Every so often a history book comes along that is clearly not intended to be treated with great solemnity. Olivia Swarthout’s Weird Medieval Guys: How to Live, Laugh, Love (and Die) in Dark Times is certainly one of them. This is a book populated by murderous rabbits, peculiar saints, questionable medical advice, strange animals, unfortunate lovers and medieval artists who occasionally seem to have been working from descriptions supplied by someone who had heard about an elephant from a bloke in a tavern.

Swarthout is the creator of the Weird Medieval Guys social media accounts, where she has collected and shared some of the stranger images found in medieval manuscripts. The book develops that idea into something considerably more substantial than simply reproducing amusing pictures with captions. Published by Square Peg, the hardback runs to 208 pages and is lavishly illustrated throughout with medieval manuscript images.

The basic conceit is rather clever. Instead of presenting medieval history chronologically, Swarthout invites the reader to imagine actually living in the medieval world. The first major section, The Struggle: Surviving Life, Love and Death, works its way through the problems of existence, including where you might live, what work you might undertake, how you might find love and, inevitably, how you might die. Quizzes, diagrams, maps, flow charts and mock advice turn the whole exercise into something resembling a medieval survival manual.

There is plenty of silliness along the way, but rather more genuine history than the presentation initially suggests. Medieval attitudes towards courtship, marriage, occupations, religion, astrology, saints, death and the natural world all appear, although none receives anything approaching a conventional academic treatment. Swarthout instead slips the information in amongst the jokes. You can therefore discover something about medieval beliefs almost accidentally while trying to determine your medieval occupation or wondering whether your prospective romantic life is going to end particularly badly.

The second half of the book turns towards the medieval bestiary and, for me, this is where things become particularly entertaining. Medieval representations of animals can be wonderfully peculiar because the purpose of the illustrations was not necessarily the naturalistic representation we expect today. Animals carried religious, moral and symbolic meanings, while some artists were attempting to depict creatures that they had never actually seen. Swarthout works through beasts, birds, fish and serpents, drawing heavily upon surviving medieval bestiaries and manuscript illustrations.

The illustrations are consequently the real stars. Some are beautiful, others grotesque and quite a few leave you wondering exactly what the artist thought he was drawing. There are wolves, dragons, basilisks, strange birds, unlikely fish and assorted creatures that appear to have escaped from someone’s nightmare. The famous medieval tendency to depict rabbits behaving badly is also very much at home here. Anyone who has spent time looking through medieval marginalia will already know that monks and manuscript illustrators could produce material considerably stranger than many modern cartoonists.

Behind the jokes, however, lies something rather interesting. Books such as this remind us that medieval people were not simply the grim, mud covered inhabitants of the so called Dark Ages that popular culture sometimes makes them. They laughed, worried about relationships, complained about other people, feared death, told stories and found humour in the absurd. The manuscript illustrations are particularly useful because they provide glimpses into that mental world, even when those glimpses involve armed animals or creatures doing things that probably should not be described over breakfast.

There are limitations. Anyone approaching Weird Medieval Guys expecting a serious general history of medieval Europe is going to be disappointed. There is little sustained political, military, economic or social analysis, and complicated historical subjects are necessarily compressed to fit the humorous format. The geographical and chronological breadth covered by the term medieval also means that material produced centuries apart can sit together because it suits a particular theme. As a result, the reader should be cautious about treating the book as representing a single coherent medieval worldview.

Occasionally the modern humour also threatens to overwhelm the historical context. That is probably unavoidable given that the entire concept grew from social media, where an extraordinary manuscript image accompanied by a clever caption works extremely well. On the printed page I sometimes wanted another paragraph explaining why an image had been produced, who commissioned the manuscript, or what the symbolism meant. Some readers have made essentially the same criticism, arguing that the humour can leave them wanting considerably more historical context.

That criticism needs to be kept in perspective because Swarthout is not pretending to have written an academic history. The research behind the selection is considerable, and medieval literature scholar Madeleine Killacky has particularly noted the extent of Swarthout’s engagement with digitised manuscripts and scholarship. The book is trying to make medieval culture accessible and entertaining, and judged on those terms it succeeds extremely well.

Indeed, I suspect its greatest strength is that somebody with only a passing interest in medieval history could pick it up because of a picture of an homicidal rabbit and emerge two hours later knowing considerably more about medieval life, belief and manuscript culture than they did before. That is not a bad achievement for a book that frequently appears determined not to take itself seriously.

It is also an excellent book simply to browse. You do not need to sit down and read it from beginning to end. Open it almost anywhere and there will be an illustration, strange fact, quiz or piece of medieval advice demanding attention. It is the sort of book that can sit on the coffee table and repeatedly lure you back into reading another few pages.

So is Weird Medieval Guys really a history book? Sort of. It certainly is not a conventional one, nor should it replace a proper history of medieval society. I would describe it instead as an entertaining doorway into medieval history, particularly the strange and wonderful world preserved in illuminated manuscripts. There is genuine historical material underneath the jokes, but Swarthout is quite happy to let the weirdness lead the way.

And perhaps that is exactly the point. Medieval history does not always need another photograph of a castle followed by twenty pages explaining feudalism. Sometimes what is required is a rabbit armed with a sword.

Recommended, particularly for anyone interested in medieval history, manuscript art or the wonderfully bizarre ways in which people have represented their world. It is light, beautifully illustrated, genuinely funny and more informative than its deliberately ridiculous exterior initially suggests. Just do not buy it expecting a new interpretation of the Hundred Years War.

Rating: 4 out of 5 homicidal medieval rabbits.

The family burial ground behind Blackthorn Hall had already surrendered several of its occupants to Lucien Beauregard Saint Clair, but the old plantation had been in the Saint Clair family for generations and there were considerably more names carved into its weathered stones. Some had died peacefully in their beds, others had fallen to disease or accident, while a few had been carried home during the war and buried beneath Virginia soil by families who believed they had finally earned their rest. Lucien regarded such sentiments as unnecessarily restrictive. With the remnants of the 27th Virginia Cavalry Regiment gathering around Blackthorn Hall and his cousin Colonel Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair once more commanding the dead and living alike, three more graves were opened.

Captain Nathaniel Fairfax Saint Clair

Nathaniel Fairfax Saint Clair had been one of the more respectable members of the extended Saint Clair family, which probably explains why Lucien had never particularly liked him while he was alive. A prosperous landowner and militia officer before the war, Nathaniel joined the Confederate cavalry in 1861 and eventually received a captaincy. He was remembered as a calm and methodical officer who preferred careful reconnaissance and a well prepared attack to the dramatic charges favoured by some of his younger relatives.

Nathaniel was killed in 1863 when a Union skirmisher put a rifle ball through his chest during a reconnaissance patrol. His body was recovered and returned to Blackthorn Hall, where he was buried with his sword, boots and the silver spurs presented to him when he received his commission. His widow insisted that he should rest among his ancestors rather than in some distant military cemetery.

Lucien has now corrected that particular mistake.

Nathaniel returned from the earth remarkably well preserved by revenant standards, although the bullet wound that killed him remains clearly visible beneath his ruined coat. Something of the old officer survives within him. He rarely speaks, but when Augustus gives an order Nathaniel responds immediately and with an almost military precision. Among the ragged veterans there are whispered suggestions that Captain Saint Clair actually understands everything happening around him.

Nobody has been sufficiently brave to ask him.

Sergeant Elijah Mercer Whitcomb

Elijah Mercer Whitcomb was not a Saint Clair by blood, but he had earned a place in the family burial ground through decades of service to the household. Before the war he had worked as an overseer of horses and livestock on the Saint Clair estate, becoming particularly respected for his ability to judge a horse almost at a glance. When Virginia went to war, Whitcomb enlisted alongside several younger members of the family and eventually became a sergeant in the 27th Virginia Cavalry.

Whitcomb survived most of the war only to be mortally wounded during the regiment’s final months of campaigning. He was brought back to Blackthorn Hall in a wagon and died there several days later. Augustus himself had once promised that Whitcomb would always have a place among the Saint Clair dead, although neither man could possibly have imagined how literally Lucien would eventually interpret that promise.

