The Lead (plastic) Pile Restored

The week started with some more ruins. These I did in a sandstone hue (inspired by Keith's description of his family home). 

But now the rest of the ruins will go on the back burner, because yesterday a nice big box of goodies arrived from Nottingham (an impressive delivery by DHL - Nottingham to my Auckland doorstep in four days). 

Contained therein were 378 foot and 16 mounted figures.

 

To put some context around this it will provide 18 battalions of Franco-Prussian French line infantry, two battalions of Chasseurs, a couple of French generals and a regiment of Napoleonic Austrian hussars that I forgot to order last time.

I can hear the cries across the internet "Oh my God 20 battalions of French FPW! Are you insane?"  No not insane, obsessive maybe, but not insane - and do I need to remind you that insanity is only a state of mind? And at any rate twenty battalions is only half the story...literally...because I am planning on 39 battalions. 

To understand why on earth I would want 39 battalions of French infantry I have to take you waaaaaay back to 1973. That was my first year of high school and I actually did quite well academically, scoring first place in the class for science and art for which I earned prizes in the form of book vouchers. One of the books I bought with those vouchers was Donald Featherstone's "Wargames Campaigns". That book was responsible for three closely related things: 

• It expanded my obsession with wargames
• It introduced me to the Franco-Prussian War
• Thanks to my new found obsession with wargames, led to a decline in my academic endeavours and never again did I reach the heady heights of first in the class for any subject (although I did do rather well in history in my last year - helped largely by the fact that a big part of the syllabus for that year was taken up with Europe 1815-1914 where my interest in the Franco-Prussian War led to me writing some bloody good essays on German Unification if I must say so myself).

Now Wargames Campaigns had three chapters on the Franco-Prussian War and I was so enthused that I built small forces using the Airfix WWI French and German sets, but there was no cavalry or artillery that was suitable so the collection went nowhere. It would not be until Wargames Foundry brought out their FPW range in the mid-1980s that I collected seriously (and hugely too with a force of more than 2,500 figures that I eventually had to sell to pay some debts). I also developed an intense interest in the Battle of Spicheren after reading Featherstone's rather simplified description of it, an interest that has seen me write a book on the subject that one day (maybe next year when I retire ) I will publish. And it is as a result of that study that I am building 39 French battalions because I want to build the whole of the French 2nd Corps that fought at Spicheren, just like I built the whole of the Prussian VII Corps that provided most of the German troops in that battle.

Anyway, within a hour of that big box of goodies arriving I had assembled the first six figures and then painted in the evening. By early next week the first battalion should be ready for display. 

The contents of that big box of goodies should keep me busy until August.