Battle reports (with pictures!)

Gentlemen,

We had two practice games Thursday night for the upcoming Keith Con. On table#1, Joe Maynard led the French troops of Marshall Maurice de Saxe (1740) against Frederick the Great's Prussians (1758). The French managed to catch the Prussians off guard, so to speak, and won the aggression roll. They marched on the Prussians near a little town with a stone wall extending out along the edge of a fallow field. This the French planned to use as the anchor for their left flank. On their right were a pond and a series of marshy areas, giving that side excellent cover as well.

The French set up with one division holding the town on the left flank and extending out into the open territory past the stone wall. The right end of the line consisted of a grand battery of thirty-six 6pdr guns (i.e. three stands). On the right flank, a deep phalanx of recently raised battalions was placed with a howitzer battery in support and some second rate cavalry regiments in reserve. The centre was dominated by that flower de l’armee fraincaise - a massive brigade of nine regiments of mostly elite French cavalry supported by two brigades of infantry and a 12 pdr battery.

On the Prussian side, two divisions were placed lined up between the edge of the lake (which was on the French side) and a medium wood against their back edge. A couple of regiments of hussars held the far left flank in case the French tried to march around the lake onto the Prussian’s flank. The third Prussian division was nowhere to be seen. Seeing as the worst possible place for it to arrive would be on the French left flank, those of us on that side of the table assumed that’s where it was. Gulp.
Joe got there late, so I started for him and he took over when he arrived. My philosophy was to attack the Prussian position with everything we had as fast as possible, before the rest of his army could show up. Mark obliged by failing to roll for the arrival of his other division for about six bounds. My mistake was thinking I could get my cavalry onto the seam between Mark’s two commands before he could fill in the weaknesses in his position. WRONG! In retrospect, I should have attacked with the infantry all along the line, keeping the cavalry back as a reserve. Instead, as the picture to the side shows, by the time Joe showed up, I had gotten the cavalry far ahead of its supporting infantry and it was starting to get hit by Prussian medium range artillery fire.

Under fire anyway, Joe & I decided to trust in numbers and we hurled the cavalry into the Prussian ranks attempting a breakthrough. In the time it had taken for the cavalry to cross the field, though, the Prussians had of course solidified their position and that plus a series of bad rolls resulted in our grand and glorious charge turning into so much burning horse flesh. Ouch. Center command broken.

The picture to the right shows the remnants of French cavalry in front of the Prussian line with the infantry desperately scrambling up behind them.

Joe did a great job of bolstering the centre with troops from the right flank and even managed to do some considerable execution with his howitzer battery on the Prussian left.

Meanwhile, a brigade of Prussian musketeers that had moved toward the town on the French left was met by a brigade of Suisse, who held their own throughout the rest of game though outnumbered almost 2:1.

Right about the time the center broke, Mark’s third division arrived exactly where we feared it would.He rapidly sped across the table. Joe had redeployed to meet him and for a time it seemed that Joe might turn the tide here. One regiment of Prussian horse was destroyed, then another. Effective French artillery fire resulted in the Prussian flank march’s 6 pdr battery becoming abandoned and musket fire kept it that way.

Alas, as much as Joe poured fire into the Prussian artillery with his own, he couldn’t destroy it. This would have broken the Prussian flank march, but instead, several French “ones” later the Prussian gun was up and firing and the remaining Prussian horse were careening for the baggage and overwhelming the few regiments of cavalry that the French had sent back to delay them. The Prussians now moved forward all across the line. The French grand battery had previously been broken up, with a third of the guns being sent back to deal with the Prussian flank march and the others wheeling left to face the brigade of Prussians threatening the town. Joe went into a period of extreme PIP starvation and the rest of the Prussians pushing forward now charged into the exposed flanks of these guns (see picture of the "coup de grace" to right). Those losses plus the losses from the conflict with the flank march, brought the French to rout with all Prussian commands intact (but not unbloodied!).

9-0 Prussian victory.

On table#2, Gary took his SYW Russians against Dave May's SYW Austrians. I didn't catch much of that game, but it seemed to me to be a contest between whether Gary's Russians would turn the Austrian's right flank which was anchored on a town:

or whether Dave's Austrian's would turn the Russian's right flank, anchored on a hill:

More reports to come....

Keith