Having identified the battles to the East of Paris as a
starting point, I then needed to choose one or two battles from those listed in
my last post. I was looking for a battle
of around 20,000 men per side with units that also fought in the larger
battles. Given that Blucher was the most
aggressive of the Allied commanders, it should come as no surprise that the
Army of Silesia was involved in most of the major battles. I also have a sizeable collection of
Prussians in 28mm (Elite and Connoisseur) and so have a good knowledge of
Prussian army organisation. So it was an
easy decision for me to start with the Army of Silesia.
My next conundrum was which battle to start with. After reading through accounts of the main
battles I have decided to start with Montmirail as this will provide me with
three Russian Corps (two infantry and one cavalry), one Prussian Corps and
several French Corps including the Imperial Guard. I can then expand these forces to cover the
rest of the Six Days of Glory battles against the army of Silesia. I’ll cover the history, army lists and my
reasons for choosing these battles in future posts.
Whilst studying these battles it became apparent that 28mm figures
were not going to work as
1. The size of the forces are too big without using
a large figure ratio, I didn’t want to do this as I felt that this was running
against my vision for this project.
2. The size of the battlefields meant that I wouldn’t
be able to accurately recreate the battlefields on my standard 8x6 table.
3. Napoleon’s tactics in a lot of these battles
involved isolating and surrounding single enemy Corps or dividing armies by
obtaining a central position and dividing enemy Corps.
All of this meant that I was looking at a smaller scale than
28mm. My first thought was 15mm, but,
again this is still too big for many of the battles without comprising on scale
or ratios. I’ve always been one of those
gamers who has laughed at 6mm and questioned why anyone would use this scale
rather than painted blocks of wood.
However, there has been some excellent demo games produced at various
shows over the past couple of years and I’ve slowly come round to benefits of
6mm. Given the issues above and my limited amount of painting time, I’ve
decided that I will try using 6mm for this project.
I’ve spent some time in recent weeks looking at the various
suppliers of 6mm figures and have decided that I will use mostly Baccus figures
for this project as I prefer the style of these figures over those produced by
Adler (I really don’t like the large heads) although I may use a mixture of
both when it comes to cavalry and personalities.
Considering the Russians had the largest involvement from the
Allied armies at Montmirail I have decided to start with them.
A quick trip down to Castle Donnington at the weekend
provided me with a couple of packs of Russian infantry in greatcoats and some
skirmishers to go with them. I’ll get
these painted up over the next week or so and post up some pictures to show the
results.
