Finally got the current batch of ADCs finished and based up. There is a bit of a risk with jobs which hang around - after a certain time (how long this is must vary from individual to individual, I guess) I sort of get used to the idea that they are not finished yet, and they can go into a state of limbo.
The replacement figure for Marshal Marmont [Art Miniaturen - henceforward AM] with his aides, who are both from Hagen
...and they leave as elegantly as they arrive
MS Foy [OOP NapoleoN casting] with his ADC [AM]
Bertrand Clauzel with ADC [both AM]
And Antoine-Louis Popon, Baron Maucune [NapoleoN] with his new staff man [AM]. It is a source of regret to me that there are no known portraits of Maucune - I would like to know more about the man. He was blamed (unfairly?) for the defeat at Salamanca, and a couple of other items on his CV suggest that he may have been very brave but more than a little dumb. It seems appropriate that my Maucune should be flagrantly ignoring his ADC - reading and obeying orders seems to have been something of a weak spot...
Anyway, this is all about my new basing standard for general officers (or Leaders, as they are termed in C&C). I have a fair amount of rebasing to do, so first I have tackled the Armée de Portugal bit of my French army. Apart from the new Marshal Marmont, only the ADCs in these photos are new - the extant generals have just been rebased with their (regulation) staff allocation.
A bit of background here - my Armée de Portugal is based on Salamanca, and is represented by 3 overstrength infantry divisions (the real army had 8 understrength ones) - the cavalry allocation keeps the full establishment of 2 divisions, which suggests an over-provision of cavalry, but my cavalry are a bit weaker than the historic original.
I am unsure what to do with the cavalry division commanders - for this army, both divisions were headed up by a general de brigade, and in each case the gaffer was an ex-staff man, with no obvious cavalry background or affiliation. Accordingly, Messrs Boyer and Curto appear on my table in rather boring regulation dress - a bit lame for supposed sabreurs. I would prefer it if I had some rather more flamboyant figures to deploy - I'm working on it - but I suspect that they were not particularly interesting individuals. Pierre Boyer gained the nickname "Pierre the Cruel" because of his harsh treatment of guerrillas, and there is a nifty portrait sketch of him, with fancy braided jacket and whiskers. However, I would guess from the style of his goatee beard that this is a later picture, from his time in Algeria, where he maintained his reputation for shooting and torturing, probably generating more unrest than he cured.
Beyond that my French army continues with another force, which is a rather vague amalgam of the Armies of Catalonia, Centre and Midi - it's chief role is to fight the partidas, and give a place in the organisation to the more colourful Confederation and Italian troops, and King Joseph's own fine chaps (poor sods). I'll get to their generals shortly.
Still on the regulation Tesco milk bottle
top, and with his varnish still a little too shiny (it should calm down
overnight), here's my new figure of Auguste Marmont, ready for basing. This is
a recent Art Miniaturen figure - very
nice sculpt - I can't remember who the casting was supposed to be - maybe Rapp - or it
could be Berthier. Whatever, it is now Augie Marmont, one of the classic
baddies of Napoleonic France. Offhand, I can only think of Bernadotte and maybe
Talleyrand who would rate more boos and hisses in the Pantomime of the Emperor.
[Oh, yes they would.]
Apart from having a remarkably bad day at
Salamanca, and having had the sense to place the interests of his nation above
those of his megalomaniac boss at the siege of Paris in 1814, Marshal Marmont
fought well throughout his career, and he was also an exceptional
administrator. I feel rather guilty about his compromised reputation -
it is not helped by my own (MS Foy's) hatchet job on his standing as a general
in my (Foy's) own history of the War in the Peninsular. No matter - history has
made its judgement. This little metal version of Auguste looks confident
enough. He can join his first ADC, and the second ADC will be along in a day or
two.
The old Marmont figure in my collection will
be recycled and will become Marshal Soult (also Art Miniaturen, the casting was always supposed to be Soult
anyway), and I have something rather fancy in the way of an ADC lined up for
that particular group. That will be a bit later. I attach a splendid, borrowed photo of a
large figure of Marshal Soult's ADC, which has nothing at all to do with me, just to give an idea - you may imagine
what my Old School attempt at painting a mounted 20mm version might be like,
but you may feel free to admire my optimism...
