His Majesty's Guardsman

One of, if not the quality, I admire most in our hobby, is the depth of friendships we develop over our shared passion for this relatively obscure endeavor.  I have good friends across the city, and some across the globe.  Of those international friends, many I have never met in person - a state of things I hope to remedy!  

 

Astute readers of my blog will have noted the troops around Vimiero are taking a "Winter's Peace" of sorts while I attend to health matters.  Not to belabor the medical stuff; I recently discovered that I was living with two large aortic aneurysms.  Thanks to the amazing folks at the medical center where I work, I am now one week out of post-op, home, and feeling stronger every day.  I even walked the pups yesterday much to my wife's chagrin.  Health-wise, I could not have hoped for a better outcome.  It looks like my dear spouse and family are stuck with me for at least another 40 years (that may be a bit greedy, but why not at this point).

 

Not a day after getting home from the hospital, I discovered this ambassador waiting for me in the mailbox.  What a joy to open the package and find this immaculately painted guardsman in the old style.  He is a vintage 30mm Willie figure of an Imperial Guardsman originally sculpted by Edward Suren and ably painted by Aly Morrison.

 

The guardsman came complete with orders which read: "His Imperial Majesty sends his regards and has dispatched one of his finest guardsmen to ensure that you take time to rest and recover.  Most importantly - GET WELL SOON!" signed Aly Morrison (ADC)

 Thanks to all for the support along this journey and for the host of well wishes I have received from our community.  With any luck I'll be able to incorporate painting into part of my rehab and will have some of my own soldiers to show off soon.  In the meantime, I want to take a moment to express my gratitude to Aly for a real lift of my spirits that was unexpected and truly delightful.  Best to you my friend.

A Bavarian Welsh and French Confection of Metal Delights

Today I present a lovely assortment of miniature sculpting styles and nationalities.  The last couple of months I have been preparing for an international re-creation of the battle north of Vimiero, but while that battle has been progressing over email, I have been busily painting and am happy to show the results of those efforts below (as well as a few spoiler photos of the battle).

The Royal Welsh 23rd Fusiliers.  Originally painted by Dick Tennant

I wanted the Battalion to have command figures in bearskins, and was a few figures short of the 36 figure standard battalion, so added a Der Kriegspieler NCO as regimental standard bearer, officer and drummer.  The rest are Hinton Hunt originals painted by Mr. Tennant in his usual extraordinary style.  I refreshed the paint a bit and added some shading.

The flags had to be replaced unfortunately, so I decided I might as well incorporate some Hagen tassels from their flag pole set.

The DKs fit in just fine with their Hinton Hunt brethren in this instance, which was a relief!

A Waterloo 1815 metal casting from their command set, slightly modified and demoted, serves as Colonel Ellis of the Fusiliers

I love the animation of this figure as he peers forward over the neck of his horse.

Here we have an Art Miniaturen casting of Roustam Raza, Napoleon's body guard and secondary valet.

You have to love all of the gold on the oriental costume which he would wear on ceremonial occasions.

The horses bridle was my favorite part!

On deck is the 76th Infantry Regiment of the Line, so I thought I would go ahead and get their Colonel and Chef de Bataillon done while I was working on command figures.

On the left is an SHQ casting and on the right, perhaps my all time favorite sculpt, a Franznap Colonel.

The different sculpting styles is really evident when seen from behind.

More Franznap - a Bavarian six horse artillery train.

Limber riders and gun complete the set.

The traces were a little fiddly to put together, but come as part of the set cast in metal.

Altogether a fantastic piece.

A better view of the artillery drivers and the traces.

I won't be doing any more six horse artillery trains until I model Napoleon's beautiful daughters - 12 pounders in the Imperial Guard artillery reserve.

Bavarian light artillery piece

Note the attached bucket as well as the cast on drag chain.

Just another beautifully detailed piece by Franznap.

Lastly a few teaser shots from the ongoing battle north of Vimiero.  The troops have temporarily laid down their arms while I take care of some health matters, but I hope to be up and running again in a couple of months.  Till then, happy gaming!

 

Vimiero 1808 - Test Game

 Vimiero 1808 is the largest engagement I have tried thus far using Muskets and Marshals, so before having a full crew over to play I wanted to get in a test game.  To that end I had a couple of brave volunteers willing to brave the cool temps in my garage head over to test the game (Thanks to SD and JD for their enthusiasm and great ideas).  Once again the rules performed very well with results that seemed historically based.  I have been consistently pleased at how well this simple set of rules has performed.  I did make a few tweaks to accommodate my big battalions and I wanted to make sure they did not adversely affect game play.  Not wanting to give away the game entirely since there is another bigger game day planned, I'll just present a brief overview of the day's action.

 

Starting positions as a French brigade faces off against three British brigades a few miles North of Vimiero.

 

British assault up the hill.

View from the French side as the battalions clash - Note the skirmishers have retreated behind the line.

