I'm sure that the ghost of Field Marshall Haig ("The machinegun is a vastly overrated weapon") will rejoice in Paddy's expose of his critics. The shades of his hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of victims will probably be of a different opinion. However, the honorific "Paddy the Apostate" has nothing to do with whether he is an omniscient iconoclast or a fount of cutsey and unconventional errors. It refers to the fact that after writing some really mediocre (to be generous) stuff about how to play with toy soldiers Paddy seems to have convinced himself that the whole thing was a bad go, and that the use of toy soldiers was unsuited to wargaming, or as he put it "the modelling and the gaming are at cross purposes." Thus he was not an Apostate from the view that Yankees and Confederates knew what they were doing, but from the true faith that the purpose of wargame rules is to animate toy soldiers. Surely this is a position that the occasional representative of the rather obtusely managed Foundry firm can appreciate. On the other subject, tactically the Confederates and "Those people" (Lee refused to call them "yankees," or even "the enemy") except that the cavalry was much better armed and more dangerous than the horsemen of Europe, including Her Britannic Majesty's troopers. Wolseley was scathing inhis comparison of Sheridan's troopers and their Spencers compared to an hussar armed with 'a yard of dull steel. Not that Sheridan's troopers couldn't use a yard of dull steel with the best of them. Forrest, not being a gentleman, sharpened his steel, but relied more often on revolvers. Some critics have pointed out that while the Prussian infantry relied on some innovative skirmish tactics in the Siege of Paris, it was not until the 1880s regulations that they adopted anything like the skirmish oriented regulations proposed in our unpleasantness, and decreased the firing line from three ranks to two (concurrent with the introduction of the magazine rifle.) Back to Dispatch July 2002 Table of Contents Back to Dispatch List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2002 by HMGS Mid-South This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com