Death has done little to improve Whitcomb’s appearance or disposition. His uniform hangs in tatters from a body that seems held together largely through supernatural stubbornness, and one side of his face bears the marks of the wound that eventually killed him. Yet he still displays flashes of his former habits. Horses become nervous when he approaches, but he will sometimes stand beside them for hours, running a dead hand slowly along a frightened animal’s neck as though remembering another life.

The living veterans avoid disturbing him when he does this.

Lieutenant Ambrose Carter Saint Clair

Ambrose Carter Saint Clair had been the troublesome one.

A distant cousin of Lucien and Augustus, Ambrose possessed all the confidence expected of a young Virginia gentleman and considerably less of the judgement. He gambled, drank, fought duels over imagined insults and accumulated debts with an enthusiasm that suggested he regarded creditors as merely another branch of the enemy forces. The outbreak of war provided him with exactly the sort of occupation for which he had apparently been preparing his entire life.

Ambrose proved to be a reckless but undeniably courageous cavalry officer. He volunteered for dangerous patrols, led charges that wiser men would have avoided and developed an alarming habit of appearing behind Union positions with no convincing explanation of how he had reached them. His luck finally failed during a confused cavalry action when he was shot from the saddle and trampled beneath the horses of both sides.

The remains returned to Blackthorn Hall were not entirely complete.

Lucien raised him anyway.

Ambrose is consequently one of the more disturbing revenants now wandering the grounds of Blackthorn Hall. His movements are occasionally awkward and his body bears unmistakable evidence of the violence of his death, but the old recklessness seems to have survived intact. When gunfire begins he advances towards it without hesitation, apparently delighted to discover that death has removed the principal disadvantage of his preferred method of warfare.

Augustus appears particularly pleased to have him back.

Whether Ambrose feels the same way remains uncertain.

The Muster Continues

Three more figures now stand among the gathering forces at Blackthorn Hall, their uniforms rotted, their weapons stained and their allegiance restored by considerably less conventional means than a recruiting sergeant and an oath. Nathaniel brings the cold discipline of the professional officer, Whitcomb the stubborn loyalty of an old cavalryman, while Ambrose contributes precisely the sort of reckless enthusiasm that got him killed the first time.

Lucien, naturally, considers the experiment a complete success.

There are still older graves beneath the trees beyond Blackthorn Hall, their stones leaning beneath moss and Virginia rain, and Lucien has begun spending rather too much time walking among them after sunset. Colonel Augustus has learned not to enquire what his cousin is planning. The Ragged Veterans have learned to keep the shovels close at hand.

It appears that the 27th Virginia Cavalry is still recruiting.

One question I am occasionally asked about my Australian Frontier Wars rules is why anyone would want to write or play rules dealing with such a difficult and confronting period of Australian history. My answer is that, when designed properly and supported by sound historical research, wargaming can do considerably more than provide an entertaining afternoon moving miniature figures around a tabletop. It can become both a history lesson and, just as importantly, a lesson about history itself.

That idea lies at the centre of the entire four-volume Australian Frontier Wars project. The rulebook, scenario book, campaign book and educators guide should not be regarded as four separate publications that happen to address the same subject. They are intended to be read and used as a coherent whole, with each volume performing a distinct function within the same historical and educational framework. The rulebook establishes the basic historical model. The scenario book applies that model to particular situations and, where possible, specific historical events. The campaign book connects those individual encounters over time and demonstrates how violence, resistance, retaliation, settlement and displacement developed across a broader historical landscape. The educators guide then draws these strands together by showing how the rules, scenarios and campaigns can be used to examine evidence, interpretation, uncertainty and the ways in which historical knowledge is constructed.

Seen in this way, none of the four volumes is truly complete without the others. The rulebook, without the scenarios, risks becoming an abstract collection of mechanics, while the scenarios, without the campaign framework, may reduce the Frontier Wars to isolated clashes that appear disconnected from the broader processes of colonisation and resistance. The campaign book provides that wider continuity, but without the educators guide there is a danger that players may experience the historical narrative without being encouraged to question how that narrative was constructed in the first place. The four volumes are therefore different parts of the same argument.

At the first level, they are intended to teach something about the Australian Frontier Wars themselves. They explore the importance of Country, movement, intelligence, livestock, firearms, water, settlement patterns, communication and the very different objectives pursued by the people involved. They also seek to demonstrate why the conflict was rarely symmetrical and why conventional wargaming assumptions about equal forces, decisive battles and casualty-based victory conditions are often inappropriate. At the second level, however, the four volumes are intended to teach something about history as a discipline. They encourage players and students to ask how we know what happened, what evidence survives, whose voices dominate the surviving record, what is missing, where uncertainty remains and how different interpretations can emerge from the same body of evidence. This second purpose is particularly important when studying the Australian Frontier Wars because the surviving documentary record is uneven and often overwhelmingly European in origin. Police reports, settler correspondence, government records, newspapers, station journals and later reminiscences can provide valuable evidence, but they also reflect the assumptions, interests and language of those who created them. Aboriginal perspectives may survive through oral traditions, cultural knowledge, later testimony, archaeology and careful reconstruction from colonial records, but the imbalance in the available evidence remains a fundamental historical problem.

The rulebook begins this process by translating historical interpretation into game mechanics. Movement distances, combat outcomes, morale, concealment, intelligence and victory conditions are not simply technical decisions. They represent judgments about what mattered historically and how those factors should interact. In that sense, every rule is an interpretation of the evidence, even when it appears to be nothing more than a number on a table. This is why the rules were never intended to produce a conventional encounter in which two roughly equal forces line up on opposite sides of the table and fight until one is destroyed. The Frontier Wars did not usually operate according to that model. European settlers, police, military detachments and other armed parties possessed different strengths and weaknesses from the Aboriginal groups opposing them, while both sides often pursued entirely different objectives.

Firearms could be decisive under particular circumstances, but they did not eliminate the problems of distance, poor intelligence, unfamiliar Country or opponents who could choose when and where to fight. Knowledge of Country, mobility, concealment, access to water, communication and surprise could be just as important as the nominal range of a musket. The rulebook therefore needs to encourage historically plausible behaviour rather than merely provide statistically balanced forces. The scenario book then places these general principles within historical situations. This is where abstract rules begin to acquire context, because the player is no longer simply commanding a generic force across a generic landscape. The scenario introduces particular objectives, geography and circumstances, while the supporting material explains why those factors matter. A raid on livestock, for example, should not be treated merely as an opportunity to score victory points by moving model cattle off the table. It can become a way of examining the growing importance of livestock to the pastoral economy, the disruption of Aboriginal access to traditional food sources and the strategic value attached to stock by both sides. A patrol searching for an Aboriginal group can similarly demonstrate the enormous difference between possessing firearms and actually being able to locate an opponent in Country that the patrol does not understand.

The scenario book also provides an opportunity to make historical uncertainty visible. Some events are well documented, while others are known only through fragmentary or contradictory accounts. Rather than concealing those gaps in order to produce a neat game, the scenario notes can identify what is known with reasonable confidence, what remains uncertain and what has had to be inferred in order to make the scenario playable. That process immediately turns the game into something more than a reconstruction, because players are being asked to consider the evidence upon which the reconstruction rests. The campaign book adds another essential layer by showing that these encounters did not occur in isolation. A clash that appears important when viewed as a single event may look very different when placed within months or years of settlement, resistance, retaliation and movement across Country. Decisions made in one incident can shape the conditions of the next, while seemingly small events can contribute to larger patterns of escalation. Campaign play can therefore demonstrate how historical processes develop over time. Livestock losses, casualties, displacement, increased policing, access to Country, changing levels of hostility and the movement of settlers can all influence later scenarios. A tactical victory may create strategic problems, while a force that appears to lose an encounter may nevertheless preserve its capacity to continue resistance.

