Behold the Glaringly Obvious – Two French Armies

The Cupboard - a lot more comfortable now that the Spanish, all the

artillery and vehicles and the ECW are stored in magnetised box files in

The Other Cupboard

Quite often, I find that I have brilliantly deduced something which has been staring me in the face for a while. I don’t like to rush my break-through moments – maybe that’s it.

My Peninsular War French army is quite big. Not compared to some, of course, but in terms of the extent to which it has exceeded the bounds of what was needed and what would have been sensible it is kind of big. An inability to stop collecting – all the usual excuses. My French army is about twice as big as could possibly be employed on my tabletop – it offers some entertaining choices of line-up in a wargame, and it is fine for providing the manpower for a campaign, but some bits of it don’t get used very often, which is a shame.

The French bit of The Cupboard - general staff are in wooden trays a few

shelves down, and guns and anything with wheels are stored elsewhere

I must explain that my army is originally built around historical fact, with the necessary large pinch of wargamer’s licence. It started out as a workable subset of the Armée de Portugal of 1812. As it grew (thank you, eBay) I could have simply increased the size of the subset – grown the thing from the original 3 divisions of infantry to the full, historical 8 divisions. Problem is that the units in that army were all pretty much vanilla French regulars – fine chaps, but you know how it is. Short on colour.

So the growth has included all sorts of Confederation, Spanish and Italian units which have enriched the army in a number of ways, but the structure is increasingly convoluted (and unlikely), with all sorts of secondments from other French armies. A couple of things have happened recently which got me thinking about the matter.

(1) My solo campaign required me to break the army into suitable units to occupy a big area on the map – it made sense to follow some kind of historical organisation (if very approximately) to do that in a sensible and satisfying way. The army began to break up a little for this one-time activity, and I have found it interesting to think of the subdivisions as separate entities. The conflict between the various army commanders was, in any case, an important sub-plot for the war.

(2) My Spanish army has grown beyond recognition – it is now big enough to take the field on its own. Maybe they should have a regular opponent. Aha.

So – although choices and variety are still important – I have come to the idea of making the permanent structure of the army such that it is in two official parts. They will continue to mix and match and visit each other as necessary, of course, but they will firm up, and not just be a temporary feature of a map game. I will, in short, have an Armée de Portugal to fight the Anglo-Portuguese, and a (slightly bastardised) Armée du Centre to fight the Spaniards – regular and/or irregular.

Great. I started sketching out the changes – which are really very small. A little evening up of formation sizes and a short list of extra commander figures which I’ll need, and we are there. In a spirit of appropriate comradeship, the two armies can share engineers and siege/fortress artillery as necessary.

The proposed structure is thus:

Army of the Centre (King Joseph & Marshal Jourdan)

Division Darmagnac

            Brigade Neuenstein

                        2e Nassau (2 Bns) & Regt de Francfort (1)

            Brigade Chassé

                        4e Hesse-Darmstadt (2) & 4e Baden (2)

            Brigade Verbigier de St Paul (Italians)

                        2e Léger (1) & 3e Ligne (2) & 5e Ligne (2)

            Italian Foot battery

Division Guye

            Royal Guard (Merlin)

                        Grenadiers (2) & Fusiliers (2) & Voltigeurs (1)

            Brigade Casapalacios (Spanish Line troops)

                        1e (Castilla) Léger (1) & 2e (Toledo) Ligne (2) & Royal-Etranger (1)

            Brigade Leberknoedel (Duchy of Stralsund-Ruegen)

                        Grenadiers (1) & Fusiliers (2) & Jaegers (1)

Spanish Guard horse battery

Stralsund foot battery

Division Villatte

            Brigade Thouvenot

Dragons à pied Provisoirs (2) & 28e Léger (1) & 4e Etranger (Prusse) (1)

& 4e Vistule (1)

            Brigade Soulier

Grenadiers Provisoirs (1) & Garde de Paris (1) & Chasseurs des

Montagnes (1) & 3e Berg (1)

            French foot battery

           

Cavalry (Gen de Divn Treillard)  

            Brigade Maupoint

                        13e Cuirassiers (3 Sqns) & 4e Dragons (3) & Dragoni Napoleone (3)

Brigade Avy

5e Chevauxleger-lanciers (3) & 7e (Vistule) Chevauxleger-lanciers (3)

            Brigade Kleinwinkel (Stralsund-Ruegen)

                        1e Chevauxlegers (3) & 2e Chevauxlegers (3)

                         

             

