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


Thursday 2 April 2020

WSS - Bavarian Return - 2nd April

A day late and the usual dollar short, I got the four remaining battalions finished - they have still to get their flags, but I'll leave that to my next flagging session.

Because they are not strictly finished (without flags), and because I feel there's probably a limit to the number of photos I can post of the same units which say, "Look - I've done the red paint now...", I thought a quick group photo of progress to date with the Bavarian army might be an idea.

Some kind of infestation in the attic
Here they are - the new battalions are the ones at the rear without flags. I also have another unit of dragoons on the bottletops, ready for a Henry Ford-style refurb-factory touch-up, and similarly for the Guard Horse - they should be quite quick, I think. Other than that I have plans to get a couple of battalions of grenadiers painted - this will be proper painting from bare metal, and I'll probably send these out to a pro painter. In passing, I might mention that one of the two painters I currently use responded rather flippantly to my query about whether he was taking on work during the plague; he said that there seemed to be a lot of unnecessary panic about some sort of flu epidemic. This was a couple of weeks ago, so maybe he has had time to revise his views. Certainly I imagine he will have been obliged to close his shop - I hope he survived. There's a lot of view-revision going on at present, and no mistake, so no snarky questions, please.

Beyond the outstanding cavalry and dragoons and the proposed add-on grenadiers, the army does look a bit light on horse generally. I have a couple of French regiments they might borrow - I'll think about it. Oh yes - I have done nothing at all about staff figures, so I'll get that organised, too. I was hoping to use some Lancer Miniatures figures for generals, but they do not match well - the guys are built like toads. Sorry about that - they are beautifully cast, but it's my army and they are not getting to play - I'll stick with Irregular and Higgins and conversions thereupon for the time being.

The photo is taken on the attic floor, as discussed, but I couldn't squeeze in and didn't have my pipe handy. The light is good up there, though, with two big Velux roof-windows. I'll take a better "parade" photo when there are more flags. Very odd, actually. I spent the photo session paralysed with anxiety in case the soldiers got damaged on the floor, though there was no-one else in the house, and I had no immediate plans to stand on them. HG Wells must have been very tough.


I've removed the remaining Austrians from the community foot-bath, and faithfully paid my dues for a couple of afternoons, scraping off someone else's damned old flock, so now they are packed into house-issue battalion boxes (freezer packs) and will be ready for work soon.

Now I'm going to tidy everything away and have a few days off painting - 6 battalions retouched in 11 days is a rate of progress I haven't come close to for many years. Now I'll do some reading. While I'm on this high-energy roll I might as well see if I can read some history books without falling asleep.

19 comments:

  1. That's the sort of infestation we'd all encourage.

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    1. Soldiers on the floor are much more insect-like, somehow. It occurs to me that if my local pest-man did soldiers, it would be an original move during a game to get him to come in and fumigate the enemy. He does a good job on wasps, anyway.

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    2. That sounds frighteningly Warhammer. (Perish the thought.) How is the Rentokil army coming on?

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  2. A splendid host. From Max Foy to Max Emmanuel.

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    1. Look after ma boys, Elector.

      Currently reading Jean-Martin de la Colonie's autobiography - he was the lt.col of Boismorel's Grenadiers, one of the units I propose to add to my start-up Bavarian army. Interesting - a dreadfully vain and argumentative man, never in the wrong, always a victim of unfair conspiracy and never missed out yet with the ladies. A lot of very good narrative about the start of the fall-out between Bavaria and Austria (he was a Frenchman seconded to the Elector), but he can't get a single German place-name correct enough for Google to find anything (except Ratisbon, of course). I'd better ask Uwe for more facts on this stuff. You try and find Heyzempirne on a map, then?

      Hope you are distancing nicely?

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    2. You know I’ve heard that before about old J-M. I tried running Heyzempirne over in my head in a French accent to see if that gives any clues, but nada. And who’s to say French aristos in the 1700s had the same accent as René from Allo Allo?

      Distancing going well. It’s easy when you’re unpopular.

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  3. Replies
    1. Thanks Ray - they are charming little chaps. Refurbished armies are strange - they are not necessarily the way you would have done it yourself, and it is necessary to keep just enough of the original identity while still improving them enough to make them your own!

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    1. Hold me back, lads! Certainly making some decent painting progress (that's decent progress, not necessarily decent painting!) - I'm deliberately taking a few days off now, before I disappear altogether into the soldier boxes. Very odd lifestyle - trying to plan to fit a walk into each day, watching DVDs I haven't seen for years (no Netflix for us, not on rural broadband speeds). I have recently started having a mug of Ovaltine (hot malted milk) at bedtime - echoes of childhood!