Some of us are destined not to be successful strippers - we just have to face up to the fact. I would love it if bleach worked for me - I keep allowing myself to be duped into trying it again.
I'm currently having a minor blitz on a pile of French command figures which are waiting to be painted - I've just spent a day and and a half, filing and fettling and supergluing - mostly Hagen and Art Miniaturen figures - really rather enjoyed myself. This is partly aimed at shifting some more of the painting queue, but also at moving to my new basing standard for general officers - it may take a while to get there, but the idea is to have brigadiers based on their own, division commanders based in twos (a general + an ADC) and army commanders in threes (a general + 2 staff). I have a nice supply of figures just itching to be painted and based - all good stuff.
I made very good progress, and while I was at it I thought it would be a good idea to do something (at long last) about a Qualiticast command group I bought on eBay - it's been in the cupboard for a couple of years. Problems with it are (1) the group includes Napoleon [gasp], and (2) the group has been professionally painted, to a standard which does not please me. The painting is, to employ a technical term, crap. I could - and shall - do better myself.
So I prised the Qualiticast figures off their little diorama base, being careful to preserve the table (with map) and the scenic drum, crossed myself and placed the figures lovingly in some nice new bleach I had bought specially. I took care to avoid bubbles, and checked they were all covered to a good depth, and left them for 36 hours. When I felt they were ready, I rinsed them off, rubbed them down with the regulation toothbrush and had a speculative pick with the official penknife.
These are not, you will notice, what are termed unpainted figures
They are now drying. When they are dry I shall stick them in the hated Nitromors, or hand remover as it is known here. That will do the job. Speak not to me of bleach, nor Dettol, nor Buckfast tonic wine, nor Fairy Dust - all that can be said for my most recent bleach attempt is that I am very unlikely now to catch any infection from the figures, but the paint on them has become "a little spoilt" rather than "gone", which is the state I had hoped for.
If bleach works for you then you have my envy and my respect - it does not work for me. The number of times I have proved this to myself, you would think I would have got the hang of the idea by now.
Not to worry. Progress consists of small steps. I think Goethe said that. It might have been the Chuckle Brothers, in fact.
****** Late Edit ****** (Saturday night, 1st July)
Nice clean, airtight Douwe Egberts jar containing the Clean Spirit experiment - give it a couple of weeks. I'll set up another trial when the Simple Green arrives.
This is General William Forbes Geddes, commanding the troops of the Scottish Army of the Covenant serving in Lancashire. "Big Willie" was born in 1592 at Seton Grange, Haddington, youngest son of Alexander Geddes - a wealthy landowner and salt merchant - and his wife Margaret Fallon. A professional soldier since he left school, where he was noted for his prowess in both Latin and wrestling, Geddes is a strange mixture - considered a "hard man" and pretty much humourless, yet he is very highly regarded by his troops, because of his reputation for ensuring that pay and provisions are supplied promptly and in full measure. Unusually tall for the day, he is also gifted with remarkable physical strength which is legendary - at the Siege of Heidelberg (1622) he is said to have thrown a Spanish officer into the river Neckar on one of the rare occasions when he lost his temper.
This casting is by Art Miniaturen, and my humble paintwork is of interest (to me) only in that it is the first time I have made exclusive use of the (cheap) Deco-Art "Crafter" acrylic paints. No particular problems - coverage is not quite so dense as with the more exotic brands, but it's OK, and anything which makes it possible for me to stay away from the GW shops has to be good.
By the way, if anyone noticed a short-lived post earlier this week, it featured a YouTube clip which refused to run properly in Blogger, so I scrapped it. Fair enough - sorry about that.
While assembling some heavyweight shipments of soldiers to go away to be worked on by painters who actually know what they are doing, I've also been doing some fiddling away of my own, finishing off some odd figures that have been in the To Be Painted pile for far too long. None of them is going to win any prizes, but it is satisfying to get a bit of the backlog cleared.
First thing I did was finish off my Peninsular War mule train - it's only taken me about 40 years to get around to having one of these. Pack and draught animals are always a bit of a thankless undertaking; since I always put off painting them, I have usually forgotten that they are mostly just a mass of harness and strapping and bits tied on, all of which requires a bit of care to make them look half-decent.
