The Game of War

It is a crisp December morn in 1472, and on a stubbled field near the Duke of Gloucester's castle at Pleshey in Essex, solid ranks of warriors confront each other. Above the castle flies the White Rose of the House of York; across the field the wind whips the Red Rose banners of Lancaster. A flight of Lancastrian arrows reaches Yorkist ranks and the battle is on. Sweaty long-bowmen in the front lines loose their shafts; behind them, -dismounted, armored knights prepare themselves. The field is alive with cries of pain and anger and the untidy flow of men.

The field is real only in the imaginations of the 15 men--one wearing a peace button--who surround it. In fact, it is a 5-by-8-ft. table covered with carefully scaled fields and forests, and populated by immaculately realistic toy soldiers. The only thing actually flowing is ale. The men are gathered, as is their monthly custom, in a private room over the Ordnance Arms, a pub in London's Southwark. The Society of Ancients is staging the twelfth battle of its miniaturized Wars of the Roses. But did the Battle of Pleshey actually occur? Not bloody likely.

"We don't re-create battles that actually happened," said Edward Smith, secretary of the society's London section and a geological researcher by profession. "There's no fun in that. You already know how it comes out. We want to see if we can do better than Napoleon or Wellington." In the society's own Wars of the Roses, Henry VI has already been drowned en route to the Crusades and the old Duke of York (in reality beheaded in 1460) has been crowned Richard III.

Toys and Tactics. The men of the Society of Ancients are hardly alone in their obsession. War-gaming is the preoccupation of tens of thousands of mini-generals round the world. About 10,000 of the most active British fans are organized into at least 35 clubs in the United Kingdom. Jack Scruby, a California war-game manufacturer, estimates that there are at least 50,000 enthusiasts in the States, from bankers to toolmakers, and adds: "Things are growing all the time." One club in Fort Wayne, Ind., meets three or four times a year to stage elaborately prepared battles, which can involve 30,000 to 40,000 soldiers.

"All of us are pretty nutty," acknowledges John Tunstill, publisher of Miniature Warfare and president of the London War Games Society. "Most people think we're a bunch of old eccentrics pushing toys around, but it's like chess in a way." The devotees follow the art in publications like Tun-still's, sport their own society ties, and patronize specialized stores such as London's Tradition Shop or The Soldier Shop in Manhattan. Some concentrate on exquisitely detailed toy warriors, others on arcane tactical research.

Morale, Too. For all their disregard of actual historical combat, war-gamers are intent on absolute accuracy in setting the stage. Gamers fight with rule book and tables of fire close at hand. The rules cover four basic elements of battle: movement, missile fire (usually cannon, rifle or arrow), melee (close combat) and morale. Movements, for example, are executed closely to scale; players deploy their soldiers according to careful tape measurement. The result of artillery fire is determined by tables compiled from actual battle experience, and by the toss of dice, to add the element of unpredictability. When plastic soldiers clash hand to hand, another set of rules--plus the dice--decides the kill ratio. Even morale is cranked into the battle equation: special tables compute expectable reaction to adverse conditions.

Historian H.G. Wells started the craze in Britain with Little Wars, a 1913 book codifying the rules of toy battles that he and his friends fought out near his country home. Many of today's rule books draw heavily on Wells' work, devised, as he put it, to attract "boys of every age and girls of the better sort." With deadly seriousness, Prussian officers originally developed the idea in the mid-19th century to hone their tactical skills for actual warfare. Today, of course, professional war-gamers play out their grim battles in locked rooms in Washington and Moscow.

The amateurs, however, prefer the splendor and simplicity of Napoleonic campaigns and the American and English Civil Wars. Despite its colorful aspects, the American Revolution finds few fans in England. Says Tunstill, possibly alluding to Viet Nam: "It's hard to play when one side refuses to abide by the established rules. The Americans won because they fought by their own rules, sniping at us from behind trees, and we were too silly to understand. We lost and we don't like to be reminded of it."

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