The Battle of Charleroi, 15mm General D'Armee.

 This weeks game, 'Charleroi, the Battle of Gilly' was taken from the '100 Days' scenario booklet for General D'Armee. Howard and Phil cobbled together the forces needed from their collections although a few units had to be drafted in to play in disguise as others. The basic scenario is that the Prussians had to play a delaying action whilst the numerically superior French had to try advance and demoralise the Prussians. Ian and Phil took on the role of the Prussians who had to deploy first and then were allowed to place two areas of (impassable) marsh which they did so next to each other on the left flank. Howard and I commanded the French and we placed a ford across the river on our right to hopefully allow Howard's cavalry to do a rapid advance. 

The top photo shows the Prussian deployment, note the two areas of marsh towards the bottom left. The photo below depicts the French positions and also shows the central Built-up Area (BUA), something we had not really used in our two previous games. 

So with Howard on our left under orders to do a rapid advance and myself a more measured advance the game began with some awful dice throwing from Howard. for the first 4 turns his cavalry failed their Command throws (even with the help of an extra ADC each turn). By this time my troops had captured the BUA (quite fast rules to play through that) and were advancing across the stream well in advance of Howards troops. Ian and Phil largely either did not move too much or slowly withdrew in the face of our advance. Then happily for the Prussians they probed forward in the middle and were able to push my French Battalion back out of the BUA. 

This photo shows Ian trying to redirect the Prussian cavalry to help the Prussian left. 

Here we can see the French infantry under Corsin and Berthezene advancing over the river slowly pushing the Prussians back. 

My skirmishers were able to get around the side of the marshy area and cause all sorts of problems for the Prussians. 

Here you can see the strength in numbers of the French Infantry pushing back the Prussians. We only got to play 6 turns out of the planned 10. Howard had finally managed to get his cavlary moving but Ian had battered Howards Infantry causing them to Falter. Happily My French Infantry had caused Phil's Prussians to Falter also. We called it a game here but with a quick look at how the battle seemed to be going the French perhaps edged a close fought victory?   

The last action of the game saw Howard give his useless cavalry a well deserved two fingered salute!

We are really enjoying these rules even if we don't get through the turns fast enough (too much chatting, tea drinking and eating of cake!). I think we have all agreed they are probably the best rules we have played for Napoleonic warfare and are looking forward to many more battles. 

I have made some progress on my small force of British, Kempt's Brigade. Here we have the 28th with Kempt himself and his ADC plus a couple of skirmish bases. As you can see we are going for big units, 48 figures to a standard Battalion. 

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