That was last week. This week I have mostly been finishing off some missing generals for my other French Peninsular Army (which is sort of the Army of the Centre, or the North, or Aragon, or any and all of these as occasion demands). Two of these are Art Miniaturen castings, for the cavalry - nominally Generals Treillard (with the white "division" border to his base) and Maupoint (brown for "brigade), and the other is an old Minifigs 20mm OPC figure, who started life as one of several Marshal Neys which I have, and will be a spare General de Division for the Army of Portugal, or anyone else who needs one.
Here they are - glad to have got them finished - feels like more progress than it really is. Once again, my photographs show the blue uniforms as rather paler than they look in the flesh - my camera has outsmarted me again. [I don't mind so much if my camera is smarter than me - it hurts more when I am out-thought by the electric kettle…]
Since the Aragon role is not comfortable for King Joseph (who is the incumbent command figure for this other army), I am also thinking of having an extra figure for Marshal Suchet - the real motivation here is that I have a very nice little mounted ADC in hussar uniform who will paint up very colourfully as Suchet's sidekick, Captain Gaultier, on the 2-figure C-in-C stand. That's down the road a piece - next painting job for me is a group of British infantry intended for digging trenches in the siege game. These will be armed with shovels and pickaxes, and mounted on the house-standard brown "mud" stands (for sieges). After that there is more artillery equipment, and a refurb job on a very elderly unit of Garrison French chasseurs a cheval, who will need some improvised command. Don't hold your breath.
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 5th 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.
First off, Happy New Year to everyone who is kind enough to
drop in here. I hope your year is good – in my own case, I am hoping for a
rather more satisfying year than 2012, which was a kind of not-quite year – a
lot of minor things that didn’t go too well, and then there was the weather,
which I have decided to take as a personal affront. However – I’m still here
and still fighting, and each day is the start of the rest of your life, as a former
work-colleague used to have written on a poster above his desk for a while.
Come to think of it, that same fellow is no longer with us – he drowned himself
in a freezing Scottish loch not long after he retired, so let’s gloss over that
quickly – inappropriate recollection.
This morning, Amazon emailed me to ask me if I would care to
rate my recent purchase of a pot of red GW paint – did it meet my expectations?
Pretty much, yes. They also suggested that, since I recently purchased CDs of the
Esbjorn Svensson Trio and some concerti by Telemann, I obviously like music and
thus might be interested in a new album from One Direction. Now that is impressive
lateral thinking, but no.
Last night I spent 40 minutes on the static exercise bike,
in the interests of getting the blood thinned down a bit after Cholesterolfest.
Went OK – backed off a bit towards the end to keep my pulse under 140bpm, but
no problems, and it was good for the first of a new series. To avoid spending
my time on the bike thinking “Good grief
– still 29 minutes to go....”, I watched one of my library of approved exo-bike
movies. Last night I watched the first half of The Charge of the Light Brigade – that’s the 1968 one with David
Hemmings. I haven’t watched it for ages, and it’s a bit dated now, but still
pretty good. The relationship between Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave and the other
fellow is what I would describe as uninterestingly soppy – not very engaging,
and I couldn’t really care much about the characters themselves. The military
bits are nicely done, but what really compromises it for me is that it comes
from a period when all British films used the same short list of actors, and I
find it distracting to keep noticing that the sergeant major used to be in The Onedin Line on TV, for example.
It may have been a "brilliant moment of madness" - it could even have been
a "mad moment of brilliance" - but such moments are fairly commonplace
on my tabletop, I think
The whole thing is rescued by Trevor Howard as Lord
Cardigan, who presents the most wonderful portrayal of a pure bastard it is
possible to imagine. I know it’s all going to end in tears, but I’ll watch the
rest of the story on my next pedalling session tonight. After the Crimean
unpleasantness, I think I’ll watch Tom Berenger as Longstreet again – yes –
haven’t seen that for a while either.
In this rather disjointed not-quite-holiday period as the
world gets revved up again, there is an opportunity to revisit all those
wargaming background projects which seem to grind on forever. One such is the
box of bits which I have earmarked to complete my collection of limbers and logistics
vehicles for my Napoleonic armies. Although it comes under the general heading
of Mucking About, every so often I
open up all the little margarine boxes and switch things around to make sure I
have the best combinations of parts for the various units. I still have to
paint up limbers, teams and drivers and pulled guns for all the French
artillery – which is 3 foot batteries at 2 horses each and 2 horse batteries at
4 horses each. I also have outstanding limber teams for one Italian foot
battery, three Spanish regular, a Spanish volunteer one and one for the Duchy
of Stralsund-Ruegen.
