I've been working away quietly in my semi-isolated state - done a fair amount of painting, refurbing and sorting-out. Here are a few quick pictures, from recent tasks which actually produced something.
I finally completed a unit of Spanish granaderos provinciales which I started (according to my notes) in March 2017 - which is not especially slow by my own standards! Figures are mostly OOP Falcata.
I replaced the crews for two French foot artillery batteries, using retouched ex-Eric Knowles Hinton Hunts - I used my original guns, which are Hinchliffe 20mm. The previous gunners were (whisper it) overscale Prinz August home-casts, very poorly painted, which resulted in these batteries being confined to the French Artillery boxfiles for many years (I'm beginning to understand how they must have felt) - now they can get out and shoot at someone.
David Crook, who saw these little chaps on my table via a Zoom visit, became quite emotional at the thought of these old soldiers getting back into action after so many years, in a form which we hope Eric would have approved of!
For my WSS collection, Goya very kindly painted some more Imperial troops - these are the two battalions of the Regiment of the Markgraf of Baden-Baden, in official shiny WSS varnish.
And I've also been working away steadily on bits and pieces for future siege games (I now have taken delivery of the Vauban's Wars rules and the posh playing cards, and am studying for my diploma). Here you see one of my handicraft evenings, cutting various length strips of 1-inch wide brown felt, to serve as forward saps in the game...
...and here is the start of a small set of mini-units for siege infantry - in this case the Peninsular War department. There is no strict requirement to re-base anything for the VW games, but I have taken a liking to these little 12-man units, mounted in 3s on skinny little bases, which can sit comfortably in trenches and on walls and covered ways. This may seem a bit extravagant, but it gives me a really useful job for some Lamming figures that don't really have a home, and other various spares from the Deep Boxes. In particular, a good number of marching figures and "standing firing" fusiliers, which normally I don't use, can get a gig at sieges.
I'm not doing anything fancy with these - just a quick touch-up if needed, some fresh varnish and stick them on the skinny bases. Initial target is about a dozen such units for each side - normal units from my standard collection will be fine for tactical events like storms and sallies, if numbers are short!
I'm also adding to my collection of trench sections and gun emplacements, and some odd-shaped earthworks pieces to serve as a fausse braie for the medieval walls of places like Ciudad Rodrigo (Vauban never got as far as Spain, as far as I can see - the proper Vauban kit will come in very nicely for the WSS...).
Once again, I've bought in scenery pieces from that fine chap Fat Frank, still going strong in his eBay shop. You can get your trenches made to order, with or without sandbags!
I'm sure there will be more pictures soon - in the meantime, I hope you are well, and keeping safe.
Tony! So refreshing to see some activity from your keyboard! You have not been idle which is encouraging. I really like the bag work on your Spanish grenadiers. Hopefully we see more.
ReplyDeleteHi Jon - hope you are well - thank you. Just a gentle return to the blog, to see how it goes. I confess I have spent a fair amount of time idle as well, but that can be quite therapeutic to a point!
DeleteWhat a treat!
ReplyDeleteGreetings and best wishes from the Deep South, Tony
Matthew
Thank you WM - all the best to you and yours.
DeleteGlad you're not slacking Tony - the Eric Knowles Hinton Hunt artillerymen are superb but I can't remember how effective they were? Also good to see you are keeping Goya in work!
ReplyDeleteHail, Stryker! Regret to admit that we don't seem to have found any ammunition among Eric's old cucumber boxes - working on it. Goya has been a big help - I get to unload some of my rubbish old soldiers on him, and he paints new units for me - seem like a fair swap? It is very much appreciated. I was going to say that he has been a Trojan - a phrase I would use at any time and without thought - but I remembered that this would not travel well, and might cause confusion in the US, so I decided against it.
DeleteAn insult in Shakespearian times. Ancient Pistol tells Fluellen in Henry V 'Base Trojan, thou shalt die'...before the latter beats him up and forces him to eat a raw leek.
DeleteThe Bold De Vries sent a Google-free email with an interesting conundrum, related to the legendary paradox of the Executioner's Axe. If I have replaced the gunners and the bases of my French artillery, he says, how can I claim they are the same units.
ReplyDeleteHmmm. Well, the guns are from the originals, and the unit entities 190 and 191 have been French foot batteries in my Napoleonic Catalogue spreadsheet for a long time, so there is just a shred of continuity. How many cells in Prof de Vries's body are the same ones which he saw in the mirror 10 years ago? So who is he, anyway?
I do appreciate this stuff - I missed it.
Nice to see you back in the blogosphere Tony. Your new figures look super, I especially like the Spanish grenadiers, fine chaps.
ReplyDeleteOur Espinosa game of a few months back has inspired me to do a lot more reading on the Peninsular War in general and I have just read an account of Victor/Perrin's siege of Tarifa at the end of 1811, yet another fascinating event of which I was completely ignorant despite my long interest in the Napoleonic Wars.