Intense fighting at the top of the hill.

The British breakthrough in the center and their right has pushed back the French, but on the left of the line the French have mounted a stubborn defense, delaying the British advance.

Brennier's brigade arrives in the nick of time - maybe too early - with a regiments of Dragoons in the lead.

Lead elements of the British advance around their left flank, form square in the nick of time and the Dragoons flow around the square taking heavy casualties in the process.

The next British regiment suddenly finds themselves unprepared for a cavalry assault and still in line.

More bad news for the British - Colonel Macara of the Black Watch goes down!

On the left of the British line the French refuse to give ground and send one British Regiment streaming to the rear just as a second engages them.  Despite overwhelming odds the French hang on by the skin of their teeth!

Oh the shame of it all!

But what is this?  Major Dornier of the French 69th is down!

More good news for the British as their second flanking battalion form square just as the French Dragoons bug out due to British fire from the first square.

At this point it seemed like a good place to call it for the day, as the next phase of the battle was likely to take some time to resolve.  The game was a great test of the rules and really helped identify a few questions I need to ask, and most importantly, how to calculate the victory conditions and the timing of reinforcements.  Many thanks to SD and JD for their input and of course Stryker over on the Hinton Hunt Vintage Wargame Figures blog, for his development of the rules and willingness to share!

Terrain for Vimiero and Works in Progress

 After taking over ownership of the Tennant collection and starting in on the repairs and re-basing, I thought it would be fun to recreate the early Peninsular War battles using the figures.  Little did I know what an all-encompassing and time intensive endeavor that would be!  The initial online battle was Rolica, fought with Wellington Man of New Zealand using a turn by turn passing of orders and each of us rolling for outcomes and fire results while half a world away.  Almost a full year and a half later I am finally knocking on the door of readiness for the subsequent battle of Vimiero.  

The year is 1808.  The French have fought a successful delaying action at Rolica, but were nonetheless, resoundingly defeated in the field of battle by the aggressive tactics of the British and Portuguese forces under the command of Wellington.  Their sacrifice did however buy enough time for the French forces to combine and converge on the small town of Vimiero, where Wellington lay camped and hopefully (if you are French) unsuspecting of the rapid approach of the French army...

Vimiero was essentially two battles; the battle for the town, and the battle several miles to the North.

 

The northern battle was fought on gently rolling hillsides separated by deep ravines

When scaled to the footprint of the miniature battalions, my wargames table is ~ 1.1 x 0.6 miles, which corresponds to the area of the battle shown above, and centered on the small farm of Ventosa.

 

Construction of the hillside begins with 1/2 inch thick blue insulation foam.

A hot wire foam cutter that I got at half price from the local art store long ago makes short work of trimming the edges, but open garage doors are a must!

Frequent reference checks are required.  The final map is marked with a grid to make the transfer of the hillside shapes reasonably accurate.

Getting there.  The magnifier is essential for reading the contour map!

Still had plenty of left over paint from building the Rolica terrain.

The hillside assembled with roads and rivers added to the ravines.

The main road along the ridge was just painted onto the hills with a thick textured paint made from white glue, sand, water and brown paints.  At this point the battlefield is essentially done and just awaiting the arrival of the troops!

Works in Progress

In the meantime I have been working on a variety of different modeling projects that have piqued my interest over the last month.

After painting the Legion du Midi, I really wanted to paint some figures with well sculpted figures.  The Franznap Bavarian foot artillery is an amazing set with beautifully sculpted figures and details.  Here you see the artillery and limber almost done.

The limber will be pulled by a six horse team.

I realized I need another light infantry Colonel for the Vimiero battle, so here he is coming along.

The Bavarian artillerists

One of the 54mm sculpts from a friend's dad's collection.  I'll be priming the whole piece white shortly now that construction is done.  Getting the light foil of the reins to behave is proving to be a challenge however.

Some guard Chasseurs a Cheval from that collection.  These were quite the challenge to assemble, but if I can ever find the time to paint them will hopefully look truly impressive!

I was inspired to add a bridge to my collection of terrain when I saw a post by Wellington Man featuring a river crossing, so I pulled out the Linka castings I had on hand.  My son had cast up a ton of these from dental plaster, and I had just enough of the required pieces to pull this out of my hat.

The bridge before adding a dilute plaster wash to smooth the joints and the placement of the end pillars.

The diluted plaster really does an amazing job at disguising the seams, but I still wanted to texture the roadway pretty heavily to further hide the joints.

The final piece.  The variegated stone colours add visual interest as well as functions to disguise the seams.  This was a super fun and quick project that really only took a couple of afternoons since all of the pieces were pre-cast.

I hope you have enjoyed this rambling post.  The next post I had hoped would be all about Vimiero, but alas, I miscounted and need to prepare one more British battalion.  The 23rd Welsh Fusiliers are prepped and should be a relatively quick addition as I am only adding a few command pieces.  Until then, stay safe and happy gaming.