Set-up and Victory conditions

The French players set up first with 36 battalions, 9 batteries and 20 regiments. Two battalions of Chasseurs occupied the woods on our left, one battalion and a battery occupied the village of Fontenoy on our Right. Two small redoubts absorbed one battalion and a light battery apiece.

The remaining troops were anchored by the 6 batteries massed in our center, supported by our guards and grenadiers. Two brigades of line infantry filled the front lines on either side of the artilery. Six brigades of cavalry were spread across our rear, in handy supporting range of our front lines, along with another brigade of infantry behind Fontenoy. (Can you tell that this account was written by one of the French players?

The British massed half their infantry in an attempt to take Fontenoy, and the other half was split again into a part to watch the French light troops in the Gavrain woods, and a reserve, leaving too little infantry to assault the French main line. Thus, the British were forced to rely on their 20 regiments of horse to break the French center. Unlike the French command, which regarded Fontenoy as merely a small "forlorn hope" which strengthened their right, the British saw the village as the key to the battle.

The British effort on their left succeeded, after 3 assaults, in taking Fontenoy, but the villiage in British hands proved to be almost as much of a block to maneuver as it had in French hands. The British artillery spent most of the game marching forward, limbered, attempting to reach a firing position. Only on the last turn did it reach a position, abreast of the newly captured Fontenoy where it could unlimber with a good view of the enemy. Only a battery of howitzers supported the British attacks before this.

There were four large cavalry battles between armies, the largest of the two as the British attempted to crush the French cavalry and the French infatnry between the grande batterie and Fontenoy. With the support of every regiment and battalion the French could bring forward, the British cavalry was crushed, losing 75% of it's strength and retiring through thier supporting troops. At this point, with the French jubilant and the British checked, we ended the game.

• Red = one morale point, a thoroughly unreliable unit.
• Green = two morale points, usually steady troops
• Blue = three morale points, men who are a cut above!
• Gold = four morale points, elite troops indeed.

In the fifth year of the War of the Austrian Succession, Louis XV of France concentrated his forces for a campaign in the southern Netherlands (modern Belgium), which had passed from Spain to Austria after the War of the Spanish Succession in I714. He as-signed Marshal Comte Maurice de Saxe to com-mand the French army. Opposing Saxe were the English and Dutch, allies of Austria, whose chief army of the Holy Roman Empire (Maria Theresa) was engaged in the Second Silesian War with Frederick II (Frederick the Great) of Prussia. The Duke of Cumberland (William Augustus), son of Great Britain's King George II, commanded the allied force.

Saxe opened the campaign by besieging Tournai, on the Schelde River, with an army of 50,000 men. Cumberland, at the head of an equal number of English, Hannoverians, Dutch, and Austrians, marched to the relief of the city. Five miles to the southeast at Fontenoy, Saxe prepared to receive the attack from a strong defensive posi-tion between the Schelde river and the Gavrain Wood. Along his linear front he constructed four defensive redoubts (a tactic he had learned from a study of the Rus-sian deployment at the 1709 battle of Poltava).

On May 11 the allies attacked. For two hours enfilade fire from the redoubts stopped Cumberland’s assault in its tracks. The duke then formed 14,000 infantrymen into a compact wedge. Despite the continued deadly fire, the allies marched between two redoubts straight into the center of the French line, which began to give way. However, Saxe directed a furious counterattack against the flanks of the wedge. In this action the French army’s Irish Brigade distinguished itself by its hard fight-ing. The allied column slowly crumbled and then fell back, losing more than 7,000 in dead and wounded. Under cover of night Cumberland re-treated toward Brussels. Tournai surrendered shortly thereafter.