This makes the campaign book essential to the coherence of the whole project because it prevents the Australian Frontier Wars from being presented as a sequence of disconnected skirmishes. Instead, individual encounters become part of an evolving historical landscape.
The educators guide completes the structure by making explicit what is already implicit in the other three volumes. It encourages teachers, students and players to examine not only what happened during a game but also why the scenario was constructed in a particular way, what evidence supported the design and where alternative interpretations might be possible. Students can compare the outcome of a scenario with the historical record, identify differences and ask why they occurred. They can consider whether the victory conditions reflect the objectives of the historical participants, whether the rules privilege one interpretation over another and whether changing an assumption about numbers, terrain or motivation would alter the result.

This is where the four-volume structure becomes particularly valuable, because the same historical problem can be examined from several directions. The rulebook asks how the problem should be modelled. The scenario book asks how it operated in a particular event. The campaign book asks how it fitted into a longer process. The educators guide asks how we know any of this and how confidently we can claim to understand it.Used together, the four volumes therefore encourage a form of historical inquiry rather than passive consumption. Players are not simply told that a particular event occurred and asked to reproduce it. They are encouraged to think about evidence, causation, uncertainty, alternative decisions and consequences. That is especially important because history can sometimes appear inevitable when read backwards. We already know what happened, which can make historical actors appear either foolish for failing to predict the outcome or powerless to change it. A simulation reminds us that people made decisions without knowing the future and often with incomplete information, limited resources and conflicting assumptions about what was happening around them.

The Australian Frontier Wars also demand a particular degree of caution because they involved dispossession, killing, the destruction of communities and profound suffering. The four-volume series is therefore not intended to turn frontier violence into a colourful colonial adventure or to provide a convenient setting for another generic skirmish game. The historical context must remain central throughout. That is another reason the volumes need to be understood as a coherent whole. The scenario book provides context, the campaign book prevents incidents from being detached from broader processes, and the educators guide encourages critical reflection on the evidence and its interpretation. Together, they provide safeguards against reducing a complex and difficult history to nothing more than miniature combat.

The aim is not to claim that a tabletop game can reproduce the lived experience of the people involved, because it cannot. What it can do is create an environment in which players are encouraged to ask better questions about the past. Why was this particular place important? Why did one group choose to fight while another withdrew? Why were livestock targeted? Why did apparently superior armed parties struggle to locate their opponents? How did previous violence shape later decisions? Why did conflict develop differently across different districts? What evidence supports a particular account, and what happens when the sources disagree? These questions belong equally to the history of the Frontier Wars and to the study of history itself.

For me, that is the real purpose of the four-volume Australian Frontier Wars project. The rulebook, scenario book, campaign book and educators guide are not separate products but parts of a single historical framework. Each volume adds something that the others cannot provide on its own, and together they are intended to move the reader from mechanics, through events and broader historical processes, to questions about evidence, interpretation and historical knowledge. If the project works as intended, the player should finish with more than a better understanding of what happened on the Australian frontier. They should also understand something about how historians attempt to reconstruct what happened, why certainty is sometimes impossible, why sources need to be questioned and why interpretations of the past should never simply be accepted without examination.

The four volumes therefore form a single educational journey. They provide not only a history lesson but also a lesson about history. The coherence of the four volume sets the central thesis, rather than treating the extra books as supplements to the rules.

In my view, there are few episodes in Australian military history as difficult to contemplate as Sandakan. More than 2,400 Australian and British prisoners of war passed through the camp in British North Borneo, yet when the war finally ended only six were still alive, all Australians who had escaped. Everyone else was dead. They had died from starvation, disease, exhaustion and systematic brutality, on jungle tracks during the terrible marches to Ranau, or in camps where men who had survived years of captivity finally became too weak to survive another day. Behind every one of those deaths was a family waiting at home, clinging to the hope that a son, husband, brother or father might somehow return when the war was over. For almost all of them there would be no homecoming.

The Japanese authorities bear responsibility for the cruelty that destroyed these men, but I believe that is only part of what makes Sandakan so painful. Australian and Allied authorities possessed information about the prisoners and considered plans for their rescue, yet no rescue came. That is the terrible shadow hanging over Sandakan. These men were victims of Japanese brutality, but their tragedy was compounded by Allied failures of intelligence, command and decision making. The six who survived did so not because a great rescue finally reached them, but because they escaped. More than 2,400 men had entered captivity. Six came home.

Lynette Ramsay Silver’s Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence is an important, disturbing and deliberately provocative contribution to the history of Australian prisoners of war under the Japanese. First published in 1998 and subsequently revised and expanded through several editions, the copy considered here being the 2006 edition, the book examines the destruction of the Australian and British prisoner of war force held at Sandakan in British North Borneo and the marches to Ranau during the final months of the Second World War. Of the approximately 2,400 Australian and British prisoners held at Sandakan, only six survived, all Australians who escaped either during the marches or from Ranau.¹ The scale of the disaster makes Sandakan one of the most catastrophic episodes in Australian military history.

Silver, however, attempts considerably more than a narrative of imprisonment and death. Her central concern is contained in the subtitle. She asks not merely what happened to the prisoners, but what Allied authorities knew about their situation, whether they possessed the means to intervene, why proposed rescue operations failed to take place, and why so much of the story remained obscure after the war.² It is this investigative dimension that gives the book both its considerable power and some of its historiographical difficulties.

Sandakan and the Destruction of the Prisoners

The basic narrative is almost unbearably grim. Australian prisoners captured during the campaigns in Malaya and Singapore were transported to North Borneo from 1942, with further Australian and British prisoners arriving during 1943. They were employed principally on the construction of a military airfield at Sandakan. Conditions initially remained tolerable by the standards of Japanese captivity but deteriorated progressively as rations were reduced, violence increased and the strategic position of the Japanese in Borneo worsened.³

Silver reconstructs this deterioration in considerable detail. One of the strengths of the book is that Sandakan does not suddenly become a catastrophe in 1945. The reader instead watches conditions progressively worsen as the prisoners become weaker, Japanese logistics deteriorate and the possibility of survival steadily diminishes. This gradual destruction is important because it demonstrates that the deaths were not simply the accidental consequence of a single disastrous decision to march sick prisoners across Borneo. They resulted from an extended process involving malnutrition, disease, forced labour, brutality, inadequate medical treatment and, during the final period, deliberate killing.⁴

The marches from Sandakan to Ranau form the most horrifying section of the narrative. Prisoners already suffering from severe malnutrition and disease were forced through exceptionally difficult jungle country with inadequate food and virtually no medical assistance. Those unable to continue faced abandonment or execution. The first major movement began in January 1945, followed by further marches as the Japanese abandoned Sandakan and concentrated prisoners farther inland. Only a fraction of those who began the marches reached Ranau, and almost all who arrived there subsequently died.⁵

The figures are difficult to comprehend in purely statistical terms. Of the 2,428 Australian and British prisoners now generally recorded as having died at Sandakan, Ranau or during the marches, 1,787 were Australians and 641 were British. The six surviving prisoners were all Australians who escaped and received assistance from local people.⁶ The absence of British survivors and the survival of only six Australians created an enormous evidentiary problem for anyone attempting to reconstruct events after the war.

Silver handles this problem effectively because she generally avoids turning the prisoners into an anonymous mass. Individual men appear repeatedly throughout the narrative, allowing the reader to understand something of their friendships, loyalties, conflicts, endurance and attempts at survival. The technique is particularly important in a story in which the sheer number of deaths might otherwise overwhelm the experiences of individuals.

There is inevitably an emotional dimension to such an approach, but Silver generally avoids excessive sentimentality. The circumstances require little embellishment. The gradual physical destruction of the prisoners, combined with the knowledge that almost none will survive, provides sufficient emotional force without the need for dramatic invention.

