The Engineer and the Coffee Table

I am still exploring the possibilities for providing my British Peninsular army with some engineers and sappers for their siege activities, as discussed in a recent post. I have had some very interesting and useful suggestions, for which thanks to anyone I haven’t thanked already. I’ve looked at some plastic ACW engineers, which were interesting but not quite suitable (primarily because of that physique thing – 1/72 plastic models are mostly wonderfully sculpted, but they also seem to represent a race of men with skinnier build and smaller heads than 1/72 metals), and the latest suggestion – from Rod – is the Art Miniaturen set JS72/0468, Napoleonic Austrian engineers, for which I have reproduced Herr Schmaeling's  catalogue picture at the top of this post. I’ve ordered some of these. I reckon a man in a shirt is a man in a shirt, regardless of nationality, though I may feel the need to carve off the odd moustache.

I think the aforementioned Finescale Factory French pontonniers which I have in the Spares Box may also switch sides and join the Brits – still thinking about this – and I have been offered some weaponless British infantry who should lend themselves to odd-jobbing and landscaping. One thing I haven’t got a source for is someone like this...

This is the only depiction I’ve ever seen of a British engineer from this period in serious working kit. The drawing is by Richard Scollins, and comes from a book I have which has an unjustly chequered past.

The book is shiny, big format. The edition I have comes from Book Club Associates, and the whole production is very obviously that most uncomfortable of things, a Coffee Table Book [gasp]. You know the sort of thing – lots of nice pictures and not much detail. A book about sieges for people who really couldn’t care less. You just know that the well known print of Major Ridge of the 5^th climbing the breach at Badajoz will be there and – sure enough – there it is. My lack of enthusiasm is evidenced by the fact that I unsuccessfully tried to unload it on eBay – twice, I think. No takers.

Well, in fact the book is not bad at all, once I got around to having a proper look at it. If anyone else is selling it on eBay, it's worth a modest bid. It contains some good stuff on artillery and engineering and all the unglamorous bits of sieges, and there are a lot of illustrations I’ve never seen anywhere else. So – credit where it’s due – I regret having previously rejected this volume – it’s fine. It even has some good pictures of British 10-inch howitzers, and you can’t get more specialist than that.