"The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley."

Aft agley they indeed went, when speaking of this latest issue. We here at CoE have been attempting to introduce scanned pictures to the standard issue format; unfortunately, we have yet to find a program that allows the various editors to freely swap JPEG and Bitmap files from their respective computer systems. The long and short of it is that after several weeks of fruitless endeavour, we are back at square one, Cut'n'Paste 101.

Rest assured, we will eventually iron out this problem, even if we must resort to passing around a single, common Office Software Package to do so. As it stands, these gaps in production will be countered by producing double issues, until we are back on schedule. In this issue, Associate Editor Scott Hansen has produced two articles on the Second Scheleswig War, or Prusso-Danish War for you unreconstructed Brandenburg sympathisers. These may help to spark an interest in this scruffy little conflict.

Also received are several articles by that Grand Old Man of Imperial European Warfare, Pat Condray. Pat's first love is the Franco-Prussian war, and he is predominatley responsible for the rise of interest in this period by his articles that appeared in The Courier in the mid-to-late eighties. Submitted by Pat is the source material that inspired those articles. I think it is meet and right to start our Franco-Prussian coverage with Pat's material.

Pat Condray also writes:

In the Oswiecim Junction scenario in issue #1 "you list two 6pdr SB batteries for the Austrians. As far as I know, the normal complement for an Austrian Brigade was a battery of 8 nominally 4pdr rifles. I haven't seen any reference to smoothbore artillery in the Austrian 1866 forces. In those days the rated weight of a rifle was usually (in Europe) based on the weight of a ball the same diameter as the rifles shell, so effectively Prussian 4pdrs, I think, fired a 9pd shell, and the heavier 6pdr fired a 15pd shell, but I could be mistaken on those numbers.

It is possible that some Austrian brigades had smoothbores. However, all information I have indicates 4pdr bronze rifles for brigade artillery. The Prussian establishment seems to have been somewhere between 50/50 (if you count the reserves) and 2 rifles to the smoothbore. The Prussians (at Oswiecim) seem to have been an ad hoc formation like the one that got clobbered at Langensalza, so it is difficult to extrapolate from standard higher level organization."

Since information on this battle is sketchy at best, I chose to portray the bulk of the troops on both sides as either reservists or garrison troops. The Austrian guns were intended to be left-overs from the 1859 war, so Pat's correction to 4pdr bronzes seems right. Also, Pat is the only reader to write that he caught the significance of the name Oswiecim. In German, the village was known as Auschwitz.

1998 is the 150th anniversary of The Year Of Revolution, when the common peoples of France, The Germanies, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Bohemia rose up in arms against those above them. Plans are to include at least one article per issue dealing with this topic, and I invite those of you who may wish to share your knowledge of this period with the rest of us to please do so.

Holding the Line:

Clash of Empires has found a new printer and will finish the current volume at the level of compleation that you see in this issue. Due to the overwhelming response of the readership in favour of the increase in price to preserve print quality, the subscription cost for Volume II will increase to $12.00 per year.

To Our Internet Brethren

Thank you for your support of CoE on MagWeb. In the latest survey, CoE catapulted from position 21 to position 14, bypassing our sister and source of inspiration The Heliograph. I have immense respect for what Richard Brooks has done for the Colonial era, and can therefore only say, "Ha!"

What's Next

Another Double Issue, chock-a-block full of 19th Century European Goodness...

The Revolution Spreads to Vienna - 1848
Uniforms of the Kingdom of Naples - Part II
Der Schlacht Bei Lagensalza: The Kingdom of Hanover's Last Gasp - 1866
The Battle of Magenta, 1859... in Skirmish Level?
More Franco-Prussian Stuff !
Naval Action: Battle of Navarino - 1827
and much, much more!!!

-Finis-