Army of Portugal (Marshal Marmont)

Division Foy

            Brigade Chemineau

                        6e Léger (3 Bns) & 69e Ligne (2)

            Brigade Desgraviers

                        39e Ligne (2) & 76e Ligne (2)

            Horse battery

Division Clauzel

            Brigade Berlier

                        25e Léger (3) & 27e Ligne (2)

            Brigade Barbot

                        50e Ligne (3) & 59e Ligne (2)

            Foot battery

Division Maucune

            Brigade Arnauld

                        15e Ligne (3) & 66e Ligne (2)

            Brigade Montfort

                        82e Ligne (2) & 86e Ligne (2)

            Foot battery

Heavy Cavalry (Boyer)

            Brigade Carrié de Boissy

                        6e Dragons (3 Sqns) & 11e Dragons (3)

            Brigade Col Boudinhon-Valdec

                        15e Dragons (3) & 25e Dragons (3)

            Horse battery

Light Cavalry (Curto)

            Brigade Col Desfossés

                        3e Hussards (3) & 22e Chasseurs (3)

            Brigade Col Vial

                        13e Chasseurs (3) & 26e Chasseurs (3)

Park, Engineering etc

            2 Foot batteries

            5 Garrison batteries

            Bridging Train

            4 cos Sapeurs/Mineurs

Prov bn of regimental sapeurs

This is not the state of my current campaign (except coincidentally). These units all exist (apart from a couple of generals, which are in hand), and each infantry brigade also includes a small combined tirailleur battalion of 9 or 12 figures. There are still some things in the spares box which should join the army at some future date, but I have deliberately excluded anything which exists only on paper.

If it seems appropriate, I may post some new team photos when everything is done. With two armies available, the Emperor himself might make the occasional cameo appearance, if only to witness the lack of co-operation at first hand.

Spanish Militia - One Small Step

Since my Falcata parcel arrived – and I confess I had given up on it by the time it appeared – I now have the happy problem of having some more Spanish troops to organise and paint.

I spent a few days sifting through various Spanish OOB’s from the Guerra de Independencia – Oman and Nafziger and the relevant bits of the J J Sañudo database – and cross checking against the illustrations and tables in Bueno. The idea is to identify a (fairly) historically authentic formation whose uniforms suit the new figures. I like this kind of homework.

The figures themselves are probably a little early in the war for me. Falcata base their range around the 1808-09 period, and the voluntarios and milicias are consistent with this – lots of round hats and double breasted lapels in evidence. However, such uniforms could have been seen right through to the end of the war – and if I produce anything which is not correct then it is simply a matter of the new uniform supplies not having arrived yet!

One thing that surprised me is that, if you study the OOB of the Spanish 4^th Army in July 1813, for example, it is very obvious from Bueno that about two-thirds of the units present had British-made single-breasted uniforms – dark blue with lighter blue collar and cuffs. And presumably they had British LI-style shakos as well. Somewhere in Lancashire, the mills must have been working night shifts! Interesting, but dull – I want some nice, classic militia that look like militia.

I have identified enough sound figures to produce four good battalions. One of these will be an 18-man light infantry unit - with lapels, ventral cartridge pouches, a mixture of trouser/breeches types, and with the skirmishers converted from light infantrymen, suitably re-headed. Falcata managed to send me enough broken figures to allow for head-donors, though to be fair they sent a lot of spare figures anyway. All these figures are pre-production castings, so there has been some cleaning up to do, but they will paint up nicely, I think.

I also have the makings of three units of normal volunteers/militia/provinciales (i.e. not lights) at 24 figures to a battalion. Two of these are in double breasted jackets, with a sprinkling of ventral pouches (nothing to do with kangaroos), and one is a mixed lot, various jacket styles, and a few of these have bicornes. My house standard does not normally provide such lowly troops as these with a mounted colonel, though a fairly ornate brigadier would be in order.

Yesterday I set about painting up the light infantry. Because of the number of body part grafts in the conversions, I decided against risking them in the mail to my normal Peninsular War painter, and to do them myself. I got started well enough – I am a bit nervous about black undercoat, since I require frightening amounts of light to see the detail on black figures – but that was OK. I got them undercoated, and did all the blue bits, but came to a shuddering halt when I got to red, since my main pot of red has turned into something other than paint. To save face, I found an old pot of red with just enough in it to do a single figure, and decided to paint a single pilot figure completely. I hadn’t intended to do this, of course, and it is something I normally don’t do (except when I am sending a shipment for painting in Sri Lanka – separate story), but in fact it’s probably a good idea. Or at least I can make the best of things and pretend it is a good idea.

