Made in 1972, Airfix’s Waterloo British and French Infantry were my first ‘horse and musket era figures as a boy. Ranks of these infantrymen would refight Waterloo time and again across my bedroom floor. Being too young to paint them effectively, I always experienced these battles in a monochrome of Airfix’s cream-coloured plastic. Plastic Soldier Review fully recognised this experience:
“As the only British line infantry available for a long time, many people will have fond memories of these figures, and the chunky detail and basic sculpting were of no consequence as Waterloo was endlessly recreated on tables and floors everywhere.“
So, I wondered recently what it would be like to actually see them in full colour. The ‘basic sculpting’ and limited detail would pose a challenge, and as for the French infantry, PSR were positively disparaging, saying:
“It’s not that the detail is poor, just that the figures bear only a vague resemblance to human beings. Legs are thin and spindly, and everyone seems slightly hunchbacked. The whole anatomy is unconvincing and, quite frankly, ugly, making them look more like some sort of troll or similar fantasy creature. Some of the poses are equally bizarre.”
Ugly trolls!? Oof, that’s a bit harsh. Personally, I find them perfectly agreeable but how they would look with paint on them might be another matter. Actually, I had begun to attempt to paint these figures some years ago, but the project never got off the ground and the selected figures have been ‘stored’ somewhere so safe that I can’t locate them. So I decided to choose some other basic poses of the troops left available to me such as those on the march.
The French infantry equivalents strangely have their muskets on the opposite shoulder, but otherwise I thought were reasonable figures.
I also painted a couple of other British infantry figures, including a bugler. The bugler I painted with a red coat rather than in reverse facings as this was in keeping with the illustration on the back of the box which showed a drummer with the same.
Both Airfix boxes included wounded figures which were particularly graphic. As Plastic Soldier Review points out, this gruesome side of the soldier’s experience is rarely found on sprues. The French set included a particularly innovative and, I thought, moving sculpt. This depicts a soldier carrying on his back a wounded comrade who is nursing a head wound. The tangle of arms and legs was tricky to pick out but made for a rewarding paint.
It was not an easy painting experience to get the best out of these old figures, much of the detail being a little indistinct, but with a bit of care they can look very reasonable. It was great to finally see some of my old childhood Waterloo armies come to full technicolour life at long last. I intend to add to this project from time to time with the other figures. Perhaps in the future I can get both entire full colour armies face to face again across those imaginary Belgian cornfields?
Suburban Militarism 