Iain M. Banks : Rest in Peace

Iain M. Banks, one of my favourite writers, passed away yesterday. A superb author and a thoroughly decent person.  He will be very greatly missed.  

 

 ***

“They could see the nebulae, beautiful and distant and beckoning, and could tell that those faraway galaxies were composed of suns, other stars like Thrial, and even guess that some of those suns might have planets round them … but they looked in vain for stars anywhere near their own. 

The sky was full of darkness. There were planets and moons and the tiny feathery whorls of the dim nebulae, and they had themselves filled it with junk and traffic and emblems of a thousand languages, but they could not create the skies of a planet within a galaxy, and they could not ever hope, within any frame of likelihood they could envisage existing, to travel to anywhere beyond their own system, or the everywhere-meaningless gulf of space surrounding their own isolated and freakish star.

For a distance that was never less than a million light years in any direction around it, Thrial – for all its flamboyant dispersion of vivifying power and its richly fertile crop of children planets – was an orphan.”  

Against a Dark Background

***

Rest in Peace, Iain.

 

 

The Verdun Project: "Under Fire" by Henri Barbusse (1916)

Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu (Under Fire) is one of the classics of the literature of the Great War. Barbusse served with distinction in the War, being awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1915 and being invalided out of service in 1917. Under Fire is adapted from his war diary which he kept from October 1915 and was serialized (and therefore out of the reach of French military censors) in the left-wing journal L’Ouvre before being published in book format in December 1916.

The book was a huge success, winning the Prix Goncourt in 1917 and selling 250,000 copies in France, a remarkable achievement in a wartime nation. It was translated into English in 1917 and was both widely-reviewed (in the Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman) and read by serving soldiers. Wilfred Own read a copy in Scarborough in 1917, and there are echoes of Barbusse’s work in some of Owen’s famous war poems.

Barbusse’s book is dedicated “to the memory of the comrades who fell beside me at Croucy and on Hill 119”. Although “Under Fire” is a fictional account, is it a grimly realistic book and it is easy to imagine that while the characters portrayed may be literary creations, they represent all too real comrades who served alongside Barbusse.

Reading the book is not a pleasant experience. For a start, the chronology of the book is dislocated. There is a narrative, but it is not particularly clear. Even when the narrative is understood it makes very little difference to the story being told. Barbusse’s intention at times is to leave the reader feeling unsettled or lost in the narrative. By this, the reader experiences what the soldiers in the trenches face: the collapse of the familiar and the reassuring.

The discordant structure of the book is matched by the pace. The first half of the book is concerned mainly with the slow, deliberate development of personalities and specific individuals. The second half, and in particular the immensely harrowing chapter “Fire”, is concerned with the destruction of the individual in the face of war. Once the descriptions in the book shift from the individual soldiers in the trenches to the effect of war on those soldiers, the book moves to a different level.

What is described is, put simply, the horror of war. Those words are easy to write and say, but Barbusse’s imagery and descriptive power are extraordinarily vivid and at times horrifying (even to a reader in 2013). This is a viscerally sickening battlefield, with descriptions of near apocalyptic devastation:

“All the way along, as far as an earthwork barricade that blocks the way, German corpses are entangled and knotted as in a torrent of the damned, some of them emerging from muddy caves in the middle of a bewildering conglomerate of beams, ropes, creepers of iron, trench-rollers, hurdles, and bullet-screens. At the barrier itself, one corpse stands upright, fixed among the other dead, while another, planted in the same spot, stands obliquely in the dismal place, the whole arrangement looking like part of a big wheel embedded in the mud, or the shattered sail of a windmill. And over all this, this catastrophe of flesh and filthiness, religious images are broadcast, post-cards, pious pamphlets, leaflets on which prayers are written in Gothic lettering—they have scattered themselves in waves from gutted clothing. The words seem to make the pestilential shore, this valley of annihilation, flower with their lying sterile whiteness.” (page 248 of the Penguin edition)

The dead surround the living soldiers, turning the battlefield into a charnel house:

“By the side of heads black and waxen as Egyptian mummies, clotted with grubs and the wreckage of insects, where white teeth still gleam in some cavities, by the side of poor darkening stumps that abound like a field of old roots laid bare, one discovers naked yellow skulls wearing the red cloth fez, whose grey cover has crumbled like paper. Some thigh-bones protrude from the heaps of rags stuck together with reddish mud; and from the holes filled with clothes shredded and daubed with a sort of tar, a spinal fragment emerges. Some ribs are scattered on the soil like old cages broken; and close by, blackened leathers are afloat, with water-bottles and drinking-cups pierced and flattened. About a cloven knapsack, on the top of some bones and a cluster of bits of cloth and accoutrements, some white points are evenly scattered; by stooping one can see that they are the finger and toe constructions of what was once a corpse.” (page 244)

All this is grim reading, and goes on for many pages. Some of the descriptions are enough to turn a strong stomach. The descriptions of the conditions in the Regimental Aid Post are particularly harrowing.

