La Haie Sainte: A Black Powder Playtest

Another update to this post. For those who have already have had a look scroll down to the black print for the play test update.

I have been thinking about this scenario for a while now, and although I enjoy painting and adding to my armies, every now and then I need a game. I have also been quite busy changing the terrain surface on my terrain boards, but that is pretty well done now (a separate post documenting my experience will come), so it is time to move on.

1er Régiment de Carabiniers

For my La Haie Sainte project, I needed 2 regiments of Cuirassiers and I do have plans to do a second. But as an aside, I said to myself let's paint just one figure as those red-plumed fellows. Well I could not stop and here we are. I believe I enjoyed painting this cavalry unit more than any previous, I may even expand it to 12, but we will have to see. I have 8 more figures left from my second Perry box of heavy cavalry and they are slated to become the 1er Régiment de Cuirassiers. I have said it before, but I will say it again, these are first rate figures and I endorse them without reservation. 

I believe I got most of the uniform and the horses right, although I do note that the plume on the helmet of the trumpeter in the above sketch is white, might change it after more research. 

British Foot Artillery

I recently finished 3 stands of artillery to make up 2 batteries of British artillery. One stand is Front Rank and the other two are Perry. I must say I like the Perry figures more and more and they really lend themselves to my painting technique. I use GW Fenris Grey for the cannon carriages, maybe if I had my time back I would have gone with a more grey colour rather than blue, but these are fifth and sixth battery of British or allied artillery I have painted and I am not going to start again. The Perry figures are actually marketed as Hanoverian artillery (BH 12), but I do not believe there is any difference.

Hanoverian unit to the right and British to the left.

I actually plan to buy 2 Perry Howitzers (BH47) and make a second unit of Hanoverians, this time with a howitzer and 2 cannons each.

I believe I will add one further battery of RHA and try to stop there. My artillery for the my Anglo-Portuguese army will then include 1 battery of Portuguese FA (Redoubt), 2 batteries of RHA (1 Redoubt and 1 Perry), 3 batteries of British/Hanoverian (1 Front Rank and 2 Perry) and a battery of RHA Rocket Corps with 4 stands. I have one limber done and another ready to go and I also plan to paint up those nice Perry (BH 49) mounted Artillery commanders.


If anyone has a link to a nice print of British artillery please sent it on as I like to post a print at the beginning of each blog entry and I could not find one.


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A Nice Gesture

A couple of months ago on the Fighting Talk forum, I saw a post that offered some painted Dutch-Belgians for a minimal cost. Apparently a gamer had run out of room and wanted to get rid. I was quite interested as I am trying to build up my Waterloo armies, so I jumped. Unfortunately, I was late and someone else snapped them up.

The original poster, Dashing Blade, emailed me though and offered to give me a couple of battalions of French Infantry, of which he had no need! All he asked was that a make a donation to a military service fund. He then sent them at his own cost from the UK to the US. He was very guarded about who he was, although he admitted his name was Ian and I suspect he is from Lancashire. 

I was able to get 3 French battalions from the lot with an addition of a few figures of my own. Dashing Blade had painted them in a campaign style, something that I never had attempted. Certainly his style was quite different than mine, but they are very nice indeed. 

Well here they are re-based, I decided to flag them as battle weary 4e, 5e and 6e battalions. Here they are looking down the barrels of a battery of British artillery.

Enormous variability in the uniforms, truly ragged.

The chefs de batallion with the 4e and 5e were painted by me as well as six of the command and elite figures.

Look at those striped trousers!

Very generous and much appreciated, thank you Dashing Blade.

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Heavy Dragoons (The Heavies!)

Been a bit slow to post recently, but I have been busy. For my La Haye Sainte scenario, I needed a large Lasalle unit of British Heavies. My favorite part of the film Waterloo is when Wellington tells Uxbridge "now is the time for the heavy cavalry".

I thought a nice unit would be the Union brigade under the ill fated Ponsonby.

Lasalle requires 6 bases for a large cavalry unit, and I usually go with each base representing a squadron.  The Union Brigade was made up of 9 squadrons or around 1000 troopers at Waterloo, so her are 2 of the 3 regiments, I need to order the Northern British (Scots Greys) figures. These represent the 1st (Royals) and the 6th (Inniskillings) regiments.

I used the midtown AP here, I thought it would be better on the red than the black pigment. The horses were done with various Inks and Washes from Vallejo and Games Workshop. I like how the horses came out.

Information on the uniforms of the British cavalry can be found here. I know of course that British Heavy Dragoons wore helmets at Waterloo, but I wanted bicorns.......

