This is a figure I've had lying around,
undercoated, for years. Enthusiasts may recognise
another vintage Alberken/Minifigs20mm OPC commander - this one starting life as the casting for
Lt.Gen "Daddy" Hill. I have now
painted him up as a senior field officer of the Royal Artillery. One issue I
had with the casting was that there is a very prominent shoulder belt, over the
LEFT shoulder - for which I could find no use. Given this fellow's map (no, it's not a towel), and the
artillery role I've given him, the rogue shoulder belt became a leather strap
for his map case. Of course, I hear you say. What else could it be?
I'll come back to this figure in a while -
for the moment, observe that his base has a black border.
I've been asked a few times in the past, what
is the significance of the coloured borders around the edges of the bases of
the senior officers in my armies? Primarily, it makes them easy to spot, but occasionally
I myself have questioned this system - house rules can sometimes live on as tradition
long after the original reasoning is lost. For my ECW armies, for example, I
dropped the coloured borders; I don't think I will, but just occasionally I
have wondered if it might be a good idea to retrofit them, after all.
It all dates back to 1970-something, when I
was using Don Featherstone's rules (gradually replaced by Charlie Wesencraft,
then - later - by the WRG, which was the beginning of a period which I refer to
vaguely as The Disillusionment...).
In these rules, a simple morale test made use of whether a unit still had its
officer present - fellow veterans and game historians will probably be able to
identify just which rules these might have been. To help with this rule, I made
sure that all unit officers were based on their own, and - to make it easier to
spot them in moments of crisis - I painted a dark green rim around the edge of
the base. This worked pretty well. I extended this to brown for brigade
commanders, white for division commanders and yellow ochre (?) for army
commanders. Yellow ochre? - well, the original idea was that I should use
vaguely earth-type colours, which would not be too offensive against the house
pea-soup green bases and tabletop.
Yes - I know, I know. The pea-soup is
already something of an affront to the visual side of things, so picking
colours which blended with it seems odd. It's OK - you just mutter the words
"Old School" under your breath, and everything is fine. In fact, if I
work at it, I can even dredge up a little genial ridicule of other people's
armies, where the soldiers carefully drag a lovingly-prepared hearthrug of
flock and cat-litter around with them - even along roads and into rivers. I am,
of course, jesting. The point is, it's OK.
In a spasm of commonsense, I eventually
replaced the unimpressive yellow ochre with a distinctive colour for the army,
so that the Anglo-Portuguese army had a red border for its commander, the
French blue, and - later - the Spanish had yellow. Yes - all right - yellow
isn't great for Spain, but it isn't red or blue and it hadn't already been
given a reserved meaning.
Righto. Time passed (that was the easy bit)
and I was no longer using regimental officers for this morale rule - though
it's always tempting to retain the coding system just in case I wish to use it
again in the future. The result was that, long after it had ceased to have any
significance, I was still devoutly painting up my units with dark green borders
around the regimental officers. A major rebasing project eventually put a stop
to that for the infantry and artillery - all command figures are now just glued
onto a multiple base, with some of their subordinates, and no bordering colour
is added. My regiments still have some way to go with liberté and fraternité, but we
have at least made a start with egalité.
However, for the cavalry it persists. Now I
would really be pushed to come up with a sensible justification for it, but any
new cavalry units I add still have the officer on his own individual base,
bordered in good old dark green. The only reason this still makes any sense at
all is that - especially in campaigns - it is a commonplace for cavalry
colonels to have to take over a brigade, particularly given the horrifying casualty
rates in the cavalry arm in my battles. So, just occasionally, a colonel with a
green border has been a useful addition to a battlefield, when acting up as a
brigadier. I think that one day I shall probably get rid of the green borders
on the cavalry, but I'm currently in that twilight,
it's-a-tradition-no-it-isn't phase.
I am now slowly moving onto a Creeping
Elegance project to change the basing standard for field officers - division
commanders are to have an attached ADC, army commanders to have 2 supporting
staff - so this gives me an opportunity to reconsider the coloured borders. I
think I'll probably keep them.
Fine. Now, if I go right back to
1970-something, I did have an additional classification of field officers. I
was aware that proper historical OOBs would identify an overall commander for
the artillery, and maybe for the engineers. Since I wasn't sure whether such a
fellow would equate to a brigade or division commander in my army organisation,
I took an escape route and came up with a separate border colour - black - for
officers of what I grouped as "service arms". Thus all commanders of
artillery and engineering get a black rim around the base.
Only problem now is - I've never had one!
I was never sure what I would use him for (my crass ignorance of how real armies
worked is a major contributor to this), and other types of painting jobs always
took priority.
Which - at long last - brings me back to
the photo at the beginning of this post - long, long ago. I have painted up the
old Alberken Hill figure to represent a senior officer of British artillery.
I was going to make him Lt.Col Hoylett Framingham in my Peninsular army, but I find that Framingham was in any case a RHA officer, and was absent after being wounded at Talavera, so I'm still pondering his identity. I intend also to
add Alex Dickson (a man from Kelso, as it happens) to look after the siege train and all that - Dickson will be
in Portuguese uniform, I think. I should also have a commander of engineering.
I think it might be appropriate for him to be on foot, and he will have the
earlier (blue) uniform. I still haven't really got a clue how these fellows
will be used on the toy battlefield (a puzzle with which some real generals of
history might empathise, come to think of it), but here, gentlemen, after only
some 40-odd years, is my first field officer with a black border.
I shall now, for shame's sake, dig out SGP
Ward's
Wellington's Headquarters to
remind myself how this stuff worked...
***** Very Late Edit *****
I found some old pics of the Picton and Napoleon Alberken figures mentioned in this post and the comments, so here they are again...
I'm also reminded that, though Napoleon came in an eBay job lot, Picton was very kindly given to me by the Old Metal Detector - apologies for my error - one of wargaming's true gentlemen. Thanks yet again, Clive!
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| Napoleon playing the part of someone else |
