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With these regiments I completed the swedish cavalry for Poltava: now
I have 24 bases which can be used as 6 V&B 3”x3” Brigade stands or 6
four-bases units for Maurice or Black-Powder.
The first regiment is the Karelska (Viborgs och Nyslotts län): at
Poltava its outfit was the standard blue coat with hat; however I decided to
represent it in the 1702 uniform with grey coat and karpus. To do this I
converted the Strelets figures by cutting away the tricorne and putting on its
place some spare karpus from the worst figures of the Swedish infantry box:
This is the result:
The Adelsfana i Sverige och Finland is indeed an “augmentation”
because one base was already done before. I added a second base with the
flag-bearer: the 1686 model flag was captured at Poltava. The regiment was with
the King main army since 1702.
The following are Dragoon regiments which, at this stage I decided to
represent with only one base (maybe one day I shall “augment” also them to two
bases each). These three regiments are a selection of the many understrenght
dragoon regiments which were present at Poltava, namely the Heilm ( former
Stenbock, yellow facings), Gyllenstierna (red facings) and Meyerfeldt (orange
facings) regiments.
The Heilm kettledrummer came from the Swedish cavalry box with a
tricorne head in place of the helmet. The Meyerfeldt regiment didn’t
partecipated at the battle, being in guard duty at the swedish camp in
Pushkarjova: however the orange facing are so tempting…
Finally, after having done all the swedish cavalry with Strelets
miniatures, I decided to paint the last two regiments with the Zvedza “Swedish
Dragoons” figures. They are a real pleasure to paint indeed, a very different
style form Strelets. However, to be fair, the Strelets have a definite
“character” and is a real satisfaction to get the best from them, because at a
glance they didn’t look so inspiring. The Zvedza are indeed on an another
planet. Anyway they mix well enough (not in the same base, clearly) and to have
some units in a “smarter outfit” gives variety to my army.
In detail they represent respectively the Norra Skanska regiment
and the Sodra Skanska regiment, this one with the coat in a lighter
blue shade:
The Sodra Skanska trumpeter livery is a result of an educated
guesswork, since no informations on the uniform are available. Both the
regiments belonged to the King’s Army from 1702: captured after Poltava were
reraised but used as garrison troops because of lack of horses and equipment.
As far as the flag is concerned, Zvedza gives a dragoon flag with the
tails and with a cross engraved (strangely enough, since such a flag can’t be
found in the Hoglund book), which is probably the only drawback of an otherwise
perfect kit. I cut the tail to have a squarish standard and overpainted the
Norra Skanska flag with two heavy coats of the Mordian Blue GW “base color”,
finishing the flag at hand.
Finally, the complete cavalry lot:
Together with the 32 infantry battalions (which I will show soon)
these figurese represents the equivalent of 96 squadrons which with the
complement of guns and general officier allows to represent the Swedish Army in
all the GNW battles. In the future however I plan to add some bases of the elusive
“Valaker” (I’ll probably will depict them as cossacks with a swedish officier
since they were indeed polish cossacks) and a base with a cart, useful to
represent objective or camp for the rules which require such an item, an
example of which is given in this 1711 print representing the swedish trophies
captured at Poltava entering in Moscow:
