Hi all,

Thank you for a brilliant weekender show BoW. I loved that you have covered some Napoleonic features as this was how I entered the hobby back at school. As all my friends played 40k, I had a a few 1/72 plastic army. I used the old Chaos magic cards (the same size as a match box) as movement trays, stuck on with blutack.

A couple of things I thought people might be interested in that I hadn’t seen in any comments, were the stories based around the other farm complex Hougoumont. It held the British right flank and was under constant attack all day. It is a thick stoned walled complex with an orchard to its south, from where the French attacked. It was the British Guards who primarily held it, reinforced during the by further units from the ridge behind it. At one point the complex was stormed by the French, the wooden beam barring the gate smashed down by a giant pioneer wielding his wood cutting axe. The French poured in through the gates until the British commander (McDonnell I think), two other officers, and a few enlisted cut there way through to the gate, closed and then barred them with a fresh timber beam before turning on the French in the complex. The only French surviver was a child drummer boy. When Hougoumont ran out of ammunition, a desperate plea was sent out and a lone artillerymen on his ammunition cart galloped down the hill, past the French attacking, through the open gates which were slammed shut just as the French reached them. It was also here that military sense won over army hierarchy as the commanding officer was not the most senior man, but the man who had started the day in the farm and had fortified the buildings.

Elsewhere, as you mentioned on the show Warren, the cavalry attacked the British, but in a very few places they were joined by infantry and artillery. Some battalions left a perfect square of dead as the muskets and cannons, firing shrapnel, shredded the squares.

The Prince of Orange, the Dutch commander, ordered troops forward to support La Haye Sant, in line only to be over run by cavalry, something he had done in the skirmish and Quatre Bras a few days earlier. Brave but tactically completely out of his depth he would be shot later in the day, an act that arguably saved more allied soldiers from his orders.

At the end of a battle, British company commanders would walk the fields and ask each other who had died. The question asked after Waterloo was who had lived.

As an aside Miniature Wargaming ran an aar based on an alternative history with the British fighting the Austrian and Prussians priory to Napoleons return. They had a little map, there forces divided into small independent armies and they fought a campaign. No points limit, just what each player had sent to capture or defend a bridge, with sometimes reinforcements arriving mid battle. It was while I was at school so mid-late 90’s. They did another such one in the Sudan. That was even better.

Sorry for the wall of text, this is why I never post anything. Thanks for reading.