The Battle of Powell...Parkey Gap

After a delay brought about by other gaming responsibilities, we finally have the results from the Powell River, and the results are that it didn't happen.  Instead, Major O'Malley's fight at Parkey Gap.  You can see the dice fall for yourself by clicking right here.

I've already updated the army lists on their respective pages, but let's highlight a few key results.

For the Kingsportians, the biggest loss is that of the 1st Duffield Lancers.  They took a total of 469 casualties, KIA and WIA, which puts them below the 50% mark.  Likewise, the 2nd Duffield Lancers took a beating, putting them right at 50%.  We can combine the surviving troops, which gives us one effective unit of Lancers within the Jones Army at 656 effectives.  We'll strip this unit of its Veteran Status, given that the majority of troops come of the Regular 2nd Duffield.  Functionally, this is no different on the tabletop than simply disbanding the 1st Duffield.  The difference comes in during the strategic game, where our surviving unit has enough surviving cavalrymen to suffer the casualties from another battle, and still come back for more.  Without the addition of the surviving veterans, just one more lost cavalryman would put them out of hte campaign.

The experts in the crowd will have to tell me how common it was back in the day to take the remnants of one unit and fold them into another.  Particularly during the Napoleonic era, when common understanding - the only one I have - is that of the story of whole villages emptied of a cohort of young men sent off to fight in the same unit.  The Men of Harlech, spring to mind here, as do the methods by which a great many American Civil War units were formed.  Did the logistics of the day allow for mixing the men of different units?  Did they have to worry about 'cross-town' rivalries when doing so?

I don't know about the real world, but in the world of Sneedville, we're going to allow it so as to prolong the fun.

But the Knoxvillians didn't come away unscathed.  The Orphans fought gallantly, but after sustaining 113 casualties, their numbers fall below the 375 criteria.  We can either disband the unit, or have the survivors fall back to Harrogate where they may be available for replacement troops for the Army of the Pines.  We can even pull 37 out right now, to replace the WIA and KIA from the Battle of Parkey Gap, plug them into the Pineville Line, which leaves 299 replacements available in the future.  Those replacements are stuck behind the Cumberland Gap, which entails more tracking and more travel time for them to 'catch up' to whichever army they find themselves reinforcing.

Which brings a curtain down on the sad events of October 3rd in the north.  Jones' Army staggers back to Sneedville just ahead of a heavy rainstorm, sadder but wiser now that they have been bloodied.  The Army of the Pines secures the Gap, then sets out in pursuit, making camp just a few miles west of Sneedville the night of the 5th.  They awake the next morning to a driving rain, a bitterly cold October rain that portends worse weather to come.

At this point we pull a slow fade, to turn our attention to the south.  The armies in and around Sneedville will linger in a soft-focus limbo as we rewind the clock back to October 3rd, where the Knoxvillian army of the East pursues its prey, and the Army of the West marches to rescue Morristown from the encircling Green's Army.