Battle Of The Apocryphal Well

ANYONE active in wargaming in the 1970s will remember it as a time of great popularity for ancients, particularly in 20/25mm scale.

This popularity was largely due to the success of the Wargames Research Group's innovative rules for the ancient period, helped by the increasing availability of cheap plastic figures from Airfix.

But while many players yearned to refight the great battles of history, one of the best-known ancient battles at that time was a fictional one, the Battle of the Apocryphal Well.

It owed its fame to being the first battle in Charles Grant's 1974 book, The Ancient War Game.

I got this copy secondhand for £16.95 - considerably more than it would have cost 51 years ago when published by Adam & Charles Black

The book is billed as an introduction to wargaming in the ancient period, but is really more of an introduction to the WRG's rules.

In the early chapters Grant bases his discussions of movement, combat and morale on how they are handled by the group's rules, which by 1974 were in their fourth edition.

I no longer have the fourth edition, but it is available in PDF format as a link at a website dedicated to the history of the WRG.

The next two chapters of Grant's book give short potted histories of the Egyptian and Assyrian empires, before getting on to the meat of the matter - miniatures clashing on the tabletop.

As an aside, it is interesting that Grant chose a completely fictional battle to illustrate the clash of Egyptian and Assyrian arms, while in later chapters, featuring Greeks and Persians, Romans and Macedonians, and Romans and Celts, he refought real battles.

The reason, presumably, was that details of actual conflicts from millennia ago were particularly hard to come by in the pre-internet age.

Whatever the reason, Grant matched advance guards from Egyptian and Assyrian armies, clashing over a well lying in the centre of a desert known as the Waste of Garan.

As luck would have it, the two advance guards arrive within equal striking distance of the well, late on the same day, lay down their arms and await the dawn to commence the inevitable battle.