Style

I had some fun with English to German and English to French translation web pages for the commanders' names, but of course plenty of English, Scots, and Irish ( and no doubt,  Welsh ) officers fought in the Thirty Years War, in many forces on all sides, so I could have just kept  the English names, I guess!    

A few words of explanation - units are 'Regiments' or equivalent, and each unit ( except guns and baggage ) has two bases.  A standard Infantry 'regiment' is made up  of about 1,000 troops,  but they can also be designated as 'Small' (about 800)  or 'Large' (about 1200). Infantry are also categorised by the ratio of Musket to Pike  - see 'M', 'MX', 'MH' in the descriptions above, and then there are some other special attributes such as the 'Assault Tactics' which denotes foot who fire a salvo and immediately charge into combat. 

Cavalry regiments are about 500 for a standard unit,  400 for Small and 600 for Large. As you can see they are also categorised in different ways, and we have Swedish ( charge at the trot firing pistols as they close ),  and Dutch ( fire pistols first, then charge if the target is disrupted ) style horse,  and some  Dragoons.    

Artillery are either Field Guns ( 3 to 12 pounders )  or Light Guns ( under 3 pounder ) - we have only Field Guns. Both armies have a 'Baggage' unit - 'used to show the direction for pursuit', say the rules. 

Finally, all units have a 'quality' rating which is 'Raw', 'Trained' or 'Elite' - self-explanatory, I hope. I think you can see that there is quite a bit more detail to keep up with in the makeup of units than there was in In Deo Veritas - I think I'm glad to see things like 'Swedish' and 'Dutch' style cavalry being included, though they ( and the musket:pike  ratios for foot ) will need to be remembered and recorded on some sort of roster,  or by using labels or markers.  

Over all, the Imperialists have 5 Foot and 7 Horse units, versus the French 4 Foot and 6 Horse, and each side has one Field Gun battery - so a slight strength advantage to the Imperialists. The French have those 'Elite' musketeers, and perhaps a bit more 'dash' with their Swedish-style cavalry.  The  scenario Victory Condtions  are simple for this scenario - the Royalists ( French ) simply have to remain undefeated under the rules. As with IDV, the armies are organised in 'Wings', and if half of an army's Wings are lost then the army as whole tests for morale - failing that test results in defeat. 

Now at last, the table with forces deployed - not necessarily the final dispositions, just a trial to see what they looked like,  with Imperialist / Parliament nearest the camera.

As you can see, the armies fit into the space well enough - I was able to deploy the Imperialists near the camera in two lines, which is sensible for the period. The French are a little more spread out, with infantry in a single line - I may revisit that for the actual game. 

So there we are. I've had a read-through of the rules - I need to allocate some single mounted figures to be the commanders, but given that,  I think we are just about ready to go.  Alas 'real' life may now intervene, so there may be a bit of a pause before the game gets played, but I'll try to get it done as soon as I can.   

I hope this is interesting for readers,  I'm looking forward to playing the game and seeing how the rules play out, and reporting back on how it goes.  Until then, keep well, everyone.  

Fnurban #18 : Knit Your Own Remembrance

Today has of course been Remembrance Sunday : my very minor contribution to that was to ensure that the village church clock was keeping good time and chimed for 11:00 am at spot-on 11:00am.   If we have the telly on for the Cenotaph, and our front door open to hear the church, we can compare our 'bongs' with Big Ben - and we were within a few seconds,  not so bad. Apart from the novelty of King Charles and the absence of his late mother, and the chance for sarcasm at the expense of the increasing gaggle of former Prime Ministers ( collective noun - a 'Crisis'  of Prime Ministers ? ),  of course the most important part is to see the march past by the many and various veterans, who have all our respect. 

Then a stroll to the village shop and Post Office, where we saw our local essay at a recent trend - the pillar box 'topper' -  on a Remembrance theme. 

    

I think it's rather splendid, and all services are represented :

Though considering it was made by ladies of the 'Craft and Chat Group', perhaps they should have taken the opportunity to make  one of the figures a  'Wren' or a 'WAAF' ?  ( by the way, I'd guess they are about '200mm' scale ). 

Anyway, a rather sweet  gesture which cheered us up, and also made it into the local newspaper. Very sadly, there was a  murder of a mother and child in the village a couple of months ago, which has dominated local media   - as a friend of ours  ( who is one of the creators )  said, it was nice to get our village a positive mention in local news for a change. 

I'll be back soon with the set-up of a trial game with Twilight of the Divine Right Pike and Shot period rules, to compare with In Deo Veritas as featured in recent posts. Meanwhile, keep well everyone, and of course, Lest We Forget..

After Kirchendorf : thoughts on 'In Deo Veritas'

As promised, in this post I will give my impressions of the In Deo Veritas Pike and Shot period rules for  'big battles' following my recent game based on their Battle of Cheriton scenario. Overall I'm quite positive about it, though there were one or two issues worth raising.  I'll also show a few more pictures of  the game in progress.

