‘All The Emperor’s Men’ (Part 6): SYW Austrian Artillery & Staff

Field Marshal Daun, with his staff on Przerovsky Hill, Kolin 1757 |  Guerres, Guerre, Xvie siècleFollowing my recent flurry of Napoleonic units (namely the Russian Mounted Jäger and Swedish artillery), I’ve returned to ploughing through the Seven Years War units in my Lead Dungeon, with a particular emphasis on finishing the Reichsarmee, followed by Kleist’s (Prussian) Freikorps.

The plan is to do a refight of the Combat of Strehla 1760 at the Carmarthen Old Guard‘s monthly Big Game Saturday on 15th April, for which I’ll need the vast majority of the Reichsarmee and part of Kleist’s Freikorps.  So far, so good; Since the start of February I’ve painted twelve Reichsarmee infantry battalions and two grenadier battalions and have two grenadier battalions, five guns and a dragoon regiment left to do for the Reichsarmee at Strehla, along with some dragoons, hussars and jäger for Kleist’s Freikorps, plus ‘Green Kleist’ himself.  I’ve also re-flagged a few units with some superb new flags and have re-based my older Reichsarmee battalions onto single bases (I need to do the same with my Prussians).

But more of that later… Back in December and January I did a load of painting in preparation for our epic refight of the Battle of Kolin 1757, but haven’t posted those units here yet, so thought I’d better catch up with them before showing off the new stuff!

Above:  I must confess that this first unit was painted quite a bit earlier than December!  In June last year we were preparing to do our large refight of the Battle of Leuthen 1757.  At the time I had quite a sever deficiency of Austrian guns, particularly of light battalion guns.  I had (and still have!) a massive stash of spare Old Glory 15s Austrian artillery figures from the days when they were sold in bags of 100 figures (I think the artillery bags were 15 guns and 60 figures?).  This stash reached epic proportions when I discovered that the Old Glory ‘French’, ‘British’ and ‘Hanoverian’ artillery packs were in fact just the Austrian pack with a different label…  These figures were then supplemented by six Austrian 3pdr guns from Blue Moon Miniatures.

Above:  The subject of Austrian artillery uniform during the mis-18th Century is an insanely complicated subject, with sources being utterly at odds with each other, describing dark brown, light brown, grey, dark grey, ‘wolf grey’ and even white coats.  The majority view however, now seems to be that the uniform was brown, being a much paler, greyish shade of brown than the darker, earth-brown shade used during the Napoleonic Wars and FAR paler than the dark coffee-brown shade used during the mid-19th Century.  The shade was known as Rehrbraun or ‘Fawn Brown’.  There is also some suggestion that the descriptor ‘Wolf Grey’ does actually mean a light, greyish-brown.  I use Humbrol 29 Dark Earth, with quite a lot of white mixed in.

The cuffs were Feuer-rot or ‘Fire Red’, being a bright shade of red.  There was no collar or lace, apart from the hat-lace, which was yellow.  The shoulder-strap was fawn brown, buttons were yellow metal and the neck-stock was black.  Gaiters were black and the powder-flask was suspended from a yellow-black cord worn over the left shoulder, the tassel of which often looked like a fringed epaulette on the shoulder.  A triangular black primer-box with a brass plate was worn on the belly and on campaign could have a white linen cover.

There were some uniform differences between the Austrian Netherlands’ artillery and the ‘German’ artillery; The Netherlands Artillery had red lapels and linings/turnbacks, whereas the German Artillery had no lapels and their linings/turnbacks were brown.

Above:  In January I realised that despite having painted all that artillery for the Leuthen game, I STILL didn’t have enough guns for our forthcoming Kolin refight!  I therefore ordered some Austrian 3/6pdrs from Eureka and in a moment of fuckwittery, ordered some more Austrian gunners, despite still having a gigantic stash of Old Glory figures (in the meantime I’ve used my stash to provide crews for all my Reichsarmee and Schamburg-Lippe guns and I STILL have 17 figures left)!  Ah well, the Eureka gunners are lovely figures.

Above:  The Austrians always painted their gun-carriages a deep yellow-ochre shade that actually seems to have been more yellow than ochre.  Ironwork was painted black.  The standard Liechtenstein Pattern guns had polished brass barrels.

Above:  My old Austrian army headquarters group was starting to show its age and most worryingly, the horses were starting to break at the ankles.  I therefore needed to do a new staff group in time for the Kolin game.  These fellas were therefore done at breakneck-speed on the day before the game.  They’re all Eureka figures.

Above:  Two staff officers discuss what type of biscuits to have in the Mess during Afternoon Tea.  The troops at the back are the newly-painted Pfalz ‘Effern’ Regiment; I’ll cover them in detail in a future article.

Above:  With the glue under the flock still drying, Feldmarschall Daun establishes his headquarters atop the Przerovsky Hill, during our Kolin refight.  The cloaked general is an Old Glory 15s figure painted by me.  The two hussar couriers are Old Glory 15s conversions painted many years ago by Gareth Beamish.  The Austrian infantry are Lancashire Games figures, again painted by Gareth, with new flags by Fighting 15s, added by me a couple of years ago.

Above:  For our Leuthen refight I needed a couple of Hungarian generals (Nádasdy and Forgách).  I had some spare senior hussar officers/generals in my stash, which I think came out of the Old Glory 15s Austrian Generals pack back in the 90s, when they had 30 mounted figures per pack (nowadays you get nine figures in the pack and I think they’re a random selection from the original 30).

Kronoskaf shows an all-white, gold-encrusted hussar uniform with brown fur and busby with red bag and white egret-feather plume.  However, all the portraits of Hungarian generals from the era (such as Hadik shown on the right) show red dolman (or waistcoat) and breeches instead of white, so I’ve gone for the red option.  As it happens, this was still the full-dress uniform for Hungarian generals during the Napoleonic Wars, so they could do double-duty. 🙂

Anyway, that’s it for now.  Stacks more SYW stuff to come, as well as some AWI action.

This entry was posted in 15mm Figures, Eighteenth Century, Painted Units, Seven Years War & War of Austrian Succession, Seven Years War Austrian Army, Tricorn (18th Century Shako Rules). Bookmark the permalink.

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