Civil Wars

More reading - two histories and a ruleset. I was hoping to go to a "MicroCon" that the club was running this weekend, but schedules and other commitments conspired to stop me at the last moment. So I'm even more P'O'd at present. My dad has offered to help me move to a larger apartment, and a game room of my own is tempting, but my job is difficult enough right now that I'm not sure it's worth the effort.

"...Afghans proudly thought of
their land as Yaghistan -- 
the land of rebellion."

It repeats in greater detail some of the character descriptions and events of Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game. While it is more focused on Shah Shuja's story, it also details the Western intrigue that both helped and hindered him in his ambitions. The British prejudice (not in a racial sense) of the situation led them to support Shuja, who had been defeated already four times trying to regain his throne, rather than Dost Muhammad who held a much more commanding position. Their fear of Russian expansion in fact led the (previously disinterested) Russians to court Persia.

Worse were the British efforts to control Shuja and his government in order to prop him up. There are Catch-22 parallels here with South Vietnam; on the one hand, Shuja could not survive without British support - on the other, that very fact made him anathema and increased the interest in bringing him down. If all that your allies can do to help you is to literally take over and set you aside, what is the use of them? Like the presidents of South Vietnam, it was a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't position - and the US had the same problem in Afghanistan in the 2010s. They could raise a new, more effective and conventional Afghan military - but that in itself repulsed the more traditional population and made them more likely to resist the obvious usurpers. As in Vietnam, they could only be sure of the cities (barely even those) and whatever areas they controlled directly - the rest was a sea of dissent. The country was too poor to support itself, so millions of foreign aid were poured in to little effect. The parallels with 2001-2021 are starkly laid out - and a bit terrifying.

Hilariously, Shah Shuja, who the British had been undermining and ignoring ever since they arrived in Kabul, was the first and only man to respond quickly when the rebellion started. Yet, without control of his own government or army, he could do nothing. His most loyal followers, when they saw the tepid British response, practically had no choice but to go over to the rebels. The political and military leaders failed to respond to the uprising when it happened, and were practically quiescent throughout until the retreat. This only encouraged the Afghans, who noticed quickly that the soldiers were even forbidden by their own officers to fire on robbers in the streets. They lost the moral high ground when the political officer, MacNaghten, was murdered while trying to double-cross the Afghan leaders, who declared Jihad.

And then they marched out of the cantonments towards the high passes, despite all the warnings of the few friends they had left (including Shah Shuja himself, who despite their condescension still considered himself their ally). Shuja held out in the Bala Hisar fortress nearby, and would continue to do so for a year. The best the British could have done was to retreat to it, but it's obvious their leaders just wanted any excuse to go home - even if that meant abandoning virtually all their followers in the process.

As pointed out by the author and one of the more pragmatic survivors, there was betrayal in this, but also breathtaking stupidity. I am inclined to go back and read the first Flashman novel, now I've gotten the full details.

A fine sample of the farcical reasoning behind much of the fighting: Governor Ellenborough read a (fictional) report that the gates of Ghazni had been stolen from an Indian temple, so as revenge, he ordered them brought back to India in triumph to avenge this "insult". The officers who took the gates recognized the evidence of their original Islamic construction, and neither the Afghans nor the Hindustanis cared. A cutting quote:

"As the saying goes, real power does not need tawdry propaganda! A more lasting monument until today is the quantity of rotting corpses of the English troops that still block the highways..."

Dalrymple uses contemporary Afghan historians and epic narrative poetry to characterize how the Afghans felt about what was going on, using the latter frequently in place of a conventional narrative. Many of these writings, available for the first time in English, were published in the 1850s in India, possibly to incite the Mutiny (which, the author pointedly notes, first broke out among regiments whose officers had abandoned them during the disastrous retreat). Almost like fiction, it brings out the atmosphere of the place and time. Characterful sketches and paintings of the principal characters are included as well.

Compares and contrasts the lives and combat experience of William Oates of the 15th Alabama, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain of the 20th Maine. I had not considered Oates before, but he wrote just as well as Chamberlain despite a more desultory education. His early life was in the Wild West, but since this is antebellum, that means what is now the Deep South, and Texas, all of which were much more frontierish in the 1840s and '50s. A generation later and with different luck, Oates might have become a gunfighter. But despite his scrappy history, he worked his way up and, like Chamberlain, became a teacher.

