Marechal De Saxe

The world is full of secrets and it should be no surprise if Tradition of London have theirs. If you go to their website, all the wargame figure ranges seem to be visible in a block on the main page: so you click on "30 mm Tradition" or "30mm Suren" and off you go.


And you might just miss the link Tradition Scandinavia which leads to 30mm Willie Series which would be a shame because, unless you follow them, you will never happen upon such wonders as The High Command T.S. Willie Box D F1.  These boxed sets are Suren figures that have been cleaned up: they retain all their original beauty but have had the wrinkles that come with age removed. With Private Schulz currently awaiting his great encounter with destiny (in the form of silicone rubber mould making) I have need of another project. And this will fill the gap nicely.

Marechal De Saxe: Suren Figure on Stadden Horse

The box does not come with horses supplied: a great convenience for me as it allows me to order the Stadden horses which I prefer. The first figure I chose to work on is the one that I take to be Marechal De Saxe. Any general lively enough to die from a 'surfeit des femmes' following an 'interview with a troop of eight actresses' deserves a figure to commemorate him.

Saxe at Fontenoy - Or Not

I found the choice of uniform for de Saxe problematic. Pictures of him at Fontenoy show him mounted on a white or a brown horse and he is dressed in a dark blue or a red uniform. According to Wikipedia he was carried round the battle in a wicker chair (he probably needed a rest) so the artists are clearly not fussy about accuracy. I chose to use the red uniform simply because it differs from the Prussian blue of the "other lot".
 
The only physical changes I made to the figure were to cut the rear of the saddle cloth off and replace it with milliput that I could fit more exactly to the horse's back, and to replace the cast reins with wire.  There's a small blemish on the horse's mane that I didn't notice until I could see the photographs I took of the figure: it's only with the magnification these images give that such problems are noticeable by me, alas.

Private's Progress

St. George's Volunteers (Gillray Cartoon from Wikimedia)

Poor old Private Schultz. He's never going to break any records for beauty, though he's perhaps not as ugly as the characters in a Gillray cartoon. But if the Guiness Book of Records had an entry for the greatest length of time taken to sculpt a figure, he'd be a contender. I am making progress, but it's very slow due to the number of errors I am making on the way.

Schulz -Some cleaning up left to do

The 'affair of the right hand' will serve as an example. I did manage to sculpt what I thought was a pretty good hand. It wasn't quite 'Staddenesque', but it was a servicable hand with the requisite number of fingers and generally satisfactory proportions. But a right hand has to be attached to a right arm of the correct length: and it was there that I failed. So the hand had to go when the arm was lengthened, and now Schultz is blessed with a new hand which, despite being in an anatomically better position, somehow doesn't seem to measure up to the standards of the old one.

Schultz's legs and feet have been completed and a base added.  As noted by DC in the comments in the previous post, there was a certain 'sauciness' about the legs that would have been suitable for one of Marshall de Saxe's actresses, but entirely inappropriate for infantry of the line.  Hopefully, this has now been fixed.  The figure is now as good as my current skills can make it, so I will be trying to make a mould after I have had a few days to convince myself there really is nothing else I should try to do.

Track Sections (Unpainted)

All this fiddling around with milliput is generating appreciable quantities of unused putty. Rather than waste it I'm putting it to good use making track hexes to add to my stock of terrain. The milliput is smeared onto paper as thinly as possible before ruts are drawn into it. I could use plaster of Paris for this purpose, but that would be at the risk of considerable warping as the plaster dries out. None of the modules are painted as yet: this process uses spray paint and so I need to complete all the new terrain before I can economically spray it all in one go.

Private Schultz

The photos show the current state of affairs with 'Private Schultz' my master figure for Reichsarmee musketeers. Hopefully, they demonstrate some improvement in technique from my first attempts.

At this point I am torn between hastening to complete the figure so I can start painting, and the need to work a lot more to bring the figure up to a higher standard. This figure, if successful, is likely to be the progenitor of the troops for at least three infantry regiments (almost 150 men) and so every improvement made now will be of considerable value later.

The pose will be March Attack.  At the moment I am planning so use brass rods for musket barrels, so only the wooden stock needs to be included on the figure.  If I tried to cast the musket using gravity casting I'd have to have a short and excessively thick musket.

Points Mean Prizes

It almost seems like heresy, but there are various mechanisms that can be introduced into the framework of the Charge! rules according to the taste of the wargamer. Long ago the group I played with fought Napoleonic battles with 15mm figures. These were, of course, tawdry affairs between massed ranks of popinjays garbed in peculiarly shaped headgear and not a decent tricorn in sight. But they are worth recalling because we used a variant of the Charge! melee rules (I have no idea where this variant first arose) that is of some interest. Such a system might be used for the Seven Years War as easily as for Napoleonics, and so I thought I might present it here.


Melee is resolved using individual combats as per the original Charge! rules. This is a point of importance to me, as the procedure generates some excitement (as well as occasional bad language and unkind remarks). But Charge! uses a single dice throw for each side, with multipliers according to the number and type of figures. With the variant rules, each side uses a 'score' which is calculated as the sum of the melee values of the figures involved plus the value of a dice roll.


