French Line Lancers

Line lancers or light horse lancers are, a bit like the horse chasseurs, a type of cavalry that was a major element Napoleon's armies that remains criminally underrepresented. Since they don't seem to be as iconic as the cuirassiers or hussars, they sadly have much less coverage in sets. I can hardly think why, as I find them both iconic and interesting.

Thankfully, Waterloo 1815 produce an excellent set for them, which is what I've used here (Set 054). I was very happy with Waterloo's British Heavy Dragoons, and I would say this set matched the high expectations the first one gave me. The models are well sculpted and the poses are dynamic, interesting and natural.

I do have one criticism of the set, and it is that command figures make up half of all the models, with only six troopers in total. Given that I'm wanting to field them in a unit of twelve this becomes a little awkward, as I have to have two buglers, two officers and two standard bearers in one unit. I think my longer-term solution to this will be to pick up HaT's French Lancers, where all the figures are troopers, and combine them with these figures to get two units. For now though, I think the quality of the miniatures themselves makes up for the overabundance of command figures.

Cheers!

French Chasseurs in Open Order

Skirmishers seem to be one of those tricky things in Napoleonic gaming. I've seen them represented as separate units, attachments to regular infantry, or even abstracted off of the table altogether. In Over the Hills you're given a few different options, with dedicated light infantry battalions that can deploy in open order and with a 'Skirmish Rating' that regular battalions have, representing the skill of their attached light infantry company.

I quite like this idea in theory (although I've yet to really test it in practice), as it seems like it can represent the way skirmishers were used to both advance ahead of the force as a whole and contribute to fire fights between individual units. To that end I've painted up a pair of four-base battalions of Chasseurs (representing around 400 men each). These guys have only two figures on a base to make them look more spaced out.

The models aren't strictly Chasseurs, but rather come from Zvezda's excellent Voltigeur set (Set 8042). I decided on doing these guys as Chasseurs because HaT do excellent sets for Light Infantry Voltigeurs and Carabaniers, so some time in the future I'd like to add an extra base to these units from each of those sets. Being Zvezda they, of course, painted up very well (in my humble opinion).

Most of the other figures from this set were set aside to be painted as Voltigeur companies for line battalions. I should have posts on those up in the coming weeks.

And here are a few British to cap things off. There were hardly enough here to justify giving them their own post, so I figured I'd tag them onto the end of this one. The infantry are from Italeri's British Infantry 1815 (Set 6095). If I'm not mistaken these particular figures are Foot Guards, so they'll be needing a few more bases in the future to get them up to full strength (six more, as it happens). For now they can stand in just fine as regular line infantry.

This mounted figure is a hussar from Airfix's Waterloo British Cavalry (Set 01743). He was floating around alone in one of my miniature drawers, so I've painted him up as a kind of cavalry officer (or else an aide de camp, if I ever need any).

I've been a little slack on posting updates, but I have actually been getting stuff painted. I'll try to catch up on my backlog a little over the next few weeks.

Cheers!