Kleiner Krieg outfits and an Orange Tree..

Having completed the Torgau OoB, I am free to paint whatever please me: the recent forays in the battles with the Reichsarmee in Saxony and the willingness to play Kolin prompted me to add more hussars to my Army lists. The first two were the Austrian regiments of Hadik and Szecheny: they were based on an hussar unit bought long time ago; by adding enough officiers, trumpeters and standard bearer and by means of a little additional paintjob I get the two units, which adds to the Kaiser and Esterhazy regiments already painted, for a grand total of 20 squadrons, still few for Kolin. Indeed I need 7 more regiments to arrive at the full OoB, namely HR 11, 17, 34, 35, 36 and the Grenz Husaren (ii) and (iv).

The Prussian Werner hussars have a carachteristic brown uniform which earned them the sobriquet of “Fleischhacker” (butcher), since brown was the colour of the guild of the butchers. To appreciate fully such an uniform one has to look at the splendid 40mm painted by Nigel in his blog.

The HR3, Warnery, is one of the white-coated regiments: here I painted only one battalion, due to shortage of lead: I need to place an order to H&R, the last one was 12 years ago….

This brings the total of my Prussian hussars to 35 squadrons, short of the 50 needed to represent the powerful Ziethen avantgarde at the battle of Kolin. Moreover I need the Prinz Moritz command stand:

Here the former “Enfant Sauvage” is depicted with an Infantry “Fluegel-Adjutant” and a Jager-zu-Pferde orderly, surely with the King order to frontally attack the Austrian position. By the way the church is a Christmas Tree decoration…Here a contemporary print which portraits him: the uniform was that of IR22, with red lapels.

The last painted unit are the Jager-zu-fuss, the unfortunate unit wiped out by the Cossacks at Spandau in 1760. Heroics&Ros correctly portraits them part with the carabines and part with the bayonet-armed musket. By the way I should add a fence in front of the carabine armed ones. The Menzel drawing depicts the hat without lace but other sources give an yellow-laced hat, as I did.

I finish with a little touch of art. The last week-end of March it was the FAI-day in Italy (FAI=Fondo per l’Ambiente Italiano=“Italian Environment Trust”). There were a lot of lesser-know palaces, gardens and museum open for free. Indeed in every place there was a long line of people, both tourists and native, waiting to see these places, which are sometimes little gems. This is a picture of an orange tree (full of oranges, barely distinguible given the poor quality of my mobile phone camera) which is in the Cloister of the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence which was open to the public in this occasion. Maybe an idea for the next town base?