So at the top of this post you will see the only completed output from yesterday’s session – a private soldier of the Regimiento del Ribero. You are unlikely to have seen one of these miniatures before, since they are not in full production yet, and obtaining them at the moment is a life-shortening exercise. I think this fellow would be ES41 in Falcata’s catalogue if it ran that far.

I used to smile faintly at blog posts dedicated to describing a lack of progress, but here I am doing it myself. Oh well. I have ordered up some red paint, and with luck it should arrive in a day or so. Since I live on the dark side of the moon, it is not simply a question of walking to my nearest stockist. I use a lot of Citadel paints – I say this without any embarrassment (you want to make something of it?) – and the Games Workshop website identifies my nearest stockist as being in Kirkcaldy – only some 17 miles away. This would certainly be true if I had a helicopter handy, or even a motor launch, but the reality requires me to drive through Edinburgh to the Forth Bridge, over the water and all the way back up the other side, which is a mighty trek for a piddling pot of paint. I have ordered online from Amazon – bless them. The paint is reasonably priced, the postage is extortionate, but the whole deal is ever so much cheaper than schlepping to the nearest city and parking in the Mafia’s multi-story arrangements.

The Joy of Robots – my nearest GW store, apparently

So when the paint arrives I’ll crack on with getting this chap some colleagues. The militia-type command figures are rather fun – more soon. There you are – I’ve managed to write another post about hardly anything. Must get out more.  

ECW - How big is an inch, Jack?

I had a hard day yesterday – it doesn’t matter why. Honest toil is a fine thing, I’ve just got out of the habit, but one consequence is that today I’m taking it easier, and am less focused than usual.

Thus I shall start – fleetingly – with a digression [now there’s a surprise]. This is what I was thinking of writing about today, but when I looked into the matter I decided against it. My mum recently heard (or watched?) a BBC programme commemorating the fighting in Libya in WW2, and El Alamein, Tobruk – all that. At one point, they were interviewing an elderly veteran, and they asked him, what was the most frightening thing he remembered from the war in the desert?

Spiders, he said. Camel Spiders were the most terrifying thing he experienced there – all the soldiers lived in fear of them. When my mother mentioned this, I had an idea that it might make an appropriate post, with a back reference to my previous Hooptedoodle on the adventures of Max Spinnejäger, my bold, spider-killing alter ego. However, when Mme la Comtesse and I checked Camel Spiders on Google, we were forced to run around the house for a little while, screaming and waving our arms. If you wish to look them up, please feel free to do so, but do not tell me about them. I wish to know no more of the subject. Mighty Max S has just retired to a sealed rest home, as far from Libya as possible.

Jack Scruby

To the main topic, then. I have already bounced this off a few of my usual expert sources, but none of them could help, so this is a general appeal to anyone who has any useful ideas.

Recently I have been interested in obtaining 20mm figures for billmen, clubmen - peasant hooligans, really – for my ECW armies. I’ve had some good suggestions, involving converting plastic figures, or converting Les Higgins artillery figures, and I also have an interesting sample figure, a militia pikeman  from Tumbling Dice, which is (to be fussy about it) a little chubby for a perfect match with the rest of my chaps, but still worth serious consideration.

Thereby, you see, hangs the problem. My 20mm ECW figures are quite small – mostly Les Higgins and Hinton Hunt, with some SHQ in the mix, they are too small to combine comfortably with Art Miniaturen, or the forthcoming Falcata 30YW figures, or even with 1/72 scale plastics. My figures, I guess, must be smaller than 1/72.

So I spent a little time looking at the possibilities of borrowing figures from other periods, or from makers I hadn’t considered. And I thought of Scruby.

I checked out Historifigs catalogue online, and I see that the Scruby Thirty Years War range (which might be just what I’m interested in, and which is still in production) are described as “1 inch” scale. There is an interesting article by Jack Scruby himself on the website at Historifigs, in which he describes how he came to re-issue the 30YW range in this scale, the implication being that they came from an earlier period.

I could take this literally, and assume – since 1 inch is almost exactly 25mm – that these are the same as Scruby’s 25mm, which (as everyone knows) are about the same size as Hinton Hunt’s 20mm. Interesting. That would fit. On the other hand, 1 inch might mean something different.

