The Big Battle - Wargaming versus Historical Reality

Horse and musket wargaming loosely covers the period from the English Civil war to the Franco-Prussian war.  Before the beginning of this period, armored cavalry reign supreme and infantry depend on long pointed sticks for protection.   Both cavalry and infantry still wore armor.  After this period, machine guns, smokeless powder, quick firing breech loading artillery, and aircraft disperse armies and force them to seek cover whenever the enemy is present.  Gone are the long lines of men in brightly colored uniforms.  Gone are the cavalry.  The period in between these two is the golden age for armies, and by extension, wargaming.

I have been reading David Chandler's excellent work on warfare in what can be described as the early horse and musket period. In The Art of Warfare in the Age of Marlborough Professor Chandler examines how wars were fought from the time of William III to the beginning of the War of Austrian succession.  

Given his background as head of War Studies at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, it should be no surprise that his primary emphasis is on the British and French, especially during the Spanish Succession War or what we routinely refer to as "The War of Spanish Succession."  This war was fought from 1701 to 1714.  It was generally styled as an attempt to resist French expansion under Louis XIV although officially it was fought to prevent the unification of the French and Spanish monarchies under the house of Bourbon.

This is not a book about that war, but rather a book about how wars were fought.   It is about the rise of massive infantry armies, the decline of Cavalry, and the big battles that are the inevitable result of two armies attempting to impose their will upon each other.

As wargamers, especially those of us who game almost exclusively in this era, we focus on the big battles, especially once our figure collections grow in size beyond all reason.  After all, battles are exciting.  Moving a column of artillery pieces up a muddy road through the Black Forest is not.   Yet, one chart in Chandler's book brought home just how unrealistic is the wargamer's emphasis on the big battle.

In Appendix One, Professor Chandler lists all the major wars of the period from 1688 to 1748 fought in Europe.  There are a total of 14 wars.  This list includes four wars against the Turks, three wars associated with dynastic succession (Spanish, Polish, and Austrian), two wars between Russia and Sweden, three internal rebellions (two Scottish and one Hungarian) and two multiple party wars (the Nine Years War and the War of the Quadruple Alliance).  Professor Chandler then lists all the major and minor engagements and sieges in each war.  A major battle is any engagement in which the total casualties amounted to at least 10,000 combined.  Minor engagements resulted in less than 10,000 casualties.  Sieges are self explanatory.

Professor Chandler identifies only 30 major battles in the entire 76 year period.   Nine of those battles occurred in the War of Spanish Succession and another 5 occurred in the War of Austrian Succession. Five of the wars had no major battles at all.  The remainder had 3 or 4 major battles.  The chart suggests that most conflicts produced a major battle just under every two years.  To be a little more exact, conflicts during this period produced 0.39 major battles per year.  The most violent of the wars, the War of Spanish Succession, lasted 13 years and produced 9 major battles (0.69/yr).  The least violent, the Great Northern War, lasted 21 years and produced only four major battles (0.19/yr).

So what is the point of all of this?  It takes me between two and four years to paint enough figures to field two armies in the horse and musket period.  That is two years of painting infantry, cavalry and artillery, basing and flocking them just to fight battles in conflicts that have few or no major battles.  Arguably, there are better things I could be doing with my time.  Of course, this is where logic breaks down.  I get as much enjoyment out of preparing the armies as I do actually fighting battles.