miscellaneous
Spanish flags
Barcena's Division arriving at
Vitoria (1813)
spanish infantry 1812
There are not today commercial plastics figures 1/72 scale (20 mm) depicting the
Spanish infantry of 1812-1813. The only way to build those units is by means of
a conversion, or painting some similar available figures.
In those times the
Spanish army rely heavily on British supplies (see the excelent book 'Spanish
Army of the Napoleonic Wars (3) 1812-1815'. Met-at-Arms Series No. 334. Osprey
Publishing. 1999), so the supplied uniforms are based upon a simplified version
of the british infantry uniform. The more distinctive item of these Britsh-made
uniforms was the shako, that was truncated-conical in shape . After a little
help from several members of Yahoo groups, I concluded that the more viable
alternatives were the Revell Riflemen and the HAT British Light Infantry which
wear a similar shako (and not the 'belgian shako' used by the British and their
Allies in Waterloo). In addition, some figures from the ESCI British Infantry
were also used with the front plaque removed.
The colour scheme is based
upon the illustrations appearing in the book cited above, that does not resolve
the main problem of the Spanish infantry uniforms of 1813-1814: the colour of
the coat. The Spanish Reglament of 1811 does not specify (maybe intentionally)
the colour of the coat, so there are two posibilities: dark blue or sky blue.
From the British shipment notes we can deduce that uniforms of both colours were
sent to Spain, so about a 33% of the figures were painted with blue sky uniforms
and the rest with dark blue uniforms. The facings were dark blue for the sky
blue uniforms, and sky blue and red for the dark blue uniforms.
The flags
were downloaded from the following Internet page:
http://www.warflag.com/flags/napoleon/napspain.shtml
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