French 1870 Staff and Artillery

 

Hello everyone, I'm here today with some news and some photos of Franco-Prussian figures I converted and painted a little earlier this year. As ever you can click on the pictures to get a proper look.

The Other Partizan 2024

I attended the Autumn Partizan show yesterday, and what a good day out it was. It was great to catch up with so many old friends and nice to see my work forming parts of one or two fine demo games. I'd particularly like to mention a wargamer called John Carpenter who came up to me to say nice things about the blog, as someone who views it keenly but never comments(!) Great to meet you John, and please feel free to make contact if there's anything I can be of help with. The regular comments from some visitors are very much appreciated and help reassure me that all this is actually reaching the outside world, but from the figures Google tell me, there are a lot more who don't say anything but do come back more or less. Between on and two hundred as far as I can tell. So hello to you all, don't be shy to comment on posts, but you could also join those who email me (address in profile). 

At any rate this was a vintage Partizan show for demo games. I usually scour the trade stands before getting to the games, but this time made a beeline for the actual wargames. No idea who won the little prize they give out, but the top game for me was The SYW presentation from David Imrie, Simon Chick and others loosely calling themselves the Bodkins. Figures and terrain were crisp and bright rather than dull or gaudy, all handsomely set off by a cloth mat in perfectly verdant shades of green. It's all shown here, and David explains how he did the cloth (1) Facebook I will be looking into this for my own setup, perhaps instead of the faux-fur arrangement I have long contemplated. 

Other fine demos were the Marlburian game by Simon Millar, a huge 30 Years War Battle, splendid WWII efforts, quite a showing of paper figures and a British landing in Egypt 1800 by the Perrys. Talking of which: 

Perrys Franco-Prussian Bulletin 

You heard it first on Hand Built History!😀 You may remember I was previously on about making masters of Bavarian artillery pieces. To move arrangements forward I pinned down Michael Perry for a proper chat. The first news is that the plastic Bavarian infantry were planned to come out by Christmas as I thought, but now it's more likely to be January. Most of the remaining work is on the box and instruction leaflet, where Stefan Huber (of Bavaria Miniatures) is providing generous help. 

Some metal packs are in hand and I will be getting masters for the guns into Michael's hands by the end of this year. What guns the Bavarians used in 1870 has long been a bit of a mystery, but my research has got to the bottom of it. It turns out their 4-pounders were the Krupp gun, but on a locally-made carriage. All the corps-level foot artillery was 6-pounders, but each of the two Bavarian army corps used a different model. The I Corps had Krupp 6-pounder pieces on locally-made carriages, where the II Corps had Bavarian-made pieces. These were rifled breech-loaders but, unusually, cast in bronze rather than steel. The upshot is that there were three different guns but all on pretty much the same Bavarian Model 1866 carriage. hence I will be making just one carriage and the bronze 6-pounder barrel, whilst only needing to adapt the existing Prussian barrels for the other two types. You should get a choice of all three barrels in the pack and theoretically Michael could box off the Bavarian artillery with just a single set, although he is inclined to make a couple of crews to give some variety.

He has also completed sculpting a number of metal packs to fill some of the gaps in the FPW French. Apparently there are Gardes Mobiles, Lancers and Cuirassiers, with a start having also been made on Zouaves. I'm not sure when these will be moulded and released, but presumably in the next few months.

You may be aware that Michael hasn't been in altogether good health for some years now, which has had an impact in terms of how slowly the FPW range has come out. I am pleased to say that he is now anticipating a routine operation in a couple of weeks time, which after some physio will see him fighting fit again. He is in good spirits and looking forward to getting this done. 

Anyway on to the pretext for all these ramblings. These are heavily-converted French staff figures and some artillery I completed earlier in the year.

Here are the staff, mainly two corps commanders. On the left Marshal Canrobert and on the right General Frossard. These two fought in all the battles around Metz so the background buildings in the Lorraine style are just right.

