WSS - A Trickle of Bavarians

Up early this morning - I went for a walk down to the beach, when it would be quiet, I reckoned. Quiet? - deserted is more like it. Haven't seen the place as quiet as this since the Foot & Mouth epidemic of 2001, when the farm was closed to the public.

The farm company have fixed the road up from the beach, past the old ruin of Adam Otterburn's Auldhame Tower - peaceful up there

I made good progress yesterday with finishing some odds and ends for the WSS project (a gun that never got varnished, a few colonels who have now been painted and can join their regiments - stuff like that), then I put about 8 battalions-worth of Austrian Foot into (appropriately) the foot-bath, to soak off the old bases and clean them up, and set to work to refurbish 2 more of the Bavarian battalions. Nothing arduous, just gently working away at them, drinking plenty of coffee and water and listening to Dominic Miller. The Austrians can chill out for a couple days.

These old troops are Les Higgins figures, from Eric Knowles' old collection - they will not take a huge amount of work to get ready to fight, but there are a lot of them, and refurbishment is always subject to creeping scope, as I have discussed many times before - when you start with the brushes, you suddenly decide that there's more to do than you planned for. Eric's WSS Bavarians were in pretty good shape, considering they must have been painted in the 1970s. My work, apart from freshening the paint, is to change the organisation (I use rather smaller units, apply nice, toy-soldier gloss varnish and rebase). Eric's army shows obvious evidence of having used CS Grant's From Pike to Shot as his prime source, and he has faithfully reproduced the odd howler and spelling mistake! Many of the glitches in CSG's book look like transcription errors - someone in the reference chain misread someone else's handwriting, or (as I do) had problems with German print.

Eric's Austrians are a bit further from what I have in mind for them, since he appears to have aimed at a sort of middle-ground army that would sort of fit the WAS, and the uniforms are a bit wild in places. All shaping up - I have a plan! In the short term, the clock will be frozen at 1703-4, and Bavaria and the Empire will fight an extended and little-known campaign against each other. With luck, some Dutch, British and French troops should join them in due course.

Maffei at the far end (with the yellow ochre regimentals) and Lutzelburg at this end (dark red). Now then - do I really need to freshen up the white trim round the hats? I guess I'd better, eh?

Yesterday's Bavarians were a single battalion each for the regiments Maffei and Lutzelburg - I am always intrigued by the Maffei name - it is often mistakenly written as Mappei, or various other variants. It doesn't look like a German name, and I wondered how it should be pronounced. I did a bit of Googling, and it turns out that the regiment was founded by General Alessandro Scipione, Marchese de Maffei, who was a native of Verona, though a commander in the Bavarian army. So it's not a German name (which I guess would be pronounced "maff-eye", with the accent on the first syllable) but an Italian name (which, again, I guess would be pronounced as "maff-ay-ee" with the accent on the second of three implied syllables). Lord knows what his soldiers called him. What is really rather odd is that the family was originally German, and Maffei was an Italianisation of the German Matthaeus. This is a recurrent theme in Bavarian military history, I think - I was surprised how many of the Bavarian generals and regimental colonels in Napoleonic times were from Italian families.

In the unlikely event that you might wish to check out the Marchese, you will find that his presence on the Internet is pretty much swamped by his brother Francesco Scipione, who was a famous scholar, writer and art-critic.

That's quite enough about that. Here's a bit of Dominic Miller - an echo of my painting session yesterday.