Little Wars

There is a common party game in which you are challenged to list the books you would take to a desert island as your sole reading material for the rest of your life.  The number of books you can take with you varies from one book to ten books or a dozen.  The obvious answers—The U.S. Navy SEAL Survival Handbook or even Dafoe’s Robinson Crusoe—are considered cheating.

If I could take only a single volume, it would have to be Three Men In a Boat, the masterpiece by Jerome K. Jerome.  Written more than a century ago, it is the single best repository of knowledge concerning the human condition.   Jerome’s best-known book not only quickly sold a million copies, but it was largely responsible for the Thames River becoming a tourist attraction.

Further down the list of books that have to go to the island with me—past several volumes of books by Mark Twain and a couple of works by Robert Heinlein—I would add War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells.  This is a great book, even if Hollywood types keep using minute sections to make bad movies.  Perhaps someday a Hollywood director will read the entire novel before he starts filming.

I guess it is not terribly surprising that Jerome and Wells were good friends—both men seem to have known just about everyone in England at the time.  Jerome even wrote a sequel to Three Men in a Boat, titled Three Men on a Bummel.  The latter work describes a bicycle trip the men take through turn of the century Germany, with frighteningly accurate predictions of Germany two generations later.  Jerome was probably inspired to write the work after reading Wells’ own book on cycling, The Wheels of Chance.

That the two men knew each other and served as literary inspiration for each other’s writing is perfectly natural.  What is surprising is where the result of the two men’s friendship can still be seen today.

One day after lunch at Wells’ home, Jerome began idly playing….Well, let me let Wells tell it:

The present writer had been lunching with a friend—let me veil his identity under the initials J. K. J.—in a room littered with the irrepressible debris of a small boy's pleasures. On a table near our own stood four or five soldiers and one of these guns. Mr J. K. J., his more urgent needs satisfied and the coffee imminent, drew a chair to this little table, sat down, examined the gun discreetly, loaded it warily, aimed, and hit his man. Thereupon he boasted of the deed, and issued challenges that were accepted with avidity....

Naturally, it didn’t take long before the contest between the two men escalated as they played with the cast lead soldiers and the small spring-loaded cannon capable of throwing an inch-long wooden stick about three yards.  The little soldiers were set up repeatedly, and just as quickly knocked down by the toy cannon.  Before long, the two men began proposing alternative methods of play.  What if the soldiers could move between shots?  Could they capture the cannon?  The two men made up new rules, added conditions, and were really getting caught up in the spirit of the new game when calamity struck.  As Wells wrote:

Primitive attempts to realize the dream were interrupted by a great rustle and chattering of lady visitors. They regarded the objects upon the floor with the empty disdain of their sex for all imaginative things.

The sight of two grown men, respected in society, crawling around on the floor playing with the toys that belonged to Wells’ son evidently put a swift end to the project, but the next day, Wells continued to expand the possibilities of the game.  He added more lead soldiers, including men mounted on horseback.  Then he added crude barriers to create a “country”.  In the earliest experiments, the country consisted of volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica and blocks of wood.

The limitations of playing in the parlor led Wells to appropriate a better room: the household nursery.  Picked primarily because the cork floor was a better foundation than the parlor carpet for the toy soldiers, Wells discovered than the cork floor also allowed him to use chalk to draw in rivers, roads, and certain other geographical features.  (Obviously, Wells had an incredibly patient and tolerant wife.  In fact, even a casual reading of a biography of Wells reveals that last sentence to be a massive understatement.  By any measure, Wells was a friendly outgoing man with an incredible imagination.  He was also a poor husband and, using the parlance of the time, a constant Lothario.)

 

Before long, the books gave way to model houses fashioned from cardboard, and miniature trees were created by placing the ends of twigs and branches into holes drilled into blocks of wood.  Mountains were represented by repurposed garden rocks.  The game commenced with one player designing the country, placing models and rocks as he saw fit.  The other player then selected which side of the country he preferred.  Both players had an equal force of infantry, cavalry, and artillery to be placed within their territory.  

When play commenced, each side took turns either moving or firing their pieces.  Using precut pieces of string for measurement, an infantry unit could move one foot, a cavalry unit could move two feet, and a cannon accompanied by at least four infantry units could move one foot.  Each player had a limited time to move his pieces, then it was the other player’s turn.  

One impressive feature was that the outcome of combat was decided not by chance, but by calculating the relative strengths of the units involved, resulting in a game determined strictly by strategy instead of random chance.  There were no dice, no flipping of coins, and no shuffled deck of cards.

Obviously, the players needed a large country estate house without cats, small children, or overly fussy spouses—or as Wells put it, “the invasion of callers, alien souls, trampling skirt-swishers, chatterers, creatures unfavourably impressed by the spectacle of two middle-aged men playing with "toy soldiers" on the floor, and very heated and excited about it.”

It took several years to work out all the rules for the game, but eventually Wells published the rules in a book, Little Wars.  The game invented by Jerome K Jerome and H. G. Wells is the prototype of the tabletop war game played strictly for enjoyment.  It is the ancestor of not only most boxed war games, but served as a guide for the development of the game Dungeons and Dragons.

The book has been reprinted several times, and as you can imagine, to purchase a first edition would be a sizable investment.  You can, however, read it for free here.

Wells developed his game and held several tournaments at his house, Number 17 Church Row, Hampstead.  Years later, the house was owned by Peter Cook and the nursery was used by Cook and his comedic partner, Dudley Moore to work on material.  The dining room no longer hosted lunch for Jerome K. Jerome, but held cocktail parties for Keith Richards, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney.

Today, the house is still standing, and it would be nice to say that if you were to visit, the nursery floor would be laid out for one of the many games Wells played.  Unfortunately, all of his lead cast soldiers were confiscated from his son, the pacifist Anthony West, during World War II by the police who angrily considered such possessions unsuitable for someone opposed to war.

The year after Little Wars was published, World War I (or “The Great War) started.  Though both Jerome and Wells supported the war, perhaps we need one more excerpt from Wells’ book.  This is from Chapter IV of Little Wars:

“Great War is at present, I am convinced, not only the most expensive game in the universe, but it is a game out of all proportion. Not only are the masses of men and material and suffering and inconvenience too monstrously big for reason, but—the available heads we have for it, are too small. That, I think, is the most pacific realization conceivable, and Little War brings you to it as nothing else but Great War can do.”

Realizing this, it seems sad and counterproductive that Wells’ lead soldiers were “conscripted” to serve in the Great War so that they could no longer serve their educational role in the Little Wars.