Then there’s two more British caissons and two French ditto
to finish off, a couple of odd wagons and a bunch of pack mules to paint up.
It’ll all get done in time – maybe this year – I got a fair amount of this
stuff completed last year, so there’s no stress!
The bits are all-sorts – limbers are a mixture of Hinchliffe
20, early Lamming and some Minifigs 20mm, cannons are similar, plus a few Les
Higgins. Horses and drivers are Lamming, Scruby, S-Range and Alberken, and I
even have a few rather posh Art Miniaturen teams for the French line. The mules
and oxen are mostly Jacklex, and the Spanish muleteers are Hinton Hunts. Should
be fine.
Going through the boxes reminded me (not that I had forgotten, of course) that I have
a couple of really nice Minifigs kits to make up – a general’s carriage and a
French flying ambulance – I really must get on with those – I’ll enjoy that.
General's carriage - all bits present
Ambulance-in-a-bag
And, of course,
having counted, examined, swapped and generally fiddled with all the bits, they
all went back into the plastic tubs and back into the big box marked Napoleonics until next time....
Good fun though, and it avoids doing anything really useful.
Also, I have a vague feeling that talking about it here makes it more likely I
will do something about it soon, but don’t hold your breath.
I'm very pleased to have a second regular foot battery for the Spanish Nationalist army, very kindly - and delightfully - painted for me by Lee, in return for introducing him to Commands & Colors and providing some uniform info. I think I came out of that exchange handsomely ahead - thank you, Lee, once again.
These guys have been sitting around in my spares box for a while, and they are now ready to join Morillo's new 2nd Divn of the Spanish army. Excellent - a real bonus.
Thus my Spanish army is complete now, apart from a few generals. Well, actually, apart from a few generals and some more cavalry. All right - a few generals, some more cavalry and a couple of limber crews.
And maybe a couple more units of voluntarios. You can never have too many voluntarios.
The castings are of Frenchmen, tweaked and modded a little here and there. The guns and the crews are by NapoleoN Miniatures, the officer with the telescope is yet another of Art Miniaturen's little gems. The Gribeauval system 8pdrs are completely authentic - Spain was a Bourbon kingdom before Napoleon, and all Bourbon kingdoms used the Gribeauval system. Spanish guns were either grey or - as in this case - stained timber with black ironwork.
Since I made a decision to finish off my Peninsular War armies (or at least give them a finite scope), and start on the ECW before I disappear down the microscope, the effort to get things tidied up has kept spawning new subprojects and the flow of finished Napoleonic soldiers has actually increased. Strange but true.
There's always this faint anxiety that figures which are available at this moment will soon cease to be so, and thus a lot of feverish haste to get stuff finished off while the chance is there.
My Spanish army has always been something of a poor relation, not least because of the traditional lack of 1812-period figures on the market, and I have been working of late to get it up to a useful size. I'm very pleased to have a new division of line infantry ready. They will have to wait a day or two to get their flags, but otherwise they are finished and on the new-issue magnetised bases. Here are 4 line regiments - those of Leon, Bailen, 2nd Mallorca and La Union - and 2 light units - Voluntarios de la Victoria and Legion Extremena.
They also have an artillery battery in the pipeline, and I have some generals and ADCs on order from Falcata (just can't get the Staff these days) - things are shaping up nicely. My original plan for a Spanish force was just a wishful fancy, given the lack of suitable figures, and it's a real satisfaction to see the guys varnished and based and ready.
Since you can never have enough of a good thing, I've also ordered up some more voluntarios/milicias from Falcata's extending range, but the real shortage is cavalry - I have to get some cavalry. There was always a shortage of horses, so the cavalry brigades were small, but I do need more.
Falcata make some very nice 1808-period cavalry in bicornes, and I would love to have some yellow-coated dragoons on my tabletop, but they are not really correct for the later PW. Most of the units around by then seem to have been composites - squadrons from here and there, mostly provincial, variously called grenadiers, cazadores, perseguidores and mostly with shabby hussar-style affectations, as far as I can see.
