Down here in South Wales, although pretty well 'out' of the mainstream of wargaming, we have a reasonably thriving confederation of about eight wargamers, all living in the same town. We fight mainly in Napoleonic or Naval, although dabbling in all periods to some extent. Due to lack of the necessary funds, I had been driven to converting Napoleonic figures from Airfix before ever seeing your "Make Your Own Army" series, but since I began reading it, I have been able to convert all kinds of French or British Napoleonic cavalry, infantry or artillery from Airfix cuirassiers or American Civil War troops. Now I am experimenting with Samurai (Robin hood set), landsknechts (Romans and Washington's Army), Renaissance reiters (Romans and 7th Cavalry) and Roman equites (Romans and 7th Cavalry). I was interested by W.T. Thurbon's letter in the latest Newsletter and agree with most of what he said, although I would argue the point that the Roman Legion merely "troubled" the Greek Phalanx, in my opinion, it beat it decisively. On his variousbows-compared-statistics I think that his statistics could be rather misleading. The 400 yard longbow range sounds pretty inferior to the 972 yards for the short bow, but it must be remembered that the former was an aimed accurate, killing shot that any Anglo/Welsh archer could be expected to achieve, whereas the latter was an unaimed 'flight' shot and also a very lucky fluke, only documented because it was made by a sultan. Personally, I think that if a force of Gwent hobilars ever faced an equal number of Turkish mounted archers, the longbowmen would settle the affair in a matter of minutes. We lately refought the Battle of Waterloo, resulting in a very costly French victory. Dispositions were as in the real battle and there were many similarities to the real battle. Things went wrong just as D'Erlon's were being ridden down by the Union Brigade (The Household was already engaged with cuirassiers). La Haye St. and Hougoumont were quickly taken by storm and the whole Imperial Guard was launched immediately into the attack, sustaining incredible casualties (4 in every 5) they smashed the English left flank and rolled up the whole line. By ironic chance, Ney (who originally survived defeat to be executed) was killed by the same blast of grapeshot that mowed down half of the First Grenadiers of the Guard. We found that the English Line was generally unable to deal with the French Column, this was because most column/line rules cover French columns and lines of European (other than English) levies. The best way to rectify this would be to waive the morale rules requiring defenders in line, if English soldiers, to throw a dice to hold in the face of a column charge (as the English undoubtedly would), this rule naturally would not effect 'common or garden' European troops. Back to Table of Contents -- Wargamer's Newsletter # 113 To Wargamer's Newsletter List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1971 by Donald Featherstone. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com