Radical rethink?

I realise it's been a very long time since I posted anything here on the Georland blog and the project has been firmly on the back burner for a while.

This has partly been because I had achieved that mythical state of "having finished" the S Range Franco Prussian armies I had intended to use for the project, and started on other things: then acquired quite a large number of additional S Range figures of various German states infantry and cavalry. This made me feel painting them up was another large project which I wasn't yet up to the challenge of starting.

So while I had (and still have) an intention to refight some of the Georland battles on the tabletop, it also dawned on me over quite a long period of time that maybe I didn't want to use the Franco Prussian figures after all for this. I am perfectly happy to have two good sized Franco Prussian War armies and use them just for that. I was influenced by this picture, a watercolour by George Keef in the Journal, entitled the Battle of Emburgy (or Enburg, depending on your reading of the script)  dated 8 August 1873. A larger version of the picture appears at the bottom of the home page of the Georland blog.

The lines of red coated troops have brought me back to my original intention, which was to use my S Range Crimean armies, to achieve a similar look. I think the FPW option came about because George Keef's original soldiers were mainly semi round FPW figures, with the French providing the Georlan forces.

So while the Franco Prussian Germans will prove useful for some of the wars of the later Epochs, I am now thinking I might go back to British Crimean War figures for Georland, to achieve a similar aesthetic to this picture.

If I do choose to go this way I won't regard the FPW project as a sidetrack, as it stands on its own and without the interest in terms of Georland I doubt I would have got anywhere near as far with painting the figures, as I would have got distracted into something else. (And in fact while I have some further S Range Crimean Highlanders somewhere in the painting crew I also have some Hinton Hunt and Douglas British Crimean figures which will probably get attention before they do). I am unlikely to be happy using the Hinton Hunt and Douglas figures alongside S range ones, but will have to see. Also I have some very nicely painted Hinton Hunt Crimean Russian infantry somewhere which I must dig out sometime.

I also greatly enjoyed  assembling my collection of buildings from German railway scenery manufacturers, so I would also need to give some thought to whether to use these or the Russian style (and slightly larger scale) buildings I have instead.

It is all a bit hypothetical as I doubt anything will happen any time soon. I realise I need to do a fair bit of research for the Orders of Battle for any engagements I might want to refight, as although there is information in the scans I have of the last section of the Journal, they can be hard to decipher and may have lost some of their content to the scanner's margin settings.

But I think some good questions to have.

The man himself

With thanks to the Royal Highland Fusiliers Museum.

Wells Outgunned - Franz Stollberg

We don't (yet) know much about the way George Alfred Keefe, his brothers and their friends fought their battles, but we do know it involved firing miniature black powder cannons. I have seen it suggested that in some way this places them at the "playing toy soldiers" rather than the "wargaming" end of the spectrum. personally I don't think this argument holds water - they simply outgunned H G Wells's matchstick firing cannon, and RL Stevenson's "sleeve-links" and printers' ems.

We als know from his letters that in January 1878 George Alfred Keefe bought a kriegspiel set from a Colonel returning home; it was missing the rules and he sent home for a copy of Baring's English edition of the rules - this seems enough to put him in the serious wargaming fraternity.

This article from Wargamers Newsletter #101 of August 1970 shows this practice might have lasted longer than might have been expected.

Robert Louis Stevenson - An Intimate Portrait of RLS by Lloyd Osbourne 1924

The second source identified by Karl G Zipple and published in the Wargamers Yearbook by Don Feateherstone was:

AN INTIMATE PORTRAIT OF R L S

by his Stepson Lloyd Osbourne

New York

Chars. Scribner’s Sons 1924

But best of all were our “war games”, which took weeks to play on the attic floor.

These games were a naïve sort of “Kriegspiel”, conceived with an enormous elaboration, and involving six hundred miniature lead soldiers. The attic floor was made into a map, with mountains, towns, rivers, “good” and “bad” roads, bridges, morasses, etc. Four soldiers constituted a “regiment”, with the right to one shot when within a certain distance of the enemy; and their March was twelve inches a day without heavy artillery, and four inches with heavy artillery. Food and munitions were condensed in the single form of printers’ “Ms” twenty to a cart, drawn by a single horseman, whose move, like that of all cavalry, was the double of the infantry. One “M” was expended for every simple shot; four “Ms” for every artillery shot – which returned to the base to be again brought out in carts. The simple shots were pellets fired from little spring-pistols; the artillery shots were the repeated throws of a deadly double sleeve-link.