Research and Reconstruction

Perhaps the greatest strength of Sandakan is the persistence underlying its research. Silver draws upon archival records, intelligence documentation, survivor accounts, Japanese evidence, postwar investigations, war crimes material, burial information and the testimony of local people. This broad evidentiary foundation is essential because the destruction of almost the entire prisoner population removed the principal body of witnesses who might otherwise have described what occurred.⁷

The result is frequently closer to historical investigation than conventional campaign history. Silver must reconstruct events from incomplete and sometimes contradictory evidence, following the movement of prisoners and guards while simultaneously examining what Allied intelligence organisations knew about conditions in northern Borneo.

This approach is particularly successful when dealing with individuals. Names, units, movements and deaths are carefully reconstructed. Silver’s detailed treatment also gives the book considerable value to family historians and descendants seeking to understand the circumstances surrounding relatives whose wartime records frequently contained little more than confirmation that they had died while prisoners of the Japanese.

The scarcity of survivor testimony makes the surviving evidence especially important. The Australian War Memorial’s collections include documentation associated with several of the six survivors as well as official records relating to B and E Forces, prisoner movements and postwar investigations. These records demonstrate both the scale of the investigative effort undertaken after liberation and the extraordinary difficulty of reconstructing events when virtually the entire prisoner population had disappeared.⁸

This is one reason Sandakan deserves to be regarded as more than another history of Japanese prisoner of war camps. Silver helped restore individual identities to men who might otherwise have remained components of an enormous casualty figure.

Operation Kingfisher and the Conspiracy Argument

The most controversial element of the book is Silver’s argument concerning the failure to rescue the prisoners and the subsequent handling of the story. This is where Sandakan is strongest as investigative history but also most vulnerable as historical interpretation.

Central to this debate is Operation Kingfisher, a proposed attempt to rescue prisoners at Sandakan. The plan contemplated the use of airborne troops, while Allied intelligence organisations operating in Borneo attempted to gather information about Japanese forces and the location and condition of the prisoners. Evidence subsequently examined by historians indicates that intelligence personnel possessed significant information about the prisoners and their movement towards Ranau.⁹

Silver is justified in regarding this as a serious historical problem. The question of what Allied authorities knew, when they knew it and what operational possibilities existed deserves examination. The fact that intelligence was being collected while the prisoners were progressively destroyed inevitably raises questions about whether more could have been done.

There is nevertheless an important distinction between establishing that a rescue operation was proposed and demonstrating that such an operation was operationally practicable. Military and intelligence organisations routinely consider operations that never progress beyond preliminary planning. The existence of a plan therefore cannot itself establish that the prisoners could have been rescued successfully.

Any assessment of Kingfisher must consider the availability of aircraft, trained troops, intelligence regarding prisoner locations, communications, terrain, Japanese dispositions, logistical support and the rapidly changing strategic situation. The Australian War Memorial’s published examination of Allied covert operations in Borneo confirms that Kingfisher never received authority to proceed, despite intelligence concerning the movement of the prisoners being transmitted from the field. It also demonstrates that explanations for the failure of the operation remain contested.¹⁰

Silver is occasionally less cautious about this distinction than I would prefer. Her accumulation of evidence certainly raises uncomfortable questions about Allied decision making. It is difficult to finish the book believing that the fate of the Sandakan prisoners received all the attention it deserved. Yet hindsight creates its own dangers. We know that almost everyone died. Allied decision makers during the relevant period did not necessarily possess the same certainty about either the prisoners’ fate or the feasibility of rescuing them.

This does not excuse poor decisions. It does, however, complicate the allocation of responsibility.

The concept of a conspiracy of silence is therefore simultaneously one of the book’s greatest strengths and its most significant weakness. It forces the reader to examine an aspect of Sandakan that might otherwise remain secondary, particularly the relationship between intelligence, operational decision making and the subsequent public understanding of the disaster. At the same time, it creates an interpretive framework within which failures and omissions can too readily be interpreted as evidence of deliberate concealment.

Bureaucratic inertia, interservice disagreement, competing operational priorities, intelligence uncertainty and incompetence can produce outcomes that subsequently appear conspiratorial without necessarily requiring an organised conspiracy. The distinction is important because the historical standard required to demonstrate deliberate suppression should be considerably higher than that required to demonstrate administrative failure.

Responsibility and Hindsight

There is another difficulty inherent in Silver’s interpretation. Japanese responsibility for the treatment and deaths of the prisoners is clear. The prisoners were deprived of adequate food and medical treatment, subjected to brutal physical conditions, forced to march when many were incapable of sustained movement, and killed when they could no longer continue.¹¹

The question Silver introduces is different. Could Allied authorities have prevented some or all of those deaths?

That is a legitimate and necessary historical question, but it requires a different standard of evidence. Responsibility for failing to prevent an atrocity cannot automatically be equated with responsibility for committing it. The distinction becomes particularly important when considering military decisions made with incomplete intelligence under wartime conditions.

At times the emotional power of Silver’s narrative risks narrowing this distinction. Once readers have followed starving prisoners through the Borneo jungle, it becomes tempting to regard anyone who possessed information concerning their circumstances and failed to rescue them as culpable. Historical analysis must resist that temptation long enough to determine whether an effective rescue operation was actually possible at the relevant moment.

Silver provides substantial evidence from which the reader can consider that question, although I am not convinced that the evidence always supports the degree of certainty occasionally attached to her conclusions. Her strongest case concerns the existence of intelligence and the failure to translate concern for the prisoners into effective action. The argument becomes less certain when moving from institutional failure to the implication of deliberate conspiracy.

The Japanese Context

Another area in which the book might have gone further is the Japanese institutional and operational context. The destruction of the prisoners occurred while Japan’s military position in Borneo was deteriorating rapidly. Allied air and naval superiority increasingly disrupted communications and supply, while Japanese formations prepared for invasion and attempted to move personnel away from vulnerable coastal areas.¹²

This context does not excuse the treatment of prisoners. Rather, it helps explain the circumstances within which Japanese policy became increasingly lethal. The prisoners became a logistical burden to a military system already incapable of adequately supplying its own forces. Japanese decisions to move the prisoners inland therefore combined operational concerns with an institutional disregard for prisoner welfare.

A more systematic examination of Japanese command relationships, logistics and prisoner policy would have strengthened Silver’s analysis. It would have allowed the Sandakan catastrophe to be understood not only as a series of atrocities committed by particular guards and officers but as the product of a military system in which the survival of prisoners occupied an extremely low priority.

The same criticism can be applied to the Allied side. A fuller examination of command relationships between Australian authorities, MacArthur’s South West Pacific Area headquarters, intelligence organisations and operational commanders would have strengthened the analysis of Kingfisher. The issue was not simply whether somebody knew about the prisoners. The more difficult question concerns who possessed the authority, resources and operational freedom to act upon that knowledge.

Narrative and Style

As a piece of historical writing, Sandakan remains remarkably readable considering both the complexity and grimness of its subject. Silver moves between individual prisoners, Japanese authorities, Allied intelligence organisations and the broader strategic situation without entirely losing sight of the human tragedy at the centre of the narrative.

There is nevertheless a price for the enormous quantity of evidence assembled. Names, units, locations and movements can become overwhelming. The detail that makes the book valuable as a reference work occasionally interrupts its narrative momentum. Readers approaching Sandakan without some familiarity with the Pacific War may occasionally find themselves struggling to maintain a clear understanding of the broader operational picture.

There is also some repetition, particularly where Silver reinforces her arguments concerning missed opportunities and failures of responsibility. This is understandable because her case is cumulative, but the book occasionally presses conclusions after the evidence has already established the point sufficiently.

More importantly, the investigative character of the book sometimes dominates broader analysis. The Japanese command system, collapsing Japanese logistics, the wider Allied operational situation and the institutional culture of Allied intelligence could all have been incorporated more systematically. Doing so would not diminish the horror of Sandakan or excuse Allied failures. It would instead locate those failures more securely within the organisations and circumstances that produced them.

Sandakan and Australian Memory

One of Silver’s greatest achievements becomes apparent when the book is considered within the broader context of Australian remembrance of the Second World War.

