Prussian Command Stands

Blücher

No, I do not have a Blucher yet, but I have recently painted up some command stands for my Prussians. I used a couple of the Calpe command sets and then added corp commanding two officers from their latest set PC9. These are absolutely lovely sets, all tell a story and are very nice to paint. They are sold as brigade command sets. I always find this a little confusing until I remember that a Prussian brigade is essentially similar in size to a French or British division. 

This made me rethink how I have set up my command bases. It is obvious to me now that I will never paint up the complete Prussian army at Waterloo or the French army at Vitoria. So I started to think about it more from a war gaming perspective. Most battles I am going to recreate are actually going to be sub-actions from larger battles, so divisional and brigade stands are really more important. At the most I will be able to field is 2-3 divisions aside, so I thought why not make big division stands. I still can throw in the occasional army commander stand at the army or corps level but really I am only going ever to need one of these for each country (this of course does not preclude me from having personality stands with Napoleon, Wellington, or Blucher). These stands will be obvious though with recognizable historical figures, so I really do not feel that they need to have different numbers of figures to represent different levels of command. I also decided to stick with 50x50mm stands for brigade stands (all but Prussian that is) with a single mounted figure. For regimental and  battalion commanders, I will continue with 25x40 mm stands.

These stands are 80x120mm, oval stands would maybe nicer but this is what I had around and I think they look quite good. First up we have the Calpe PC2 command set. You can go to the Calpe site to read the little vignette about each set. But essentially we a brigade commander standing with his telescope with his ADC holding their horses while his staff officer receives a dispatch from a mounted feldjager. I added a mounted Corp commander (but who would know with the Prussian uniform) from the PC9 command set. This one I believe represents Yorke, but it could be whomever you like.

To paint the figures, I used the guidelines on the Calpe site, they are really quite excellent.

The feldjager was a great figure to paint. I will use this stand as a divisional command stand (brigade in Prussian speak)

The second stand is Calpe PC8, which has a chief of staff to the left. This stand is actually designed to be a corps command set and I have added the Bulow figure from the PC9 set (he is the chap with his arm up in the air). The ADC is speaking to a staff officer while the other staff officer is looking at Bulow.

The chief of staff is quite an imposing figure.

I painted 3 of these figures some time ago, and at the time I was less careful with accuracy, so some of the horse leather is brown, which I actually quite like, but is quite inaccurate for Prussians.

A mounted feldjager is missing from the set, but I may add one at a later date. I had other uses for him.

Quite nice I think.

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