Gotta love purple facings!

I've been working on the Pragmatic Army recently on my Will ye go to Flanders blog, and haven't posted here for a while.

So let me remedy this with a plate showing what will be a brigade of regular French infantry, organized for use with the Koenig Krieg rules. Each battalion will consist of twelve miniatures. I have two (and a half) battalions cleaned up and primed so far. I'll work on them concurrently with my Dutch infantry.

This brigade fought at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743. Nice, simple uniforms and attractive flags.

Click on image for a larger picture

Uniform templates courtesy of the excellent Not by Appointment blog. Flags by me courtesy of PowerPoint.

The button arrangement is not spot on for these regiments, but given the myriad of possible pocket designs and button combinations, with just about every regiment having a different pattern, this is unavoidable! It shouldn't matter, however, seeing as practicality dictates that there is only a limited choice of options available on figure castings anyway.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been working on the next instalment of the Marquis' memoirs, usually while commuting back and forth from work. Bear with me here, as while the creative juices have been flowing, inspiration- and time- tends to come in fits and starts. There is usually a lot of reworking before I get anything that I am happy with enough to post here.

I'm not about to give up my day job to be a writer, that's for sure!

Film about Fontenoy?

While net surfing I came across this. Looks as if historically, one could pick holes in it ad infinitum, but I seldom confuse movies with history at the best of times- I just sit back with popcorn and a beer or two and enjoy the spectacle.

I don't know much about the film used in the clip, though I suspect it isn't a classic!

A worthy cause...

Commander of the Anglo-Allied army in the Seven Years War,

Prinz Ferdinand of Brunswick

I would assume that almost everyone who checks out this blog has an interest in the 18th C. military history in general. While my main focus is the War of the Austrian Succession, my interest in the era is by no means limited to that struggle, and I voraciously read anything on the earlier War of the Spanish Succession or the later Seven Years War as well.

One of the best books ever written on the latter conflict was the comprehensive campaign history by Sir Reginald Savory; "His Britannic Majesty's Army of the Seven Years War".

First published back in 1967, it remains the best- indeed pretty much the only- in-depth treatment of the campaigns fought in the west between the French army one one hand, and the Anglo-Hanoverian army with its various German allies on the other.

I had the good fortune to read this book back in the 1980's, as they had a copy in the University of British Columbia's main library when I was a student there. In a recent online search, I see now that the copy has since been "lost" according to university records. A bummer, and with hindsight I regret not being the lowly thief who carried out the crime! A second-hand copy of the Athena Books reprint is hard to find and expensive, with any copy of the original Oxford edition selling anywhere from $500- $1,000 dollars. Ouch...

So on to the point; Nigel Billington is looking into the possibility of a new reprint of this invaluable book, and wants to see how much interest there is out there in such a project.

If anyone is interested, and haven't yet heard about it through TMP or the Emperor vs. Elector site, I urge you to support the project so that one of the staples of the literature on the SYW can again see the light of day to a general readership, and perhaps recruit future enthusiasts to this fascinating era- as it did with me back in university.