A Huge Thank You: 400 followers and future plans

I noticed a few days ago that the number of followers of this Blog has ticked around to just over 400. I just wanted to take the time to say a huge thank you to every single follower, commenter and reader who's supported the Blog over the years. 

I really am very grateful indeed to every one of you for sharing the hobby with me.  When I started blogging in 2010 I thought it might be a bit of a solitary pastime. But not at all. It's been a gateway to a terrific community, full of ideas and friendship - thank you all for making it such fun!   I'm not sure I offer anything new at all - I think every idea I've posted on the Blog has been adapted and modified from things that other people have pioneered.  But I have really enjoyed jumbling those ideas about and coming up with gaming ideas which have been fun wargame with, and which are (fingers crossed!) also enjoyable to read!  

And hopefully you can continue to enjoy the hobby with me going forward in the future.

And any mention of "The Future" for a wargamer tends to lead to thoughts of elaborate and ambitious plans. As I rule, I really don't really like predicting or announcing what I'm going to do. One of my favourite quotes comes from something Tears of Envy posted a while back on her blog from Victorian philanthropist Henry Wellcome: "Never tell anyone what you propose to do until you have done it". Sound, prudent advice. Which I am about to ignore (no doubt at my peril).

I like reading wargamers' plans and targets, not least because they always seem to have that feel of excitement and expectation about them. So, with that backdrop, here's mine for the next 3 or 4 months:

As you know, I'm still working through a series of posts on painting French late war infantry, with a few more Verdun-related and French-Great-War book reviews to come. After that, I'll post the French support weapons and artillery (some very nice models to model and paint from Brigade Games and Scarab), with some "hardened" veteran infantry and Tirailleurs Sénégalese bringing up the rear.  I'll also try and find a more Gallic-ised banner for this Blog (something I've been meaning to do for what seems like forever!)

That probably takes me up until July, at which point I'm looking forward to modelling and painting a French armoured Escadre from the Groupe D'Artillerie Spéciale at Berry-au-Bac, at the opening of the Nivelle Offensive in April 1917. It's been a while since I tackled tanks on the painting table, and I'm keen to get back to weathering oil stains and rust! 

Alongside the front line troops, I'm hoping to do some French command stands and a short series of French vignettes, including a couple of well-known wartime personalities, a distinctive Parisian air and some French Trench Loot (matching the British Trench Loot I did a while back).

On the writing side I shall be posting some more Verdun and French related book reviews, which I think people seem to have enjoyed (at least they've told me so!). There's a couple of Verdun scenarios for "Through the Mud & the Blood" (which are written but not play-tested), and also a feature to be posted on creating French "Grandes Hommes" for "Through the Mud and the Blood" which is half-written but also needs play-testing. Finally on the writing front, and to accompany the Escadre from the Groupe D'Artillerie Spéciale, there's something I'd like to post this summer about recreating French Great War tank tactics on the tabletop - this would be a short article, pretty much along the lines of the "Rolling Into Action" article I prepared for the TooFatLardies Christmas Special in 2011.

I'm hoping to round-off the Verdun Project with a few game reports and AARs, together with an AAR of the "Verdun: A Lost Generation" boardgame from Against the Odds - probably in the summer when I can get my boardgaming chums over for a weekend. 

I think doing much more than finishing the French in 2013 may be a tall order. But once I've finished the French, I'll hopefully make a start on Lord Strathcona's Horse from Moreuil Wood in 1918.

Hopefully you can join me some, or even all, of these! Best regards and thanks until then, mes braves!

The Verdun Project: Painting Late War French Infantry – Part 1

As promised, if not quite as early as I’d hoped, I’ve posted here the first of a short series of posts on painting late Great War French infantry. I’ve done the same in the past for British and German late war infantry, and thought that I should at least do the same for the French.

As before, I started with the bases, worked on the faces and then progressed to blocking out the key colours of the Poilu. I’ve covered base construction in previous blog posts, and I like to work on painting the base texture first, mainly because it needs a broader brush and less accuracy – it doesn’t therefore matter at all if the paint gets splashed on the boots and puttees of the undercoated figures.

The paints I use for the base are a mixture of Plaka acrylic, Louvre acrylic and Vallejo. The Louvre acrylics are really fantastic paints; wonderfully creamy and very easy to dilute, they are a perfect terrain paint. The Plaka paints are slightly trickier to work with, and I found they often separate in their smallest pots into a base gloop and a suspension floating on the top. They are, however, really excellent matt paints for terrain and bases, and can be very effective for dry-brushing. The Vallejo paints are used for fine terrain details, mainly on the brickwork I like to sprinkle on the bases to add a little colour, and for the brass-fret barbed wire and the stakes which the barbed wire gets wrapped around.