Sandakan never achieved the place in Australian popular memory occupied by Gallipoli, Kokoda or even the Burma Thailand Railway. One obvious explanation is the almost complete absence of survivors. Survivor communities played an important role in shaping Australian understanding of Japanese captivity after 1945. Sandakan had virtually no comparable community because almost everyone who might have created it was dead.

The scale of this absence is difficult to overstate. When Allied investigators reached the region after the Japanese surrender they encountered burial sites, abandoned camps and evidence of mass death rather than a substantial population of prisoners awaiting repatriation. The task was therefore one of investigation and identification rather than rescue and recovery.¹³

This helps explain why Sandakan occupied an uncertain position in Australian wartime memory for decades. There were very few men able to provide public testimony, participate in veterans’ organisations or tell journalists and historians what had happened. Families often possessed limited information concerning the circumstances of individual deaths.

Silver’s work therefore performs a commemorative as well as historical function. She did not merely reconstruct a military disaster. She contributed substantially to restoring Sandakan to Australian public consciousness and to identifying the men behind the casualty statistics.

This achievement should not be underestimated. Historical writing is sometimes most important not because it provides the final interpretation of an event but because it forces that event back into historical discussion. Sandakan unquestionably achieved this.

Overall Assessment

Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence is an exceptional work of investigative military history, although it is not beyond criticism. Its greatest strengths are the depth of its research, its reconstruction of individual experiences and Silver’s determination to pursue uncomfortable questions concerning Allied knowledge and decision making.

Its principal weakness lies in the argument that also makes the book distinctive. Silver demonstrates convincingly that serious questions surround Allied decisions concerning the prisoners and the failure to implement a rescue operation. She also demonstrates how easily the experiences of the Sandakan prisoners might have disappeared from Australian historical consciousness. I am less convinced that every failure, omission and subsequent silence can safely be assembled beneath the stronger concept of conspiracy.

Institutional failure can arise from fragmented intelligence, poor communication, competing priorities, uncertainty and incompetence without requiring coordinated concealment. Indeed, the surviving documentation concerning Allied intelligence operations in Borneo supports the conclusion that information about the prisoners was available while simultaneously leaving considerable room for debate about why that intelligence failed to produce a rescue operation.¹⁴

That qualification does not substantially reduce the importance of the book. If anything, it makes Sandakan more valuable because Silver forces readers to confront questions that require continued investigation rather than passive acceptance.

The most impressive achievement of Sandakan is ultimately not the accusation contained within its subtitle. It is Silver’s reconstruction of what happened to men who had almost entirely lost the ability to tell their own story. With only six survivors from more than 2,400 prisoners, the historical record could easily have been dominated by Japanese documentation, bureaucratic reports and casualty lists. Silver painstakingly reconstructed the individuals behind those records and helped restore Sandakan to Australian historical memory.

I would consequently regard Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence as essential reading for anyone interested in Australian military history, Japanese prisoner of war policy, intelligence operations or the command problems of the final campaigns of the Pacific War. It should nevertheless be read critically, particularly when considering Operation Kingfisher and the extent of deliberate postwar suppression. Those controversies do not diminish the value of the book. They are an important part of its continuing significance.

More than a quarter of a century after its original publication, Silver’s fundamental achievement remains intact. She took one of the darkest and least understood Australian experiences of the Second World War and made it extremely difficult for Australian military history to overlook it again.

Footnotes

1. Lynette Ramsay Silver, Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence (Burra Creek, NSW: Sally Milner Publishing, 2006); Australian War Memorial, “Sandakan Memorial,” collection ART92680.
2. Silver, Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence.
3. Australian War Memorial, “Stolen Years: Australian Prisoners of War: Sandakan”; Australian War Memorial, “Australian Prisoners of War: Second World War: Prisoners of the Japanese, Borneo (Sandakan).”
4. Silver, Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence; Australian War Memorial, “Stolen Years: Australian Prisoners of War: Sandakan.”
5. Australian War Memorial, “Sandakan Memorial”; Department of Veterans’ Affairs, “Sandakan Memorial Park, Malaysia.”
6. Australian War Memorial, “National Sandakan Remembrance Day Commemorative Address 2024”; Australian War Memorial, “Sandakan Memorial.”
7. Silver, Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence.
8. Australian War Memorial, “Australian Prisoners of War: Second World War: Prisoners of the Japanese, Borneo (Sandakan)”; Australian War Memorial, “Rare Personal Documents from Sandakan Death March Donated to the Australian War Memorial,” 28 September 2016.
9. Ooi Keat Gin, “Prelude to Invasion: Covert Operations before the Re occupation of Northwest Borneo, 1944–45,” Journal of the Australian War Memorial, no. 37 (2002).
10. Ooi, “Prelude to Invasion.”
11. Silver, Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence; Australian War Memorial, “Sandakan Memorial.”
12. Ooi, “Prelude to Invasion”; Department of Veterans’ Affairs, “Sandakan Memorial Park, Malaysia.”
13. Australian War Memorial, “National Sandakan Remembrance Day Commemorative Address 2024.”
14. Ooi, “Prelude to Invasion”; Silver, Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence.

Bibliography

Australian War Memorial. “Australian Prisoners of War: Second World War: Prisoners of the Japanese, Borneo (Sandakan).” Canberra: Australian War Memorial.

Australian War Memorial. “National Sandakan Remembrance Day Commemorative Address 2024.” Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2024.

Australian War Memorial. “Rare Personal Documents from Sandakan Death March Donated to the Australian War Memorial.” 28 September 2016.

Australian War Memorial. “Sandakan Memorial.” Collection ART92680. Canberra: Australian War Memorial.

Australian War Memorial. “Stolen Years: Australian Prisoners of War: Sandakan.” Canberra: Australian War Memorial.

Department of Veterans’ Affairs. “Sandakan Memorial Park, Malaysia.” Canberra: Australian Government Department of Veterans’ Affairs.

Ooi, Keat Gin. “Prelude to Invasion: Covert Operations before the Re occupation of Northwest Borneo, 1944–45.” Journal of the Australian War Memorial, no. 37 (2002).

Silver, Lynette Ramsay. Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence. Burra Creek, NSW: Sally Milner Publishing, 2006.

The Saint Clair family cemetery lies beyond the eastern boundary of Blackthorn Hall, beneath ancient oaks that were already old when the first members of the family were laid beneath them. Generations of Saint Clairs rest there under weathered stones bearing names that once carried considerable influence throughout the county. Lucien Beauregard Saint Clair had known those names since childhood. They belonged to portraits hanging in the darker rooms of Blackthorn Hall, to stories repeated around the family table and to ancestors whose courage, wisdom and general magnificence seemed to increase considerably with every passing generation.

As the Dark Confederacy grew, Lucien found himself requiring followers who could be relied upon without demanding payment, questioning his orders or disappearing when matters became particularly unpleasant. The solution was conveniently located on his own property. After all, the Saint Clair family had always placed considerable importance upon duty to blood and family. Lucien merely decided that death was an inadequate excuse for avoiding it.

These were not common corpses dragged from some forgotten battlefield. They were Saint Clairs, and Lucien believed that family obligations did not necessarily end at the grave.

Major Ambrose Saint Clair

Major Ambrose Saint Clair had been Lucien’s great uncle, a stern and thoroughly unpleasant man who had spent much of his life insisting that the younger members of the family lacked discipline, courage and proper respect for their elders. He had served in the Mexican War before returning to Virginia, where he devoted himself to managing the family estates and quarrelling with almost everyone who disagreed with him. Family tradition maintained that Ambrose had never lost an argument, although this may have had something to do with his habit of carrying a pistol during most conversations.

He died several years before the Civil War and was buried with considerable ceremony in the Saint Clair family cemetery. Lucien remembered standing beside the grave as a boy while relatives solemnly described Ambrose as a pillar of the family. Lucien remembered him rather differently.

When Ambrose was raised, death had done remarkably little to improve his disposition. The old Major emerged from the earth still wearing the decayed remains of the coat in which he had been buried, one skeletal hand immediately reaching towards the place where his pistol had once hung.

