THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN LITTLE WARFARE 5

Category: The Beginnings Of Modern Little Warfare

That seemed fair; but so desperate is the courage and devotion of lead
soldiers, that it came to this, that any small force that got or seemed
likely to get isolated and caught by a superior force instead of waiting
to be taken prisoners, dashed at its possible captors and slew them
man for man. It was manifestly unreasonable to permit this. And in
considering how best to prevent such inhuman heroisms, we were reminded
of another frequent incident in our battles that also erred towards
the incredible and vitiated our strategy. That was the charging of
one or two isolated horse-men at a gun in order to disable it. Let me
illustrate this by an incident. A force consisting of ten infantry and
five cavalry with a gun are retreating across an exposed space, and a
gun with thirty men, cavalry and infantry, in support comes out upon a
crest into a position to fire within two feet of the retreating cavalry.
The attacking player puts eight men within six inches of his gun and
pushes the rest of his men a little forward to the right or left in
pursuit of his enemy. In the real thing, the retreating horsemen would
go off to cover with the gun, "hell for leather," while the infantry
would open out and retreat, firing. But see what happened in our
imperfect form of Little War! The move of the retreating player began.
Instead of retreating his whole force, he charged home with his mounted
desperadoes, killed five of the eight men about the gun, and so by the
rule silenced it, enabling the rest of his little body to get clean away
to cover at the leisurely pace of one foot a move. This was not like
any sort of warfare. In real life cavalry cannot pick out and kill its
equivalent in cavalry while that equivalent is closely supported by other
cavalry or infantry; a handful of troopers cannot gallop past well and
abundantly manned guns in action, cut down the gunners and interrupt
the fire. And yet for a time we found it a little difficult to frame
simple rules to meet these two bad cases and prevent such scandalous
possibilities. We did at last contrive to do so; we invented what we call
the melee, and our revised rules in the event of a melee will be found
set out upon a later page. They do really permit something like an actual
result to hand-to-hand encounters. They abolish Horatius Cocles.



We also found difficulties about the capturing of guns. At first we had
merely provided that a gun was captured when it was out of action and
four men of the opposite force were within six inches of it, but we
found a number of cases for which this rule was too vague. A gun, for
example, would be disabled and left with only three men within six
inches; the enemy would then come up eight or ten strong within six
inches on the other side, but not really reaching the gun. At the next
move the original possessor of the gun would bring up half a dozen men
within six inches. To whom did the gun belong? By the original wording
of our rule, it might be supposed to belong to the attack which had
never really touched the gun yet, and they could claim to turn it upon
its original side. We had to meet a number of such cases. We met them
by requiring the capturing force--or, to be precise, four men of
it--actually to pass the axle of the gun before it could be taken.

All sorts of odd little difficulties arose too, connected with the use
of the guns as a shelter from fire, and very exact rules had to be made
to avoid tilting the nose and raising the breech of a gun in order to
use it as cover. . . .

We still found it difficult to introduce any imitation into our game of
either retreat or the surrender of men not actually taken prisoners in a
melee. Both things were possible by the rules, but nobody did them
because there was no inducement to do them. Games were apt to end
obstinately with the death or capture of the last man. An inducement was
needed. This we contrived by playing not for the game but for points,
scoring the result of each game and counting the points towards the
decision of a campaign. Our campaign was to our single game what a
rubber is to a game of whist. We made the end of a war 200, 300, or 400
or more points up, according to the number of games we wanted to play,
and we scored a hundred for each battle won, and in addition 1 for each
infantry-man, 1-1/2 for each cavalry-man, 10 for each gun, 1/2 for each
man held prisoner by the enemy, and 1/2 for each prisoner held at the
end of the game, subtracting what the antagonist scored by the same
scale. Thus, when he felt the battle was hopelessly lost, he had a
direct inducement to retreat any guns he could still save and surrender
any men who were under the fire of the victors' guns and likely to be
slaughtered, in order to minimise the score against him. And an interest
was given to a skilful retreat, in which the loser not only saved points
for himself but inflicted losses upon the pursuing enemy.

At first we played the game from the outset, with each player's force
within sight of his antagonist; then we found it possible to hang a
double curtain of casement cloth from a string stretched across the
middle of the field, and we drew this back only after both sides had set
out their men. Without these curtains we found the first player was at a
heavy disadvantage, because he displayed all his dispositions before his
opponent set down his men.

And at last our rules have reached stability, and we regard them now
with the virtuous pride of men who have persisted in a great undertaking
and arrived at precision after much tribulation. There is not a piece of
constructive legislation in the world, not a solitary attempt to meet a
complicated problem, that we do not now regard the more charitably for
our efforts to get a right result from this apparently easy and puerile
business of fighting with tin soldiers on the floor.


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