I also added some more of the “lichen” on the side of the fallen logs – very fine sand and PVA glue! – and tried to paint them so as to add a little colour.

The bases get built up with a mix of Louvre Raw Umber and Plaka Grey and finishing the bases on a platoon took about an evening, although doing 72 at once seemed to go on forever!

After the bases, I worked on the faces for the figures. All of the paints used were Vallejo Model Colour, with the base being Green Brown, mid-tone being Sunny Skintone and the highlight being Basic Skintone. Sometimes I wonder if I really need to have a three-colour base on the faces and hands of the figures – probably not, but that’s just how I’ve got used to doing it.

 

I then added some extra highlights of Vallejo White blended with Basic Skintone to emphasise parts of the face and hands catching the light – noses, fingertips, cheek bones or scars, whatever comes to mind when I look at the figure, really. Its an enjoyable part of painting the face, very much a reward for working slowly through the mass of faces on the figures.

I added most of the moustaches in black or dark brown, with a couple of lighter tones, and with that the faces were finished.

Next, I worked through the base tones on the figures, starting with the Horizon Blue base (a mix of Vallejo Mirage Blue and Vallejo Dark Bluegrey, in a 50/50 blend). I’ve been using an acrylic flow improver from Windsor & Newton for a while now, and it’s perfect dipping the brush in a small palette of flow improver when painting the basecoat colours, but especially the Horizon Bleu, which covers a large area of the greatcoats, vests, trousers and puttees on the French infantry.

I added the helmets in a base colour of Vallejo German Grey (…I know, what irony…), and that was the first stage done.

In the next post, I’ll cover the other base colours with highlighting and super-detailing to follow.

And, as an added extra, I’ll add a slightly random figure in the shape of a French war reporter. A couple of these crop up, unannounced, in Henri Barbusse’s “Under Fire”:

*******

“Two Somebodies come up; two Somebodies with overcoats and canes. Another is dressed in a sporting suit, adorned with a plush hat and binoculars. Pale blue tunics, with shining belts of fawn color or patent leather, follow and steer the civilians.

Some heads in the group are now turned our way. One gentleman who detaches himself and comes up wears a soft hat and a loose tie. He has a white billy-goat beard, and might be an artiste. Another follows him, wearing a black overcoat, a black bowler hat, a black beard, a white tie and an eyeglass.

"Ah, ah! There are some poilus," says the first gentleman. "These are real poilus, indeed."

He comes up to our party a little timidly, as though in the Zoological Gardens, and offers his hand to the one who is nearest to him—not without awkwardness, as one offers a piece of bread to the elephant.

"He, he! They are drinking coffee," he remarks….

The assemblage, with its neutral shades of civilian cloth and its sprinkling of bright military hues—like geraniums and hortensias in the dark soil of a flowerbed—oscillates, then passes, and moves off the opposite way it came. One of the officers was heard to say, "We have yet much to see, messieurs les journalistes."

When the radiant spectacle has faded away, we look at each other. Those who had fled into the funk-holes now gradually and head first disinter themselves. The group recovers itself and shrugs its shoulders.

"They're journalists," says Tirette.

***********

The figure is from the War Reporters range from Bicorne Miniatures. Sadly, there isn’t a specific Great War reporter figure, but the Rudyard Kipling inspired figure does almost as well. I’ve depicted him here with an attempt at a Louis Vuitton trunk, Mont Blanc pen and a copy of the morning’s Le Figaro. Definitely a gentlemanly way of waging war, although one not shared by the Poilu !

 

The Verdun Project: French Poilu

Here’s the first (of four) section of the first (of two) French infantry platoons I’ve been painting for what seems like for ever! 

In classic Poilu greatcoats, heavy beards and field-packs, the figures are from the excellent Brigade Games 28mm late Great War French range. Size-wise, the figures are a near perfect fit with Great War Miniatures, which I use for the bulk of my late Great War Germans. The figures came quickly (three weeks) and well-packaged across the Atlantic from Lon Weiss at Brigade Games (thanks again, Lon!). Very little cleaning or preparation was necessary on any of the castings, and the sculpts are just about in perfect poses for a typical section of fusiliers or voltigeurs from a French infantry regiment of around 1916-1917. 