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2/IR48

About 4 months ago, I bought 16 Hungarian infantry off ebay. I am not sure of the painter's name, but I had bought a French infantry unit from him a couple of years ago because I really liked his painting style. The method I use now (white prime, thinned paints with dark wash) is based on what I learned from studying these figures. I had a plan to paint an Austrian Avant Garde Lasalle division, and needed some extra Hungarians (only had 24 figure battalion pack), so this seemed like a good opportunity to cut some painting time and get the unit done. 

The unit came with green facings and a low porte attack pose. I am not wedded to painting specific battalions for my Avant Garde division, so that was ok with me as I had already painted a blue faced and had started a red faced German battalion. Red, blue and green, what more could you want! 

Green facings in a Hungarian infantry unit limited the choice to just 2 units, IR48 and IR62. Both had yellow buttons, I like yellow buttons. The specific facing colour is steel green.  The Clash of Empires website has a colour guide to Austrian facing colours, I used GW Knarloc Green which I believe to be a little light, but so be it. IR48 was called Vukassovich up to 1809 and Simbschen after this.

In line, great GMB flag. I painted 20 of the 36 figures all the rear rank as well as the officers on the right and left flanks.

 Square

I alway make the left most base in my infantry battalions using two 40x20mm bases rather than one 40x40mm base. The rear rank is glued to the thin square base, but the front rank base is magnetised so it can be removed to mark casualties. You can see that I did a pretty good job of matching the style.

The darkest Army Painter was used, a matt varnish was applied and the white areas were dry brushed to bring out the white again.

The great problem with pointy bits sticking out from the base is that it is difficult to have a tight column of march. If you are using the Republic to Empire rules though this is fine as it is recommended that you leave a base sized gap between each base when figures are in column of march.

Well that leaves just two more 36 figure infantry battalions, one 12 figure cavalry regiment and one horse cavalry gun to do and the Avant Garde division will be done.


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10ème Régiment de Cuirassiers (blue ones)

I had not planned to paint any French Heavy Cavalry as none of these units served in peninsula, aside from the 13ème Régiment de Cuirassiers and than they served in no major actions. My new found interest in the Waterloo campaign has of course changed this. These are the first armoured cavalry I have painted. A brief run down on these units can be found here.

I decided to go with the  Perry plastic heavy cavalry. These are nice figures, easy to assemble and paint and they look great. This is the second unit of Perry plastic cavalry I have painted, and I like these even more then the dragoons. 


As readers of this blog will know, these figures started off as green. A quick application of Vallejo Prussian blue followed a light drybrush of sky blue sorted that. The horses were done with Citadel Brown Ink. I am still trying to find a good pink, this is a mixture of red and white. If anyone has a suggestion for a premixed light pink, I would appreciate it, I do not like mixing colours.


The unit is based as a large Lasalle unit with 6 bases, and I hope that they will see some action in my "La Haye Sainte" scenario. I have to say that I really enjoyed painting these figures.

The knowledgable among you will of course point out that the 1ème et 4ème Régiments de Cuirassiers are in the OB for this action, but I wanted pink so we have 10ème.

The sharp eyed will also note that the flag is wrong, as the 10ème have battle honours for many actions through central Europe. This is the flag for the 4ème,

I have one more box of heavy cavalry which I believe I will do up as 2 regular Lasalle units (4 base); the 1ème Cuirassiers and 1ème Carabiniers.

At least I did not have to repaint the trumpeter!

I quite like this unit.

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British Rocket Troops

Well let us get on to something completely different. For my "La Haye Sainte" scenario, I needed a unit of rocket troops from Captain Whinyates' Rocket Battery of the RHA. This rocket battery was made up of 13 sections each of eight 6pd rockets as well as some cannon. I knew very little about rockets so decided to do some research. I knew that the rocketmen wore the uniform of the Royal Horse Artillery so that was pretty easy.

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What was confusing though was the contents of the Old Glory British Rocket Troops package. There appeared to be 2 sizes of rockets and apparati. A search through google books revealed Congreave's original treatise and I found out that rockets came in all sizes! 

After a good sort through the package, I decided to do 3 bases of the big rockets and 1 base of the small 6 pders, I needed for the La Haye Sainte scenario. I could find no reference on what colour to paint the launching apparatus, but decided to go with the British artillery blue-grey. I use GW Fenris Grey for this purpose. The white primed figures were painted using a Vallejo Prussian Blue and GW Fortress Grey. I have started to modify slightly my method of applying the Army Painter dip. I continue to paint it on generously after I have thinned it slightly and then within 1-2 minutes remove the excess with a dry brush to prevent any heavy build up or pooling. This is working out quite well and has lightened up the figures. After application of the matt varnish, I sometimes do some minimal drybrushing, here I only felt that I needed to touch up the white on the helmet plumes. Saxon Dog who is a far better painter then me, has a nice tutorial on his blog illustrating this method. 