Barbusse also focuses to the point of near obsession on the natural elements of the battlefield, and in particular mud, water and the changing state of the human body at war. Mud becomes the medium through which we view the world of the trenches, full of slime beds, puddles, mud masses and drenching, oozing, liquid putrescence. Men become shapes, shadows and silhouettes. Mud becomes a "cowl", a "covering", a "carapace" and, ultimately, a silent tomb. The physical regression of men into a primordial slime of the battlefield matches and complements the moral regression Barbusse experiences around him in the fighting.

Similarly, skin is discoloured, blotched, burnt and yellowed by the chemicals and noxious gases of the battlefield. The soldiers undergo a metamorphosis from being civilians to soldiers and then to someone, something, created by war itself.

“"I'm gangrened, I'm smashed, I'm all in bits inside," droned one who sat with his head in his hands and spoke through his fingers; "yet up to last week I was young and I was clean. They've changed me: now I have only this filthy old body to drag along." (page 259)

This is a terrifyingly long way from l’Attaque a Outrance and the white gloves of the 1914 class of St Cyr.

This is the entropic struggle of men with death and nature which Barbusse presents in an environment of isolation, solitude and abandonment. There is the endurance of the human spirit throughout, but it is enveloped totally by the darkness surrounding it.

“All these men of corpse-like faces who are before us and behind us, at the limit of their strength, void of speech as of will, all these earth-charged men who you would say were carrying their own winding-sheets, are as much alike as if they were naked. Out of the horror of the night apparitions are issuing from this side and that who are clad in exactly the same uniform of misery and mud. It is the end of all. For the moment it is the prodigious finish, the epic cessation of the war. I once used to think that the worst hell in war was the flame of shells; and then for long I thought it was the suffocation of the caverns which eternally confine us. But it is neither of these. Hell is water.”

You may be wondering at the end of this book review whether I enjoyed “Under Fire”, and whether I would recommend it. I found that the dislocated structure of the book makes it quite difficult to continue reading for the first 100 pages. However, I was very glad I persevered. It is hard to enjoy a book like this, but it was gripping. Once Barbusse commences the detailed description of the battlefield, I found it almost impossible to put “Under Fire” down. To do that seemed to me to be almost disrespectful.

Visually, "Under Fire" provides a wealth of images of the French army at war on the Western Front.  Among the horror, there is also gallows humour, glimpses of the world of the reserve trenches and, unnervingly, descriptions of life away from the front line.  The uniforms of the Poilu are described in a way which never makes the Osprey books - a rag-tag, polygot assortment of clothing and material tied and strapped to the soldiers' bodies so that they appear like tramps. There are interesting passages featuring Zoaves, Tirailleurs Sénégalais, pioneer battalions and the higher command of the French army.  Journalists get a very bad press from Barbusse's pen.  Some of the descriptions are bitter and jaundiced, but are perhaps all the more resonant for that.  In short, there's a lot here for a wargamer wanting to create the unique feel of the French front line, and I found a lot of inspiration in the book for creating backgrounds and settings for wargames.  Its certainly a description of the war which is very different in feel and tone from Junger's "Storm of Steel" or Graves' "Goodbye to All That".

In the end, I think it’s a book everyone should read. Grim and disturbing for at least half of the book, but deeply memorable. Five out of five star shells.

The Verdun Project: Painting Late War French Infantry - Part 3

This is the third and last part of my short series of posts about painting late Great War French infantry. In the last post, I covered painting the mid-tone and highlights for all the colours but for Horizon Bleu and a couple of details on the figures.

I left the Horizon Bleu until last to make sure that the colour tones blended uniformly across the demi-platoon. I used a 50/50 combination of Vallejo Model Colour Grey Blue and Vallejo Model Colour Mirage Grey for the mid-tone, with a highlight of nearly 100% Vallejo Model Colour Grey Blue mixed with a dab of Vallejo Model Colour white. (Full painting details are on the “Late Great War French Infantry Painting Template” in the resources section of this Blog).