      How's the static cycling coming on? My wife joined a new gym club just two months before the lockdown, so she's definitely getting cabin fever now.

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  5. Very nice Tony...
    I have to admit that I feel slightly alarmed at the idea of putting toy soldiers on the floor as well...
    I don’t think that HG invested the same amount of time in his toys as we do...

    All the best. Aly

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    1. I was trying to be brashly dismissive about my floor games session, but it is a bit tense, and I think I probably won't do that again until my therapist opens for business again. There's some deep issue about the floor being where most of my life's broken soldiers have ended up.

      You've given me an idea for a daft mental project - estimate how much HGW's collection soldiers cost him! - I imagine that he just bought them off the shelf at Gamages. Or did Wm Britain deliver the stuff direct to his house by horse and cart. Yes, I quite like that - I may put this up as a post here, and invite comments/opinions.

      I shall blame you, of course, sir.

      Keep well, Aly. My gardener is coming tomorrow - first time for a few weeks, so I am drawing up insane schemes for leaving the garage door open, leaving money hidden in a Really Clever Place - far beyond the realms of what is necessary, I guess, but I don't get out much these days, and that's now official.

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  6. Good to see the progress, and I hope your painter is OK. Anyone who isn’t at least mildly scared right now is an idiot! Today is my first day of full time hospital work (non Covid patients, as far as we know), but our other hospital has 60 patients, more than half on ventilators. At least we are starting to see some of them recover now.

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    1. Very difficult times, Peter - it goes without saying, I hope, that there is no limit to the admiration and respect I have for you and your colleagues, world-wide. We seem to have instituted a new UK custom of standing on our doorsteps every Thursday at 8pm and applauding the health workers - I'm all in favour of public recognition, but this must be the cheapest government initiative we've had here for a while.

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  7. Or parents lived through the Great Depression and World War 2; we CAN do this together. It would have helped if both of our Governments had listened to their own experts earlier, but what is done is done.

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  8. Which scenarios do you use? Are there Bavarian only (one on side) scenarios for the WSS or WAS. I know there are battles but don't know many historic scenarios. Most of these battles are too unpopular or small.

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    1. Since my armies are not ready to fight yet, I do not use any scenarios at all. My plan, eventually, is to build up Alliance and Franco-Bavarian armies to fight some small version of something like Schellenberg, but at first I will have Bavarian and Imperial armies only. Scenarios? There are known to have been some battles between the two in 1703, when Bavaria first came under the influence of France. I'm currently reading the autobiography of Jean-Martin De la Colonie, who was the French lieutenant-colonel of the regiment Boismorel, which was intended to be a unit based on French emigrés, comprising two fusilier battalions and one of grenadiers. In fact only the (red uniformed) grenadiers ever existed - they appeared at Schellenberg. Thus far, I can't find much in English apart from the translation of Colonie's book which describes this early war period.

      Frustration with Colonie is that it is not unlike trying to build up a picture of the Napoleonic Wars by reading Marbot, or Thiebault - a lot of the book is self-justificatory clap-trap, some of it of questionable veracity. Throughout, Colonie's grasp of German place-names is frustratingly wild - he mentions a battle at Heyzempirne (somewhere near the Danube, around Ratisbon?) in early March 1703, when an Austrian force of about 20,000 under General Schlick was defeated by the Elector's army, but Heyzempirne, like most of Colonie's other geographical references, is impossible to find in Google or on a map (I have a Bavarian friend checking German sources to see if there are more reliable accounts). Not to worry. This is a game of toy soldiers - I happen to have obtained a pre-existing collection of miniatures which I am working hard to restore. I do not have to pretend that this is real history; I can happily make up my own campaigns and create whatever battles I need - my imagination is sufficient to do anything I want. I will eventually (I hope, pandemics permitting) collect enough factual knowledge and enough additional troops to attempt something more popular, but the modern obsession with "proper" scenarios (or improper scenarios that were published in one of the accepted publications) seems to me to be a problem for someone else. I am happy to re-fight a historical action if it is possible and if it looks like fun, but I am more than content to have a little fictitious action as required to keep me going. As I say, some historical guidelines would be nice, but I'm not dependant on them, at least in the short term. I can make up my own scenarios - so can anyone, if they get their heads out of the magazines.

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    2. If this link works, have a look at

      https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=XYEACwAAQBAJ&pg=PT60&lpg=PT60&dq=heyzempirne&source=bl&ots=U8Z5ljfpJJ&sig=ACfU3U0udr9Ba0P6RQfMaSz8Y39MOuLC4Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjx5NDJ4droAhVhoXEKHd-yCYEQ6AEwAHoECAsQKw#v=onepage&q=heyzempirne&f=false

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