Foreword

Achtung Schweinehund is an autobiography of sorts which focuses on author Harry Pearson’s lifelong love of games, and wargames in particular.

"This is a book about men and battle. It is not about real battle (and since most of it is about me, it’s not always about real men either), but about the make-believe battle that has filled my leisure time ever since I was given a Davy Crockett hat on my fourth birthday. It is about models and games, Action Man and cap guns, Rat Patrol, the War Picture Library and playing with toy soldiers. It is about growing up in the 1960s and not growing up thereafter. It is about how war is turned into a game (and how sometimes games are turned into war), the urge to play and the need to hide.

‘A man,’ Montaigne counselled, ‘should keep for himself a little back shop, all his own, quite unadulterated, in which he established his true freedom and chief place of seclusion and solitude.’

What follows is a journey into what the French philosopher would have called a shop, but what most of us would recognise as a shed.” Achtung Schweinehund, page 6.

Background

Harry Pearson is a writer who has established a comfortable niche in the sports and non-fiction markets. He has written a number of books (including The Far Corner, in my opinion one of the better books written about sport) and is a regular columnist for the Guardian. Pearson’s writing has a certain style to it which some love, and some may hate. To sum it up in one word it is whimsical. He is the type of writer who starts a chapter in a book about football with a page long discussion on leek growing in county Durham.

Achtung Schweinehund

“The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work.” Cormac McCarthy, as quoted in the preface to Achtung Schweinehund.

I recently read Mark Barrowcliffe’s The Elfish Gene and came away feeling rather dejected and depressed. Barrowcliffe’s book felt to me like a long downer on gaming and, while in places I enjoyed it, it did leave me wondering if a grown man should enjoy playing games so much. Within seconds of picking up Achtung Schweinehund my mood was reversed. Pearson celebrates the gamer and his own gaming experiences, and his enthusiasm is utterly infectious.

Like Barrowcliffe, Pearson is English. And like Barrowcliffe he grew up in rather industrial and grim surrounds. But where Barrowcliffe feels that gaming held his development back, Pearson rejoices in the release it provided.

”The sixties was an era of sweeping social change, but we spent our childhoods staring backwards. ‘The swinging sixties?’, my friend TK is fond of remarking. ‘Not in Walsall they didn’t, buddy.’ TK is ten years older than me, but I felt the same way. To me, the Summer of Love was a six-week school holiday filled with Stukas, swastikas and bazookas.” Achtung Schweinehund, page 3.

Pearson’s enthusiasm is accompanied by a high degree of inquisitiveness about where that enthusiasm comes from. He begins with early recollections of his childhood and looks at the path that led him to wargaming. The England of his childhood was obsessed with war he tells us – full of war stories, Commando comics, Action Man and movies like Dam Busters. Pearson doesn’t just tell us that England was obsessed with war, he looks at why this might be so. He also asks what it is about gaming and collecting that gives people – and men in particular –such pleasure.

”As children we form a bond with our toys and a residue of that feeling remains. We give them life and in return, as Anatole France notes in On life and letters, they give us joy and forgetfulness.” Achtung Schweinehund, page 176.

Achtung Schweinehund then chronicles the development of Pearson’s mania for wargames and for collecting wargame armies. There follows a kind of potted history of wargames and miniature making which follows no particular path, but constantly leaps between entertaining and enlightening anecdotes. Did you know the Brontës were wargamers? Perhaps you did, but Pearson also tells us that each had their own favourite model soldiers and invented personalities and histories for these, and that the soldiers lived and fought and adventured in a world the Brontës called “Angria”. I don’t know about you, but it sounds to me like Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell were the world’s first fantasy roleplayers.

While we are on the subject of roleplaying, it has to be admitted that Pearson doesn’t have a lot of time for those of us who prefer character sheets to toy soldiers.

”The classic RPG was D&D (Dungeons and Dragons – honestly, you really must stay in more), which in my limited experience generally involved sitting round on the floor smoking dope while some bloke who was holding the rulebook said ‘But as you enter the inner sanctum of Flock, Baldo Forkiegash, your keen dwarfish eye is arrested by an eerie glimmering light. Could this be the sacred sword of Poof the Mothslayer glinting in the candle flame. Throw a score of ten or more to find out.’” Achtung Schweinehund, page 235.

E. Gary Gygax, Games Workshop and LARPing all come in for considerably harsher criticism. But as Pearson notes:

”It is hard to take the moral high ground when you have just bought three hundred Garrison 20mm Macedonian phalangites from a man called Alistair in Auckland, New Zealand.” Achtung Schweinehund, page 100.

Oddly enough my father is called Alistair and he lives in Auckland, New Zealand. But as far as I know Dad has never collected miniatures. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t collect them. As Pearson goes on to tell us, keeping your hobby a secret seems to be a big part of being a gamer. Pearson, with customary inquisitiveness tries to delve into the reasons for this need for secrecy. He questions why “hobby” has become something of a dirty word:

”In the 1960s you’d often hear friends of my granny remark approvingly that so and so’s daughter’s husband has got himself a nice little hobby. A hobby – marquetry, stamp collecting, whatever – was considered a bit of a step up from what men normally did when left to their own devices: getting drunk, betting on greyhounds and chasing hairdressers. Not any more though.” Achtung Schweinehund, page 98.

Pearson can’t quite fathom why this change in attitudes has occurred, but accepts that it has and describes his coping mechanisms in some detail – secrecy and making notes of anybody vaguely cool connected with the hobby.

Achtung Schweinehund is bookended with anecdotes about Pearson’s current loves. When his partner formed a book club and tried to encourage Pearson to join, he and a friend rebelled and formed something they called games club. At games club Pearson and his friends play modern board games such as Princes of the Renaissance and Zombies.

Pearson continues to question his love of gaming, but never comes close to losing it. The end of the book comes with a charming anecdote involving meeting a young boy in the first flushes of a love for games. And just before we reach that point we have this lovely exchange between Pearson and his friend TK.

”I said, ‘God, what a pair of sad gits we are.’

TK said he didn’t know what I was talking about: ‘A lot of people say that, but I don’t get it. Look at you and me, buddy. We work hard, we don’t smoke, we don’t gamble, we don’t go down the pub, we don’t chase after women and we don’t sit in front of the telly all night moaning that there’s nothing on. We have a hobby that’s given us decades of fun, helped us make hundreds of friends around the world and we don’t do a drop of harm to anybody. What’s sad about that?’

I said, ‘I know, but don’t you think sometimes we should do something that is actually, you know, a bit more grown up?’

‘Like what? Fishing, golf, scientology?’” Achtung Schweinehund, page 241.

Conclusion

The focus of Achtung Schweinehund is mainly on wargaming, but the enthusiasm and love of games in general makes it an uplifting read for gamers whatever their particular milieu.

In my view Pearson’s whimsy often makes his newspaper columns appear scatter-brained. Given the room to breathe and stretch however, and his kaleidoscope of anecdotes and insights hang together with much more cohesion and clarity.

I was left with only a couple of minor reservations about the book. The first is that Pearson’s obvious enthusiasm for miniatures occasionally means that he breaks up an anecdote to provide factually correct, but utterly dull, information about a particular model or accessory. The author notes that he is aware of the habit, but is forced into it by forces beyond his control. The second reservation is that the wandering nature of the book sometimes leaves threads hanging. Pearson’s inquisitive nature sometimes means that he gets distracted by a new query before he has provided an answer to an earlier question.

Overall I rate this book on 4 for style and 4 for substance. If I were a wargamer, I would almost certainly rate it higher.

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