Top Swede

This is Marshal Bernadotte aka Charles XIV of Sweden aka Carl III Johan of Norway aka turncoat. So just how did a French Marshal rise to become a top Swede? Well, I’m not entirely sure but he was brother-in-law to Joseph Bonaparte which may have helped. Later he turned his back on his old master when Swedish forces took part in the Leipzig campaign fighting along side the Allies.

Those of you who know about these things (and you know who you are) will be aware that Hinton Hunt never produced a personality figure for Bernadotte. This figure is actually a clever conversion given to me last year by Roy. The horse is APH/1 Ancient Persian Chariot Horse with a blanket added (how did you do that Roy?). The rider is PN60 Marshal Blucher with a different head attached.

I decided to paint the figure as Bernadotte to give me someone to command my Swedish contingent. The uniform is pure speculation although having just found a picture of him on Wikipedia I see I’m not that far off.

Happy birthday to us

Well this blog is two years old today so Boney and Nosey came together to receive a rousing chorus of Happy Birthday from me (and a slightly more muffled version from their comrades behind the Perspex of the display cabinet). Then all the lads waiting in the lead pile joined in with a rendition of “for they’re such jolly good fellows” followed by three hearty cheers.

I’ve noticed a tendency for blogs to tail off around the two-year mark as ‘blog fatigue’ sets in so I guess I’ve reached a critical point. I don’t think I’ve ever focused on a single wargame project for as long as this one but I’m hoping to keep going for a while longer yet.

Silesian Landwehr

Here’s the finished unit at musketry practice in the churchyard (the vicar is getting mighty fed up with all the noise). All the figures used were David Clayton produced Hinton Hunt castings of varying size and quality (which I can just about get away with in a Militia Battalion). The flag bearer is one of the figures added to the range by David Clayton and I think the officer may fall into the same category as he doesn’t appear in my Hinton Hunt catalogue. The unit is made up of:

22 x PN19 Landwehr Private (firing)
1 x PN20 Landwehr Officer (marching)
1 x PN23 Landwehr Flag Bearer (advancing)

This is the first of my Prussian units to be completed and I have quite a few more to come including two more Landwehr and a couple of Line Infantry units – I may even be able to stretch to a third one with some odds and sods. However, the commencement of painting work on these is still a very long way off.

Next up will be another personality figure – who could it be?

Growing Land-weary

They are growing in numbers but it is a very slow process and I have to admit I am getting just a little bit fed up with painting them. This always happens to me when painting a 24 figure infantry unit, the first few are fun then the next batch are not quite as much fun, then I find a distraction (in this case those Schleswig-Holsteiners) and then finally I finish them. I hope to complete the last few of the Landwehr this evening or tomorrow.

I had a rummage through the Hinton Hunt lead mountain a couple of days ago and concluded that I really do need to get my finger out and increase the rate of production. I was quite surprised at just how many tired old figures are waiting to join the ranks of their comrades in my display cabinet. This was despite the fact that I have a spreadsheet listing them all (I have a spreadsheet for everything) – I guess seeing them in the flesh has more of an impact.

One thing is sure; I need to produce some more artillery batteries to balance up the force although this is no trouble as my gun crews are only 4 figures strong. However, I am still low on 24 figure infantry units so I will have to focus on these for the rest of this year. The plan is to paint up my next unit of French line infantry as Swiss – Many years ago I was inspired by this picture of Peter Gilder’s Hinton Hunt Swiss. After that I’m not sure, maybe the Old Guard or the Nassau Grenadiers or the British Light Infantry or the…

PS. The sharp eyed among you may have noticed that I made yet more changes to that darn flag – I realised that the eagle in the centre looked more like a bedraggled vulture than a magnificent bird of prey, but that’s it now I’m not touching it again!

Mit Gott

When Rafa innocently commented on my last post that he thought the flag my Landwehr were carrying might be the wrong one I immediately felt uneasy. This was because I knew that Rafa knows his stuff and also that I hadn’t bothered to research the flag at all – after all a Prussian flag is a Prussian flag right?

Wrong actually, a quick look on warflag.com revealed that the Landwher did carry flags that were different from the Line Regiments. Now I never set out to make this project particularly historically accurate but my little error bugged me so much that I had to re-paint the thing. So here is PN23 Prussian flag bearer carrying the colours of a Silesian Landwehr Regiment. The flag is apparently conjecture but if anyone does have more specific info kindly keep it to yourself.

Whilst on the subject of my errors (not a favourite area of mine as Mrs S can testify) Roy pointed out that the original Hinton Hunt range did contain one more flag bearer that I didn’t mention in my last post. This is FN24 Old Guard flag bearer. I had thought that this figure was a Clayton produced one because it does not appear in my catalogue but then I found it listed on an Additions sheet. This is all the more embarrassing for anorak-kind as I have one of these figures in my possession and a quick inspection shows it to clearly be a Marcus Hinton creation.

Landwehr Command

I mentioned in a previous post that the original Hinton Hunt 20mm wargame range only offered three standard-bearer figures and these were limited to the French and British forces. They were BN13 and BN14 representing Regimental Colours and King’s Colours respectively and FN4 Colour Bearer for the French 45th Regiment.

When David Clayton took over production of Hinton Hunt in the US he introduced several new standard-bearer figures presumably in an attempt to fill this gap. His figures are not the best of sculpts but they do at least provide some reasonable models with cast-on flags to brighten up the battlefield. The alternative would be to convert some regular HH figures but this isn’t something I’m particularly skilled at so I’m happy to use the Clayton ones.

The figure pictured is PN23 Prussian Landwehr Colour Bearer Advancing. These cast-on flags are very delicate and I managed to break this one while striping the old paint from the casting (thank goodness for super glue). The other figure is PN20 Landwehr Officer Marching - another Clayton casting but this time of an original Marcus Hinton sculpt. The flag is painted free hand, something else I’m not very skilled at but it’s passable when viewed from a distance.

Artillery

You may recall that I have been using plastic guns from various Revell/HaT sets with my Hinton Hunt gunners. This was because I had no HH artillery pieces when I was painting gun crews and I justified it to myself on the grounds that “HH artillery is out of scale anyway”.

Well, it is true that the HH pieces are a little small in comparison to the gunner figures but I have been fortunate to acquire several vintage models recently – thanks largely to Don. The picture shows (from left to right) a vintage Austrian field gun (AL5), a model from the Newline Designs range (AU 12/1) and a plastic gun from the HaT Austrian artillery set (8037).

It’s fairly obvious from the photo that the model produced by Newline Designs is a very close fit in size with the original HH one and they are superb little castings as well. The plastic gun is a bit big and thin and er, plastic. So in the true spirit of this project I have decided to include vintage models where I have them and use Newline substitutes where I have none.