So here we have 3 bases of the 42pd rockets, they actually would fire them in 2's, so I should have 2 rockets on each apparatus, but I felt this was more illustrative. I have one extra large rocket that I will probably add in when I get a chance. This will represent a full section of rockets. I am sure they will see action in the future. One weakness of the Old Glory miniature rocket set is that these are clearly cannon men and not specialized rocket troops, I suppose I could have done some modifications, but I left them as is. 

How would this be for some future figures. Maybe someone who knows the Perrys' could send this illustration on to them. These would be very cool miniature stands!

For the La Haye Sainte scenario, I decided to go with one stand with some 6 pders. Lt Dansey, RHA was sent forward with 2 guns and some rockets, he left the 2 guns behind and advanced by foot with his rockets to assist in the defense of La Haye Sainte. 


Here we have Lt Dansey and his men with their rockets already to fire at the advancing 13e légere!

These bases were fun to assemble and although I favour other figures over Old Glory, I am quite happy with these 4 bases. I may even do up one of their rocket limbers in the future.


Time to get out the blue paint I suppose.


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A Cautionary Tale: The Green Cuirassiers!

Formerly titled the 4ème Régiment de Cuirassiers

Well, I never thought I would make such an error! I have been rushing to finish up this unit of cuirassiers for some time. I had done 4 of the figures before Xmas. There is a painting contest over at Analogue Hobbies, and I was also keen to get my next scenario "La Haye Sainte" started and I needed a unit of cuirassiers.

I noticed after I had sent the photos to Curt at Analogue, that the 4th actually had orange facings and I had painted these pink; easy enough swop out the flag and repaint the numbers (shame really as I had done a nice job  on the 4's) on the saddle cloth. I was trying to figure out why I had done what I did, so I was reviewing some sources and suddenly it dawned on me that I had made a much bigger error, by painting the coats and saddle clothes green. Merde!!! F..........!

I still have no idea what happened, but here they are "Les Cuirassiers Verts". Time to dig out some blue paint I suppose.

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I/RIR11 Prussian Reserve Infantry

Here I hope is the start of my next army: The Prussians. I had dabbled with the Prussians a couple of years ago when painted up a few small (12 figure) units of Wallmoden's Korps. This was my first introduction to Calpe figures and I have been looking forward to getting back to them.

As readers of my blog will have noted, I have recently developed an interest in Les Cent Jours. I suppose when you have built a large British force, it is hard to abandon it. So with a good few French done, I felt Prussians would be a good idea. Lots of mini scenarios germinating in the old grey cells involving the Prussians at Placenoit, Wavre and Ligny. My recent success with the Lasalle rules in an asymmetric scenario have also encouraged me to press on. 

I had a look through the Prussian forces in the Waterloo campaign and was fascinated to see that many of the units that were in Wallmoden's Korps had been folded into the 1815 Prussian OB. Even more cool was the fact that it seemed that most of these units were still uniformed as they were in 1813. I wanted to start with a Prussian brigade with 9-10 infantry battalions and some artillery and cavalry support. It felt it was a little boring to stick with the actual OB for a brigade, but rather to have any 3-4 units each from the original 1813 line infantry, reserve infantry and landwehr OB. I suspect, since I have some of the units partially painted for Walmoden's Korps , we will see IR25 (von Lutzow's Freikorps), IR30 (Russian German Legion) and III/IR27 (von Reiches) in my Prussian brigade. Might even try to jam in IR28 (Berg in French Uniform). Certainly Lutzow's Hussars will also appear as the 6th Prussian Uhlans. Steven Summerfield's books as well as Les Cent Jours website were quite invaluable in my research. As most of you know, I try to build my units around the Lasalle army lists, I will start with the core list and slowly add infantry and light cavalry abteilung organic brigades. 

No Print of a Silesian Reserve unit available I am afraid 

Well that is all very exciting and it is easy to get carried away. But back to the current post. Here we have I/RIR11 or I/IR23 in 1815. By 1815 this unit would have still had their grey reservist uniforms, aside from the officers. They should be in regulation shako, but I had these figures on hand with the peaked reservist cap, so they must of lost their shakos. The figures were primed white, followed by Citadel Fortress Grey for the uniform and Astronomican Grey (more blue tinge) for the overcoat rolled over the shoulder. Usual other colours, followed by AP Darktone (very thinned-thank you Roger), and a quick drybrush with the Fortress Grey. The yellow collars identify their Silesian origin. The flag is wrong  (it is for a Landwehr unit), but it does look nice. I believe I may change over to Flag Dude, it is just so much easier to have the flag all set to go.

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