French Combined Grenadiers and Artillery

It's been a while since I last worked on my Napoleonics. I took a break from them to work on other projects for a year or so, some of which you can see in earlier posts. But with the new year I've felt excited to return to work on my French and British armies. I sent off an order for some new models (which have since arrived) but first I wanted to paint up the figures I had leftover.

The first unit of these was a battalion of French Combined Grenadiers. Many nations followed the practice of detaching the grenadier companies from their infantry and converging them into dedicated grenadier battalions. The French didn't use this tactic as often as other powers like the Austrians or Russians, but it was done. The resulting units provided heavier, more elite formations of infantry that could be used to drive an assault home at the key point.

 

These figures are from HaT's French Grenadiers set. I used most of the figures from that set to provide grenadier companies for my French line battalions and had just enough left over for a combined battalion. As I mentioned previously, these HaT figures are done in a much heavier 'chunky' style to the other figures I own. I actually quite like this, as I feel it gives the grenadiers an air of physical power and size when put next to the slimmer figures I normally use.

I actually have enough figures set aside to do several more grenadier command bases. I'm thinking that I'll paint those bases up on their own and then detach grenadier bases from the line battalions to form additional Combined Grenadier Battalions if I ever need them for my games.

The other unit I have today is a French artillery battery. These figures are also HaT, with the exception of a few bits and pieces-mainly the mounted figure-which are Italeri in origin. I painted up the first two cannons from this set a long while back (four years!) so I think this was a long time coming.

The layout of the bases likely looks a little strange, with these odd strips on the sides. I made the choice to add these after finishing the guns themselves, when I didn't much fancy scrapping the bases I had just finished. These extensions give a much wider and-to my mind-much more convincing footprint for a battery. They also allow me to use more of the figures that came with the set, as I can only cram four artillerymen onto my usual bases. The plan for future artillery is to use a single wide base rather than this system of strips which, while flexible, is a lot more fiddley than I'd like.

As I mentioned earlier I've had a number of new models arrive since I got back to my Napoleonics. I was able to snag a lot of kits that had thus far eluded me, included Zvezda's beautiful French Foot Artillery. Some of those new models should start appearing in posts soon enough. For now though I have one more post that'll be going over some of the 'loose ends' that needed tying up. Hope to have that post up soon.

Cheers!