Trench Loot

I’ve been working on a few additions to my Great War stuff amongst building up the Dark Age forces. I’ve also managed to get a few trench raiding games in over the last couple of months and it’s spurred me on again in the direction of doing some German trench raiding parties and a few extras for the defending British forces. One of the things I was keen to try was a couple of trench raids in which the attackers could try and collect “objectives” in addition to completing their mission determined under the TooFatLardies’ Winter Sports supplement for “Through the Mud and the Blood”.

These objectives would be items of military importance, but as it was dark and soldiers being soldiers, there was a good chance of some loot being included in the night’s haul. I doubt there was many troops who could turn their eye away from an interesting souvenir. Here’s what a young George Coppard was doing in 1917:

“I decided to jettison my souvenirs weighing nearly twenty pounds which I had been lugging around in my pack. German fuse tops, funny shaped bits of shrapnel and a rusty saw-edge bayonet were among the collection of old iron. Why I had been torturing myself with agonizing load I don’t know, just a boyish habit of collecting something out of the ordinary, I suppose.” “Boy Soldiers of the Great War”, Richard van Emden, (p95).

So, with that inspiration, here’s six objectives from a British trench which I came up with for my German trench raiders. Some are militarily valuable, some useful, others ... well, you decide

So we have – a pair of British trench maps, with German trenches shown in red and the British forward positions simply delineated in a single blue line.

A very smart Burberry trench coat and scarf. No military value, but it’ll be a hit with the Belgian ladies in Bruges ...

A couple of cases of carrier pigeons – clearly valuable military loot

A field telephone – again, something which GHQ won’t be happy has gone walkabout

A collection of fine Scottish Malts imported from Jenners. Military value? Of course!!!

A kettle. Well, I guess the German kettles have been turned into an U-boote ...

So the idea was really to add a bit of colour in the tabletop trenches producing some physical items rather than just card counters. All of these were basically made out of scrap cardboard, wire, tin-foil bottle tops, green-stuff and grey-stuff and some items from the bits-box and it was a lot of fun making them.

The only really tricky thing to make was the pigeon. I won’t tell you how many attempts there were before I settled on the final one.

I also finished off a British version of the “Communications Down” figure I’d made for the Germans a while ago. I wanted to add a card into the card deck of “Through the Mud and the Blood” for British Communications breakdown, and wanted to field a figure on the tabletop to show this visually. So, here he is, converted from one of the wonderful generic casualty figures from Silent Invader over on the (most excellent) Lead Adventure Forum:

Next up - a look at some British casualty figures and battalion stretcher bearers. Hope you can join me later for that.