Article available for download

I’m delighted to announce that my article about building a late-Naoploeonic Prussian army that originally appeared in Wargames Illustrated 268 is now available for you to download for free from BfK. My thanks to Dan and his colleagues at the magazine for granting permission for this to happen.

As with any article you write, things happen to it during the production process so that the final, edited version is different to the one originally submitted. I’m not complaining because such changes are usually to do with professional quality control and add polish to the finished item. However, on re-reading the published version of the article, I think it’ll be helpful for me to add a few explanatory notes.

The main clarification I’d like to make concerns the example Orders of Battle in the article. The guys at Wargames Illustrated did some lovely pictorial representations of these rather than print my rather prosaic text. These are great but did lead to some questions about the details of the brigade structures, so here’s some more specific detail to accompany them.

Firstly, von Zieten’s Upper Silesian Brigade serving with Blucher’s Second Corps during the Spring 1813 campaign. The OOB is as follows:

• Silesian grenadier battalion.
• First Silesian infantry regiment (three battalions).
• Second Silesian infantry regiment (two battalions).
• One battalion from the Lieb regiment.
• Two companies from the Silesian Schutzen battalion.
• Neumark dragoon regiment (four squadrons).
• First Silesian hussar regiment (two squadrons).
• Second Silesian hussar regiment (two squadrons).
• Foot artillery battery No. 11.
• Foot artillery battery No. 13.
• Horse artillery battery No. 9.

Secondly, von Kraft’s 6th Brigade serving with Bulow’s Third Corps during the Autumn 1813 campaign:

• Colberg Infantry Regiment (three battalions).
• 9th Reserve Infantry Regiment (three battalions).
• 1st Neumark Landwehr Infantry Regiment (four battalions).
• 1st Pommeranian Landwehr Cavalry Regiment (four squadrons).
• Foot artillery battery No. 16.

Next, von Kraft’s 6th infantry brigade serving with Borstel’s second corps in 1815:

• 9th (Colberg) Infantry Regiment (three battalions).
• 26th (Elbe) Infantry Regiment (three battalions).
• 1st Elbe Landwehr Regiment (three battalions).

And finally, the 3rd cavalry brigade serving with Borstel’s second corps in 1815:

• 4th Kurmark Landwehr Cavalry Regiment (six squadrons).
• 5th Kurmark Landwehr Cavalry Regiment (four squadrons).
• 4th Elbe Landwehr Cavalry Regiment (six squadrons).

Secondly, a few people have asked me about the “Painting Your Prussians” panel. I’d like to clarify that I didn’t write that section or paint the 15mm figures featured in it. So I can’t really provide helpful answers about the paints and techniques used. If you want to know how I paint 28mm Prussians, the answer is simple: watch this space! I (fairly) regularly write posts about what I’m painting, my techniques and the paint, brushes and other equipment I use. And, perhaps foolishly, I aim to include work-in-progress photos where possible.

Thirdly, I devoted a section of the article to the discussion of how many wargames rulesets don’t do justice to the Prussian army – especially in terms of command and control. In general, I stand by that argument but now that I’m becoming increasingly familiar with the Republic to Empire rules, I feel the need to say some more about how these particular rules treat Prussian forces. I won’t do that in this posting simply because of time constraints at the time of writing but I promise to devote a post to this topic in the near future.