|
|
作者：Tony Barton
Dragoon , English Civil War 1643 .
I’ve been having great fun making horses recently , which at last allows me to make some of the mounted figures I have long been planning .
The first is this Dragoon :~
A true mounted infantryman , who dismounts to become a musketeer .
Armies have always needed fast-moving troops to seize villages , bridges and passes , and be able to defend them . And cheap mounted soldiers were always needed to escort convoys of vital supplies.
The Dragoon was invented at some time in the 16c, as a mobile form of Shot. He is the descendant of the mounted archer , widely used in the 15th century .
In some countries , particularly France, he seems to have been armed originally with a short carbine known as a “Dragonne “ .
The gun didn’t last, being quickly replaced by a normal length musket , but the name stuck to all mounted infantry thereafter.
For brief period , there were also mounted Pikemen , but in practice it was so inconvenient the idea was soon dropped. Dragoons on foot had to shift for themselves for protection from Horse once dismounted , which is why they often used physical cover .
They were cheap : the smallest and cheapest horses, merely to get them to the critical position , where they dismounted and operated as musketeers.
Given the difficulty of handling a match on horseback, they were for preference armed with wheellocks or snaphaunces, and by the ECW with the earliest type of flintlock. For convenience , the guns themselves tended to have shorter barrels than those used by the Foot .
The Royalists in the ECW had several regiments of them , and they played a major part in their mobile operations , and became something of an elite.
They were used for quick assaults on towns and fortified houses , and gained a reputation for ruthlessness and plundering.
The Parliamentarians seem to have been less enamoured , and only had a few companies , who seem to have been generally pretty useless , until with the formation of the New Model they got Okey’s Regiment , who distinguished themselves at Naseby and thereafter.
Apart from all their usual skirmishing and convoy work , in field battles they were often moved to a hedge line where they could shoot into the flanks of the enemies’ advancing Horse .
One man in ten had to be used to hold the horses .
Giving a footsoldier a horse obviously gave him ideas above his station ; and there was always a tendency for them to better themselves by becoming Horse. The trend started at Naseby , where Okey’s Dragoons of the New Model memorably remounted and charged into the melee at the end of the battle.
In future centuries, Dragoons became proper Horse , though still trained in the foot drill and encumbered with muskets until near the end of the 18th century. Mounted Infantry thereafter tended to be reinvented for each campaign , such as the Cape Wars and the Boer War , and Horse themselves became little more than MI by the end of their history , since modern warfare made mounted action less and less possible.
The figure :~
An HT Slim body : I really like these.
The size and proportions are ideal for historical figures , the best so far in an off-the-shelf figure.
But pricey , and rather hard to get.
The outfit is entirely scratchbuilt.
The musket, with an English Lock Type 1, is one of my own resin castings with a special lock.
Quite how the muskets were carried when mounted is obscure : they could have been slung on carbine slings , but that means the barrel hangs very low behind the right leg , so I have elected to use a sling instead, mounted on rings pinned into the stock .
Something similar is shown in a 1620s woodcut , and it seems an entirely logical arrangement , since the balance is much better . He can mount and dismount without it getting too much in the way .
Firing from the saddle was innacurate , and not the way dragoons were used . It needed a very well-trained horse ; and with a gun this length reloading would be nearly impossible anyway .
The bandolier is the usual issue type . The blue colour is common on surviving ones. Some may have used paper cartridges in a leather pouch instead .
The sword is another “pattern” sword , a very crude broadsword made for the Tower, with a basket hilt cut from sheet iron.
He wears his own clothes , typically a browny-grey , as were most everyday garments at the time, being made from undyed cloth.The buttons are glass beads sewn on with a knotted thread .
Some dragoons may have been issued with infantry coats, and dragoons who were formed from existing Foot companies might have had them , but the evidence of issue is not definite for companies first raised as dragoons.
The boots are optional ; most footmen turned into dragoons would have worn shoes, if only because of the difficulty of getting boots.
Boots were also awkward to wear on foot, especially with spurs, though without the spurs they tend to come off ! Although highly fashionable at the time with young gents , they have distict disadvantages when walking in rough country.
He has a crude poncho made from a blanket strapped behind the saddle , and an oiled canvas snapsack for his rations and spare clothes tied on top.
The saddle itself is based on several Dutch pictures, and one surviving in the Royal Armouries , which are of a lower type without the built-up cantle of the Great Saddle . I think this was what was meant by a “pad” saddle , which is mentioned in documents.
There were a lot a variants on the basic pattern , which had a wooden tree , padded with flock or tow and covered in leather, which was stitched and nailed in place.
The horse is a rebuilt Marx Thunderbolt, remodelled , with a plastikard neck and head covered with Efaplast air-drying clay.The mane and tail are crepe wool.
He’s based on a friend of mine , a cob called Domino who lives nearby.
He’s small ( 14h or so ) but heavily built, and what I imagine such horses looked like at the time. Not a trace of Arab blood in his veins |
上一篇：简易德军小岗亭下一篇：这几个哥们拿的是叫什么枪？
|
[复制链接]
发表于 2010-10-12 11:51
发表于 2010-10-12 11:58
发表于 2010-10-12 13:20