Russian Foot Artillery, 1812

    As mentioned previously in my post last year about the Russian Horse Artillery, the Russians of the Napoleonic era had a special fondness for the Artillery arm, and habitually had more cannons per thousand men than any other army in Europe. This was certainly true at Borodino, where there were more than 5 artillery pieces for every 1,00 men (the French were also well provided with ordinance, with more than 4 guns per thousand men). This meant that we needed LOTS of artillery for our version of this big battle, to be run in less than 3 weeks. Although I already had some 10 batteries of my old Minifig Russian Artillery, another 9 were needed from me (not to mention new batteries from Barry, Joe, and Greg as well). The additional horse artillery were completed last year, and here are the additions to my Russian Foot Artillery contingent.

Two Russian six pounder foot batteries firing from behind some earthworks.

"How about a whiff of Russian Grapeshot, Frenchies?"

The earthworks are resin from Old Glory Shipyard; very nice.

Two more Russian 6 pounder foot batteries; I used a number of slightly different shades for the elusive  "Apple Green" color that Russian field carriages and limbers were painted.

Close up of the two batteries' the guns are the excellent Sash and Saber models, in this case French guns standing in for Russian. 

The crews are Old Glory 25/28mm; great variety of poses, and an outstanding value!

A 12 pounder battery of the Russian Imperial Guard. The distinctions are subtle - yellow litzen on the collars and cuffs, which are otherwise the black piped red common to all Russian crews;

Green pompoms with yellow centers instead of the red pom poms used by the rest of the Foot Artillery,

and the Guard Star emblem on the leather equipment.

This is a Line 12 pounder battery; we use four crew per stand for 12 pounders, three for everything else. 

Two stands make up a battery. 

When the battery is limbered, the stands are placed one behind the other, with the guns facing to the rear.  I do have a couple of Russian limbers, but I'm way to cheap to even think about limbers for 20 batteries!

Here are all six new batteries deployed; they cover a frontage of 2 feet!

The Reserve Artillery of the two Russian Armies that fought at Borodino each had 6-8 batteries apiece. Yikes...    "Here, froggy, froggy Froggies!"

And with these batteries, all I have left to finish for the Borodino project are a French Guard Horse battery, a French Young Guard Battery, and a Polish foot battery; those are 75% complete as of tonight. Yipee!