If, at this point, anyone feels moved to send a comment about the correct way of measuring a wargames miniature, then please don’t bother. I appreciate the thought, but I tend to fall asleep while such explanations are going on. The only criterion which matters is, do they look good alongside other figures which they are to be used with? I don’t care whether we should measure a miniature soldier from the toenail to the eye socket, or to the scalp, or to the bookshelf behind him. Accuracy, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

So what I’d really like to know is, does anyone have any experience of Scruby’s 1” 30YW figures? Anyone actually got any? How big are they? How big is an inch, in fact? As a general guide, anything which is a little smaller than plastic 1/72 would be in the ball park. I could, of course, order some samples from Historifigs – in fact I probably will – but I thought someone might have been down this road before. I don’t think any other range in Historifigs’ very large catalogue is advertised as 1 inch. I am intrigued.

But don’t mention spiders. I don’t dig spiders, man.

Paul Glickman's take on the Stan Freberg take on the classic 1950s hit.

Late Edit: many thanks to Ross for a very useful link to the Historifigs site, which shows this extract from the 1968 Scruby catalog. This seems to indicate that 1-inch figures are somewhere between the  25mm and 30mm ranges in size. If the drawing is to scale, it suggests that Scruby had a house standard inch measuring about 28mm, which was an astonishing piece of foresight, and is similar to the conversion ratio used by my local hardware store, as  discussed in my recent blog post on Hardboard.

From 1968 Scruby catalog (thanks to Historifigs)

Hooptedoodle #70 – Don, the Probability Well

Today’s pointless yarn is about a fellow I was at school with, somewhere around the middle of the last century.

Don was always an engaging, likeable chap – great sense of humour, and he was a good footballer as a kid – but he had a remarkable ability to get into scrapes. He was constantly getting hurt, or into trouble for something which, strictly, wasn’t his fault. Unlucky - you know?

When we left school we pretty much lost touch, and since we live hundreds of miles apart I’ve only met him a few times since, but I still hear tales of his misadventures. Don seems to have a knack of being around when things go wrong. There is a long record of 200 year old pictures falling off walls as he walked past, lifts getting stuck when he was in them, one case of a very old and valuable parrot which died of a heart attack when Don spoke to it - things like that.

I arranged to meet him for a beer about 5 years ago when I was visiting his part of the world, and was privileged to see a small sample of his powers in action. A full pint of Guinness slid horizontally across a perfectly steady table – no-one touched it – and dropped into someone’s lap. I swear this is true – there were four of us at the table, and we all saw it quite clearly. Later during the same evening (and this was before the general smoking ban came into effect in England), Don took exception to a note which was attached to the ash tray on our table, which said:

Please be considerate of diners in our restaurant. If anyone

is eating near you, please refrain from smoking. Thank you.

The Management.

Don airily waved his hand-rolled cigarette over the ashtray, and accidentally managed to set both the notice and a paper napkin alight, which caused some excitement. By this time, the staff of the pub were keeping a very careful eye on us, but we survived the rest of the evening without further dramas.

My favourite Don story was told to me by another old school chum (are you allowed to have school chums now?), who was present on the occasion when a group of friends was meeting in a London pub before going to the theatre. Don arrived a bit late, and was introduced to a lady in the party whom he had not met before. As she stood up to greet him, Don bowed in suitably theatrical style and their heads met with quite a thump. The general merriment was ended when the lady realised that she had become separated from one of her contact lenses, and would not be able to watch the play without it. A panic search failed to find it, so she rushed off to get a taxi home to collect some spare lenses.

She was about half-way home when the tip of Don’s cigarette, which somehow had fallen into her handbag and had been smouldering quietly, caused her bag to burst into flames. A bottle of cologne exploded and, though no-one was injured, the fire brigade had to come to put out the burning cab.

I have no plans to travel on an aeroplane with Don. To me, the scariest thing of all is that he has earned his living for the last 40 years – and very successfully – as a driving instructor. Are some people genuinely accident prone, or are they just clumsier or less careful than others?

Solo Campaign – where is it?

Back in February I got a nice email from Francis, which prompted a time-out discussion of how my solo Peninsular War campaign worked. I was a bit shaken at the time to learn that Francis was sufficiently excited about my efforts to think about having a go himself.

This week Francis was in touch again, asking what has happened to the solo campaign – have I abandoned it?

It’s a good question, but the answer is no – the campaign continues, but has been delayed for a number of reasons, some of which are not really very good reasons at all.

