"Firing into the Brown" #69 - Skirmish Games, Toulouse, Dickens and stuff...

"So Carnehan weeds out the pick of his men, and sets the two of the Army to show them drill and at the end of two weeks the men can manoeuvre about as well as Volunteers. So he marches with the Chief to a great big plain on the top of a mountain, and the Chiefs men rushes into a village and takes it; we three Martinis firing into the brown of the enemy".

Kipling "The Man Who Would Be King"

Time for another update..

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Had so much fin with the first game that I thought I'd expand the horizons a little and throw in some of the glitter..  man cannot live by small arms alone.. 😏

The book makes the inestimable suggestion that if armour is used, it's used only on one side as fundamentally the rules are for an infantry/man based skirmish..  but having put the rules for armour in it, it seemed a shame for me not to try them, so for this game the sides of the last game were expanded.. the British with a 2pdr AT gun and an MMG, the Germans with a Pz II and an MMG.

Same battlefield as last time but I switched the axis left to right instead of up to down..  first conundrum, where to position the 2pdr - as a crew served weapon, it can turn on the spot but cannot move..  clearly it can't be everywhere so it seemed logical to place it on the road where it could turn to cover either flank in the event it needed to..

Move 2 following and the British have had a good start before the jokers turn up - the Germans have started slow but the Pz II is deployed to cover their right flank (and more importantly for them out of sight of the 2pdr!)

Turn 3 following and the threat of the Pz II is enough to break up the British advance - note the first two British casualties, one of them an officer - most of the squad have taken cover, but the Germans are filtering forward using the hedge line for cover..

Move 5 following - the Pz II can't be everywhere, and the threat of the British MMG deployed on that flank is enough to get the Germans to switch it to the other flank.. it did dreadful damage as you can see from the number of "downed" stands.. British casualties are mounting...

..abysmal initiative cards.. 😏

Last turn following - on their left flank the British switched to close quarters rather than standing off and shooting, and very successfully too..  now the German casualties are mounting, but in the end of turn morale check the British fail, and the game goes to the Germans.

Post match analysis:

• Another fun game which was far closer at the end than it was a couple of moves in!
• Crew served weapons are supposed to be static - I think based on the the lightness of the weapon I might allow limited movement for some in future games
• Another game that highlights you are better off getting stuck in than hiding and being picked off one by one..

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Madame de Montespan

Another in the occasional "regiments of renown" series featuring the histories of various regiments painted in haste at the beginning of a project but which were not documented here for posterity.. so we come to French infantry regiment "Toulouse", part of my War of the Spanish Succession collection, and one of my favourites simply because of the flag.. 

There is a very (very) good potted history of this regiment on the Kronoskaf WSS site (link below) so there's little point in me repeating the good work completed there, but by way of a framework to hang some 'rabbit holes' on (😏), at Blenheim they were in Tourouvre’s Brigade (under Lieutenant General the Marquis de Sauffrey) as part of the Bavarian contingent facing Eugene on the Franco Bavarian Left flank - they consisted of two battalions for a total of about a 1000 men.

The regiment was created by the regulation of 20 February 1684 for the Comte de Toulouse, the natural son (😏) of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan.

During the War of the Spanish Succession, the regiment was commanded by:

• Jean Comte de Cadrieu from 4 April 1693 (an Inspector General of Infantry, and also titled Baron of Calmont de Plancatge)
• Jean-Louis, Comte d’Hautefort-Bosen from 8 May 1703 to 15 March 1718 (made brigadier on 26 October 1704, maréchal de camp on 8 March 1718, lieutenant-general on 20 February 1734, and died at a good age on 9 March 1743)

Their service during the war was a follows - surprised they weren't at the other big three..

• 1702 - the Battle of Friedlingen.
• 1703 - Siege of Kehl, the attack and capture of Hornberg, combat of Munderkingen and the Battle of Höchstädt. It later participated in the capture of Kempten and Augsburg.
• 1704 - the first battalion of the regiment was at the Battle of Schellenberg, the entire regiment was then at the Battle of Blenheim and it was then besieged in Landau by the Allies.
• 1705 - the regiment was increased to three battalions
• 1706 - the relief of Fort-Louis and in the capture of Drusenheim, Lauterbourg, Haguenau and the Marquisat Island.
• 1707 - the attack on the Lines of Stolhofen
• 1709 - the Combat of Rumersheim.
• 1711 - one battalion was posted to Spain
• 1713 - the sieges of Landau and Freiburg.

I've managed to find very little on the two Colonels - Jean Comte de Cadrieu is the better documented and apart from those facts above it would appear that he was most active in south west France being prominent in a number of the Alps campaigns, and also at the siege of Toulouse.

The records show that a regiment of infantry named Hautefort Bosen was disbanded in 1698 and it's men incorporated in the La Couronne Infantry Regiment - I do wonder if Jean Louis might have been involved with them but have managed to find little or nothing on anything to do with Hautefort Bosen!

These are Minifigs (but not sure about the officer..  Dixon perhaps?) and painted and based my me some time pre-2006 - the flag is from Warflag.com (which currently seems to be down 😒)

References:

Toulouse Infanterie - Kronoskaf Project WSS

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That time of the year again, and my regular reader will know that as Christmas approaches it is my want to read a Charles Dickens, so it's Dickens time again! 

Here's the 'Christmas Dickens' timeline to date...

• 2013 - "David Copperfield" (9/10)
• 2014 - "Nicholas Nickleby" (exceptional)
• 2015 - "Oliver Twist" (8/10)
• 2016 - "The Old Curiosity Shop" (7/10)
• 2017 - "A Tale of Two Cities" (7/10) and "A Christmas Carol" (9/10)
• 2018 - "Great Expectations" (10/10)
• 2019 - "Bleak House" (8/10)
• 2020 - "Little Dorrit" (retired hurt - no score 😏)
• 2021 - "Our Mutual Friend" (8/10)
• 2022 - "Pickwick Papers" - brilliant... (9/10)
• 2023 - "Dombey and Son" - hugely enjoyable.. (9/10)

My top four Dickens novels so far would be "David Copperfield", "Nicholas Nickleby", "Great Expectations" and 2022's absolute joy, "Pickwick Papers" - "worst" (it's Dickens for goodness sake, how can there be a worse?), 'least enjoyed', was without a doubt "Little Dorrit" which was mawkish beyond extreme, but of which my opinion seems to be at odds with most other people - I may have to have another go at some point, as Dickens 'only' wrote 16 major novels (there were a few books of short stories etc), and I've now read 11 (and a bit) of them...

This years Dickens, however, will be "Barnaby Rudge", of which I know nothing, so a bit of a voyage of discovery...

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 Laters, as the young people are want to say...