Legere skirmishers

These Foundry figures are painted up as skirmishing chasseurs from a French light infantry battalion.  I'm not assigning these figures to any particular regiment - there aren't any legere regiments in the 1815 divisions I've been working on; I believe there were only half a dozen legere units present at Waterloo.  I bought these figures from Foundry thinking they could be used as skirmishing Young Guard at Plancenoit; in fact, the figures are marketed as being "Young Guard".  However, these figures don't have epaulettes, which I think is wrong for the Young Guard regiments in 1815.  I have seen suggestions that there uniform shortages may have resulted in some men wearing coats without epaulettes and that, like the newly-raised Middle Guard untis the Young Guard may gave had a "rag-tag" appearance.  However, my Perry figures all have epaulettes and I'd like to keep these dinstinctions for my Young Guard.  The Imperial Guard needs to look a bit special, I think. So these figures were relegated to regular army.

Not being well-versed in the actual gaming of later Napoleonic battles, I don't know the extent to which legere centre companies would have engaged in skirmishing.  My reading suggests that the light infantry regiments were used in a similar way to the line ones, and whilst there may have been occasions where more than just the flank companies were sent out to skirmish, such occasions may well have been rare.  But you never know, and these figures may come in useful at some stage.  The figures are drawn from 3 of the 4 different chasseur companies and I gave a couple of them white trousers to mix things up a bit. These are the first legere figures I have ever painted and I was initially caught out by some details of the uniforms.  For example, I had assumed that the metal straps on the shakos were yellow metal like the line infantry, but it appears they were silver.  The drummer figure clearly isn't in imperial livery, but according to the Mont Saint Jean uniform website it is perfecly acceptable to have some musicians in the older style uniforms as it's probably that not all of them would have received imperial livery coats in time for the Waterloo campaign.  These are nice, characterful sculpts; well worth doing, I think.    

10 figures.  Painted October 2012.