There's more good news and I hope your wallet can take it. I'm just lucky that I get freebies. New Magazines! Both worth getting. The first is First Empire edited by David Watkins. I have issue 12, July/August. This is a slick magazine with color-40+ pages in length. The magazine features traditional graphics and overall has a pretty classy look. The articles are well written, with an EE&L feel rather than that of the traditional English "gaming" magazine. The first article is "Gefrees 1809," a nice piece about evil Austrian scum invading the peaceful German countryside with their regulars and hired lackeys and levies. This was especially interesting to me as the EE&L group is playing a similar style game (a la "With Eagles to Glory"). The article was well done and included orders of battle. This was followed by Gallantry and Discipline-on the British infantry-with many firsthand accounts of behavior during the campaign. There are various personal opinion articles, (the one on formations and deployment is particularly noteworthy), and the Q & A/letters. One of the interesting things in the UK at the moment, which articles and a lot of the letters appearing in the magazine reflect, is the popularity of a TV show based on the adventures of a rifleman of the 95th called Sharpe. It's pretty good, too, I must say. It's been shown in the NYC area on PBS (Masterpiece Theater). There is also an article on the Anglo-Russian Landings in Holland, book reviews, and a "how to" on magnetic basing. This is all fun and makes me regret that I'm a speed reader and can knock these magazines off in 15 minutes. The good thing is that the articles are written well enough to be reread many times. My only criticisms are that the articles are a bit light, short, and very English related. But there's a lot of good material here, and in a very pretty package to boot. Boy, I'm not surprised. Dave Ryan's Partizan Press empire rolls on. With the publication of issue no. 11 (Feb.94), the well recommended "Napoleonic Notes & Queries" has gone slick, changing its name to: "The Age of Napoleon." Dave says that it was the magazine's popularity which enabled him to make this change. We start with Part I of a nice article on Napoleonic Yugoslavi,a followed by a long piece on the British and French Cavalry 1808-14, complete with useful data on prior service and Peninsula performance. There is a juicy "Centerfold" of a reenactment unit -68th light infantry (British)-said to be very good at drill and "personal interpretations." Nothing beats seeing what a uniform looks like hanging on a real person. There's also an article on Spanish uniforms in 1807, and it covers more than just the backs of them. You can also find a fascinating tale about the evolution of British knapsacks, 1660-1820, and, of course, the familiar Notes & Queries, a complete Order of Battle of the Saxons and the Prussians at Jena/Auerstadt, plus a bunch of the usual neat filler material. Here, too, I'd have to say the feel of the articles is a bit light but it's by far the best of the batch. Yeah, really recommended. One of the interesting things about all these British magazines is that they have tons of flyers for Napoleonic Tours-fascinating stuff. I'm reminded of a sidebar here. In the U.S. there are magazines dedicated to the recovery of battlefield relics with metal detectors, not from National Battlefields but from a ton of unregistered sites. Because people live been doing this for quite some time there's probably not that much worthwhile stuff left to be found over here. But I know of an artist who happened to be at the Waterloo battlefield, where the law (at least when he was there) allowed the use of metal detectors. He recovered many buttons and the metal parts of a Baker rifle. From his experience I would guess that European battlefields have not been probed to anywhere near the extent as American locales. Only recently, metal detectors have been used to discover coin hoards from the Roman Empire. A lot of artifacts may still be properly recovered before they vanish from the exigencies of time or the far more dangerous incursions of urban development. Hey, you know you're getting old when ... but here's a new one. Once you're over forty you really notice that time speeds up--real badly and real fast. Many of you have heard that I have lots of figures and that I used to paint a lot. Now that's true, but it isn't the same any more. The plain truth is that there's just not enough time for anything, and even though I favor my own troops, I still paint for a few select clients (all their checks clear). But you know the weird thing is that half my clients are actually good figure painters who simply have no time to paint for themselves. There is something wrong here, some incredibly evil force at work. Won't someone paint something for me? One of these guys employed his daughter's girl scout troop to prime and paint base coats. I need assistants, too. My wife Sheila use to prime for me but she has less time to do that now than I do. Maybe we should have had kids-but they never work at what you want them to anyway. Anyway, after decades of painting, of figuring out all kinds of shortcuts and techniques to speed things along, there's still hardly any time left. A word of warning: this will happen to you too-you're as doomed as doomed can be! Brian Stokes, the author of Houserules, puts out an irregularly published newsletter for people who have bought his rule system (recommended). This small tome features two of the things that gamers enjoy most (well, the EE&L bunch anyway), wargame reports and serious military history. This issue featured Part 1 of an artillery lecture. If you have the rules, send for the zine. Get the address, copy it off the box, I won't give it to you. You can't blame me--I am guilt-free. WARGAME PROBLEMS Unlike you guys, I never get to play at conventions. I scarcely have time to do much more than attend meetings and go to the bar. There was one lecture I would have liked to attend at Cold Wars on Sunday afternoon. Scott Washburn was giving a talk on tactics from the point of view of reenactments, taking into account actual drills and the like. Now this is one of the basic ideas behind EE&L rules. Command and Control. If you've ever participated in a reenactment or have ever seen one, you can easily understand that once an order is given it is followed because you can't see enough of everything else that's going on to make an independent decision--unless something so scary happens that you just plain want to run for it. The officers and NCOs are the only ones whom the soldier feels know just what's going on and they will follow their orders as best they can. That's what an officer does. He is not supposed to make "policy" decisions. A good example of this was seen in the movie Gettysburg, with Chamberlin's stand on Round Top. He had his orders and all he could see was that he was gradually being outflanked. His final desperate charge was totally within his defensive orders. This is the perfect example of just how flexible an officer can be. MARTIAL ART OF PAINTING One thing I always try to remember and remind others of, is that this is a changing and growing hobby (we hope). There is a constant influx of new gamers coming in to keep our ranks full. The problem with all of us oldtimers is that we tend to take a lot of stuff for granted. But there have been a lot of things that have been happening just in paints within the last few years to alter our long-standing views. This was all brought to my attention recently by a note from a new subscriber. Cheers for him, Todd. Yes, a twenty-year veteran of board games got bored, decided to try miniatures, and came up with some very interesting questions.... I'll try to paraphrase and condense them for you. "Uniforms: were they all just one standard issue uniform?" NO. For cost and supply reasons, soldiers would wear everything they were issued for as long as possible (because they had to pay for it). They would also "borrow" enemy greatcoats, trousers, and shoes. In fact the "bed ticking" striped trousers you see in some illustrations are the result of "proper" cloth shortages. Back to Empire, Eagles, & Lions Table of Contents Vol. 2 No. 6 Back to EEL List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1994 by Emperor's Headquarters 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