Lucien regarded this as encouraging.

Ambrose now follows his great nephew with the same expression of permanent disapproval that he wore in life. Whether some fragment of the old man’s personality remains is uncertain, but Lucien occasionally catches the Revenant staring at him in a manner that strongly suggests Ambrose still believes the younger generation has made a complete mess of things.

Cousin Nathaniel Saint Clair

Nathaniel Saint Clair had been one of those unfortunate branches of the family tree that respectable Saint Clairs preferred not to discuss. A gambler, duellist and enthusiastic consumer of other people’s whiskey, Nathaniel possessed considerable charm and almost no judgement. He disappeared regularly for months at a time before returning to Blackthorn Hall with an impressive story, an empty purse and, more often than not, somebody looking for him.

His luck finally deserted him during a card game in Richmond when another gentleman accused him of cheating. Nathaniel indignantly denied the charge and demanded satisfaction. Unfortunately, the other gentleman proved considerably better with a pistol than Nathaniel had anticipated. His body was returned to Blackthorn Hall and quietly placed in the family cemetery, where everyone hoped that he had finally ceased causing embarrassment.

Lucien had always rather liked him.

Nathaniel proved surprisingly difficult to raise. When he finally clawed his way from the grave, several playing cards and a silver dollar were discovered amongst the remains of his burial clothes. Lucien took this as evidence that someone in the family had possessed a sense of humour.

The Revenant Nathaniel retains something of his former swagger. His movements are stiff and unnatural, but there remains an unmistakable arrogance in the way he carries himself. He sometimes turns towards the sound of cards being shuffled and has been known to stand silently beside games played by the Ragged Veterans.

Nobody has yet been foolish enough to deal him in.

Cousin Thaddeus Saint Clair

Thaddeus Saint Clair was Lucien’s second cousin and perhaps the strangest member of the family even before Lucien began raising the dead. He never married, rarely travelled beyond the boundaries of the family estates and spent most of his later years living alone in a small house on the edge of the Blackthorn property. He possessed an uncomfortable reputation for knowing things before they happened. Servants claimed that Thaddeus could predict storms, deaths and unexpected visitors, while several members of the family quietly recalled occasions when he had warned them against journeys that subsequently ended badly. The Saint Clairs publicly dismissed such stories as superstition, although few of them willingly remained alone with Thaddeus after dark.

Lucien was never quite so certain.

Thaddeus died shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War and was buried beneath a magnolia tree at the edge of the Saint Clair family cemetery. Unlike the graves surrounding it, his resting place seemed strangely untouched by the passing years. Weeds rarely grew across the mound, the earth remained dark and the inscription upon his stone was still clearly visible long after neighbouring memorials had begun to crumble.

When Lucien performed the ritual, Thaddeus did not claw his way from the earth with the other dead.

He was simply standing behind Lucien when he turned around.

That particular detail is rarely mentioned.

Thaddeus now accompanies the Dark Confederacy as one of Lucien’s Revenants, dressed in the decaying remains of the dark suit in which his family buried him. He rarely moves unless commanded and has never spoken since his return, yet there are moments when his behaviour suggests that something more than Lucien’s necromancy occupies the ruined body. On several occasions Thaddeus has turned towards approaching danger before any living member of the posse became aware of it, while at other times he simply stands staring into the darkness beyond the campfire as though watching something moving amongst the trees.

Even Lucien has become increasingly reluctant to turn his back on him.

Blood Remains Blood

Lucien considers the raising of his relatives entirely practical. Blackthorn Hall needs defenders, the Dark Confederacy needs soldiers and the Saint Clair family has always maintained that its members have obligations to their blood and their land. Lucien has merely extended those obligations somewhat beyond their traditional duration. Ambrose brings the discipline of an old soldier, Nathaniel whatever remains of the instincts of a gambler and gunfighter, while Thaddeus brings something altogether more difficult to explain.

The Ragged Veterans are considerably less comfortable with the arrangement. They will fight beside corpses raised from forgotten graves without much complaint, but there is something different about the three Saint Clair Revenants. Ambrose watches the men as though inspecting an exceptionally disappointing regiment, Nathaniel still seems interested whenever somebody produces a deck of cards and Thaddeus occasionally turns his head towards things nobody else can see.

Around the campfire the men have consequently developed a simple rule. Never insult the Saint Clair family in front of the dead Saint Clairs.

Nobody knows whether they can understand.

Nobody particularly wants to find out.

The next two ragged veterans to return to Blackthorn Hall are men who never saw any particular reason to abandon weapons simply because newer ones had appeared. Both had served with the 27th Virginia Cavalry, both had spent much of the war using old fashioned muskets with considerable effectiveness, and both had survived by combining patience with the sort of stubbornness that often passes for wisdom in veterans. The summons of Lucien Beauregard Saint Clair has drawn them back into the old circle, carrying weapons that may be outdated but are still perfectly capable of doing what they were made to do.

Obadiah Mason Chiswell

Obadiah Mason Chiswell had never possessed enough money to replace equipment simply because something newer had become available, which explains why he entered the 27th carrying an old percussion musket that had already seen years of service. Other cavalrymen mocked the weapon until Chiswell demonstrated that a large lead ball fired from an unfashionable musket remained perfectly capable of ruining a man’s afternoon.

Chiswell often served dismounted whenever the regiment required additional firepower, and he became known for extraordinary patience, careful loading and a refusal to waste ammunition merely because other men were shooting. He was never the fastest man in the regiment, but he was often the one still firing steadily after everyone else had exhausted both their cartridges and their enthusiasm.

After the surrender he carried the same musket home and continued using it for hunting, occasionally remarking that unlike governments, armies and currencies, black powder remained dependable. He worked small farms, repaired fences and took whatever employment came his way, while the old regiment gradually became something remembered rather than something lived.

Chiswell returned to Blackthorn Hall because his father had once worked for the Saint Clair family and because he considers obligations to be inherited almost as readily as land. He does not pretend to understand Lucien’s darker interests, although he has recently developed the habit of loading his musket before walking anywhere near the family burial ground after sunset.

Thaddeus Ewell Fontaine

Thaddeus Ewell Fontaine had always seemed older than the men around him, even when he was still young, and he distrusted most innovations on the grounds that they usually created new ways for things to go wrong. He disliked repeating firearms, breech loaders and officers who spoke too enthusiastically about progress, preferring the musket he understood and could repair himself with little more than oil, wire and stubbornness.

During the war Fontaine became a dependable rear guard and occasional marksman, although calling him a sharpshooter within hearing distance usually resulted in a lengthy explanation about the difference between careful shooting and showing off. He survived several disastrous actions by possessing an almost supernatural ability to recognise when an officer was about to issue an order that should be ignored.

The postwar years found Fontaine working small farms and avoiding politics with equal determination. He wanted little from the new world and expected even less from it, until rumours reached him that men of the 27th were gathering once more at Blackthorn Hall.

Fontaine arrived without invitation, carrying his musket, bedroll and enough ammunition for what he described simply as unfinished business. Of all the veterans at Blackthorn Hall, he seems least disturbed by the increasingly unnatural events surrounding Lucien Saint Clair, maintaining that Virginia has always contained stranger things than respectable people are prepared to admit.

Chiswell and Fontaine bring a slower but very deliberate sort of firepower to Lucien’s growing force, and neither man feels particularly disadvantaged by carrying weapons that others consider obsolete. Both understand their muskets completely, both know exactly what those weapons can and cannot do, and both possess enough experience to make every shot count rather than waste ammunition trying to impress anybody.

Their return also strengthens the sense that the old 27th Virginia Cavalry is becoming something more than a gathering of ageing veterans ( a bit like most wargames clubs!). Chiswell watches the family cemetery with growing suspicion, while Fontaine accepts the strange riders and disturbed graves with a fatalism that is almost reassuring, and both seem prepared to remain at Blackthorn Hall for as long as Lucien continues giving the remnants of the regiment a reason to ride again.

