La Bataille d' Heilsberg 1807

L’Ancien Regime (1745) to Second Empire (1860)

Heilsberg Survivors Connect Generations

We were struck on the stark contrasts of age at the recent Consim convention in Tempe when we played La Bataille d’Heilsberg 1807 at the annual Duel in the Desert. Marshal Enterprises has hosted Duel in the Desert effectively, since it came back from the dead in 2011 (There is a list of all of the Duel in the Desert contests in Tempe at the end of this piece). While most of the Consim attendees were not unlike Monte and myself in Tempe: the grey has overwhelmed our temples, or, in many cases for our colleagues, the follicles had long disappeared into an acute sense of baldness. And many of us had fallen into a medical decline not at all unusual for those who have entered the sunset years. Yet there is some glimmer of hope that all is not decline. Credit to Mr. Kranz at Consim that, while the overwhelming majority of those attending the recent Dallas and Tempe Consims, there was a significant growth in those attending whose 10-year high school anniversaries has not yet occurred. Whether the current younger generations, who face an entirely different set of social constructs, are wired to recreate battles and wars which even the late Queen Elizabeth II was almost too young to have participated in (remember, she was a truck mechanic in the United Kingdom serving in her father’s (George VI), Royal Army as a teenager as World War II was ending), is unknown. But we suspect that will be determined in the next generation, hopefully before all of us silver-haired (or absent-haired) have all passed over the horizon. The years that have passed since we first formed Marshal Enterprises nearly 50 years ago have seen us battle with time—marriages, then children and then for some grandchildren; jobs--then careers, trials and tribulations and then retirements. The passing of many colleagues, family and friends. Then for Marshal Enterprises at least, a renewal. We know that for many people at Consim, both in Tempe and in Dallas, the story is not significantly different. Our own lives, and those of our friends and colleagues, finds a series of similarities with La Bataille d’Heilsberg 1807. The French Empire would reach the zenith of its power and prestige shortly after Heilsberg with the great victory at Friedland just a few days later. Just less than seven years later, the Imperial dream would be all ashes (save for a brief respite of a Hundred Days) and Europe would be tossed into the great cauldron of reaction for more than 30 years—and for some states, more than a century. overall commander of the Russian forces at Eylau, Heilsberg and Friedland, was born in 1745 in Brunswick to a Hannoverian family. He served in the final campaign of the Seven Years War in the Hanoverian army. After the war, he went into Russian service in the 1770’s, mainly fighting in the Russian wars against the Ottomans; but also in Persia and Poland. His complicated machinations in Russian court intrigues would take him both to the bottom and top of the Tsarist theatre of psychodrama of his time. His apparent embrace of the new Tsar, Alexander I, would make him commander of the Russian First Army in Pultusk before assuming overall command in the winter of 1807. The actors in La Bataille d’Heilsberg would represent both the end of an era and the beginning of the next age. First, the Coalition had many participants who represented L’Ancien Regime. Bennigsen himself,

Engaging In Tsarist Intrigues

The Russian Cossack leader Platov was born in 1753. While he was too young to be in the Seven Years War, he entered Cossack service in 1766. From there, it seemed he was constantly at war with the Ottomans, Tatars and Persians. While seeming to fail at intrigues during Tsar Paul’s reign, his career was revived under Alexander I, and this old Cossack would accompany Tsar Alexander in his triumphant journey to Paris and then London, where Platov received an honorary degree from Oxford after Napoleon’s exodus to St. Helena.

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