When life serves you lemons...

Thursday, 24 December 2015

When life serves you lemons...

you play a wargame!

I find myself home alone for Christmas for reasons too depressing for this blog. I could mope, or I could set up a big war game. And what better topic than the worst bad day in history.

It started off quite ordinarily for Xenophon, an Athenian mercenary working his craft for Cyrus, a prince of Persia. He had a battle to fight. But as a Greek Hoplite fighting a Persian horde twice the size of your army, it was probably equivalent to a Sydney to Canberra drive for us. You had to be careful, but you would probably arrive safely.

Xenophon was careful, and he and the Greek Hopiltes won the battle - twice - once in each direction. You had to be there to really understand it, but think of a wheat harvester. It drives down one row harvesting wheat, and the turns around and comes back through the next row. They probably would have done a third row, but the Persians were sick of the battle by that point and didn't hang around for an encore.

Unfortunately for Xenophon, Cyrus thought he was Alexander the Great (60 years early) and when he saw the Persians crumble, decided to charge through the chaos and kill the opposing king. He didn't bother with his helmet, took a javelin to the throat and game over player one. With the death of Cyrus, none of the other Persians wanted to play King Maker any more, so the 10,000 Greeks found themselves 800 miles into hostile territory.

Xenophon thought he could turn this around and had himself elected as a General. (I know that if the Aussie diggers got to vote on who the generals were, there would be a lot of great haired idiots launching the next attack at Passchendaele!) He lead the boys home through a number of hairy episodes and made Carrhae look like picnic, and even managed to write a book about it.