(1) Recent bad attack of Real Life – I have been involved with banks and lawyers and an accountant and all sorts of people, trying to make sense of my mother’s finances (which are not in trouble – merely obscure) and also to do some work on a trust fund of which I am the managing trustee. Boring but necessary. In truth, the impact on hobby time has been less to do with the actual time spent on these tasks than with the dispiriting effect that they have. Spending an hour trying to have a sensible discussion with my “personal account manager” at RBS, for example, is a depressing experience for both of us.

(2) The English Civil War – my reading and the arrival of the first real troops have absorbed a lot of the available enthusiasm. Much of the hobby time I have had has been spent on this. That’s all fine – there’s no rush, after all.

(3) The amount of joy I get from the campaign has been dimmed a bit by a couple of early decisions I made which I now regret. This is not a terminal problem, and I intend to carry on anyway, but I wouldn’t do this campaign the same way again. The particular issues are:

(a) The intelligence rules don’t really work very well – more seriously, they are tedious enough to prompt me to take shortcuts or marginalise them. They would work well for two players with an umpire – this is a comment which is of general application to a number of the problems I’ve come up against, and is maybe a reflection of the inherent difficulty of making sense of a solo campaign – or at least of my failure to understand these difficulties fully in advance.

(b) The theatre of operations is hugely complex, and I thought I was being clever by adopting the game map from Omega Games’ “War to the Death”, which represents the peninsula as an array of “Area” boxes connected by notional roads. This greatly simplified the movement and supply rules. I also declared some parts of Spain off-limits for the game, to concentrate activity into the area around the Portuguese border and the roads back towards France and Madrid. In reality, this has forced the campaign into too few areas – the tendency is for big clumpy armies to march around the same parts of the map. I would have been happier with a more detailed map, and more detailed distribution of the forces, but the workload would have been impossible. Again, this is an area where the campaign would have worked better with two players and an umpire...

(c) This one is a real pain – I originally intended to write a little computer program to handle attrition, recruitment and battle losses and recovery for all the units. I didn’t, since I was not confident that the rules were firm enough, and since the dice-throwing rules I had drawn up looked simple in operation. This paper-based book-keeping is proving to be a lot of work – even with a battery of spreadsheets, it is a problem. I wish I had written that program – it would have reduced the workload of running the campaign by about 40%. The campaign will not work without the numbers, but I would rather spend my time on map movement, battles and writing up the account. An umpire would have had a problem with this too. I could still write the program, but it’s a bit late now.

Not another letter from my mother's lawyer?

So? So I’ll get back to the campaign very soon, with due apologies to anyone who has missed it, and with thanks to Francis for giving me a prod. The arrival of November and the greater emphasis on indoor activities will be a help.

I have been thinking of uniting the two separate parts of the Spanish “4^th Army” by sailing one part around the Spanish coast on British ships, but need to add a few rules to make this work. I must read up on how fast ships sailed in 1812, and maybe introduce a random event which can sink the lot in a storm!

The campaign was still a good idea. I just needed more time and a new brain. 

ECW - And Still They Come

Another two units of foot ready for action - here are (in the red) Sir Thomas Tyldesley's Regiment [R] and John Booth's Regiment [P]. Just for a change, the Hinton Hunt unit are the Royalists this time, the Parlies being (mostly) Les Higgins.

I find that I'm still doggedly making sure that the two armies build up at the same pace - it occurred to me today that it must be important for some reason. Since I am still some way short of being able to stage an actual battle, I'm not sure why I am being so careful to keep everything in step. Not to worry - I'm happy with progress, which continues to be steady rather than dramatic.

I now have six units of foot ready (3 each, naturally) and two of cavalry (even split, again), plus a few general officers. There are another two units of horse and two more of foot ready for painting, so I guess the lead mountain must be getting smaller.

My traditional terminology - "Ready to go in The Cupboard" as a euphemism for "Ready to Fight" - is not applicable to my ECW troops, since they do not live in The Cupboard - they are kept in a series of nice, new, pink box files!

Spanish Army - New Commander

Hot from the much-delayed parcel of Falcata figures, here - at last - is the Commander of my Nationalist "4th Army" for the Peninsular War. This is Mariscal de Campo Don Pedro Agostin Giron, Marquis de las Amarilas, Duque de Ahumada (1778–1842), accompanied by his trusty chief of staff, Colonel Sainz.

Giron was a competent, rather than exceptional leader, but the fact that General Castaños, the victor of Bailen, was his uncle must have been a big plus on his CV.

The tasteful yellow border to the base identifies the Spanish commander - house rules...