War games
John Keegan
Has anyone noticed that the Second World War isn't over? Choose the right day in summer, and the wrong place (the Andover Bypass vaut le detour), and you will get lunch with those friends near Amesbury later than you think. The Military Vehicles Conservation Society has D-Day on its mind, Spearmint in its molars and an urgent date with a hundred other Dodge six-by-sixes in the shadow of Stonehenge. And it isn't only the Second World War that rumbles on. The First World War has sprung to life again, beckoning pilgrims onto Townsend- Thoresen (Bapaume — ses tranchees, ses cimetieres) and filling the lecture room of the National Army Museum on Saturday afternoons with enthusiasts, yes, en- thusiasts, for the Western Front.
If you prefer fancy dress to khaki, other conflicts are still recruiting. There is at least one American Civil War re-enactment society, offering a choice of blue or grey, and several which re-fight the English Civil War. A party of knightly jousters tours the village fayres of the Home Counties and in the far west the Ermine Street Guard is hop- ing to get its ballista on the road this year. Across the Atlantic the throngs of make- believe soldiers are even denser, numerous enough to provide full-scale colonist and redcoat armies for President Reagan's visit to the bi-centennial re-enactment of Yorktown last autumn, and sufficiently warlike in manner for the Secret Service to insist on the flints being taken out of their muskets before they marched past the reviewing 'stand.
These are the P131 of the military leisure industry. The general staff is elsewhere and, like the leadership of a Latin American army in the heyday of sombreros and rank cigars, far outnumbers the men in the ranks. War garners! The very word is like an air raid siren, to send me, at least, scuttl- ing into the nearest whist drive on the rumour that they're abDut. Better a fourth at a game you don't understand than any part in the interminable tedium of Austerlitz encore or .Russia re-invaded. Dice, rulers, green baize cloth, a break for tea and wads. It might look like fun. But these men are serious. And when they say that a six-pounder firing at infantry in square at a range of three inches has caused 50 per cent casualties, they mean it. It could be as much as your own life is worth to gig- gle at the wrong moment.
Trouble is, too, that they might be right The war game world, like that of tropical fish collectors and model railway en- thusiasts, has generated its own, by now enormous, literature which quite often con- tains extremely accurate information on the most obscure of military subjects. The back numbers of the cyclostyled news sheets by which the garners communicate have become collectable and, as the world ex- pands, cyclostyling gives way to print and four-colour illustration. Hard covers began to enclose the literature a decade ago and now there is a whole branch of military historical publishing exclusively dedicated to the war gaming market. It isn't, to my mind, readable in the ordinary sense of the word but it satisfies a need.
It also, in many cases, contains the germ, of a good idea. And that is an anti- determinist approach to events of the past: thoroughly healthy to lay out the consti- tuent elements of a battle or campaign, and ask whether their interaction might not have led to some different conclusion. Alas, the war game writer is rare indeed who can bring the enquiry to life. But now a suc- cessful author from beyond the boundaries of the war game world has taken it up and offered it to the general reader. William Seymour's scheme, explained in a short in- troduction, is to set the scene of a battle and, as it develops, 'put forward some of the options that might reasonably. have been expected to confront the command- ers'. The battles he chooses are ten in number, all commanded, at least on one side, by English-speakers, and ranging in date from Hastings to Anzio in 1944.
Anzio was a good choice because Lucas, the Allied commander of the landing, was an unqualifiably bad general confronted by an opportunity which he threw away. So, too, was Agincourt, an adventure story of a small army seeking to escape a larger one, being brought to battle nonetheless and still triumphing in the end. Hastings belongs in the same category. The choices before both Harold and William were fairly simple and we can ring the changes on them within the bounds of factorial mathematics. With the others — Dunbar, Saratoga, Waterloo, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg — doubt takes over. To Waterloo, for example, the author assigns 13 moments of decision, none en- tailing a choice between more than four op- tions. 'Simplify! simplify!' is, of course, the cry by which every great man operates. It certainly lay at the heart of Napoleon's method of command. But Wellington, in battlefield terms an equally calculating operator, must surely have had more on his mind than the two puzzles with two and three options respectively which William Seymour allows him. He himself recalled `putting on and off his cloak more than fifty times' in the course of the battle, dur- ing which he rode from one end of the line to the middle several times, losing all but one of the numerous entourage with which he had begun the day in the process. It is a description of hyperactivity, mental as well as physical, and implies a far wider range of outcomes than permitted here, even if we tie them solely to Wellington's own powers of decision. If we remember that his subordinates were not 12 millimetres high and that the field of Waterloo was not green baize, the options begin to multiplY alarmingly. They also lead us away from the point, which is that generals are thinking beings, who must make up their minds against the clock. Pressure of time is one of the ingred- ients of battle the author most successfullY conveys, as well as the limited scope of the individual's vision and the impossibility of taking back a move once made. War garners, please ponder.
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