 

The figures were fairly easy to paint (although slowed down by trying to do all 76 figures for the two platoons together!)  Never again! The trickiest thing, as readers of some of my previous Blog posts might guess, has been to get the colour of Horizon Bleu “just right” for the greatcoats, tunics, pants and puttees of the Poilu. I hope I’ve captured it well enough to make most people happy (at least some of the time!).

I also tried to tone down the gun-metal glint on the bayonets and the mess tins. The metal on a couple of my earlier French figures looked to be a bit too shiny for Verdun conditions. 

As ever, please do let me know what you think in the Blog comments.  Many thanks indeed to everyone who's given thoughts, suggestions and comments so far.  All errors and colour-blind misinterpretations of what you all meant when you commented remain my fault entirely!

The next three posts here on the Blog will be a three stage painting guide, similar to what I did for the Late War British and Late War Germans. Hopefully can get these published here during the course of the forthcoming Bank Holiday Weekend. 

I also thought it might be helpful to do a figure scale comparison of Late Great War French miniatures, featuring Great War Miniatures (for comparison), Brigade Games, Scarab Miniatures, Forgotten & Glorious Company of Art, Old Glory and Woodbine Miniatures. I’ll see if I can finish that in the next week or so.

Finally, the next book to be reviewed will be Henri Barbusse’s “Under Fire”, which is a very good book, if pretty stomach churning at times.

Being There

“When my mind drifts back now, it is images rather than a coherent narrative which present themselves to me: mist rising from horse lines in the thin keen wind of a morning by the Danube; long marches, the men ankle-deep in mud behind creaking wagons, as the beech and ash woods of Germany enfold us; a hill-top in Northern Spain, when snow fell below us in the valleys but we lay on dry, iron-hard ground under the stars; grizzled centurions lashing at the transport horses, yelling at the legionaries to put their shoulder to a wheel that was spinning as if in mockery of their efforts; a boy with blood oozing from his mouth as I rested his dying head on my arm and watched his leg kick; my horse flinching from a bush which parted to reveal a painted warrior, himself gibbering with terror; the sigh of the wind coming off a silent sea; the tinkle of the camel bell across desert sands. Army life is a mere collection of moments.” (Augustus, Alan Massie)

How do we remember our wargames? Do we remember them as “a mere collection of moments” experienced from the eye’s view of a small metal figure? Do we remember them as a game played with friends in a social environment? Or do we remember them as a competition, consulting rules and charts to find the result?

I’d wager that each of us probably remembers all three of those, perhaps at different times or stages of our hobby. I certainly do. But the games I remember best (or, perhaps, the ones I like to remember most clearly) are the first type. These are the games which I’m immersed in the battle, thinking along the same lines as one of the combatants, measuring myself against the challenges on the table and (just possibly) gaining an insight to what it might have been like to be THERE. 

I can see some of you smiling and shaking your heads as you read this. You’re thinking that I’m indulging in wishful thinking. Perhaps I’m even deluding myself. Miniature wargames are governed by rules, and the gaming element of the hobby relates to the action on the tabletop. It’s certainly true that outside of the rules there doesn’t necessarily need to be an additional context or theme which influences the players. And, many of you might argue, isn’t wargaming like many other activities in this regard? For example, you can go to the theatre, watch a play, marvel at the set design, be impressed by the costumes and follow the playwright’s message – and that should be enough for a good evening out.

Yes … perhaps …

But as any stage actor will tell you, the thing which really lifts a performance is the audience and their reaction to what’s happening on the stage. It’s the “buy-in”, the participation, the energy of the audience’s involvement and reaction which drives the actors on. The two are reciprocal, but a theatre play without an audience is just – well - a rehearsal.

Creating a theme and a context in a wargame, whether within or alongside the rules, is a bit like trying to get the theatre audience to become drawn into the drama of a play. I thought about these sort of ideas a lot last year. In particular, I tried to think of different ways I could, when running a club wargame or helping to run a participation game at a show, try and immerse the players in the context and theme of a game.

The route to immersion in a wargame, the road to “being THERE”, starts with the rules and the parameters of the game you’re playing. It’s here that the roleplaying hobby has a head start on wargaming. Roleplaying games are strong on theme and setting. They have to focus on world-building and setting because the visual aspects of terrain, scenery and miniatures are very often absent. The setting created in the roleplaying game is a key element of the fun and enjoyment – a strong theme really helps when the only other items you may have as a player are pens, paper, dice and imagination.

And for this reason, some of what follows originates from the roleplaying side of the gaming hobby. Some …. but definitely not all. I don’t want to turn the wargames I play into a roleplaying game – the colour of Centurion Valerian’s eyes (hazel), or OberGefreiter Zeigler’s dexterity at leaping from high walls (not the best since he was wounded on the Somme) isn’t going to matter at all. For much of what follows, less is definitely more.