I wanted to ask you if you could recommend any titles on the Spanish operations of the war. The Spanish seem to appear mostly as guests in all the various books about British operations and I would like to read more about Franco-Spanish battles where there was little or no allied involvement. I have Gates' Spanish Ulcer which is fairly comprehensive but looking for a bit more detail. As a bit of an authority on the Spanish army and its doings where do you look for your information?
Hi Dave - thank you very much. I had a slight chortle at the idea that I might be any kind of authority on anything at all, but I have been interested in the Spanish army and its operations for quite a long time, and have struggled to gain knowledge, so I can share a bit of that, certainly.
DeleteThere are many obstacles - firstly there was something close to two centuries of British refusal to make more than occasional, scathing reference to the Spanish at all in our military history (this is improving, thank goodness - as my late, lamented friend Gallacher once said, "it was their bloody war, after all, and they actually lived there"). French contemporary works on the Peninsular War obviously take the Spanish more seriously, since they spent a lot of time and bled a lot fighting them, but they still mainly appear as part of the context rather than a main thread.
[I'll send a second part to this, to get round the comment size limitations...]
[Continuing...]
DeleteYou can get a lot of clues about the campaigns by reading some of the OOBs in the Nafziger archive, and there is a wealth of information about which units were where, and when; there is a lot of material also in the appendices to Charles Oman's great history - a snag with this is that there are a great many typos and transcription errors (many of them present in the original army returns and reports, to be fair), and there were, to be frank, a lot of units which had very similar names, a lot of units which were known by different names at different times (often at the same time), and a lot of bad handwriting in contemporary records. Thus a basic idea of the structure and (rapid) evolution of the Spanish army is necessary to sort out the facts from the misunderstandings.
I'll email you sometime this weekend with some additional ideas, but here's some good things to think about:
Charles Esdaile has done some superb, impartial work - a lot of it is about the cultural and political aspects of the wars, and much of that is about the irregular forces and the popular view of the war. Suggest the following:
[Esdaile] - The Peninsular War (a New History); The Spanish Army in the Peninsular War (2012 revision); Fighting Napoleon (mostly guerrilleros and irregulars, though in this context the distinction between regulars and others is always rather blurred!); Peninsular Eyewitnesses.
Nick Lipscombe's atlas of the Peninsular War is a bit of an investment, but well worth a look.
Don W Alexander's "Rod of Iron" is a fantastic book, if you can find it, about Suchet's campaigns against the irregulars in north-eastern Spain - a lot of good stuff in there - in fact, Suchet's own memoirs are available in an English translation - worth a read.
On the actual army, and their organisation and dress, there are a number of excellent works by Jose Maria Bueno - "Uniformes Españoles de la Guerra de Independencia", "El Ejercito y la Armada en 1808", and "La Expedición Española a Dinamarca 1807-08" are marvellous, and a couple of recent Ken Trotman publications, by Gerard Cronin and Stephen Summerfield are recommended - "Spanish Infantry of the Early Peninsular War", which includes militia, and "Spanish Cavalry of the Early Peninsular War", which also includes the guard units and the artillery.
For useful nuts and bolts about the campaigns, one of the Histoire & Collections big-format books is about Ocaña, and that is available in an English translation (complete with the usual errors - do they ever proof-read these things?) - nice book, for all that. There is a lot about the Spanish army and their battles in the Guerreros y Battallas series (which is a sort of Spanish Osprey series) - pretty good.
Also excellent is the database constructed by Col JJ Sañudo of the armies and service records of all the nations involved in the Guerra de Independencia - which is available (or was) on CD - now you're talking, though Sañudos remarkable efforts are, inevitably, a little handicapped by the poor quality of some of the original record keeping - it is still the greatest single source for clearing up ambiguities and who was who. This may be the most confusing topic I ever attempted to study - or at least it was until I started reading about the 30 Years War...
As I say, I'll email you with some other thoughts - cheers.
Hurrah!...
ReplyDeleteRocking back onto the stage in true style Tony 😆
The Spanish look lovely...
I am intrigued to see how your siege games play out... it’s not something I have ever done... but it sounds like it could be an excellent solo project...
All the best. Aly
Hi Aly - I am carefully avoiding all reference to Brexit, Covid and the US Electile Dysfunction - this is just a toy soldiers blog - honest, matron.
DeleteIn fact, avoiding such reference is helped by the fact that I am currently making a point of listening to the news headlines on BBC R4 at 6am, then I avoid all news channels for the rest of the day. Listening to a lot of Debussy and Fauré this week, and then there was Tamsin Little's farewell concert - thus, in a trance-like spirit of slightly breathless reverence, I felt I should share this with you...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkk6zTscrKA
I especially like the Granaderos, and hope you enjoy Vauban's Wars; there were probably more sieges in the Peninsula than the rest of the Napoleonic Wars put together!
ReplyDeleteMy WSS forces are not yet ready for sieges, but I can do Napoleonic sieges as soon as I have the bits organised. Working on it! I'm very interested in the various sieges on the East coast - I need to work on Spanish forces to get this organised, but it's motivating. Most of these old fortresses were pretty much medieval with extra bits stuck on, so some improvisation will be needed with the VW rules. All good stuff.