It took some time to work through the Horizon Bleu colours on the figures, but I resisted the temptation to move from the mid-tone to highlight each figure individually. I’ve tried this figure-by-figure approach in the past, but I’ve generally found that it takes longer.

I tend to apply the highlight in short lines of paint, attempting to follow the folds of cloth on the figure. I found dipping the paintbrush in Windsor & Newton Acrylic Flow Improver helped before painting the highlights, just to make sure the brush ran smoothly over the ridges and edges where the highlight would show.

After about 90 minutes, I was done. The only thing left on the figures was to make a couple of small marks on the collar tips of each figures (with Vallejo Model Colour Dark Blue) to denote a representation of the regimental unit. And finally, I painted the edges of the bases of the figures with a hard wearing coat of Louvre Acrylic Black.

Painting a thick black edge on the figures is always the last thing I do to the figures before varnishing. I like the way that the edge breaks the figure from the terrain on the wargames table. It’s a personal choice, but its something I like to do with my figures, at least for the Great War where I’ve universally used 3mm bases for ease of players picking them up during our games.

And there we have it.  A French demi-platoon, with Vivien-Bessieres rifle grenades, from around the time of the battle of Verdun in 1916.

 

 

I hope you’ve enjoyed this short series. Next post will be a figure scale comparison across a number of late Great War French 28mm manufacturers, followed by a book review or two. Hope you can join me for those.

The Verdun Project: Painting Late War French Infantry – Part 2

This is the second part of my short series on painting late Great War French 28mm infantry figures.

I finished last time with having completed the faces and hands of the figures and having made a start on the base colours of the Horizon Bleu greatcoats, tunics, trousers and puttees.

The next stages of painting the figures are fairly unexciting, and consist of adding the base colours to all areas of each figure. I tend to work in a “three stage colour” system of the type pioneered by Kevin Dallimore and friends in the late 1990s. The hobby owes a huge amount to great painters like Kevin and, as I have said elsewhere, I am only too happy to stand on the shoulders of giants!  If you ever read this Kevin - thank you so much!

I like to block in the base colours for the pack, canvas bedroll, leather pouches and webbing, rifle and helmet as mechanically as possible. 

 
I make a note of the three colours used for each part of the figure on a paper template grid. I’ve posted a copy on the Blog on the right hand side under “Play-Aids” with the other documents. I’ve done something similar for each of the armies I’ve painted over the years. On the template grid, I try and reduce the painting of the base colours and mid-colours to as mechanical a formula as possible. This helps with continuity over the course of painting an army or force, and also makes sure I don’t forget which colour to use for, say, the chinstraps on a helmet or the colour of the waist-belts. 

In building up the template grid I try and refer back to resources, such as colour photos from museums, artwork or photographs from the period and, of course, the very helpful Osprey (and similar) publications on the period in question. As regards the French army, I was very well served with a large amount of images on line, photos sent to me by friends (thank you Curt!) as well as the two Osprey books below which were very helpful in showing images of troops and their equipment.

Having blocked in all the base areas of the figures, I gradually build up the mid-colours (with one exception, as mentioned below). Sometimes, when the mid-colour involves adding white, I move onto the highlight immediately after applying the mid-colour. However, as I try to use white as a highlight colour as sparingly as possible, I generally prefer to try to do all the separate mid-colours together, blending the tones of the figure where necessary.

I then get to stage of the figure looking about “75% done”, but without any of the vibrancy or highlights which bring the figure to life. I then add the highlights, trying to keep these as selective as possible so as not to drench the mid-colours. You’ll see in this regard that not all colours have highlights in the template grid – sometimes its not necessary to highlight absolutely every colour, especially when the item being painted is comparatively small on what is a 28mm model figure which is going to be viewed on a wargames table from a few feet away. As mentioned before, I try to use a different shade or tone for contrast instead of just adding white to the mid-colour. Hopefully the template grid helps give an idea of this. An example of this is the three shades used on the field packs …

I also like to do some of the detailing at this stage to try and bring the figures to life. So – moustaches, wood-grain on rifles and revolver handles, buckles and webbing get finished at this point. I think of this stage as a reward for working through the duller mid-colour tones …

That leaves me the figure looking finished apart from a couple of final items. The main one, as you’ll see from the figures below is the mid-tone and highlight for Horizon Bleu. I’ve decided on all the figures to paint only the base coat of Horizon Bleu (plus some deep shade) until right at the end. This allows me to ensure that the key colour – what you might call the colour of the late Great War French infantry – is done as the final item and is allowed to frame and dominate the figure.

