fective and leads to a mere tree to tree and house to house
scramble, and that large open spaces along the middle, or rivers without
frequent fords and bridges, lead to ineffective cannonades, because of
the danger of any advance. On the whole, too much cover is better than
too little.) We decided that one player should plan and lay out the
Country, and the other player choose from which side he would come. And
to-day we play over such landscapes in a cork-carpeted schoolroom, from
which the proper occupants are no longer evicted but remain to take an
increasingly responsible and less and less audible and distressing share
in the operations.

[Illustration: Showing the war game in the open air]

[Illustration: The war game in the open air]

We found it necessary to make certain general rules. Houses and sheds
must be made of solid lumps of bricks, and not hollow so that soldiers
can be put inside them, because otherwise muddled situations arise. And
it was clearly necessary to provide for the replacement of disturbed
objects by chalking out the outlines of boards and houses upon the floor
or boards upon which they stood.

And while we thus perfected the Country, we were also eliminating all
sorts of tediums, disputable possibilities, and deadlocks from the game.
We decided that every man should be as brave and skilful as every other
man, and that when two men of opposite sides came into contact they
would inevitably kill each other. This restored strategy to its
predominance over chance.

We then began to humanise that wild and fearful fowl, the gun. We
decided that a gun could not be fired if there were not six--afterwards
we reduced the number to four--men within six inches of it. And we ruled
that a gun could not both fire and move in the same general move: it
could either be fired or moved (or left alone). If there were less than
six men within six inches of a gun, then we tried letting it fire as
many shots as there were men, and we permitted a single man to move a
gun, and move with it as far as he could go by the rules--a foot, that
is, if he was an infantry-man, and two feet if he was a cavalry-man. We
abolished altogether that magical freedom of an unassisted gun to move
two feet. And on such rules as these we fought a number of battles. They
were interesting, but not entirely satisfactory. We took no prisoners--a
feature at once barbaric and unconvincing. The battles lingered on a
long time, because we sh