Research isn't easy - until JM Bueno's lovely Uniformes Espanoles de la Guerra de Independencia, most reference works on the Spanish army took the easy option, and trotted out the 1806 regulations, with contemporary prints of Romana's Division and the works of Dighton and a few others. Things are a lot better now for the infantry of 1811-14, but the cavalry from that period is still pretty poorly understood.
Anyway - this is my version of Pablo Morillo's Division of 1812-13. A few educated guesses (or half-educated), and a pinch of wargamer's licence where it suits, but I'm pleased with them. The rank-and-file are Minifigs S-Range SN1s, the command figures are conversions from Art Miniaturen Belgians, and from Portuguese castings by NapoleoN and Kennington.
The recipe is as before, except these fellows are mounted on what in Scotland are traditionally known as "cuddies". The recipe? - something like 80% Jorg Schmaeling, 1% superglue, 19% coffee. If they'd all been destined for the same unit I would have varied the horse colours a bit, but it's not worth the bother at one horse per regiment - no-one will notice. It just means that, in addition to the officers clearly all being brothers, their horses are brothers too.
New Falcatas for June include these
My plans for completing my Spanish army may be about to change again, since Falcata have announced some new General Staff figures for June, plus an assortment of new Peninsular War offerings - including light infantry in bicornes and marching militia in round hats. Oh, well.
To celebrate my release from eBay packing duties, I got the first six of my converted Spanish infantry officers finished while listening to the Champions League Final this evening. There are four mounted colleagues for them which are about half done, but all the rank & file of the six new units are still to come back from the painter, so I have a couple of days to get them done.
The chaps in the picture were originally Art Miniaturen Dutch-Belgians, and they now have various new hats and heads attached. I'm pleased with them - something very satisfying about non-catalogue figures in your army.
Yesterday I got a package from Art Miniaturen - always a pleasant experience. There were various items in the pack, including some of Herr Schmaeling's excellent French Line Artillery limber horses and drivers, which I have finally got around to ordering and which will no doubt make an appearance here in the fullness of days.
The things I was most anxious to get hold of were a couple of packets of set no JS 72/0224, the (Waterloo period) Dutch-Belgian Command set - five officers on foot plus two mounted. I've used these before, with head or hat transplants, to provide 1812-style Spanish infantry officers. Conversions are a strange area of activity for me - I do not rate my talents very highly in this area, and yet I've had surprisingly few disasters over the years. There is something very pleasing about creating a unique figure - especially if it is something which I could not have got elsewhere. It feels, admittedly, like something of a cheat - superglueing together bits of someone else's art is an easy way to get good results, and Schmaeling's figures are particularly fine. Now that I have a little more confidence I find it a little easier, but it still requires a very deep breath to bring a razor saw into contact with one of these little jewels.
The picture shows the contents of one of the Dutch-Belgian packs, ready for the surgeon. On the right you see a Minifigs S-Range SN1s (top), whch figures provide all my Spanish rank-&-file, and a Les Higgins British light infantryman (bottom), which makes an excellent hat/head donor with appropriate mods. When the bandages come off - assuming the results are presentable - the world will hear of these guys again.
A Bit of Previous - here's one I did earlier (1st Sevilla) - colonel is one of these same Art Miniaturen Belgians, with a Les Higgins head
"If you can't say anything nice," my grandmother used to say, "then just button it."
Let's get back to safe ground - pictures of toy soldiers should be pretty uncontroversial. Creeping Elegance is my euphemism for that process whereby figures that I don't like very much get gradually replaced. In this particular instance, I had a Spanish Line Infantry unit for which the other ranks were Warrior figures and - while there is nothing instrinsically wrong with Warrior, I hasten to add - I've never been completely happy with them. By some combination of pose and size they don't quite fit in with the rest of my troops, and I've always intended to replace them with the Minifig S-Range SN1s I use for all my Spanish line when I got some.
I've now done it. This is the first part of another push to get the Spanish Army finished. This is the 2nd Regiment of Jaen - formerly a provincial militia unit, but promoted to the Line in 1810. The other ranks are, as mentioned, now SN1s, though the command figures include Kennington Portuguese and the mounted officer is an Art Miniaturen Belgian officer with a new hat (borrowed, I think, from a Minifigs Old Guard bandsman). Yes, their facings are brown - Bueno says so.
