1. Don Bailey visited and, since he's building and painting an ECW army (15mm), we discussed ECW rules and such. I presented one of my 30mm games, after which, we picked it apart (quite easily done). My ECW rules are all built upon the paper-scissors-rock principal... pike has the advantage over cavalry, cavalry bashes all infantry other than pike, and sword-andbuckler pulverizes pike.
Don had been looking at the MAGWEB for rules ideas, in particular, the site for the PARTIZAN PRESS. PARTIZAN has around 10 of its issues on MAGWEB (called The ECW Times), and we looked at them, searching for information concerning the meaning of the key and often-repeated phrase "the musketeers ran to the shelter of the pikes" when cavalry approached.
Digression. PARTIZAN publishes some good stuff in the content of its historical magazines... it publishes some lousy stuff (in my opinion) when it comes to publishing ECW rules booklets. I've tried about all of its rules, from skirmish level to tactical, and they're not worth the price.
PARTIZAN's regular historical outputs are rather pricey... and to compound the problem, they are all published in what I term "micro-print'... teeny-tiny-teeny-weeny letters in a little booklet, whose pages are about 6 inches wide and 8 inches tall. And they manage to squeeze onto each page, about 60 teeny-tiny-teeny-weeny lines of text, which 1, so help me, can't even read.
End of digression.
Don and I failed to find any truly informative data on MAGWEB about our pet phrase. And, after he left, I discovered that, on my shelves, I had about a dozen other PARTIZAN ECW booklets, none of which proved of any help. It was Don's idea that, perhaps, musketeers were not as much a pushover for cavalry as was implemented in my rules systems. He referred to one quotation in a PARTIZAN article which stated that, during one battle, when a cavalry unit attacked, the musketeers beat them off using the butts of their muskets. But a single reference didn't quite convince me.
Picture a pike unit with musketeers on either side. In the front rank of the pike unit is Prit, the Pikeman. To his right, in the musketeer unit, is Mark, the Musketeer. Now, I've been told by the ECW re-enactors, who know about such things, that when cavalry closed in on the pike-andmusket formation, the musketeers broke ranks and pushed and shoved their way into the pike formation. So, here, we have Mark pushing and shoving and stepping on legs and tripping over various pike people, and finally standing directly in back of Prit, who is holding his pike forward to repel the horsemen.
The story, according to the ECW re-enactors, is that Prit is bending forward, one leg forward, one back, and Mark is straddling Prit's back leg, and that all of Mark's buddies are doing the same... the musketeer units on both the right and left flank of the pike have somehow battered and smashed and bashed their way into the pike formation.
But note that the "standard" ratio of pike to musketeers is 2-to-1, hence there are two musketeers now hiding behind every pikeman. A little bit hard to believe.
All of which says that the above re-enactor story appears to be crappola. And I, for one, am still in the dark about exactly what the musketeers did when they "sought shelter in the pikes".
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© Copyright 2001 Wally Simon
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