Background image is Les Dernières Cartouches (The Last Cartridges) by Alphonse de Neuville

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Slight diversion: The Battle of Montmirail, 1814

So, one of my local living history acquaintances recently began painting 28mm Prussian infantry and blogging about it, entirely off his own bat. :-) So, of course, I'm doing my best to suck him deeper into the realm of wargaming.

If he had picked 15mm, this would have been simple enough, given the large number of troops I already have painted in that scale. But since he picked the larger size, I have pulled some of my neglected Perry stock out of the back room and am preparing to slap some paint on it. He's got a good start on me (20+ Prussian landwehr infantry already ready to go), so I need to get going. We're hoping to have a small Black Powder set-to in January sometime, probably modeled on a portion of the battle of Montmirail, where part of the 1st Brigade of GM Otto Karl Lorenz von Pirch tried to collapse the French right flank, crashing into the Guard division of GdD Claude-Étienne Michel in the woods around Bailly. Since my friend has started off by painting landwehr, I'll paint up my French as the light infantry of GdD Étienne Pierre Sylvestre Ricard's 8th Division that were dispatched to help out Michel's Flanquers, Fusiliers, and Velites. No fair building guardsmen to fight militia! But if we stick with this battle, it would be kind of fun to produce some of the less famous regiments of the Garde that fought under Michel.

Edited to add a few links about the battle:

Wikipedia (with a nice order of battle)
History of War (passable summary but no maps, boo!)
a visit to the battlefield by my blogging colleague JJ (but he focused on the southern side of the battle while we are in the north with the Prussians)
the Nafziger order of battle
Vernet's (rather dark) painting (I mean, literally dark, hard to see)
the relevant chapter of Maurice Weil's history of the war of 1814, translated by Greg Gorsuch, from the Napoleon Series

No comments:

Post a Comment