Leaving the Horizon Bleu until the end also gives me the chance to adjust the tone and shade on the figures to make sure looks right. Somehow, it seems to work, as hopefully you’ll see in the next Blog post, along with the super detailing for the base and for the figure.

I'll try to post the final part of this short series in a couple of day’s time. Hope you can join me for that.

A Huge Thank You: 400 followers and future plans

I noticed a few days ago that the number of followers of this Blog has ticked around to just over 400. I just wanted to take the time to say a huge thank you to every single follower, commenter and reader who's supported the Blog over the years. 

I really am very grateful indeed to every one of you for sharing the hobby with me.  When I started blogging in 2010 I thought it might be a bit of a solitary pastime. But not at all. It's been a gateway to a terrific community, full of ideas and friendship - thank you all for making it such fun!   I'm not sure I offer anything new at all - I think every idea I've posted on the Blog has been adapted and modified from things that other people have pioneered.  But I have really enjoyed jumbling those ideas about and coming up with gaming ideas which have been fun wargame with, and which are (fingers crossed!) also enjoyable to read!  

And hopefully you can continue to enjoy the hobby with me going forward in the future.

And any mention of "The Future" for a wargamer tends to lead to thoughts of elaborate and ambitious plans. As I rule, I really don't really like predicting or announcing what I'm going to do. One of my favourite quotes comes from something Tears of Envy posted a while back on her blog from Victorian philanthropist Henry Wellcome: "Never tell anyone what you propose to do until you have done it". Sound, prudent advice. Which I am about to ignore (no doubt at my peril).

I like reading wargamers' plans and targets, not least because they always seem to have that feel of excitement and expectation about them. So, with that backdrop, here's mine for the next 3 or 4 months:

As you know, I'm still working through a series of posts on painting French late war infantry, with a few more Verdun-related and French-Great-War book reviews to come. After that, I'll post the French support weapons and artillery (some very nice models to model and paint from Brigade Games and Scarab), with some "hardened" veteran infantry and Tirailleurs Sénégalese bringing up the rear.  I'll also try and find a more Gallic-ised banner for this Blog (something I've been meaning to do for what seems like forever!)

That probably takes me up until July, at which point I'm looking forward to modelling and painting a French armoured Escadre from the Groupe D'Artillerie Spéciale at Berry-au-Bac, at the opening of the Nivelle Offensive in April 1917. It's been a while since I tackled tanks on the painting table, and I'm keen to get back to weathering oil stains and rust! 

Alongside the front line troops, I'm hoping to do some French command stands and a short series of French vignettes, including a couple of well-known wartime personalities, a distinctive Parisian air and some French Trench Loot (matching the British Trench Loot I did a while back).

On the writing side I shall be posting some more Verdun and French related book reviews, which I think people seem to have enjoyed (at least they've told me so!). There's a couple of Verdun scenarios for "Through the Mud & the Blood" (which are written but not play-tested), and also a feature to be posted on creating French "Grandes Hommes" for "Through the Mud and the Blood" which is half-written but also needs play-testing. Finally on the writing front, and to accompany the Escadre from the Groupe D'Artillerie Spéciale, there's something I'd like to post this summer about recreating French Great War tank tactics on the tabletop - this would be a short article, pretty much along the lines of the "Rolling Into Action" article I prepared for the TooFatLardies Christmas Special in 2011.

I'm hoping to round-off the Verdun Project with a few game reports and AARs, together with an AAR of the "Verdun: A Lost Generation" boardgame from Against the Odds - probably in the summer when I can get my boardgaming chums over for a weekend. 

I think doing much more than finishing the French in 2013 may be a tall order. But once I've finished the French, I'll hopefully make a start on Lord Strathcona's Horse from Moreuil Wood in 1918.

Hopefully you can join me some, or even all, of these! Best regards and thanks until then, mes braves!

The Verdun Project: Painting Late War French Infantry – Part 1

As promised, if not quite as early as I’d hoped, I’ve posted here the first of a short series of posts on painting late Great War French infantry. I’ve done the same in the past for British and German late war infantry, and thought that I should at least do the same for the French.

