WAR GAMES : TULARE VS GLOTTENBERG

 My song, I fear that thou wilt find but few

 Who fitly shall conceive thy reasoning,

 Of such hard matter does thou entertain

So begins the 58-page rule book-cum-manifesto drafted by Alberto Figuira Jardim to govern his campaigns of lead soldiers in the field, tin planes in the sky, and wooden ships on the pond. Though both a lawyer as well as a professor of English and philosophy, Mr. Jardim clearly had much time on his hands. Beginning in 1915, he molded and painted, named and numbered, thousands of soldiers and brought them into action on a massive battlefield on the grounds of his summer house, the Quinta da Estrela in the village of Caniço, on the Portuguese island of Madeira, a thousand kilometers from anywhere.  “You didn’t watch television in those days,” explained his grandson Miguel. At a time when Europe was convulsing with the bloodshed of the First World War, Alberto Jardim created his own scenes of valor and devastation, as the brave young sons of two imaginary foes – the nations of Glottenberg and Tulare – fought each other tooth and nail in the imaginary land of Mandolia. Keeping fastidious notes of the day’s casualties, and plotting strategies for the next day’s campaigns, Mr. Jardim laid waste to wooden villages with hand-made bombs dropped from planes that zipped along wire lines. When Mr. Jardim moved Tularese forces to the outskirts of a particularly ornate town at the corner of his property, and then allowed it to be burnt to the ground by the forces of Glottenberg as they beat a hasty retreat, his grandson demanded to know how he could be so reckless with something that had taken him many weeks to build. “Ah, my boy,” he exclaimed, “but that is the stupidity of war.”  

From the collection of guest contributor T. Jardim