The Warrior soldiers have gone away to a new home, where I believe they will serve their new owner well. I am currently basing and finishing off a big batch of Falcata guerrilleros, who will appear here sometime, and there are some 5 or 6 more Line battalions in various stages of preparation. I also have castings set aside for a second foot battery for the Spaniards, and am looking around for more cavalry for them.
Hussars are a no-brainer, so I could certainly add a unit of hussars (any nationality, really), and I really fancy the new Falcata cavalry figures which can be Line Cavalry or Dragoons, though they are maybe a bit 1808 for me - I'm working on that. Once again, I am surprised how little information there is around for what Spanish cavalry looked like in 1810-12.
In the meantime, here are the corrected version of the Segundo Jaen. Fine big bayonets, eh?
This is a later addition to the posting – on the subject of the real Segundo Jaen, here is a tiny piece taken from the Base de Datos sobre las Unidades Militares en la Guerra de la Independencia Española, edited by Col J J Sañudo and published by the Ministerio de Defensa. Here you see what this particular unit is known to have done in 1812 – all the marches, their strength on various dates, their presence at the Battle of Salamanca, the fact that their colonel was Don Francisco Ignacio Cepeda...
Correct, it isn't. Since it is forever 1812 here, Lasalle has been dead for 3 years or so. Nice find on eBay - one of Jorg Schmaeling's little masterpieces for Art Miniaturen. In an ideal world, this would, in fact, be Lasalle, but I have tweaked him a bit, retouched the paint job to help disguise the handiwork of a pro painter and rebased to the house standard - in short, I've sort of coarsened the figure so he will fit in!
This is now an all-purpose flash French cavalry commander - in the current campaign he will be Montbrun, but he would also work as an over-the-top colonel of Chasseurs a Cheval looking after a brigade. Because the figure is to have a multi-purpose role, I've waived the usual coloured border round the base to denote rank.
This is as near as my collection gets to class... Now - into The Cupboard with him.
If you study a modern English-language history of the Peninsular War - and Charles Esdaile's book is a particularly good example - you get an impression of that conflict which would have been barely recognisable 50 years ago.
It seems unbelievable now, but my original plan for my wargame armies for the Peninsular War had no Spanish troops on either side. Laughable might be a better word. There were reasons. Partly it had to do with the availability of suitable miniatures in the correct scale (20mm or old-fashioned 25mm - basically "1-inch" figures), but it is also true that the overwhelming impression I gained from my reading prior to (say) 1975 was that this was appropriate. I had read and re-read Michael Glover's "Wellington's Victories in the Peninsula", and moved on to his more substantial "The Peninsular War 1807-1814" when it appeared in 1974. Looking at it again today, it is remarkable. Considering that Glover freely acknowledges that his main source was Oman's multi-volume tome, it does make you wonder what happened to all the Spanish bits. The narrative strings together the campaigns of the British troops (with some reference to their integrated Portuguese allies) and of the French armies which were specifically engaged in opposing them. Thus there is only fleeting reference to the other French armies (virtually nothing about the crucial fighting between Suchet and the guerrilla forces in the north, for example), and the Spaniards appear only rarely, and in cartoon form. Cuesta is portrayed as a character straight out of Punch and Judy, and the performances of the Spanish field armies are mentioned only when they support the general themes of incompetence and disorganisation. The cataclysmic Spanish success at Baylen is covered in two short paragraphs, and - to restore balance - Castaños is described as "one of the few Spaniards of talent".
You get the idea. This polarised view of history was supported by Jac Weller's "Wellington in the Peninsula" and by what I had seen of the classic work by Napier. The Spanish guerrillas were effective (if distressingly given to barbaric vengeance), but the real war was between Wellesley/Wellington and the French Army of Portugal. This was the received British view of the Peninsular War.
Because of the shortage of pre-1812 wargame figures, I was pretty much committed to the later stages of the war, and I took Salamanca as my period of choice. Admittedly there were some Spanish troops in the Allied army at Salamanca, but they did not play a major part, I could find little or no reliable information about either their organisation or their dress, and the writings of Messrs Featherstone and Co suggested very strongly that no-one would actually choose to command a Spanish force anyway. So though I did pencil De España's division into my proposed OOB, I had no thoughts really on how to set about recruiting it.