The intention and hope is to try and capture the essence of a wargame’s theme, or to highlight some aspects of the setting which possibly, just possibly, might change the course of a raid, an assault or even a bigger moment of military history. 

 
Of course, all of this is very, very personal. I am definitely not saying that consciously and deliberately trying to create a particular context, theme, and a sense of a particular time and place is necessary in a wargame. Nor am I suggesting that the ways I’ve used are in anyway a blueprint for you should do it. So much is dependent on you – as a player or as a gaming umpire. What you think is enjoyable and fun and what your players want are the most important issues to focus on in this journey.

But with that caveat aside, here’s my own (very personal) list in seventeen easy steps, of what we’ve tried in our club and what’s worked for us: 

Salute 2013: A remarkable day out

Another year, another Salute over. But somehow, this one was different. The venue at Excel Docklands seemed busier than ever, the games ranged from universally excellent to astonishing and the quality of painting and modelling on display was at times breath-taking. As I walked around, I was rather in awe of the time hobbyists had collectively devoted to their hobby, and to each game, to get them to the standard seen on the day.

But yet, there was something more. For me, and I suspect a lot of people, this was almost certainly one of the most social wargames shows I’d ever been to. Perhaps it’s the fact that I was helping out with the TooFatLardies participation game (more of that in a moment). Or perhaps it was the Bloggers Meet Up on Saturday lunchtime which gave me the chance to meet so many people who, until Saturday, I’d only met online. I think that’s at least part of the answer. 

But I think it’s also in the fact that the internet has been drawing hobbyists, wargamers and the hobby together for years. We chat in forums, through blogs, or online through email with people all over the world, as well as in our local clubs and communities. I think that’s revolutionised the hobby, giving us all the chance to get inspired, try new periods, different paints or new figures and generally swap news, rumours and fanciful, elaborate plans in different periods of history. And a big show like Salute gives people chances to catch up, to talk, to get inspired all over again. It’s a social hobby, and now more than ever. I came away with a terrific feeling on Saturday evening. Exhausted yes, but really proud of my hobby, the people in it, and the place we’d arrived at together.

Anyway, I’m guessing you want to see some pictures!! So….here goes….

The Verdun Project: "The Price of Glory" by Sir Alistair Horne

“The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916” is Sir Alistair Horne’s magisterial account of the battle of Verdun in 1916. Published in 1962 it remains one of the leading English language books on the battle and campaign, being widely read and almost invariably cited extensively in Verdun-related bibliographies. It was the first book I read which covered the battle of Verdun in any detail, and may also have been yours.

Having re-read it over the past few weeks, I’ve also found it a more difficult book to review than I first thought it would be. Hopefully the reasons for this will become clear in this post. But first, let me start with what is excellent about Sir Alistair’s book.

I mentioned in the first sentence that “The Price of Glory” is a “magisterial account”. It’s hard to think of another book on the Great War which reads quite as well, and certainly (at least to my mind) none which were published in the 1960s. Sir Alistair’s style is effortlessly readable. It’s intelligent and thoughtful without being overly academic. The book is meticulously organized and comprehensive and wears its considerable scholarship lightly. The text benefits from the author’s clearly excellent linguistic skills, enabling him to create a cogent and consistent narrative of the critical events of the battle throughout 1916.

 There is also a quite definite and deliberate flourish about the book. “The Price of Glory” forms Sir Alistair’s central pillar of his fine trilogy of books about modern France, preceded by his account of the Paris Commune (“The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune, 1870-1”) and followed by his account of the fall of France in 1940 (“To Lose a Battle: France 1940”). Its been a while since I read the other two books in the trilogy, but my recollection is that, taken together, they are a deeply impressive achievement, and one of which any writer would be justifiably proud. The sheer scale of the historical events being confronted does not overwhelm Horne. His written style and command of his material is deployed in a vivid, striking style. This is history as grand theatre, with France as the stage and her survival against terrible circumstances as the main act.

Being aware of the context of “The Price of Glory” as a historical account is important. It is impossible to read the book and not be impressed by the scale of the history Horne has created. The fine and careful balance between a broad sweep of strategy, grand-operational details and human stories create the feel that the battle has been explored in all of its features.

And, taken on its own terms, as history and historiography, I think the book is terrific. If you are at all interested in the battle of Verdun, the fairly modest cover price of the book is well worth paying.

So, you might be wondering why this is a difficult book to review.  

