Both soldiers and players, regardless of their talent, must know a certain theory and certain principles. Indeed, their theory resembles ours. Isn’t it true that it teaches them to conduct his troops on a battlefield, according to established rules, to reassemble at the opportune moment, to have them converge at a determined point in the briefest span of time? Shouldn’t they try to make the others attack them where they are the strongest, to change fronts when the opponent attacks them at their vulnerable point, to manage their soldiers’ lives for the ultimate moment? . . . The two are sisters; the path one follows, the method one uses to succeed in chess, are absolutely identical to those that the greatest commanders recommend.11
All this shows how strong the strategic paradigm, which is the most important thing chess and war have in common, really is. Unsurprisingly, many famous commanders had more than a passing interest in chess. Among them were William the Conqueror (who once broke a board over an opponent’s head), Richard the Lionheart, Edward I of England, Tamerlane (who named a captured city after a chess move), and Napoleon (who tended towards rashness and always remained a mediocre player). Nevertheless, the differences between war and chess are as important as the similarities. The board is much too simple to give a good representation of terrain. The number of pieces is too small. Their moves are stereotyped and have little to do with the real-life tactical possibilities open to the kind of troops they are supposed to represent or, indeed, to any kind of troops at all; this is even more true of Go, which is why it is not discussed here. Not only are logistics ignored, but chess is a game of complete information. Every move by each player is instantly and completely visible to the other: as a result, reconnaissance and intelligence are not required. This in turn means that, though surprise does play an important role, the means for achieving it are completely different. Friction too is left out, including, since all “orders” are instantaneously delivered without any possibility of misunderstanding or disobedience, the kind of friction that operating a mechanism of command and control involves.12
Chess has often been praised for the fact that it is a purely intellectual game that involves neither chance nor physical skill of any kind but focuses on strategy alone.13 In tournament chess, great efforts are made not only to provide a neutral (meaning sterile) atmosphere but also to isolate players from each other and from the public. The intent is to prevent any kind of psychological factor from penetrating and influencing the play. To no avail: in reality, what are being tested are one’s entire nervous system, one’s fears, one’s tenacity, and so forth.14 Some players were famous for their ability to unbalance their opponents. They deliberately varied the tempo of their moves, rose from their seats, paced around, sat down again, played with their fingers, and so on. One world champion, Mikhail Tal, has been described as “an encyclopedia of kinetic movement.”15 He was also accused of staring at opponents, hypnotizing them, and breaking their will. Some actually tried to protect themselves by wearing dark glasses! Understandably, he himself did nothing to discourage the rumors.16
One can certainly appreciate what the organizers are trying to do. On the other hand, the purely intellectual character of the game goes a long way to explain why it never became nearly as popular as, say, many kinds of combat and contact sports did. The same applies to all of its successors, however carefully construed and however sophisticated. More pertinent to our subject, the more successful the efforts at making sure that the game should be governed solely by the players’ intellect, the less like war it will become. As in any laboratory, perfection can only be achieved at the cost of estrangement from the real world. From this point of view, banishing or trying to banish psychology is the worst thing one can do. Another difficulty is that both in chess itself and in its predecessors and derivatives players take turns in making their moves. Both for this reason and because the moves made on the board are purely symbolic, it excludes fighting – the very factor which, to quote Clausewitz again, is the essence of war.17 To end the list of problems, strictly speaking what chess simulates is not war but merely a battle. The moves that lead to the battle, or follow it, are excluded.
Some versions of chess could be understood as attempts to correct some of these shortcomings. This applies to Chinese chess, described above, and also to Burmese chess, or sittuyin. In it, the initial moves, whose purpose is to arrange the major pieces on the board, form part of the game;18 to that extent, it simulates not merely a battle but a campaign. In the West attempts to deal with these problems date back to the Renaissance, but little is known about them. The first “chess reformator” whose name has survived was one Christopher Weickmann of Ulm, Germany, who flourished around 1650. As he himself explained, the objective was to present “the most necessary political and military axiomata, rules and ways of playing . . . without great effort and the reading of many books.”19
Weickmann’s work was continued by C. L. Helwig and Georg Venturini. They published their detailed proposals in 1780 and 1798 respectively. All three men claimed that their games had excited the interest of some senior military professionals of their day who regarded them as useful for training purposes. In the case of Helwig and Venturini those claims may have had some base in reality. True, neither of their games ever became very popular. However, both are known to have been close to the Duke of Brunswick, a cousin and close ally of Frederick the Great. He successfully commanded the Hanoverian Army during the Seven Years War; forty years later, while in his seventies, he was decisively defeated by Napoleon at Jena in 1806 and died of his wounds.
