"Operation Gericht" at Partizan 2014

*****

Hauptmann Erich Mueller’s Roland C.II rattled alarmingly as it navigated through the acrid clouds of black smoke and dust rising from the battlefield below him. He had been flying the new reconnaissance aircraft for only a month. It was tricky to fly, with the lumpen air-frame rolling and barrelling alarmingly through patches of turbulence, but its upward visibility was excellent. From his pilot’s cockpit he could scan the sky over Verdun for signs of French scouts with ease. Only when he looked downwards was there a problem. His position above the upper wing made downward observation hard for the pilot. Not that he would want to look down into the valley between Fort Douaumont and Fort Souville. 

It was hard to imagine men were fighting over the cratered, burnt, flayed and devastated landscape. It was hard to think of men even existing down there. He could hardly glimpse the French positions in the village of Fleury. His aerial maps were useless. They showed a bucolic French village nestling by a deciduous forest. The valley he saw beneath him when he inclined his right wing, contained a blackened carcass of a shellfire-shattered wood, by the side of a greasy smudge of broken brickwork. This had once been Fleury, he thought for an instant, before his observer signalled that the photos had been taken, and he turned his aircraft slowly, and clumsily, for home.

*****

At the bottom of the valley leading to the village of Fleury, things looked very different to Leutnant Ulrich von Bek. He was tired of wiping the smoke and acrid chemical gases from high explosive shells from his red-rimmed eyes. If he was honest, he would admit to being exhausted with the battle altogether, which seemed to get worse every single day. He’d lost count of the toll the Bone Mill on the Meuse had taken of his comrades in the 157th Reserve Infantry Regiment. The furnace of the battlefields of Verdun was nothing like the fighting in the summer of ’14. The battles of the French frontiers had been terrible. But they had been child’s play compared to Verdun. The war he was fighting in the valleys, inclines, hills and forts north of Verdun was impersonal. Alienating. Industrial. Savage. 

The screech of German artillery landing about 50 metres in front of his Stosstruppen shook him out of his thoughts. He looked up and nodded to Gefreiter Max Adler, the determined and relentless NCO leading his Flammenwerfer section. It was time to advance.  The Fatherland had called him here to this black and broken place. It was now up to men like him to answer.

*****

Caporal Yves Deschamp picked his way through the carcass and entrails of the dead forest, struggling through the curious mixture of shell-stripped branches, iron splinters, indeterminate bodies of fallen soldiers and pools of oily water with a scum of grey slick grease on the surface. He tried to hurry past a couple of the pools over which a green film of gas still lingered, discolouring what was left of the vegetation and the corpses scattered around it. 

It was supposed to be simple to find the advanced machine gun position guarding the approach to what was left of the village of Fleury. At least it had been simple on the map which Sous-Lieutenant Gaston Monet had thrust into his hand in what passed for the battalion headquarters in the remains of the village cordwainer’s house.

 He spotted a hollow-eyed, grey faced Poilu before him, crouched, guarding in the shelter of a savagely decapitated oak tree. “It’s a bad one, this spot?” Deschamps asked.

“Yes mate, it’s the worst.”

“Where are the Boches?”

“They’re in front of you, mate. Now it’s up to you”.

*****

Uncle Max’s house was always so cold. In winter, when the river outside his small flat off the Aleksanderstrasse was running glossy with slush and ice, he never wanted to light the fire in his grate. It could be sharp with dead-cold on Aleksanderstrasse, the ground outside could be iron hard with frost, and ice might even be forming on windows of his flat, but Uncle Max never seemed to feel the cold.  Or at least he would never want to light a fire.

I suppose, old soldiers from the Great War like Uncle Max were just tough. VerdunKämpfer – a breed apart from the old Germany, before Weimar. Before the Fall. 

I sometimes wondered if something terrible had happened at Verdun to Uncle Max. Something he had seen, or remembered. Or possibly, something he had wanted to forget. I wondered if his experiences had involved fire in any way. I’d noticed that he always wore his sleeves long on his left hand, and I was sure I’d seen a burn scar on his left wrist once. But I might have been mistaken. Either way, I never asked him about the War. Some memories are best left to those who were there.

**********

So there you have some images from a very fine days gaming at Partizan in the Park, from yesterday! It’s tricky to umpire a game and then trying to create any sort of narrative from the rush of cards, dice rolling and questions which flash past you!. So I’ve not even tried. All of the above moments relate to the action on the table in one way or another. The conversation between Caporal Deschamps and the Poilu are authentic and are taken from an anecdote of Jean Meigneau of the 174e Infantry, quoted in Lieutenant Jacques Pericaud’s “Verdun” (1917) at page 378. I sanitised some of the original language for the blog!

I completely failed to tweet (@RoundwoodsWorld) any of the action as it was happening, mainly through been busy talking to players and passes-by, and also because the Partizan Big Top was steel-framed and seemed to block out all radio signals to my iPhone!  Sorry!

We played two terrific games (the second culminating in the terrifying flammenwerfer attack by Gefreiter Max Adler's Stoss detachment - unstaged, but timed with great precision), with an absolutely great group of players both times. Huge thanks to all of the participants, including Ian, Craig and the two teams who played in the afternoon (and all of whose names I’ve forgotten – sorry!). Thanks also to everyone who stopped by to say hello – it was great to meet you all.

Highlight of the day was having the chance to say a big thank you to Dave Andrews and Aly Morrison, who both stopped over late in the day. I have long wanted to say “thank you” to them both for creating such a wonderful range of figures for the Great War, which have provided so many hours of fun painting and gaming. I finally got my chance – thank you both again Aly and Dave!

So, next stop for Operation Gericht is Evesham on the 14th June. I’m hoping by them to have finished the French Battalion Command Group which I started, but didn’t manage to finish, before yesterday’s game. I’ll also post the scenario for yesterdays’s game here over the next few days, together with some of the hand outs used in the game.

And for those who are almost Verdun-ed out, thank you for sticking with me this long. Only a couple more weeks to go before we move the focus onto Berry-au-Bac and the Artillerie Spéciale…