Prussian officers

As promised the other day (and just a little late) here are some pictures of the last two Prussian officers I painted for the Möckern game. I have to admit, that with these two it is pretty hard to find some conclusive information on what they did before or after the battle. So I can not really tell which unit or province they came from. On the other hand this left me with some freedom as to how to depict them.

Up first is Major von Hiller who commanded the Prussian infantry at Möckern.

EDIT: I got some more information regarding Major von Hiller from Christian, a reader of this blog, which I wanted to share with you:

I have some information on Major von Hiller. His full name is Baron August Hiller von Gaertringen. His father is from Wurttemberg in the south of Germany. August was born on 11 November 1772 in Magdeburg and died on 18 January 1856 as one of the last veteran officers of the Waterloo battle. As he was wounded at Möckern, he did not participate at Blücher’s Rhine crossing, but joined the army laster and was engaged in the conquest of Paris. At the Waterloo battle he had a decisive role as he was leading the attack on Plancenoit.

[OK… I could kick myself for not seeing the Plancenoit connection! Rhanks a lot for the information Christian!!!]

Now rank wise he was not the highest ranking officer at Möckern. That was Oberst Katzeler (see below). Depending on what book you read, this also leads to some confusion as to who commanded the advent grade at Möckern as most authors choose one or the other to have done so. Reading through the Prussian after action reports you get the impression, that Oberst Katzler was in command of the advent grade, but passed command on to Major Hiller and did lead the cavalry instead. Some notes mention that he was  Oberst der Kavallerie (Colonel of cavalry), so he probably felt more comfortable leading the mounted troops than the infantry.

But this also presents a slight dilemma for me from a modeling perspective. Given that he was command of roughly three brigades worth of troops, he should have a medium sized base under the Republic to Empire rules. Given his rank it should be a small one. Since I was unable to find any historic drawing or paintings of the man I was aiming to keep his base rather generic anyway. So I chose the small base but put two horse mounted officers on it to indicate his higher responsibilities (with most brigade commanders I just use one mounted officer and one or two infantry minis). Both minis are from Calpe. One (who is to depict von Hiller) is wearing Silesian yellow. Given the number of Silesian troops in the advent grade, this seemed fitting to me. The other officer is wearing East Prussian orange. I really like the combination of orange and dark blue and since there was one East Prussian unit, I felt this would be acceptable.

Major von Hiller

Major von Hiller

Major von Hiller

I already said a few words about Oberst Katzeler when talking about von Hiller so I will mostly go into the the choice of minis here. Being an Oberst he was benefitted with a larger base and to fill that up, I put two more mounted soldiers besides him. Since he commanded the cavalry at Möckern, I felt that these should be men from a cavalry unit and which unit would be more fitting for that than the Brandenburg Hussaren. Those of you looking closely will notice, that the mins for Katzeler is actually the same as the one for von Hiller (just on different horses). I only noticed this when I was just about to start painting them. In all honesty, I should not really have cared, since they will most likely never be right to one another on the tabletop, but I was painting them both in one go and it bothered me. Now the easiest solution would have been to use a different mini, but since I was already hard pressed for time, I did not want to dig through my lead pile, clean and fill the gaps up and base coat another mini up. So I just kept him and sculpted a beard on the man. Very small addition, but it made a huge difference when it comes to his looks. Otherwise I just painted him up in Brandenburg colors, which seemed the right thing to do with the high number of Brandenburg units in the cavalry force. Again all minis are from Calpe.

Oberst Katzeler

Oberst Katzeler

Oberst Katzeler

Oberst Katzeler