Someone has blundered....

The Remnants of an Army by Lady Butler

...and I am that someone.  I recently received an email about my recent piece in Miniature Wargames Issue 411 from Mr. Andrew McGuire.  The piece was a scenario for "The Men who would be Kings" ruleset based around the battle of the piquets which took place at the beginning of the Little Inkerman battle.  Mr. McGuire wrote;

"I just wanted to make a small correction to Conrad Kinch's article on adapting The Men Who Would Be Kings to the Crimean War in his Little Inkerman article in MW 411.

In his order of battle, Conrad refers to the British 95th regiment as the 95th Rifles, and gives them the rating of sharpshooters. This would be applicable to the 95th regiment of the Napoleonic Wars, but not to that of the Crimea, as the 95th became the Rifle Brigade in 1816, when numerous regiments were disbanded, and the regimental number 95, along with many others, became vacant. It was reassigned to a newly raised regiment in 1823, as the 95th (Derbyshire) Regiment of Foot. This is the regiment which fought as part of the 2nd division in the Crimea, and has no connection to the 95th Rifles. 

Two battalions of the original 95th's successor regiment, the Rifle Brigade, served in the Crimea, but not at the engagement described in the article."

He is, of course, absolutely right.  Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.  This is a case where if I was thinking I would have realised that I was making a blunder, but I saw the regimental number and my brain temporarily went on holiday.  As it happens, I would argue for keeping the sharpshooter (4+ shooting) rating for the 95th on this occasion.  There are two reasons, the real reason and an after the fact rationalisation. The rationalisation is that the lads on the field only represent a small proportion of the regiment deployed as skirmishers and therefore is quite possible that they were the best shots. The real reason relates to game play; in the scenario two British players have to compete to hold off the Russian columns for as long as possible while vying with each other to earn a Victoria Cross.  The 95th are deployed far back on the board (because that was where they were stationed) and will therefore have little chance to fire in the early portion of the game.  This would handicap their player, so I rated them as marksmen so that when they did get to fire they would be more effective - which leveled the playing field a bit and made it more of a contest. 

Thank you very much to Andrew for writing and pointing out my mistake.  It's rare to get specific feedback on anything, so I was very glad to get it. 

Prof. Spencer on lessons learned from the Boer War

I've been laid up recently and so spent rather more time listening to YouTube than I would usually.  Thanks to Rob Enfield of British Muzzleloaders, I came across the Western Front Association which has put a series of lectures on the Great War (including ones of the Eastern Front!) up on YouTube. There is some really fascinating stuff there, by genuine  historians working in the field,  and their channel is well worth a browse. 

A look at Marshall Petain's Great War service. 

By the way, if you enjoyed the lecture on the Boer War, the same author has an article on the differences between British and Boer marksmanship, which you can read here. 

Now, if you'll excuse me I had to go and see what blunder I should commit next.