Napoleonic & ECW wargaming, with a load of old Hooptedoodle on this & that


Saturday 4 December 2010

New Unit - Dragons à Pied

With a considerable amount of help from my friends, here's a new unit - an unexpected bonus for the army.


Majority of the figures are Les Higgins, one of the foot officers is a 20mm Garrison casting, and the mounted officer is PMD, though I put him on a rather passive Falcata horse to give suitably non-reg campaign appearance and to avoid having the rather silly Higgins horse galloping alongside marching troops. The drummer is a 1/72 Strelets plastic, and I'm not awfully happy with him, but there isn't much else available.

Anyway, I'm very pleased with the unit - thanks very much to Iain for most of the Higginses, and to Clive for help with the command figures. I fear these chaps have a fairly humble career coming up - they seem like ideal garrison troops for a fortress or maybe a hostile village. Higgins put epaulettes on the advancing dragoon figure, though not on the "at the ready" one, and thus I have a very high proportion of guys here in elite company uniform. Accordingly, they are a provisional bataillon de marche, from the 19e and 23e regiments, who seem to have sent all their best men!

4 comments:

  1. Hi Tony - what an excellent looking little unit. Far too good for garrison duty!

    Ian

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  2. Lovely unit Tony. I can see what you mean about the drummer figure though, the rest are just so much finer. Would a conversion from a metal figure be a possibility?

    Cheers,
    Lee.

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  3. Lee - yes, the drummer is a disappointment. He is from a Strelets set which combines French foot dragoons (doing various siege-type things like carrying ladders) with Polish grenadiers. Yes, odd is a word that comes to mind, but also quite interesting - some of the figures are very nice - a sapeur of foot dragoons, for example.

    Not so the drummer - the drummer is a mutant. The problem with dragoons for the old head-swap ploy is the damn horsehair mane - it falls well below the shoulders, so a good transplant is well-nigh impossible. I did think of using an Old Guard grenadier drummer - the elite company in a dragoon unit (I think) sometimes wore bearskins, so a judiciously green-painted grenadier drummer might be OK. I was so pleased to get the Strelets figure that I hadn't considered that he might be grotesque. Maybe I should go back to the earlier idea.

    I looked through all the old Garrison, Hinton Hunt, Lamming, s-range etc listings, and as far as I can see no-one ever did a dragoon drummer.

    Hmmm...

    Thanks for tuning in!

    Tony

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  4. Tony,

    I know you said that if you could start all over, you would use plastic miniatures. Looking at this unit...I do think your model soldier collection has a certain quality that can't be reproduced with modern plastic miniatures. Mind you, I like the modern 1/72 models, and it's not about metal or not...maybe it's just nostalgia. A vague memory of how I wanted my armies to look like when I was a boy. I'm just a tad jealous now, ...never mind, just keep inspiring me.

    Pjotr

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