A lot has happened in Great War studies since the book was written in 1962. Revisionist accounts have been published of many Great War battles. It’s now possible to advance many arguments surrounding the course of the fighting in titanic battles such as Passchendaele which are far removed from the “Lions led by Donkeys” approach taken by authors such as Alan Clark and Bill Laffin in the 1970s. Of course, the revisionist accounts do not, taken by themselves, automatically negate all earlier works. But the historical revisionism focused on the Great War of the past 15 years or so does force a reader to think about the content, scope and depth of earlier works, and encourages the reader to view earlier historical works critically, while remaining respectful regarding the achievements of earlier writers. Once this approach is adopted, re-reading “The Price of Glory” starts to be a difficult process.  

I found myself on most pages, and in every chapter, finding a sentence, an example or an argument which I suspect may be ripe for reappraisal or further research. The context in which these examples arise seemed difficult to reconcile with other circumstances I’d read in other, more recent, French and English-language accounts. Taking Horne’s history at face value lead a reader to thinking that the command, operational and tactical problems in the French army of 1916 were uniquely pronounced. And that seems, at least to me, to be unlikely.

As an example, take the descriptions of the fighting around Le Mort Homme and Cote 304 in April 1916 in Chapter Fourteen of “The Price of Glory”. This was a critical part of the battle, and was by any judgment a battlefield environment which both sides struggled to maintain control of their forces and achieve their operational objectives.

There are some very brief references in the book to the careful siting of defensive machine gun sections, and of the importance of French batteries located to the rear of the Cote 304 ridge line. But the details of micro-terrain, and the tactical developments which both sides used to try and achieve success in the fighting on and around them, is not clearly set out. While heavily wooded today, Cote 304 is deceptively steep, with its sides set at a steeper angle than comes across in many photographs of the terrain in 1916 or later years before re-forestation. Stripped of cover by constant artillery barrages, any attack to take Cote 304 had limited cover and advancing troops were exposed under heavy fire. Siting of defensive positions and machine guns in this environment was therefore essential. None of these details of the micro-terrain (which are invaluable to wargamers) really flow from Sir Alistair’s book.

 

Horne addresses the tactical elements of the fighting in outline only. By contrast, he is far more interested in reflecting the dramatic elements of the fighting. He references a contemporary cartoon entitled “Verdun: Storming the Mort Homme” depicting the Kaiser and Crown Prince flogging German soldiers into the arms of Death. He describes the exhaustion of the German troops in the area, which he ascribes to the “German command’s ruthless system of keeping divisions in the line over lengthy periods” (page 164). And he recites the accounts of Le Mort Homme and Cote 304 smoking like volcanos, obscured by clouds of dust and smoke churned by constant bombardment. Reading his account becomes at times an assault on your own senses as a reader. It is certainly magisterial, but there’s an overload of the dramatic sense of the battle. At times it becomes history as grand-guignol; an element of the cold forensic analysis of the revisionist military historian is lacking.

Of course, all of this is my very subjective view. At all times Horne is an entrancing writer. You simply want to read to the next page, and the narrative carried me away to the end of the book pretty much effortlessly. But time and again I was hoping for more detail, more analysis and more depth, not least regarding the French command system and French tactical and operational doctrines at the key stages of the battle.

These absences do not impair the pleasure of reading “The Price of Glory”, or diminish the respect I have for what Sir Alistair achieved in his account. They do, however, possibly leave the book as less authoritative than it might first appear, although another way of interpreting this would be to consider the book as the starting point for further reading.

I also thought about how helpful the book was to me as a wargamer. As with other books I’ve reviewed, the scale of Horne’s history is strategic and operational. Tactical themes are subordinated into the narrative, and perhaps this is indicative of the historical approach of a generation of historians from the 1960s who interpreted the Great War in the context of grand strategic themes, nationalism and anonymous social and industrial forces. In this regard, Horne was not alone, but the absence of tactical details in the book, of how the German and French infantry fought in detail at different stages of the battle, and how their tactics evolved, is a notable omission. For these details, you have to look to other books.

In summary then, I would strongly recommend “The Price of Glory”. It’s accessible, comprehensive and deeply impressive. It has some significant problems, and these make it difficult to see the book as being the single authoritative text on the battle. However, in my view these are problems which have been exposed through the course of time and through the development of further historical studies after the book was written.

For the general wargaming reader, five out of five star shells and a strong recommendation. For the wargamer looking for platoon-level tactical details on the battle, perhaps only three out of five star shells, with the caveat that the focus of the book is on higher-command levels, regardless of the battle being a classic “soldier’s battle”.