The next pair of ragged veterans to gather at Blackthorn Hall are men who always preferred to settle matters at considerably shorter range. Both had served with the 27th Virginia Cavalry, both had survived the collapse of the Confederacy, and both had learned during the war that when fighting moved into farmyards, lanes, barns and buildings, a shotgun could be a far more persuasive weapon than any amount of elegant cavalry doctrine. The call of Lucien Beauregard Saint Clair has brought them back to the old circle once again, older, poorer and rather less impressed by grand causes than they had been in their youth.

Hiram Ambrose Rucker

Hiram Ambrose Rucker had worked around horse yards and livestock markets before the war and joined the 27th with a borrowed saddle, a doubtful horse and a confidence in his own abilities that somehow survived both. He was never a particularly accurate shot at distance, but once the fighting became close his heavy double barrelled shotgun made accuracy a considerably less important consideration.

Rucker soon developed a reputation for being the man to send into barns, farmhouses and narrow lanes where cavalry tactics had ceased to have much meaning. He survived several encounters by firing both barrels at distances where missing would have required considerable effort, after which he generally relied upon profanity and a very large knife until somebody gave him enough time to reload.

After the war he returned to horse dealing and discovered that peace had not made him noticeably more honest. For several years he drifted between livestock markets, questionable card games and business arrangements in which ownership of the horse being sold was sometimes open to interpretation. He eventually heard that old men of the 27th were gathering at Blackthorn Hall and arrived without waiting for a formal invitation, bringing his shotgun, two bottles of whiskey and a horse of uncertain provenance.

Rucker claims that he returned because he was curious, although nobody who knows him believes curiosity alone would have carried him that far. The truth is probably simpler, because Blackthorn Hall offered him familiar faces, familiar arguments and the possibility of once again belonging to something larger than his next horse deal.

Edmund Lee Garnett

Edmund Lee Garnett came from a Virginia family that had once possessed considerable standing but considerably less money, leaving Edmund with the manners of a gentleman and the finances of somebody who could rarely afford to behave like one. He joined the 27th determined to restore something of the family reputation and discovered very quickly that war cared remarkably little for pedigree.

Garnett became a dependable cavalryman and developed a particular fondness for the shotgun during the increasingly confused actions of the final campaigns. His calm manner concealed a willingness to fight at unpleasantly close range, while his habit of apologising before firing became one of the regiment’s stranger traditions and did very little to comfort the men on the receiving end.

The years after the surrender were not kind to him, and he eventually made a living as a professional gambler, relying upon good manners, a respectable coat and the tendency of other men to underestimate somebody who spoke softly. Lucien’s invitation to Blackthorn Hall offered him something gambling never could, namely a return to a world in which the Garnett name, the Saint Clair name and the memory of the old regiment still carried weight.

Garnett remains unfailingly polite around Blackthorn Hall, even when discussing matters that would persuade most visitors to leave by the nearest door. He has also learned that Lucien’s hospitality comes with certain complications, particularly when some of the men sitting around the fire appear to belong to a generation that should no longer be attending reunions.

Hiram Rucker and Edmund Garnett give Lucien’s growing force the sort of brutal close range firepower that the old cavalrymen understand instinctively. Neither man has much interest in firing carefully from a distant hillside when a shotgun and a few yards of open ground will settle the matter more quickly, and both are particularly useful when Lucien’s business carries the posse into buildings, narrow streets or places where mounted manoeuvre is no longer an option.

For all their differences, the two men have found Blackthorn Hall disturbingly easy to settle back into. Rucker treats the strange noises, empty graves and unfamiliar riders with the same indifference he once applied to stolen horses, while Garnett prefers not to ask questions that might require impolite answers, and between them they have reached the practical conclusion that whatever Lucien Saint Clair is building, a pair of loaded shotguns will probably remain useful.

The season is almost over, although before anyone starts thinking about winter I should point out that this is Melbourne, where winter does not actually end so much as temporarily go into hiding before returning unexpectedly sometime in November when you have finally put the heater away and confidently ventured outside without a jumper. No, I am talking about something considerably more important than the weather. I am talking about footy.

And by footy I do not mean that namby pamby game where somebody receives the lightest touch from an opponent, collapses as though struck by sniper fire, rolls dramatically across the grass while appealing to every available official, and then makes a miraculous recovery thirty seconds later when it becomes apparent that nobody is going to give him a free kick. I am talking about Aussie Rules, a proper game where enormous men launch themselves into packs from ridiculous heights, players are tackled into the turf, somebody loses a tooth, an umpire makes a perfectly reasonable decision and fifty thousand spectators immediately unite in the belief that he is blind, incompetent and possibly engaged in an international conspiracy against their particular football club.

More importantly, I am talking about my beloved Western Bulldogs, who have managed to keep the season alive for at least one more week after a close win over Collingwood. Naturally, being the Bulldogs, they could not simply establish a comfortable lead, maintain it and allow their supporters to spend the final quarter enjoying the football with a quiet drink and a smug expression. That would completely undermine generations of club tradition. Instead, we received the complete Bulldogs Supporter Experience, involving hope, anxiety, despair, renewed hope, several conversations with the television, a brief consideration of whether following lawn bowls might be better for my health, and the familiar conviction that the umpires were obviously participating in some vast conspiracy whose precise purpose remains unclear but undoubtedly involves preventing the Bulldogs from winning.

Then we won.

Better still, we beat Collingwood, and there is something particularly satisfying about that because victories over the Magpies come with an additional benefit unavailable when defeating most other clubs. Somewhere across Melbourne, thousands of Collingwood supporters suddenly became very quiet, stared blankly at their television screens and wondered how the natural order of the universe had been so cruelly overturned. I am sure they will recover eventually, although there is absolutely no reason why the rest of us should be in any hurry for that to happen.

So now the Bulldogs march onwards into another week of finals football, although at the time of writing I am not entirely certain who we are playing, where we are playing or precisely when we are playing. These are merely administrative details which can be sorted out later. The important thing is that we are playing, because twenty four hours ago the season was threatening to disappear and leave me facing that horrible football wasteland when weekends suddenly become available for gardening, household maintenance and all those jobs I have successfully avoided since March by explaining that the footy is on.

Naturally, the dangerous thing now is hope, because experienced Bulldogs supporters understand that hope should be approached in much the same way as an unexploded artillery shell. You know you probably should not fiddle with it, experience suggests that doing so may end badly, but eventually curiosity gets the better of you and you start wondering whether perhaps, just perhaps, this could be our year. Before long you have mentally mapped the entire route to the Grand Final and are explaining to anyone prepared to listen exactly why the Bulldogs can win the premiership.

I am not going quite that far.

Yet.

For the moment, I am simply enjoying the fact that the season continues for at least one more week, Collingwood has been dispatched, the Bulldogs are still alive and the blood pressure should return to something approaching normal before we have to do it all again.

A reprieve is a reprieve.

GO DOGGIES!

Thanks to ChatGPT for help with the pics.

The next two ragged veterans to return to Blackthorn Hall are riflemen, men who learned during the war that patience, good ground and a steady hand could often achieve more than enthusiasm and noise. Both had served with the 27th Virginia Cavalry, both had survived the collapse of the Confederacy, and both had spent the years since trying with varying degrees of success to build lives outside the regiment. The summons of Lucien Beauregard Saint Clair has now drawn them back into the orbit of the old command, where familiar faces, old loyalties and increasingly unfamiliar events are beginning to gather together again.

William Fitzhugh Carter

William Fitzhugh Carter had been the son of a modest Virginia landowner and entered the 27th with enough education to keep company accounts but considerably more enthusiasm for soldiering than bookkeeping. During the war he developed into an excellent skirmisher and became known for taking deliberate shots from cover while the more excitable members of the regiment galloped about attracting attention. Carter survived the final campaigns largely because he had learned that bravery and standing in the open were not necessarily the same thing.

