92nd Foot (Gordon Highlanders) - reinforcements

Back to the project - finished some reinforcements to bolster the ranks of the 92nd, which are now just about complete.
I enjoyed doing this little lot despite highlanders taking so long. I've come to realise that as long as I keep doing different things, e.g. varying all the redcoats with blue jacket cavalry, Greenjacket rifles, artillery etc, I can get a lot more done, rather than facing the psychological mountain of a whole regiment of the same uniform at 1:1
Huge thanks to Steve at Victrix who sent me a huge box of "spare" Highlander sprues to help out on my project, a very kind gesture which, on my limited budget, was enormously appreciated. So, apart from a few Front Rank, these are nearly all Victrix beauties. Of the three regiments in Highland uniform at Waterloo I've put the Black Watch in square, the Camerons in firing line, and the Gordon's charging (or maybe running away from D'Erlon's columns - you decide!)

 With the regiment suffering so heavily at Quatre Bras, these 60 or so men represent more like two companies, rather than one. I had to use a panorama shot to try to get them all in one shot, hence a bit blurred!

The 92^nd Foot was a regiment of enormous experience. Many of the men in the ranks in 1815 had been soldiering since the previous century.  Several had seen action as long ago as 1801 when they fought in Egypt and even more had campaigned with Sir John Moore in the Coruna campaign and then returned to the Peninsula for the rest of that war. During this time the battalion fought at Fuentes D'Onor, Vitoria, Pyrenees, Nivelle, Nive, Orthes and Toulouse.

 The running officer (left) is Lieutenant Andrew Will, a Peninsula veteran, who was one of the few officers of the 92^nd to survive Quatre Bras and Waterloo unwounded. Indirectly, however, this luck led to his posting, in 1819, to Jamaica where, like so many in the regiment, he died of yellow fever. The figure is a conversion, adding a Highland officer's body to the running legs from a Victrix. British Line Infantry box.

The men of the 92nd were nearly entirely Scottish, predominately from Aberdeenshire and Invernesshire, and Gaelic was often spoken instead of English. By Waterloo these seasoned veterans were growing long in the tooth -  the average age in Number 1 Company for example was 36 -  and a large proportion of those who survived the Napoleonic wars were discharged between 1815 and 1819.

In the centre of this pic is Captain Archibald Ferrier who had survived Quatre Bras but is seen here falling wounded at Waterloo. He was promoted to Major in 1818. Like Lieutenant Will above, Ferrier also died of yellow fever in Jamaica in 1819.

If I have time, I'll take some pics with these 92nd mixed in with the Scots Greys,"Scotland Forever" - though probably not with any hanging on to the stirrups, as has been famously claimed.