Since my return to wargaming this period in recent years, I find that the histories now give a much wider view, and that it is now generally accepted that the Spaniards did much more than merely providing a location and an excuse for the British and the French to fight each other. I have done a lot of work on researching and building Spanish contingents for both sides, still taking my base year as 1812. It is a lot easier now.
The Nationalist Forces
None of this would ever have been possible if I hadn't obtained a copy of JM Bueno's fine "Uniformes Españoles de la Guerra de Independencia", which is a real reference bible. In the scales I use, only Hinton Hunt and Minifigs (I can use some S-Range figures) made Spanish infantry in the British supplied 1812 uniform. Since I was dissuaded from selling the house to raise funds to purchase HH (which, strictly speaking, are a tad small for me anyway), I managed to collect together enough Minifigs SN1s figures to put together some battalions. Partly this was achieved though some swaps which in some cases amounted almost to acts of charity - I am still very appreciative of everyone who helped. Most of my line units are SN1s, with mounted colonels converted from Art Miniaturen Belgians. The Cazadores de Castilla required a double-breasted coat with British light-infantry style shakos, so Falcata French infantry were fitted with Higgins British LI heads. Because I could not get hold of enough S-Range infantry, I also have a battalion of Warrior figures. They are OK, but I'll replace them if I can get more of the Minifigs. There's something about Warrior - if you measure them they should be reasonably compatible, but somehow they don't look quite right. Also, they always have that lunging stance which causes visitors to say, "Ah - I see you have some Warrior infantry - what unit is that?".
Regiments of Sevilla, 2nd Princesa and Jaen, with, in the foreground, the Tiradores de Castilla (left) and Cazadores de Castilla.
I have also added a battery - the gunners are uniformed in the French style - not least because the castings are NapoleoN French foot artillery. The officer is Art Miniaturen.
My generals are as yet unpainted - they are in the pipeline. I would like to add some cavalry, but am still looking for suitable figures. Warrior do make lancers, but they have a touch of Picasso’s Don Quixote about them which makes it hard for me to take them seriously, and Warrior's own horses are too like Bucephalus to fit in. There were (very briefly) some terrific Falcata lancers, available a couple of years ago, but I missed those (of course).
I'm now working on a militia brigade to add to this organisation - 4 battalions plus a battery. Castings are NapoleoN and more Minifigs S-Range, and I hope to obtain a battalion's-worth of Kennington's 1812 American militia, which look to me like a good prospect for a nation switch. I'll put some pictures up here when the militia are painted and ready for action.
Another manufacturer who is still doing well, but a rather different style of figure. Jorg Schmaeling's super 1/72 metal figures are, in my view, diorama-style, and very nice too - a little pricey, but lovely. Art Miniaturen are also nice, helpful people to deal with. Herr Schmaeling is happy to provide odd figures from his listed sets, and I understand that he will even consider spare parts - hats, pelisses and so on.
Apart from the price (which is not astronomical, by the way), the only other slight snags are
(1) there is occasional flash trouble - these figures are very detailed, but no compromise is made in animation to ease the casting process - some of the older figures can display signs of mould damage, particularly swords and muskets, and horses' legs can require a bit of dremelling to make them perfect
(2) Schmaeling does not accept payment by credit card or PayPal (at least he didn't a couple of months ago) - this is a bit of an issue for UK residents, since the good old British banks still make it very expensive to transfer money internationally. It is not a real stopper, but how you choose to work around the problem is up to you. I would never, of course, advise anyone to send cash euros in a registered letter. Perish the thought.
I have only one unit which is entirely Art Minaturen - my beloved French 3rd Hussars. These cost me a real arm and a leg, since I felt that my painting could not do justice to such fine figures, so I commissioned the very talented Jez Farminer to do the full collector-standard paint job on them. I am very pleased with them, but I cannot afford to follow this route very often!
I have some French voltigeurs, and a good number of command figures. Here are a few pictures, which I hope speak for themselves.
Finally, here's a conversion - I produced this Spanish colonel by grafting a Les Higgins British Light Infantry head on to an Art Miniaturen Belgian officer figure. The width and quality of the range make these figures ideal for conversions.
