Plodding through the heat: Keeping on re-basing

It won't be a surprise to anyone in the UK,  but it has been exceptionally hot here in the past few weeks. and that has slowed down pretty much all activities, including hobby activities. There's also been quite a bit of 'real life' stuff competing for attention, so the toy soldiers have taken a back seat. But I have made a little progress, and made a couple of interesting acquisitions.  I believe there has also been some sort of football (soccer, if you prefer ) competition, which I think has taken many people's attention - though very little of mine! But it did spark a little pondering on the nature of games and gaming..

The great re-basing project continues with the vintage Minifigs 7YW/AWI collection.  I've been working on the slightly mysterious French infantry with unusual green facings ( see my earlier post about identifying them ), which I have decided to designate as the Volontaires Étrangers de la Marine.  Although there were lots of green-trimmed musketeers, I had no command figures for the unit - step forward the Garrison figures I recently acquired from Rob Young of The Eastern Garrison (many thanks, Rob!).  I'm no great shakes with the paintbrush, but I was fairly pleased with my efforts painting them - my first attempt at painting a drummer in the the blue-and-red French royal livery coat came out quite well, I thought, bearing in mind the 'three foot rule'.  I'll admit I have no idea whether this unit had drummers in the royal livery, but it was fun to paint it!

   

When simply block-painted in an old-school style, the officers looked rather bright and clean compared to their rank and file, who are a little 'aged' so to speak, so I gave the command group a thin wash of Army Painter Soft Tone to dull them a little - but it has been pointed out to me by the excellent Ross from Battle Game of the Month that the officers would probably have higher-quality (and maybe cleaner!) uniforms than the 'PBI', so maybe my newly-painted command group is quite authentic!  

I also enjoyed painting a version of this unit's  interesting flag, with the standard French 'quartered' banner further sub-divided into green and white, fortunately in a quite simple and easy to re-produce way. Having fixed  them to MDF bases and applied a couple of coats of old-school plain green to the bases, here is the finished unit basking in the sunshine in the garden this afternoon: 

 You may have noticed the horsemen behind the Volontaires in the photo - these are my first re-based unit of cavalry from the collection. They represent the Russian Slobodskiy Hussars  and I very much like their lavender-coloured uniforms! Here they are, taking their place in the sun : 

 

I have a bit of a dilemma with cavalry:  I settled for 50mm x 50mm bases with two figures per base, which fit the suggested base sizes for both Black Powder and Honours of War rules.  But BP has six such bases (12 figures)  for a standard cavalry unit, and HoW  has 4 bases (8 figures).  Given that I am using  4 bases (16 figures) at 40mm x 40mm  for infantry, the standard BP cavalry unit would look a bit too big.  It's also relevant that most of the cavalry I have acquired seem to be in 'units' of 12, so adopting the 4-base HoW format would mean leaving quite a lot of figures unused.  So on consideration, for now I am going to have a cavalry 'unit' of 6 figures on  3 bases, just as shown. I think I might consider them as a 'squadron',  part of a 'regiment' of  2 'squadrons'.  As you can perhaps see in the above pictures, my cavalry and  infantry units have roughly the same frontage, which I am happy with. Admittedly all slightly arbitrary, but to my mind they should  look 'right' on the tabletop. And I have another six figures of these nice hussars, to make another 'squadron'!   

Next up for basing, lots of Russian infantry.. 

There's almost 100 figures here, and I can probably get 5 battalions out of them, so not a bad little force.  The Musketeers (left) have already had their old bases removed, the rest still need to have a paddle in some water to soak off their current stands - which look to be made of balsa, curiously enough. So this will be my job for the next few days..  

I've also done a little light shopping - specifically, I got tempted by Pen and Sword's half-price offer on Henry Hyde's  book Wargaming Campaigns. It arrived at the weekend, and is a substantial tome ( 500 plus  pages! ).  I loved Henry's previous Wargames Compendium when it came out, and I think it was one of the factors influencing  me to move from just reading blogs on wargaming to getting back to actual gaming and starting this blog. So let's hope this one is as good - and provides some inspiration for campaigning.  It will certainly occupy a lot of reading time!  I was interested to see the Acknowledgements page near the front, where Henry lists a whole lot of people who 'helped me to name the vast numbers of places that sprang up as I created the imagi-nations of Dahlia and Chindrastan featured in these pages'.  Many familiar names were on that list, including several I have met (in person or on-line) and a couple who follow this blog. Henry also thanks 'veteran wargamer Arthur Harman', who 'has undertaken the heroic task of creating an index for this monster' .  Indeed, quite a major job,  well done Arthur! 

 

At the other end of the price range, a charity shop find I couldn't walk away from this week - Alan Clark's Barbarossa, a chunky paperback for all of £1 !  Possibly influenced by listening recently to Al Murray and James Holland's  We Have Ways of Making You Talk podcast, which devoted a series of episodes to the decisions, planning and preparations behind Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. This one may go on the backlog pile at first, but I'm sure it will make an interesting read eventually..

Alan Clark was an 'interesting' character of course, I can't say I was an admirer of his politics or his personal conduct - but the relevant question is 'was he a good historian, and a good writer'? The latter will become obvious, the former - well, he may have been superseded by later authors with more access to Russian archives. for instance, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. 

 Finally just a bit of whimsy really: here's a picture of the scene at Pizza Express restaurant on the South Bank, Central London last Wednesday evening - at the time England's footballers were playing against Argentina for a place in the World Cup Final. It was all rather lovely, quiet and peaceful. We'd been to the nearby National Film Theatre, to see a rather charming film - Night Train (dir. Jerzy Kawalerowicz,  Poland, 1959) well worth a look if you enjoy a good railway-based movie.      

 

The fact that I was at Pizza Express should tell you how much I know or care about football - precisely nowt -  but it was interesting to see the reactions to the result and to England Manager Thomas Tuchel's  tactical decisions.  It made me think;  if Monty and Eisenhower on 6th  June 1944 had said 'OK everyone, we got the  landing done successfully, we've got the beach-head established, now we'll sit on the defensive and let the Panzers come at us', how would that have gone?  ( shades of what actually happened at Anzio? ).  But I also thought, if we were wargamers playing the Normandy Campaign  as a game of some sort, we might very well do exactly that, because the victory conditions would doubtless specify that simply establishing  a beach-head and not being thrown back into the sea would give the allies a marginal victory - and Herr (sorry!)  Tuchel only needed a marginal victory..  As players, though, we would have thought that was pretty 'game-y' and not really in the spirit of things.  So I concluded I had little sympathy for Thomas T, and that maybe England need a 'Monty' for manager? Discuss...  😀

With that, I'm sure I've entertained you all for long enough, so I'll sign off. The heatwave does seem to be easing off a bit, and I've got some more free time in the next few days, so hopefully I can get those Russians sorted out, and report my progress in a future post. Until then, keep well everyone, 

 

p.s. a quick 'plug' -  my old friend 'Liverpool Dave' has had a bit of a rush of blood to the writing fingers and revived his long-moribund personal blog Serener Skies  Recent posts include reminiscences of cartoon strips in the Daily Mirror,  Liverpool Corporation buses,  the dream of a remote lochside idyll versus the reality of modern tourism, and the late Kevin Keegan's triumphant FA Cup Final in 1974 (the latter may have been the last soccer match I watched with any real interest!). Not a wargaming blog, but Dave can certainly write, and wargaming does get a mention - he poses the question of whether  there a correlation between interest in military history and interest in public transport? I think a few readers of this blog may be able to answer that one, while looking at Dave's nice pic of a Leyland Atlantean..