 

First the  plus points : 

Simplicity - there were no really  complex mechanisms,  only 'D6' dice are needed. Tests for unit disorder, wing fatigue and  army 'general will' involve one D6 and a few modifiers. For combat, units usually roll 1 to 3 dice, it's always  4,5 or 6 to hit or save, and variable factors for advantage or disadvantage will add to, or subtract from, the number  of dice rolled. All quite easy, and to me has quite a nice 'old school' feel - '4,5 or 6' takes me right back to Charles Grant and 'Battle'!   Charts with modifying factors are quite short, easy to assimilate. It would also be simple to add your own modifiers if you wanted to 'tweak' the rules. 

They read quite well: the rules are set out in a logical order, with not too much detail up-front.  'Army Composition' comes first and starts with Commanders, then the Wing concept, then different troop types are described in plain English  (  'the most common unit of the period was the formed infantry unit of between 900 and 1200 men. Frequently called a 'Brigade', each unit represents a grouping of regiments' ) - technical stuff about how many hits they take or shots they fire can wait till later. I found that made it easy to assimilate information in gradual stages.  The explanation of different parts of the rules generally follows the turn sequence - Orders, Movement, Combat, Retreats, Pursuit, Cohesion (wings), General Will ( army level ) - all pretty sensible, and the writing is pretty clear and easy to understand. 

Scale: use of the 'Brigade' as the basic unit  ( 900-1200 foot, 400-600 horse ) is sensible for battlefield units in larger battles.  There's not a specific 'figure scale' - the Brigade is defined by its base size, so you can decide whether to use 6mm ( or even 2mm ) figures and pack loads in, or 10mm/12mm/15mm with less figures in the Brigade.  

Orders and Move sequence are quite neat - you  move  a 'Wing' ( from either side ) at a time, using a  card draw - the order that wings move in can  be crucial and is effectvely random, giving some uncertainty of outcome. You could rationalise this as different Wing Commanders responding more or less promptly to orders, which feels right.   Orders are given each turn, but at the level of a whole  Wing - so you are only issuing maybe four orders per turn -   and are v. simple,  just Attack/Hold/Withdraw.  

Vive la France..

 I very much liked the use of Levels of Disorder - Sound/Disordered/Disrupted/Routed/Destroyed - as the main mechanism for the effect of combat, rather than tracking casualties. I suspect that  reflects the period correctly - the deep blocks of pike and shot units depended on keeping cohesion, probably more than on simple numbers of losses.  It was obvious to use counters ( e.g. coins ) with the number of counters indicating disorder level - casualty markers could be even more appropriate. Simple!

Sensible combat outcomes - units hit by fire, or losing a melee, suffer increases in disorder level, may be forced to Recoil or Rout,  and can be destroyed completely if losing by a wide margin or suffering enough hits. The 'Recoil' result  makes it sensible to keep a sufficient distance between front and supporting lines,  allowing front-line units to recoil without disordering the second line, and that feels right, too. The simple  interpenetration rule allowed a second line unit to step forward and replace a first line unit that was halted by artillery fire - straightforward.

Wing 'Fatigue' seems sensible - once a Wing suffers  routed or destroyed brigades, it can be fatigued (i.e. demoralised) triggering automatic 'Hold' or 'Withdraw' orders.  Similarly 'General Will'  for the whole army. It looks like with 1/4 to 1/3 of the army's  brigades routed there is a 50/50 chance of defeat -  .go over 1/3 routed and it gets more likely. Finally the after-battle 'Pursuit' mechanism is fun, simple but effective and a useful device in campaigns.

Turn 2, imminent action

 I did have a few issues, though:  

The melee combat mechanism felt a bit long-winded : although the 'hit' and 'save' rolls are simple, the problem is that you have to roll for Unit 'A' to hit, then Unit 'B' to save those hits, then Unit 'B' to hit, then unit 'A' to save those hits, and then finally compare the number of unsaved hits for each side to get the result.  When the armies got to grips, with melees all along the line, I ended up with 7 or 8 sets of melee combats to do as above, so that could be up to something like 30 die rolls! For a solo player, that started to feel like hard work - though I suppose with two players it would be less work for each.  Hmm.. do we really need the 'saves' part?  Could we just combine the charts of variable factors for 'hits' and 'saves' into one, and have one die roll per unit instead of two? In melee that would still give 'opposed' die rolls so both players involved, but less drudgery..

Shooting ranges : admittedly I probably shouldn't have halved all the movement rates and shooting ranges to fit my small table.  The 'normal' move distance for an Infantry Brigade is 12 inches, and their muskets have a range of 3 inches. Once I halved those, trying to measure  1.5 inches for musket range (and one inch for cavalry pistol/arquebus fire) became a bit ridiculous. Even at the unmodified 3 inch musket range, it felt a bit awkward, and of course if Unit A starts its move less than 12 inches from Unit B, then A could charge into contact in one move, wihout ending a move within musket range. There's a mechanism to deal with that - Unit A stops at musket range and both units exchange fire, before A closes in for melee, if not stopped by B's fire.  That does give an authentic-feeling sequence of events, with units advancing, giving fire and then charging home, but it also adds two more sets of 'hit and save' die rolls per combat!  