As one might expect, all three inventors started by increasing the number of squares on the board. Next, all three gave each side a much larger number of pieces to “command” and modified those pieces’ moves in order to provide a better approximation to reality. Different types of cavalry, infantry and artillery were all introduced, as were some other types of contemporary troops. Helwig also added various kinds of terrain – blue stood for water, red for mountains, light and dark green for marshes and forests, and black and white for open fields. Going one step further, Venturini got rid of the squares altogether, replacing them by a grid of no fewer than 3,600 squares which was used to overlay a map of the border area between Germany and France, “the cockpit of Europe” where many campaigns took place. Both Helwig and Venturini allowed units of each arm to advance at different speed over different kinds of terrain. Venturini even factored in logistic elements, including supply convoys, field bakeries – all-important in contemporary warfare, since it was the need to bake bread every five days that dictated armies’ moves20 – magazines, roads, and bridges.
This was a revolution indeed. Logistics had always been part of war: Napoleon may have been the first commander who said that armies march on their stomachs, but he was certainly not the first who knew this to be the fact. So why did they not figure in the wargames people designed, played, and watched either in the field, or in some arena, or on boards? The answer is that, to speak with a modern expert on ancient warfare, war had always been seen as part tourism, part large-scale robbery, punctuated by occasional – seldom more than one or two per campaigning season – large-scale, parade-like, encounters known as battles.21 On the one hand, so limited was the range of weapons that, raids and skirmishes apart, an enemy force situated more than a mile or so away might as well have been on the moon. On the other, deploying an army of any size into battle array required hours to accomplish. All this meant that such encounters took place by mutual consent, sometimes after armies had been facing one another for days, even weeks, on end.22 Exactly as in Kishon’s story, previous wargames provided a better insight into the way war was understood than war itself did.
Not surprisingly, once Venturini had incorporated logistics into his wargame it was only a matter of time before attempts were made to include other elements of warfare as well. Following in Venturini’s footsteps was a Prussian father-and-son team, Leopold and Georg von Reisswitz. The elder Reisswitz played his wargames with
the aid of miniatures, made of porcelain and representing individual soldiers, on a large sandbox. Later the sand was replaced by movable plaster casts of mountains, bodies of water, and so on. Then as today, such devices have the advantage of providing a three-dimensional model of the terrain. Vegetation, roads, rivers, etc. are easily added. What is more, the substitution of a variable “board” for a fixed one for the first time enabled players to be provided with scenarios, thus finally doing away with the rigid symmetry that, in the interest of fairness, had governed almost all previous wargames. It was this aspect of the matter that made it suitable for military training and education. The year was 1811, and Prussia was governed by King Frederick William III of whom Napoleon once said that he could talk of little but “military headgear, buttons, and leather knapsacks.”23 He loved the game, as did his two sons, the future Frederick William IV and Kaiser William I. They introduced it to the future emperor of Russia, their brother-in-law Nicholas I. Incidentally, one of those who looked after the military education of the two princes was none other than Clausewitz.
Toy soldiers have a very long history going back all the way to Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages. Wargames using miniatures go back at least as far as the Renaissance. It is said that a certain Junellus Turianus got Charles V to play with them on a table top.24 In 1614 the emperor’s great-grandson, Philip IV, then just nine years old, was presented with a complete wooden army. Its creator, Alberto Struzzi, was a political economist whose works were much read at the time. He took care to provide players with stacks of money as well as troops.25 Later in the century the young Louis XIV owned a set of 5,000 silver soldiers, only to have it melted down to help pay for his “real” wars. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the price of miniature soldiers, now made of tin, kept going down, which enabled growing numbers of people to play with them. Eventually miniatures included not just carefully crafted soldiers but cannon, vehicles of every kind, tents, and much more. Some modern enthusiasts even add field toilets, insisting, no doubt correctly, that without them no army can exist and operate. Apparently the joy of designing figures, painting them and the like predominates over that of making them “fight.” As the example of the Prussian “soldier king” Frederick William I (father of Frederick the Great) and some of his successors shows, real-life rulers sometimes showed a similar preference.26
The rules governing miniature wargames are broadly similar to those of board games. They were very popular in early twentieth-century Europe, especially England where well-known public figures from Winston Churchill down played them.27 They also became the subject of an amusing little book by the famous writer H. G. Wells. He explained how they should be played, provided some simple rules, and suggested, tongue in cheek, that aggressive leaders everywhere might be locked up in a room and made to play them against each other while thankfully leaving other people in peace.28 Not such a bad idea, incidentally, and one that has its historical precedents in the combat of champions of which we have spoken. Thanks to the introduction of cheap plastic figures during the 1960s the field still remains a well-developed, if fairly minor, hobby. Miniatures representing troops of almost every imaginable time and place continue to be manufactured in very large numbers. Rules for playing with them also continue to be published.29 Often it is a question of reenacting historical battles. Indeed it could be argued that by going back centuries and even millennia, miniature wargamers are in a position to make a very substantial contribution to understanding warfare as it was waged during the periods in question. Other miniature wargamers focus on exploring the future rather than the past. Their games incorporate all sorts of fantastic characters endowed with fantastic capabilities. Those include not only the standard military ones of offensive, defensive, and movement but every kind of magic too.
