Replacement Unit - Brunswick-Oels Jaegers

Creeping elegance.

That's when you start refining your armies to make them "nicer", or nearer to your personal (current?) idea of perfection. In my case, this follows an extended period during which I was so desperate for more and more troops that I would have kept both the new and the old versions of a unit, just to get the numbers up.

This is the second time I've replaced the Brunswickers, which is getting a bit serious, I guess. My original battalion was all Minifigs - the officer and drummer were s-range (and were really very nice), but the rank and file were the later, bigger Minifigs - as wide as they were high - and they were pretty awful. No - I didn't mean to express it like that - what I mean is they were a poor match for the rest of my armies. Anyway, I lived with them in that state until a few years ago, when I set about getting rid of all the overscale Minifig "chunkies", and I replaced them with castings from the current Kennington range.

The Kenningtons were fine - much more like the thing - but they were, strictly speaking, the Leibregiment from Waterloo. Now I think this uniform is probably pretty authentically what the Brunswickers wore in the last year of the Peninsular War, but I really wanted to try to get some figures in the earlier uniform with the longer polrock coat.

I'm delighted to say that I managed to buy some suitable vintage figures on eBay a week or two ago, and Clive (once again) very kindly helped out with some matching skirmishers, and here they are, based in my normal light infantry style, with two half-subunits of skirmishers and two close-order subunits to act as supports. They seem to me to be some sort of early Minifigs, though the small bayonets are clearly not s-range (I have some s-range Brunswickers, and the figures are similar but distinctly different). If anyone knows what they are, please shout. The officer may well be s-range - not sure. Alas, I did not get a replacement drummer to complete the unit, so I still have my Kennington drummer. If anyone has a spare s-range Brunswick drummer (BrN 6s?), please get in touch - I'll be very interested!