The Charge of the Reserve Cavalry

 

The charge of the Reserve Cavalry at Waterloo is arguably the most iconic episode of the entire battle.  Up until now, I have focussed on the what might be described as the extremities at Hougoumont, Mont St Jean, Papelotte, La Haye, Smohain, Frischermont, Rossomme and Plancenoit, as well as the North-South axis from La Belle Alliance to La Haye Sainte.

Now it is time to complete the cavalry and the opposing squares.  This is not to suggest that I am starting from scratch: far from it - most of the squares are already done and so are nearly all of the cavalry.

But just to complete the figures is to ignore the somewhat daunting task of producing the scenery over an area that is as large as everything else we have completed, combined.

To achieve our chosen mission, a team of nine people has been working on the scenery over several weeks.  We met at an industrial facility in Somerset, a perfect location for the job at hand.

The aim of this blog entry is to show progress to date.

This map, taken from the Adkin book shows the locations of the squares, plus the attacking French cavalry

This is an aerial shot from the Siborne model but shows the action at the time of the attack of the Imperial Guard.  It is useful to identify the field system and its colours.

We began by building 59 sections, the edges of which were contoured to the shape of the terrain with tops nailed on, made of soft board.

At this stage, the shape of the ground is hard to discern but at eye level the subtle relief of the Waterloo geography reveals itself.

Once the sections were built it was time to cut out faux fur in accordance with the Siborne field system.

At this stage, the faux fur is obviously the wrong colour. 

Me directing operations

Once the fur was applied the track and road system could be built, in this instance the straight Roman road from Nivelles to Brussels, which is now the motorway.

Labels were then attached to denote the colour of each field.

The next step was to mark out the location of each square.

Once the sections were painted, it was time to them outside to dry in the sun.  At this stage, the colours are very basic.

The process of refining the colours now begins.  The dirty yellow area will in time become trampled corn.  The Nivelles road is just a black undercoat.

That bright green needs moderating

Once dry, the model went back inside for further colour refinement

Location of Allied artillery batteries in the front line

A first look at the location of the French cavalry regiments

More updates will follow as soon as possible.