As before, I started with the bases, worked on the faces and then progressed to blocking out the key colours of the Poilu. I’ve covered base construction in previous blog posts, and I like to work on painting the base texture first, mainly because it needs a broader brush and less accuracy – it doesn’t therefore matter at all if the paint gets splashed on the boots and puttees of the undercoated figures.

The paints I use for the base are a mixture of Plaka acrylic, Louvre acrylic and Vallejo. The Louvre acrylics are really fantastic paints; wonderfully creamy and very easy to dilute, they are a perfect terrain paint. The Plaka paints are slightly trickier to work with, and I found they often separate in their smallest pots into a base gloop and a suspension floating on the top. They are, however, really excellent matt paints for terrain and bases, and can be very effective for dry-brushing. The Vallejo paints are used for fine terrain details, mainly on the brickwork I like to sprinkle on the bases to add a little colour, and for the brass-fret barbed wire and the stakes which the barbed wire gets wrapped around.

I also added some more of the “lichen” on the side of the fallen logs – very fine sand and PVA glue! – and tried to paint them so as to add a little colour.

The bases get built up with a mix of Louvre Raw Umber and Plaka Grey and finishing the bases on a platoon took about an evening, although doing 72 at once seemed to go on forever!

After the bases, I worked on the faces for the figures. All of the paints used were Vallejo Model Colour, with the base being Green Brown, mid-tone being Sunny Skintone and the highlight being Basic Skintone. Sometimes I wonder if I really need to have a three-colour base on the faces and hands of the figures – probably not, but that’s just how I’ve got used to doing it.

 

I then added some extra highlights of Vallejo White blended with Basic Skintone to emphasise parts of the face and hands catching the light – noses, fingertips, cheek bones or scars, whatever comes to mind when I look at the figure, really. Its an enjoyable part of painting the face, very much a reward for working slowly through the mass of faces on the figures.

I added most of the moustaches in black or dark brown, with a couple of lighter tones, and with that the faces were finished.

Next, I worked through the base tones on the figures, starting with the Horizon Blue base (a mix of Vallejo Mirage Blue and Vallejo Dark Bluegrey, in a 50/50 blend). I’ve been using an acrylic flow improver from Windsor & Newton for a while now, and it’s perfect dipping the brush in a small palette of flow improver when painting the basecoat colours, but especially the Horizon Bleu, which covers a large area of the greatcoats, vests, trousers and puttees on the French infantry.

I added the helmets in a base colour of Vallejo German Grey (…I know, what irony…), and that was the first stage done.

In the next post, I’ll cover the other base colours with highlighting and super-detailing to follow.

And, as an added extra, I’ll add a slightly random figure in the shape of a French war reporter. A couple of these crop up, unannounced, in Henri Barbusse’s “Under Fire”:

*******

“Two Somebodies come up; two Somebodies with overcoats and canes. Another is dressed in a sporting suit, adorned with a plush hat and binoculars. Pale blue tunics, with shining belts of fawn color or patent leather, follow and steer the civilians.

Some heads in the group are now turned our way. One gentleman who detaches himself and comes up wears a soft hat and a loose tie. He has a white billy-goat beard, and might be an artiste. Another follows him, wearing a black overcoat, a black bowler hat, a black beard, a white tie and an eyeglass.

"Ah, ah! There are some poilus," says the first gentleman. "These are real poilus, indeed."

He comes up to our party a little timidly, as though in the Zoological Gardens, and offers his hand to the one who is nearest to him—not without awkwardness, as one offers a piece of bread to the elephant.

"He, he! They are drinking coffee," he remarks….

The assemblage, with its neutral shades of civilian cloth and its sprinkling of bright military hues—like geraniums and hortensias in the dark soil of a flowerbed—oscillates, then passes, and moves off the opposite way it came. One of the officers was heard to say, "We have yet much to see, messieurs les journalistes."

When the radiant spectacle has faded away, we look at each other. Those who had fled into the funk-holes now gradually and head first disinter themselves. The group recovers itself and shrugs its shoulders.

"They're journalists," says Tirette.

***********

The figure is from the War Reporters range from Bicorne Miniatures. Sadly, there isn’t a specific Great War reporter figure, but the Rudyard Kipling inspired figure does almost as well. I’ve depicted him here with an attempt at a Louis Vuitton trunk, Mont Blanc pen and a copy of the morning’s Le Figaro. Definitely a gentlemanly way of waging war, although one not shared by the Poilu !