More Stuff Back from the Painter

The significant thing about this lot is that these should be the last five battalions to be added to the French Peninsular War army for the foreseeable future. There are a few limbers to get painted up, and a mule train(!), and a couple of old units of Chasseurs a Cheval which are due to be refurbished and re-based, and that (officially) is that. Oh - and there are a few engineering figures half painted - and then there's a complete 11-battalion division of Kenningtons, command and everything, but they can stay in a box until I decide whether I'm going to paint them...

First picture shows some of the new guys ready for finishing touches to the paintwork, "grassing up" of the figure bases in the statutary house baseboard colour, and then basing - the main purpose of the picture is really to show off a small part of my cherished collection of bottle-tops. You may imagine the volume of Highland Spring that's gone down the hatch to achieve this. Strictly speaking, it will mostly have been Tesco's own brand of bottled water, which is a fraction of the price but comes out of the same hole in the ground in Perthshire.

And here they are a few days later, still to get a couple of flags, but otherwise ready for The Cupboard. Here are a 2nd battalion for the 2nd Nassau, the 4/28e Leger, the Garde de Paris, a battalion of the Chasseurs des Montagnes and the 4th infantry regiment of the Vistula Legion, who - by some bureaucratic oversight - remained in Spain after all their Legion mates were recalled to go to Russia.

I've always wanted a battalion of the Garde de Paris, ever since I saw the illustration of one of their grenadiers in Windrow & Embleton's lovely book. Of course, at that time I was dumb enough to think the whole regiment dressed like the grenadiers. My battalion is, intentionally, very scruffy - mostly Falcata figures, though the grenadiers are old Garrison chaps. They will not be getting a flag - anecdote time...

A few years before my 1812-vintage battalion would have been recruited, the Garde de Paris had been at Bailen, where they lost their eagles and were sent to the prison hulks, an experience which very few of them survived. I understand that the reformed, reorganised regiment of this later period was not issued with replacement colours - units which lost their eagles, however much they might have suffered in the process, were not usually a high priority for the issue of new ones.

Not much glory here, then.