Delete...that was "the East coast OF SPAIN..." of course!
DeleteI'm with the others: a joy to have you back. My, you have been a busy worker bee too; some fabulous looking units, particularly the grenaderos provincales.
ReplyDeleteIt's 'funny' and perhaps a little bit interesting, but having been a current affairs 'junkie', I have, in the past few years, taken an approach similar to yours. Don't want to be 'ignorant', but one can easily hear too much about stuff that one cannot (or will not) impact. I recall being amazed when my father seemed to go 'off' too much news/current affairs. Now I understand why he did...!
Regards, James
Thanks James. The radio thing is weird - maybe, as your comment implies, it's just me, but it seems that radio may be the only industry in the UK that guarantees its staff full and uninterrupted employment. If I leave the radio on, I will hear endless phone-ins from people just bursting to tell their personal Covid tragedies to the world, endless local spokespersons sounding off about the unfairness of regulations, just a massive whinge-fest - no wonder everyone is suicidal. Freedom of speech is a fine thing, but freedom to refuse to listen any more must be protected too. If people are having a terrible time then naturally I am sympathetic - it's dreadful - but I really don't want to bloody hear about it all the time...
DeleteAs I say, it must just be me, but I wonder, did people phone their radio stations in 1940 to complain about the air raids? When black-out regulations were posted, did local businesses complain it was unfair on them? Maybe they did. Maybe, also, it doesn't do to draw parallels, but it seems hard to avoid.
All the best James - keep safe. Always wear your tin hat in the bath.
I agree with the others - nice to hear from you again. I will be interested to read what you think of Vauban's Wars as I have been waiting to read a review or two before buying. Over 20 years ago I built the parts for a fortress - not as beautiful as 3d printed or paper version currently available but serviceable. I started to develop rules but then, butterfly like, flitted on to other fields. I had heard that the Field of Battle cards were not as posh as the price would suggest even allowing for a small print run so suspect that the Vauban's Wars cards are the same. Best wishes. Jim
ReplyDeleteHi Jim - the posh cards for FoB are actually pretty good, but pricey - getting them sent from the US made them especially steep. Now, of course, you can get them from Lancashire Games, here in the Good Old UK, which is less eye-watering. If you want to have a squint at Vauban's Wars, the most cost-effective way of doing that is to get the pdf download, which I think is $15 or so.
DeleteReviews are going to be very personal, I think. Like a lot of the Piquet products, it is a game which lends itself to be adapted to suit the user, and every user will have different objectives, I think. Because of the nature of the troops I have available, my earliest efforts at this are likely to be Peninsular War based, which doesn't quite fall into vanilla VW (because of the ancient fortresses involved), but can be adapted without too much grief!
Thanks for your good wishes - take care.
Tony - lovely Spanish figures.
ReplyDeleteI second your recommendation for reading. To prepare for my battlefield tour in Spain and France last year, I read Esdaile's book on the Peninsular War. I found it to be a very good read, giving a very good social and political context within Spain as well as detailing the fighting. The book on Suchet in Aragon sounds interesting, I shall try to find that. Also, for the tour our military tour guide was Nick Lipscombe, a knowledgeable and approachable nice chap.
Lipscombe as your tour guide sounds pretty cool. Suchet's memoirs are a decent read, once you get used to his referring to himself in the 3rd person. Your battlefield tour is a thing of wonderment - the chance of doing such things again in any kind of timescale which will work for me seems very remote.
DeleteTony,
ReplyDeleteWelcome back. The Spanish grenadiers are excellent and it’s nice to see some of Eric’s figures getting a refurb and ready for action. I’m sure they will serve you well.
I’ve only skim read Vauban Wars - it looks promising but time recently has been spent insulating the garage in the hope it will serve to facilitate large games all year round,
Really good to see you back
Hi Graham - thanks - hope things are good with you. Insulated garage? - great idea - our garage is too much of a jungle to attempt this (in several senses), so I am interested to see how you get on. Since my son's car is parked here now, I have recently been keeping my own car in said garage, which is very unfamilar indeed - viewed with suspicion by the neighbours etc. We have some landscaping work starting here shortly, which will get rid of a redundant rhododendron bed and widen our driveway, so with luck the garage can go back to being just a storage dump again.
DeleteAnyway, that's enough about me - I wish you every success with your insulation work. [Are you sure the leaflet didn't say "Self-Isolation"?]
The Spaniards do look the part as do the Baden Baden boys!
ReplyDeleteAs for the news. Like you it's once a day for me too. Although it's on the good ol Beeb at 6. Its thoroughly depressing as always!
Thanks Ray - yeah - news is for the birds, man. I'm happier reading about what happened two or three hundred years ago - at least you can close the book when it suits, and have a snooze.
DeleteWelcome back - splendid figures especially those Spanish Grenadiers! I'm intrigued by the Vauban stuff, it will be interesting to watch progress as you prepare to open the first parallel..
ReplyDelete