Some miniature wargames use physical devices to enable players to hit the enemy “army.” H. G. Wells employed a toy cannon activated by a spring which, he wrote, in trained hands could hit an “enemy” formation nine cases out of ten at a distance of ten yards. His near contemporary, Frederick Jane, a well-known military writer who also devised a naval wargame, invented a “striker.”30 Hand-held, it had an asymmetrically mounted pin at its head; players used it to punch holes in ships made of cardboard. The results would then be adjusted according to the part of the ship that was hit. As both writers noted, the method demanded the coordination of mind and body. Thus it brought in some of the “nerve” that fighting requires – precisely the element that most board games, played in a comfortable setting and at a leisurely pace, leave out. Jane even claimed that, in his experience, the closer the game moved to the “combat” phase, the greater the excitement and the harder players found it to aim their strikers. As children we used to roll golf balls against one another’s fortresses which were made of wooden blocks. However, so unlike operating real weapons were the actions required in such games as to be almost ridiculous. As a result, except among children, games based on such means never became very popular.
The great disadvantage of miniature wargames when used for serious training is the difficulty of matching the scale of the figures to that on which the terrain is represented. If the game is played on the floor, as those proposed by H. G. Wells were, then people will find themselves crawling on all fours. They may even be forced to lie down in order to adjust their perspective to that of the “troops” they command. If it is played on a table, then limits are set by the ability of players to reach their figures and move them. The growth of firepower, which was accompanied by a very sharp decline in the number of troops per square yard of territory, has made the problem much more difficult still.31 Thus such games are best used to reproduce small-scale engagements and skirmishes. Years ago I myself saw them used for this purpose at the Marine Corps officer school in Quantico, Virginia; the officer in charge, incidentally, has since become a very senior general. Even so, the toy soldiers and vehicles used were proportionally much larger than the surrounding terrain features.
A way out was suggested by the younger Reisswitz, whose system of wargaming led to all subsequent ones down to, and in some ways including, the introduction of computers during the 1950s.32 Reisswitz replaced the model of terrain with a topographic map based on contour lines, a type that first made its appearance at the very end of the eighteenth century.33 The map was drawn to a scale of 1:8,000. Play proceeded by means of metal counters of different sizes, each representing not an individual but a unit of some kind. As a result, each was able to take up the correct frontage on the map. Not the least important effect of the change was to reduce the size of the necessary apparatus. Instead of requiring a massive six by six foot table it could be fitted in an easily transportable mahogany box. Some are still on show in German museums.
Like all previous games of this kind, Reisswitz’s players had to take turns in moving their pieces. The innovation consisted in each turn now representing two minutes of real time. This meant that the distance each type of unit and, even more important, each piece of information directed to or by “commanders” could cover in each period of time, known from actual experience, could be factored in. Commanders, in other words, were required to operate as they would in real war.34 Instead of pieces capturing one another, as in chess, an elaborate system for determining the outcome of combat was introduced. Based on experiments conducted, among others, by the great military reformer Gerhard von Scharnhorst,35 it made use of dice and took into account the number of troops on each side as well as the arm to which they belonged. Engagements could end with good or bad effect, with each of the two possibilities being further divided into best, two-thirds of best, and so on.36 The game, in other words, still left out the actual fighting, which is too complex to be understood by simple causation.37 To compensate for this fact it relied on statistics – just as quantum mechanics would do in respect to physics a hundred years later.
The new game neither required that the players be precisely balanced nor was content with schematic r
epresentations of warfare. Instead it allowed specific scenarios to be produced and played out. The scenarios were devised by an umpire who handed them to the players. They in turn wrote down their general “campaign plans” as well as the specific movements they intended to make. Their notes concerning the latter they handed to the umpire. The umpire made the necessary adjustments to the pieces on the map, which was divided in two by a cloth screen. Sometimes three maps were used, one for each player and one for the umpire. True, intelligence – the systematic gathering of knowledge about the enemy, the use of spies etc. – still did not play a role. However, since the umpire was also responsible for giving each player as much, or as little, enemy information as his patrols would provide him with in reality, each side no longer had complete information about the other. Once again, the game reflected changes in contemporary understanding, as exemplified by Clausewitz,38 as to what war was all about and what its main constituents were.
In 1824 the entire complex was presented to Frederick William III who was still on the throne. He in turn made the chief of the General Staff, General Karl von Muffling, have a look at it. Much later, the meeting was described by a Lieutenant Dannhauer who had helped Reisswitz develop the game and who was destined to end his career as a general.39 Apparently the old gentleman was skeptical at first. However, as the presentation continued he grew increasingly excited, finally exclaiming that this was not a game but serious training for war and promising to send a set to every regiment in the army. Not only did he prove as good as his word, but he had the semi-official military weekly, the Militair-Wochenblatt, publish an article that gave the game high praise. It had succeeded, the author said, in closing the gap between “the serious business of warfare” and “the more frivolous demands of a game.”40
Wargames Page 24