The melee values we used in our Napoleonic battles were:

Heavy Cavalry = 3
Light Cavalry = 2
Infantry = 1


So if two light cavalry troopers are fighting one heavy cavalryman we'd be comparing (2+2+Dice) vs (3+Dice). A casualty would be removed if a difference of two or more in scores result (as the ordinary Charge! rules dictate), although an additional saving throw of 6 on a single dice roll is allowed for cuirassiers.


It should be noted here that infantry are decidedly weaker in melee than before; no less than three of them are needed for an equal combat against a single heavy cavalryman. I believe this to be a considerable advantage over the original rules where infantry, if they have significantly narrower bases, can rather too easily mob cavalry. As John Preece has noted: allowing only one infantryman to fight any given cavalry trooper can be a useful amendment to the original Charge! rules.

Dragoons Versus Cuirassiers

 

So much for detail. Now it so happens that Smith, with a full cavalry regiment of thirty all ranks, has been manoeuvring to charge a regiment of Jones's dragoons. I suspect it will come as no surprise to most readers if I disclose that the latter regiment, for a variety of reasons, numbers only twenty.

A Fight To Forget

Jim Wannop, having bundled his good lady wife out of the car somewhere in the vicinity of Wolverhampton, was in the area 'visiting family': which meant he spent the day fighting a battle with me. Two infantry battalions, a regiment of cavalry and one cannon per side with Charge! elementary rules in play. Unfortunately we were very pushed for time and so I failed to take any photos to record the fight.


That is probably for the best: my performance was not something to dwell on. Napoleon is supposed to have once said "I have fought sixty battles and I have learned nothing which I did not know at the beginning". In my case, on the evidence of the day's proceedings, it appears that I may have forgotten most of what little I ever knew.

Hohenzollern Cuirassiers - Looking On With Dismay At Their General's Ineptitude

Although I failed to recognise it at the outset, the battle was going to hinge on whether I could advance sufficiently rapidly from the confined space in which I had to deploy. Had I placed my cavalry in the front line I might have been able to do so. But instead they spent the larger part of the battle trapped to the rear of my infantry who were frankly going nowhere. Jim had noted the fault in my arrangements and, alert to the opportunity, pressed forwards to box me in very effectively.


The only bright spot was in the closing stages of the battle. My Hohenzollern Kurassiere made a brilliant charge losing but one trooper to a ragged volley, and then sabring a fair number of infantry without any further loss to themselves. Sadly, by this stage my infantry were melting away and my army was at half strength: the agreed decision point.


Perhaps I need to take a lesson from Napoleon's book.  After any setback he'd write a distorted acoount of the battle for Le Moniteur, confident that a sycophantic editor would publish it without any questions.

Officers And Gentlemen

The rank and file of the Hohenzollern Cuirassiers are almost at full muster. The near completion of this stage has raised the issue of how the regiment is to be officered. I decided (for reasons of vanity if nothing else) that I wanted the entire regiment to be made from my own figures. I am therefore taking one of my trooper castings and promoting him, by craftknife and milliput, into an officer: this will serve as a master for an officer's mould. Converting a figure is easy compared to creating one entirely from scratch, and so at the same time I am converting another casting into a dragoon figure to be used for my second Imperial cavalry regiment.

Hohenzollern Cuirassier Officer

Looking at this photo now I can see the poor fellow is frightfully flat chested:  I shall have to adjust him to more heroic proportions. 

Just to add to the list of projects (and to make more efficient use of the milliput I mix up at each stage) I am creating an improved horse figure. This uses a casting of my first horse as a starting point. I have moved two of the legs very slightly for ease of casting as well as refining the horse's anatomy very slightly.

Horse Begets Horse

The final photo shows the current state of my attempt to sculpt a new infantryman. It took a while to decide how to get this moving. I really needed some kind of physical reference point on the dolly: I didn't make any progress until I hit upon the idea of using the frontal edges of the coat for this purpose. So I rolled out two thin cylinders of milliput and pressed these onto the dolly so they ran along the approximate position I though the coat's front edges should be on. Once these were on I used two shorter cylinders to form the inner edges of the coat tails, and after that I could fill in between cylinders to complete the form of the tails.

Mr Blobby

Rubbish In, Ruins Out

I am forever looking for ways to make use of excess milliput left over from conversions, filling in, or my attempts at sculpting.  In the past I was using this for making trees, but I long since gotten enough of those.

The photo shows the final destination of the last year's unwanted milliput. This ruin is intended to take the place of the temporary fieldwork thrown up alongside the mole on the river Weser in Sittangbad. It was made out of MDF offcuts left over from making terrain baseboards. Having made the structure out of MDF, I applied the waste milliput (whenever I had some) on top and cut the stonework in it using my bamboo sculpting tool. This isn't a style of terrain making I particularly like (the effect is rather too like icing on a cake rather than believable construction) but it did salve the conscience on otherwise throwing away perfectly usable material.

Soubise and Lentulus discuss prospects for the forthcoming campaigning season

Aside from that, its clear from the photo that the green on the tile edges is far too bright and doesn't merge at all with the green on my other terrain boards.  So I'll have to go over it again and try to tone it down.