French Guard Artillery

1 x horse gun and 4 x crew + 1 x foot gun and 6 x crew. The hose artillery gun is HH, need to replace this with a larger model, it looks a bit ridiculous next to a true 25mm piece.

French Line infantry reinforcements

Just completed my second French line infantry battalion.
The figures are early Minifigs (possibly Alberken? I've never seen any Alberken figures myself) apart from the officer who is a Hinton Hunt casting and the drummer who I believe is Newline.

These are highly compatible with HH size & style wise, in fact I recall reading on the Vintage 20mil site that there was a huge controversy in the mid / late 60's over the provenance of Minifigs masters. Looking at the HH officer and the Minifigs eagle bearer side-by-side I can see why you might think that one was a conversion from the other (allegedly).

French Foot Artillery

I decided I needed to add a battery of artillery to my fledgling French army, but as I've got 12 crew figures and 3 guns I thought why not paint them all in one batch? So here they are.

All completed in less than a week, to be fair I have had a lot of spare time!

All original HH figures, but I think the guns are Hinchcliffe.

Fifth of Five

The last two weeks I have been working on a unit of French Line Lancers.
As these are the fifth French unit I've painted as part of this project I decided to paint them in the facing colours of the 5th Regiment. The PVA glue sticking the flock to the bases is still not dry and it shows in these pictures, it'll dry clear in a couple of hours. All original HH OPCs ,which I do prefer to the 'dismountable' series, even if the groinal area of the riders is a little difficult to reach with a paintbrush.

Fly me two dragoons

Not many people know but back in 1812, Napoleon was experimenting with a balloon observation corps. Obviously horses were short at the time due to the army eating most of them on the retreat from Moscow. As his Dragoons were considered quite flexible (ie being converted to Lancers or serving on foot) he decided these would be the guys to man his fledgling aerial service. Meanwhile Marshal Ney was commanding the rearguard on the retreat and had no cavalry left to scout for the dreaded Cossacks. So he sent an urgent communique to the Emperor, which has since been memorialised in song by none other than Francis Albert Sinatra, "Fly me two Dragoons so I can slay among the Tsars!".

Apologies for the appalling humour, I blame over-indulgence over the festive period.

Meanwhile here are my completed 1st Dragoons

As they arrived from Ebay:-

Refurbished:-

Seasons greetings to all.

Cheers

Dave

Back with bearskins!

After a hobby lay-off of quite a few weeks I managed to get some painting done this week, my first attempt at a French Old Guard Grenadier battalion.

Next up will either be some French artillery or a French Dragoon unit

Painting Postponed

A couple of weeks ago I had an operation to start reconstruction of my nose following an earlier procedure to remove a skin cancer tumour. I now have a flap of skin connecting my forehead to my lower nose which could be in place for several weeks. This means I can't wear my spectacles, so can't focus close enough to do any painting.

So, I've been using my time to think about rules. I always intended to use Charles Grant's Napoleonic Wargaming rules as serialised in Military Modelling in the early 1970's and subsequently published in book form, but scaled down to 1 inch = 20 yards, 24 figure battalions, 12 figure cavalry units and 1 gun batteries. Some of the original rules relied on having figures mounted singly and units having supernumerary officers to represent Command and Control. Officers =1 point, Colonel =2 points, for a total of 6, which would be reduced as officers became casualties. Grant himself suggests (at least in the book version) that instead you could assess officer casualties in proportion to overall losses. So this is the way I decided to go. With that in mind I've produced a couple of tables which should (hopefully) be the basis for implementing playable Morale rules. The following link should open a pdf from my Google Drive:-

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QRDYqyAz00rhmwLk7lwEF3lOvtwLsXrt/view?usp=sharing

I've run through a couple of scenarios using these and they seem to work quite well.
I pitted two French battalions in column in an attack on two British units in line.

The right-hand British unit managed to decimate their French opposition, who halted, then broke and ran after getting reduced to 50% strength. The left-hand Brits were less lucky with their dice throws and the French managed to charge home, breaking the line. I repeated the scenario several times, in all cases the columns were repulsed. So, all-in-all, I think the result was reasonably accurate historically, while giving troops in column at least an outside chance of success. The columns would have had a better chance if the lines had been supported by an initial artillery bombardment!