Chamberlain, points out the author, did not have quite the heroic upbringing that hagiographers have ascribed to him. His father went bankrupt a couple times, and Chamberlain himself struggled against stuttering all his life. Though a brilliant junior professor at Bowdoin, he felt compelled to join the Army, going so far as to find a pretext - leave to study in Britain - to get away with it, and his coworkers were surprised and disgruntled. His feeling towards the war was more idealistic - Harriet Beecher Stowe was a neighbor, and Jeff Davis spoke at Bowdoin before the war.

The narrative here is fairly bare-bones, even in the combat writing, and the few maps are not of much use. But then, the book is less a military history and more an exploration of character. Chamberlain's relationship with his independent-minded wife was particularly fraught - she was uninterested in being the First Lady of Maine, for example, and lost three children in infancy. While Oates, curiously enough, was one of the few Confederates who urged his government to arm slaves and offer them freedom to join the beleaguered rebel army, which like the more famous Patrick Cleburne retarded his career. This is the same man who defended one of his veterans from a charge of murdering a black man. Basically, both men were ambitious to the point of being willing to put other considerations aside - Chamberlain his wife's needs, Oates his distaste for the KKK and other overt signs of white supremacy. Both initially moderate in their views, they ended up on directly opposite sides of the aisle politically, because Chamberlain, to keep his office, leaned into the Radical Republican agenda which otherwise was not his style.

So while they were both successful, there was also a sort of unrecognized tragedy in their lives.

I haven't finished this one yet, but it's increasingly depressing. Chamberlain had a couple minor scandals in his leadership both of the state and Bowdoin, and as his career wound down, Oates' burst into flower. He went to Congress (in the process marrying a woman who had been born into the house where he recovered from wounds while he was staying there) by building and leading the Democratic political machine, grinding down the black man to do it, and learning to filibuster.

A smaller and shorter ruleset than I expected. I'm interested in the premise, but so far as I can tell, most of the available volumes are more pictures than "fluff." I'm torn between:

• using my SCW-ish figures on a small scale (changing inches for centimeters), which would allow me to use full-sized platoons and a few light vehicles on my small tables.
• or using some of my 54mms. Like the SCW, none of these are really for the period, but WWI Scots and Western Desert British will work, while Germans can be Fascist foreign legion and Japanese could suggest skirmishes in "the far pavilions". On my tables I'd only really be able to have ten men a side.

There is no fluff at all in the rules here, not even army lists. (A generic recommendation of a command section, three ten-man squads, and optional vehicles and a "special" squad is provided.) Clearly players are expected to add flavor themselves. Gradations of experience help here. Royalist regulars would be better trained, while the socialists of Manchester would be poorly equipped but have greater swings in morale.

The rules themselves are not that complex, but there are a lot of variables to keep track of. This is part and parcel of having a Spanish-Civil-War-esque feel, where the training, equipment and origin of troops must widely vary. Vehicles are the same way, as they can be commandeered civilian, hastily-militarized, or proper armoured cars and tanks (in varying types and with varying armament). Thankfully the damage chart is the same for all, albeit with modified rolls for different types. For less than 25 pages, this is pretty packed. I will need a Quick Reference Sheet, for sure.

The only portion that contains the atmosphere of the "period" in play is a list of Random Event cards on the back cover. Suggestions like "Bike has a flat tyre or phone lines cut - one unit out of communications", "Nice weather for ducks - a downpour reduces shooting range by 6", or "Ha ha, they forgot to fill it up - an enemy vehicle runs out of fuel and may not move." Except for the front cover and a cheerful man with colorful scarf, pipe and teacup (who seems to be the rules' mascot), the only illustrations are color photos of minis.

Overall, though, I am quite interested in the game and the theme. I think my next purchase will be the Concise Sourcebook, but it's clearly possible to play without it to begin with. I have the feeling Spanish Civil War rules can work in a pinch as well, as there is clearly that same heterogenous mix of political and religious views bouncing off each other - a little more chaotic than Spain, even.