Here absurdity promptly entered, and would certainly have disturbed a German staff-officer. Some of our soldiers were much sturdier than others and never fell as readily; on the other hand, there were some disheartingly thin warriors that would go down in dozens if you hardly looked at then: and I remember some very chubby and expensive cavalrymen from the Palais Royal whom no pellets could spill. Stevenson excelled with the pistol, while I was a crack shot with the sleeve-link. The leader who first moved his men, no matter how few, into the firing range was entitled to the first shot. If you had thirty regiments you had thirty shots; but your opponent was entitled to as many return shots as he had regiments, regardless of how many you had slaughtered in the meanwhile.

This is no more than a slight sketch of the game, which was too complicated for a full description, and we played it with a breathlessness and intensity that stirs me even now to recall. That it was not wholly ridiculous but gave scope for some intelligence is proved by the fact that R L S invariably won, though handicapped by one-third less men. In this connection it may be interesting to know what a love of soldiering R L S always had. Once he told me that if he had had the health he would have gone into the army, and had even made the first start by applying for a commission in the yeomanry – which illness had made him forego. On another occasion he asked me who of all men I should most prefer to be, and on my answering “Lord Wolseley” he smiled oddly as though somehow I had pierced his own thoughts, and admitted that he would have made the same choice.

One conversation I heard him have with a visitor at the chalet impressed me irrevocably. The visitor was a fussy, officious person, who after many preambles ventured to criticise Stevenson for the way he was bringing me up. R L S, who was always the most reasonable of men in an argument, and almost over-ready to admit any points against himself, surprised me by his unshaken stand.

“Of course I let him read anything he wants”, he said. “And if he hears things you say he shouldn’t, I am glad of it. A child should early gain some perception of what the world is really like – its baseness.”

Robert Louis Stevenson - Voyage to Windward

Another source on Stevenson's wargames, identified by Karl G Zipple:

VOYAGE TO WINDWARD

The Life Of

Robert Louis Stevenson

J.C. Furnas

William Sloane Associated

New York 1951

The second winter at Davos was more private. The Stevensons rented a wooden chalet – rather like a New York elevated station on a mountain slope – near the hotel where the Symondses awaited the completion of a permanent home. The new quarters were as bleak as all else. But they afforded Lloyd room for his printing press and, in the lower story, which was difficult to heat, ample floor space for a new game:

From a military family-friend Louis had received Hamley’s “Operations of War” – a still recognized summary of the strategy, tactics, and logistics that Victorian soldiers developed out of the great campaigns since 1800, rich with maps and resounding names like Wellington and Moltke, written with a leisurely clarity akin to that of Darwin. Louis had been long attracted by, if seldom earnest about, chess, and by the picturesque moral devotion of soldiering – remember, the Charge of the Light brigade still outweighed, in literary convention, the fetid, feckless campaign that had included it. In a famous and unmistakably childish passage, Louis once professed to a consistent ambition to have been leader of a horde of irregular cavalry ³⁴. Deeply as certain phrases of Tolstoi later affected him, he never forgave the great Russian for his disrespectful picture of strategists in “War and Peace”. It is strange indeed to find Louis Stevenson, who had never yet heard anything more warlike than the sunset gun from the Castle, lecturing a former captain of artillery from the siege of Sebastopol on the trenchant niceties of war. ³⁵ (Inconsistently enough, he highly approved of Zola’s war scenes.) Now, in the chilly-to-freezing semi-basement of the Chalet am Stein, gathering hints from professional soldiers relegated to Davos, he set his ingenuity to work on a German-style war game that sounds like immense fun.

It had skill – popguns fired printers’ “ems” from Lloyds font of type, and the boy’s superior accuracy sometimes checked Louis’s superior planning; luck – data on strength and condition of opposing forces were scattered over the “theatre of war” on face-down cards, to prevent reconnoitring cavalry from knowing just where the most valuable information might lie; variations in quality of troops – some corps of lead soldiers, solider on their bases, stood fire that routed less staunch regiments; censorship and misleading news releases – the correspondence that Louis supplied to the Glendarule Times and the Yallobally Record is fine, if sometimes ferocious , travesty of British war correspondence of the period. When the Record suggested that General Osbourne be court-martialed, the editor was---hanged by order of General Osbourne. Public opinion endorsed this act of severity. My great-uncle, Mr. Phelim Settle, was present and saw him with the nightcap on and a file of his journal round his neck. ³⁶ 

Louis always loved not so much making believe child-style – some biographers have missed the point – as the fun of making-believe, which is another matter. A child enjoys being a pirate specifically; some adults enjoy the general proposition of dressing up for and acting the part of a pirate: a few can do so without condescending toward either themselves in the part or the part itself. In an anecdote which I hope is not apocryphal, Louis is watching a child play boat and, wearying of it, climb out of the armchair that had been acting as boat, and walk away. “For heaven’s sake,” Louis calls after him, “at least swim!” That is genuine technique in play.