After the war he returned home to find the family property burnt to the ground. He sold the land leaving him to drift between work as a surveyor, hunting guide and occasional guard for merchants willing to overlook his Confederate past. He retained the long rifle he had carried during the war, patched and repaired many times but always carefully maintained, and often remarked that a good rifle possessed considerably fewer bad habits than most men.

Carter came to Blackthorn Hall after receiving a short letter bearing the Saint Clair seal, although he has never revealed precisely what Lucien wrote. Whatever the message contained, it was enough to persuade him to put aside the life he had built and answer the call of his old connections once again, bringing with him his rifle, a small collection of belongings and very few questions about what exactly Lucien intended.

Richard Dabney Page

Richard Dabney Page was already an accomplished hunter when he joined the regiment, having grown up among the wooded ridges and valleys of Virginia where accurate shooting was regarded as a practical skill rather than a military speciality. His ability with a rifle soon made him useful for scouting, picket duty and dealing with enemy officers or skirmishers who believed themselves safely beyond pistol range.

Page was badly wounded late in the war and spent much of the final campaigning recovering while the Confederacy collapsed around him, an absence he has always regarded as a personal failure despite having had very little choice in the matter. When he finally returned home there was no regiment waiting for him and very little of the old life left to recover, so he spent the following years hunting for food, guiding travellers through country he knew better than most maps and keeping largely to himself.

The rumours that the 27th was gathering again at Blackthorn Hall therefore stirred something Page had thought long buried, and he arrived carrying the same rifle he had once used in Confederate service. Unlike Carter, he is openly suspicious of Lucien’s interest in the occult and has seen enough strange things around Blackthorn Hall to know that some threats are not easily explained, although he has wisely decided that asking Lucien too many questions is likely to produce answers he would rather not hear.

William Fitzhugh Carter and Richard Dabney Page bring something different to Lucien’s growing force, since neither is interested in close range heroics when a rifle and a good position will do the work more efficiently. Their return gives the remnants of the 27th Virginia Cavalry two experienced marksmen who know how to wait, watch and choose their moment, while their familiarity with the Virginia countryside makes them particularly useful whenever Lucien requires eyes beyond the boundaries of Blackthorn Hall.

Both men remain loyal to the memory of the regiment, although neither is entirely certain what that loyalty now requires of them. Strange riders have been seen moving through the trees after dark, familiar names have begun appearing where they should not, and Page in particular has started checking the faces around the campfire rather more carefully than he once did, while Carter simply cleans his rifle and waits to see what Blackthorn Hall produces next.

I recently came across Sun Rot, and it immediately caught my attention because it seems to have been designed specifically for those of us who are unable to leave well enough alone when it comes to games, miniatures and new projects. It is part roleplaying game, part skirmish game, part board game and part miniature project, all wrapped up in a grim and decaying fantasy setting beneath a dying sun, which means it manages to combine several perfectly respectable hobbies into one potentially expensive distraction.

At its heart, Sun Rot is a cooperative, GM led adventure game in which the players control a small band of characters trying to survive in a world populated by strange creatures, questionable allies and the sort of situations that generally deteriorate as soon as someone announces that they have a plan. The setting is firmly grimdark, although not in the polished heroic fantasy sense that the term sometimes seems to have acquired. This is a world that looks worn out, diseased, unstable and probably best avoided altogether by anyone with even the slightest instinct for self preservation.

The rules are deliberately light, with characters drawn from four broad classes, Fighter, Wizard, Cleric and Astrologer, while actions are resolved through a combination of dice and cards. The dice determine whether the character has managed to achieve something useful, while the cards can then introduce complications, consequences and unexpected developments, which rather neatly prevents success from becoming too reassuring.

This is where the game begins to move away from a conventional board game and becomes much more interesting. Rather than providing a precise answer for every possible situation, Sun Rot gives the GM and players enough structure to keep events moving and then expects them to decide exactly what those events mean. A simple encounter can therefore become considerably more complicated as one player attempts to solve a problem, creates another and then watches with growing concern as somebody else makes the perfectly reasonable decision to interfere.

For me, that is one of the strongest parts of the design because the emphasis is clearly on creating a narrative rather than calculating the mathematically perfect move. The cards and dice create the circumstances, but the players have to turn those circumstances into a story, and this should produce the sort of games where everyone remembers the ridiculous sequence of events long after they have forgotten who technically won.

The boxed edition contains a substantial amount of material, including more than 250 cards, a double sided board, card terrain, character and monster standees, tokens, twelve dice, rules and a large collection of scenarios. In practical terms, that means you can open the box and start playing without immediately discovering that you also require a separate starter set, three expansion packs and a piece of terrain that appears to have been discontinued six months ago.

The real attraction for me, however, is that Sun Rot does not have to remain a board game.

The supplied standees can be replaced with miniatures, the card terrain can be replaced with proper scenery, and the game is miniature agnostic enough to encourage the use of figures from an existing collection. This is where the whole thing starts to become particularly dangerous for anyone who already owns more miniatures than is strictly necessary.

There is also a dedicated Sun Rot range available through North Star Military Figures, including the principal characters, Lunar Celebrants and several monster packs. The official range gives the game a strong visual identity, but it does not lock the player into using only those figures, which is exactly how I prefer these things to work. You can use the official figures, substitute something suitable from the collection, convert your own or simply rescue an old fantasy miniature from the back of a drawer and give it a new career.

This flexibility is probably what makes the price of the game easier to justify. If Sun Rot were simply a US$99 board game, I would probably hesitate, particularly once Australian postage had been added and the package had acquired the usual impression of having been personally escorted across the Pacific. If it were merely a rules light RPG or a small skirmish game, I might have the same reaction.

The difference is that it is all of these things at once.

You are getting a board game that can be played straight from the box, a rules light roleplaying framework, a skirmish game that can be transferred easily onto a fully modelled tabletop, a large collection of scenarios and, should you wish to surrender completely, an entirely new miniature project.

That combination is where I think Sun Rot becomes well worth the money.

The RPG element provides the story and character framework, the board game components make the whole thing immediately accessible, the skirmish element gives the action a proper tabletop presence, and the miniature side opens the door to painting, converting and terrain building. None of these parts appears to overwhelm the others, so the game can be approached as casually or as obsessively as the player wishes.

You could play entirely with the contents of the box and never buy another thing, which is theoretically possible.

You could also gradually replace the standees with miniatures, build dedicated scenery, add the North Star figures, introduce creatures from other ranges and eventually reach the point where the original board has quietly disappeared beneath several square feet of lovingly constructed ruins.

That seems rather more likely.

There is also a design philosophy here that I find appealing. Sun Rot does not appear interested in producing a rule for every conceivable situation, instead using simple mechanics to generate problems and leaving the GM and players to interpret the consequences. For some people that will be too loose, particularly those who prefer every uncertainty to be resolved by consulting paragraph 7.3.2 on page 84.

For me, however, the freedom is part of the appeal.

I have always preferred games where the rules create situations rather than attempt to dictate every detail of what happens next, and Sun Rot seems to work very much in that spirit. The game creates the problem, the cards make the problem worse, and the players then have the pleasure of discovering exactly how much damage can be done while trying to repair it.

The more I look at the complete package, the more I think it offers very good value for the right sort of gamer. At roughly A$138 before postage it is certainly not cheap, but looking at it simply as a board game rather misses the point. For someone interested in RPGs, skirmish games, tabletop gaming and miniatures, it effectively provides several different forms of gaming within the same system.

That is either excellent value or a highly efficient method of emptying both the wallet and the painting queue.

My approach would be to start with the full box, use the supplied standees while learning the game and then gradually replace the characters and monsters with miniatures as particular favourites emerged. The North Star range provides an obvious starting point, but the miniature agnostic nature of the game means there is no real limit to what could eventually appear on the table.

And that, I suspect, is where Sun Rot will cause the most trouble.

The dying sun, grotesque monsters and questionable magic are all very well, but none of them is quite as dangerous as the moment you realise that the game has given you a perfectly legitimate reason to start another miniature collection.

I already have enough projects.

Naturally, that probably means Sun Rot is exactly the sort of thing I need.