Now I've always had the impression that effective musket range was really quite short - even in Napoleonic times, probably not much more than 100 yards, and I suspect that 40 yards might be more realistic ( and by the way, how terrifying must that have been, and how did anyone have the courage to do that? ), and as a result I can't help feeling that we might be better off simply rolling musketry up with melee into something called simply 'combat',  which occurs when units get sufficiently close to each other. This seems even more appropriate when playing 'big battles', where the basic unit is a Brigade. The player represents  a General, and  he doesn't know or care whether the Yellow Brigade defeated their opponents with a musket volley only, or by charging home - they probably did both, anyway. So maybe we don't need to replicate the combat at  such a level of detail?  I think my halving of the distances and ranges perhaps just served to emphasise this point. 

Turn 5, fighting all along the line

Cavalry are, in general, all the same ( fully armoured cavalry get an extra 'save' die, but that's about it ), and I wondered why the 'Trotters vs Gallopers' or  'Dutch vs Swedish style'  concept that appears in other rule sets was not used - I feel that is a big part of the 'feel' of the period. I suppose perhaps the rules are taking up my point about not going into too much detail? But it felt like something was missing somehow. It might be addressed by simply adding a variable - one exta 'hit' die for 'Gallopers' charging at 'Trotters',  perhaps? 

I was confused by the 'Impetuous Pursuit' rule, used when a unit losing a melee retreats, and the winners may pursue - as so often the ECW Royalist cavalry would, for example. If the losing unit ends its rout move within 18 inches and line of sight of the winning unit(s) then the winning unit(s) must test to see how it.. responds to the opportunity to attack the enemy at his most vulnerable  says the rulebook - but in the earlier paragraph on Retreats,  Routing Units use the March Column move rates.. They must attempt to move the full distance..  For a cavalry Brigade, the March Colmn move is 27 inches -so if Prince Rupert's regiment gets the better of some of Parliament's   'old decayed servingmen and tapsters' and put the latter to rout, the Roundheads will be 27 inches away at the end of the rout move, and the Royalists won't even get to roll a die to pursue, whether they want to or not. Hmm.. have I missed something?  As a result, the only Impetuous Pursuit that happened in my game was by an Imperial  cavalry unit against a French Infantry brigade - none of the many routed cavalry units were pursued by their vanquishers. That seems to be wrong, doesn't it? 

For the life of me, I can't find a mention of Dragoons dismounting or mounting-up. There's a rule for changing formation between 'normal' formation and March Column ( it takes a full move), and there's a rule for deploying/limbering  artillery ( e.g. field guns - a full move without moving to deploy, may then fire ). But Dragoons dismounting - no mention. Hmmm... have I just missed it? 

I didn't make much use of commanders ( army generals and wing commanders ), I kept things very simple by not attaching them to units, simply kept Wing commanders  close to their units, so as to keep all brigades 'In Command' - if 'Out of Command', units cannot move toward the enemy. The command radius is 6 inches, so the units of a wing have to be quite close together. But in the Cheriton scenario in the rulebook, both sides have three units each of  'commanded musketeers' - Company sized units, deployed in the woods to the East of the battlefield. Those units are very likely 'out of command' right from the start, given the specified deployment. So they should not be able to advance against each other, unless their Wing commander personally comes over and leads them - which would leave the rest of his wing 'out of command'. I suspect a special rule was intended, to the effect that these detachments don't have to be 'in command' to operate normally. But I don't see any such rule. 

by Turn 6, French line has swivelled to along the road

That's about it, I hope this has been of some interest.  I may have outstayed my welcome! I should add that the above are only my personal opinions, you are entirely free to disagree with them ( please feel free to use the comments area  below )  and  if I am factually wrong on any of them, I am happy to be corrected. Overall, it was positive experience using these rules, I enjoyed the game and most of it felt 'right' for the period. The organisation of armies  into Wings which are ordered and moved as a whole, and the use of Disorder rather than casualties seemed particularly good - my favourite parts, I think.  The influence of Frank Chadwick's much-loved 'Volley and Bayonet' rules is strong, I suspect, and that's no bad thing. 

I had also hoped to have a look at a rival set of rules - Twilight of the Divine Right from the Pike and Shot Society / Wyre Forest Wargamers.  But I've banged on for far too long about In Deo Veritas, and as a result I haven't even fully read Twighlight..  so that will have to wait for another time. It will be interesting to compare them, as both sets of rules are for a similar 'big battle' scale of game, and obviously in the same period. 

I'd better get on and read those rules, and next time I should set out the details of a battle to be played with them, so we can see how they play.  Meanwhile I hope this was interesting and/or useful; keep well, everyone.

 

  

 

  

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