Until sent to school, Austin had been making friends with British jack-tars; proudly conducting pack horses down to Apia; building forts on the lawn with Arrick, that ingratiating cannibal; playing the old Davos war game with Louis and Lloyd, Austin being known as general Hoskyns; taking desultory lessons in history and arithmetic from Louis and Aunt Maggie.

Notes

³⁴  Lloyd (An Intimate Portrait of R.L.S. : 37) wrote that, as a youth, Louis once planned to enlist in the Territorials. Possible but unlikely – there is no other mention of such a scheme.

³⁵  Louis’s admiration for Tolstoi seems to have been bestowed on the didactic writings rather than the novels. This was no Russophobia – Louis was mad about Dostoevski in the early French versions.

^{36  “}Stevenson at Play” (SS): XXVII, 374

Austin Strong was R.L.S.’s step-grandson.

(SS) is the South Seas edition of the works of R.L.S.

In a short biography at the end of his booklet, Karl Zipple gives the following two references:

Letters and Miscellanies of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 1. Published in New York by Charles Scribner’s and Sons, 1902

Lockett, W.G., Robert Louis Stevenson at Davos. Hurst, London, 1934.

Hamley, Sir Edward B., Operations of War, various editions, 1872. This was Stevenson’s textbook on war used to set up the rules. The maps may have been the basis for his war map?

Don Featherstone:

I find this fascinating, stimulating and inspiring stuff and it makes me wonder whether in generations to come other wargamers will look as tolerantly at the literary offerings I have attempted to make in this wonderful hobby of ours.

History of the Army of George I

The following posts contain the contents of the History of the Army of George 1.

George was George Alfred Keef, the founder of the army. The notes he kept were later bound together by his grandson Oliver Keef. George appears in the pages as King George himself, usually referred to as H.I.M. (His Imperial Majesty) or Imperator. He seems to have been invincible in the field through the many campaigns recorded

After the Epoch XI B, the Journal is written in a different hand and style. If we assume the dates attributed to actions in the Journal are the same as in  real time then this change would take place in 1875. It is possible that this second hand is that of one of his brothers, Herbert Keef or Arthur Keef.

This transcript has been produced from photographs of the pages of the original Journal. As they are foolscap in size they could not easily be scanned. The maps illustrating the posts are from the same source so are not of a high definition - it may be possible to replace these with clearer images at a later date.

The transcript seeks to reproduce faithfully the spellings, abbreviations and punctuations of the original. In a very few cases it has been impossible to identify particular words. Often these are names, either of places or characters, which are fictional. In these cases the most likely spelling is given and we have tried to make this consistent throughout the whole History.

 Where there is an editorial note to help clarity it is given in [square brackets and italics]. Other brackets have been taken from the text.

Some words are spelt in more than one way in the text and this has been repeated here. Words such as honour and vigour are spelt -or in the manuscript and this spelling is repeated here. Capitalisation is slightly erratic in the manuscript. Where necessary extra paragraph breaks have been introduced into posts to make them easier to read on screen. In a very few cases punctuation has been altered the better to convey the author's intentions.

I would like to thank the Keef family for making the manuscript available and helping to decipher it where this has been difficult.

It is intended to add further historical notes and illustrations, along with a gazetteer of place names, a list of characters, and other appendices, at a later date.

The family are also considering whether to make the full transcript available in Kindle or other format.

The wargaming activity of George Alfred Keef and Herbert Keef is remarkable in two ways:

the completeness with which it has been documented and how this information has survived;

the early date (first use 1860, the Journal's campaigns starting in 1872) which is substantially earlier than the 1898 publication date of Lloyd Osbourne's article in Scribners Magazine on Robert Louis Stevenson's wargames, which has traditionally been held to be the first published account of gaming with miniature figures, the publication in 1913 by H.G. Wells of Little Wars, or the early wargames of the Trevelyan brothers.

We hope that you will find it not only historically significant but interesting and entertaining.