First Taste of Combat, The Newly painted Swiss in battle

        Well, they needed their baptism of fire and they certainly got it! My newly minted Swiss faced off against my Prussians. The scenarios was that the Swiss were defending their position on Napoleon's northern flank prior to the battle for Leipzig. While they fought well they were rather soundly defeated. Brad The Unlucky (BTU henceforth) and Trunkmonkey commanded the Swiss while R.U.P., J&R and myself ran the Prussians. The rules were our longstanding Napoleonic home-brew that I will someday type up and publish.

 

early in the fight, BTU's French cavalry has frozen the Prussian left in squares where they are lashed with fire, RUP's Prussian cavalry are doing the same to the Swiss center and the strong Prussian rightnder J&R is rapidly closing in on Trunkmonkey's Swiss left

 

 

the threat posed by the French Chassuers stymied the advance of my Prussian reserve battalions.

 

while closer to the center my Landwehr charged recklessly at BTU's Swiss guns

 

 

R.U.P., using a careful combination of charge threats and artillery, froze the Swiss center in squares while the Prussian right closed into hand-to-hand combat

 

maintaining lines of fire while still presenting charge threats was a task the R.U.P. handled quite well

 

 

after their foolish run at the guns the Landwehr took shelter behind the Regulars

 

 

finally enough damage had been done by fire that the Dragoons saw their chance and charged driving the Swiss back and breaking a unit that had failed to form square in time

 

on the Prussian left the Swiss advanced down the hill and drove off one of the Reserve Infantry squares, but it was too late, the Swiss left was collapsing and their center was frozen in squares by the threat of cavalry charges meant that there was little else to do but retire and try again another day

 

as I was cleaning up I snapped some pictures of the end of the battle

on the left the badly battered but still defiant Swiss are retiring under the unrelenting pressure of J&R's 

while in the center the Neufchatel Battalion watch in horror as their brigade brothers failed to make a square in time and are broken by the charging Prussian Dragoons

 

in the center right the Dragoons have driven past the village and confront the French Chassuers

BTU had to turn them to face the the threat of the Prussian cavalry and the long-suffering Prussian infantry could finally deploy into line, they were no match for the disciplined fire of the Swiss and two battalions scurried back to safety

 

with the center collapsing BTU pressed the Prussian infantry with close-range fire and turned the cavalry toward the Prussian Dragoons, the Prussian infantry were becoming brittle from many turns of losing firefights and would be unable to effectively pursue, the Swiss would be able to execute a controlled retirement

one of Trunkmonkey's few bad rolls left the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Swiss unable to form a steady square in time to halt the onrushing Dragoons, the fate of disorganized foot when ridden-down by cavalry is too grim to contemplate, this doomed the Swiss hopes of halting the Teutonic tide

        We all had a jolly good time. We were a bit rusty with the rules (not having played them in ages) which would have impacted how things turned out. We found them much more satisfying than Black Powder in that there was a tasty level of granularity.