2nd Nassau-Usingen Regiment 1815

I have finally got around to getting to work on basing up my figures for Lieutenant General Hendrik George de Perponcher-Sedlnitsky’s 2nd Dutch-Belgian Division in the Hundred Days campaign. First up is (Colonel) Prince Carl Bernhard of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach’s (Saxe-Weimar in English) 2nd (Nassau) Brigade, with possibly my absolute favourite uniformed Allied unit from Quatre Bras, the 2nd Nassau-Usingen Regiment. As they are now firmly mounted on bases ready for completion by flocking, varnishing, and fitting of standards I thought it was a good excuse to take some ‘Work In Progress ‘type photos of the near completed regiment…

A few of the Light (Voltigeur) Company chaps need their shako plumes corrected – I actually made the decision a long time ago that for my 1815 Hundred Days Napoleonics I was going to commission the painting,  as I wanted to maximise the the detail and appearance of the uniforms, but not wait 500 years to finish them (which is what would happen if I was painting them myself) – and a few of the flank company chaps have slipped through quality control checks with the wrong colour plumes! The big hold-up with these is I originally put the units together in 2008 for the SHAKO II rules, but we were using ‘economical’ units of 16-figs (on 4 bases) at that time, and as under Lasalle these are “large” units (6-bases) they needed about 39 figures per battalion (once you included skirmisher markers and a casualty figure) – the real life battalions were each around 900 men strong at the outset of the campaign – so I went from having about 54 figs to needing 117! So that was an extra 63 figures to buy and get painted!

I suppose I could have just done 2 Battalions instead of 3 – after all the II/2nd Nassau-Usingen Battalion spent the first half of the battle of Quatre Bras sitting in a field behind the crossroads and Chausée de Namur, and not seeing any significant action due to having only 8-10 musket cartridges per man (as it was armed with French muskets) – but that just didn’t seem right! And the battalion did move forward later in the battle (with the II/Orange-Nassau Battalion who were similarly poorly munitioned) to form a reserve line of resistance lining the Chausée de Nivelles around 4pm, with the II/2nd Nassau-Usingen subsequently moving across the  Chausée de Nivelles into the northern part of the  Bois de Bossu around 4.30pm and seeing some (very) minor action late in the battle… So it just felt wrong not modelling all 3 battalions.

These figures are of course the lovely Perry Miniatures range, and I commissioned Dragon Painting Service (Hong Kong) to do the painting – because it was done as 2 separate jobs 3 years apart two different painters did the work – but the second one has very closely matched the first so there are only small subtle differences between the two batches. Right now Dragon are painting me a large batch of Perry’s French for the first division of Reille’s II Corps for Quatre Bras & Waterloo and for what it’s worth I’ve had nothing but great service from them over the last 4 years with a number of fairly large jobs. Incidentally talking Hundred Days and Lasalle Armies a report and photos of our last Game is here for those interested.

Addendum: I should point out the skirmishers in the front rank are actually the Nassau Volunteer Jäger Company figures from Perry Miniatures painted up as the 2nd Nassau-Usingen Regiment. Although they were volunteers from the same area as the 28th Oranien-Nassau Regiment (and were attached to that Regiment) their uniform very closely resembled the 2nd Nassau-Usingen’s Voltigeurs so I have used them here as surrogate skirmishing Nassau-Usingen Voltigeurs (although the shako plumes are the wrong colour and need repainting green).

The actual Orange-Nassau Volunteer Jäger Company (Compagnie vrijwillige jagers ‘Oranje-Nassau’) apparently wore a very similar uniform to the 2nd Nassau-Usingen Regiment (including possibly the same green trousers although I have seen one source suggest grey like the Dutch Jägers) but I don’t believe this identical colour is 100% certain. As mentioned the company (under Captain Emilius Bergmann) was attached to the 28th Oranien-Nassau Regiment, so I eventually need 1 more of these figs to do an addition skirmisher stand for the latter unit to represent the attached Volunteer Company.

Regarding the 2nd Nassau-Usingen the following was posted by John Franklin to a discussion on TMP which is of interest:  Captain Emil Bergmann’s own extant account states that the Volunteer Jäger company, which was equipped with various rifles of different calibre, had expended all of its ammunition on the 16th, and so only twelve men and two officers served at Waterloo. The others were sent to the rear. I do have some very interesting manuscript items relating to the uniforms of the Nassau, and what is of interest is the amount of variation the troops had. Indeed, I believe that many of the latter companies in the 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the 2nd Nassau, from Sachsen-Weimar’s Brigade, were wearing the uniforms they had been given in 1813, and were equipped with an array of different items! Certainly these poor souls were given the worst of the second hand India Pattern muskets which had been sent to the Low Countires from Britain, and they had a terrible time in getting them into a serviceable state. This is corroborated by various Dutch accounts, which state that the Nassau troops were waiting in line outside the Jewellers shops while their weapons were being repaired.

Another interesting piece of information is that a few sources (mostly Dutch or German ones) seem to refer to the 2nd Nassau-Usingen Light Infantry Regiment. Whether it was technically light infantry or not (I don’t believe all the companies in each battalion were trained to skirmish) it might explain Wellington’s strange decision to request the I/2nd Nassau-Usingen Battalion be sent into Château d’Hougoumont to fortify if for defence on the morning of the 18 June (perhaps mistaking the Regiment for genuine Light Infantry)?

I’ve also got some images up of Bijlandt’s 1st Netherlands Brigade too.