Canrobert, with kepi doffed and a staff officer at front. Canrobert was quite a stout fellow, so I built out both his body and his face with green stuff. In the Panorama of Rezonville he is shown with the full dress saddlery. The fiercely waxed moustache was made from very thin brass rod. All these figures started life as Perry figures but from many ranges. Canrobert was an ACW general and the staff officer a Russian Napoleonic figure. Others came from the Carlist War, the ACW, the Paraguayan War range and elsewhere. A lot has been scratch built, incluuding nearly all the saddlery.

The command stand and two more converted officers. The chap at the back is a portrait of General Lapasset, wearing the standard general's campaign uniform The French general staff corps (front right) dressed rather like generals, with the same frock coats and trousers, but wore gold aiguilettes and their kepis were of "amaranthe", a pinkish or mauve shade.

Here you can see the fanion bearer properly. Most French generals had a cavalry trooper (here from 2e Hussars) who carried a small flag on a lance to mark the commander's position. This practice was widespread but unofficial and only regulated later. Corps commanders usually had a plain tricolour fanion. Generals of division sometimes had fanions too, the patterns seemingly anticipating the 1876 rules. So comprising vertical red bands on white, one stripe for the first division of a corps, two for the second, etc, all equally spaced.

Here is Frossard with an officer of Chasseurs a Cheval and a dragoon fanion bearer in waistcoat.

Another view. Frossard was a typical general of the French Imperial Army, ie a veteran campaigner, personally brave as a lion, but passive and lacking initiative as a commander. At least he had the sense to get his men to dig rudimentary cover before the battle of Gravelotte, which undoubtedly saved lives and helped hold the position against Steinmetz's fierce attacks.

One of the individual command figures, this time a senior artillery officer to command the corps artillery in terms of my wargame rules.

And here's the main punch of the corps artillery, the rifled 12-pounder muzzle-loader. It's quite a big beast, though I'm sure I made it to strict 1/56 scale like all the other guns. Incidentally this photo and others in this post were taken using the "macro" function of my camera. I don't really enjoy photography to be honest, it's just the means to an end, but I recently made the effort to decipher the menu buttons and whatnot, as I wanted to show guns and staff from close up.

Here's the whole batch of artillery. From left we have a mitrailleuse, the 12-pounder, a 4-pounder horse artillery battery and a mounted officer.

Note that the mitrailleuse stand only has two crew figures. In my wargame rules a gun with four crew represents the typical pair of batteries, ie 12 guns, where the mitrailleuse came in single 6-gun batteries. Strictly the base width should be half that of the double battery's 45mm, but there would be no way of getting a 28mm gun onto such a narrow stand, so the compromise is 30mm wide. 

 

Buildings of Ancient Greece

You may have noticed that so far I haven't shown anything going back beyond the Middle Ages or so. Partly that reflects my own favourite wargaming periods of mainly "horse and musket" plus World War II.  But when I was working on commissions it was just what people wanted me to build. There was an exception however, as my late friend Mark Sturmey had interests which very much included the ancient world. Specifically he built up armies for the Trojan Wars, and for Republican Rome versus Pyrrhus of Epirus. For the first of those wars he was very taken with the tales in Homer's Iliad, where the Greek and Trojan armies clashed outside the city of Troy. So he asked me to create some suitable buildings to set the scene, and we had a number of games using the "Impetus" rules with some special abilities for the various heroic commanders, reflecting the favour of the gods.

Something for Sale

These buildings never got photographed for reasons I've related before, but they have come back into my posession recently, following Mark's family selling his collection via Hinds Figures. As with the Basque stuff shown in the last post it was nice to see them again, and good to photograph them for the record. But I honestly don't think I am likely myself to ever need wargaming scenery for ancient Greece. Having thought it through therefore, I have decided for once to sell these models on. The first sensible offer will therefore secure these four buildings, and I'll be glad to see them go to a good home. To give you an idea, I am thinking of a sum in the low hundreds of pounds. If you have wargaming pals who might be interested I would be grateful if you could mention this to them.

News on the Perrys' Franco-Prussian Range

A couple of years ago I was dragged away from doing my own stuff to make masters for the French and Prussian artillery pieces of 1870. I feel it as a certain honour to be part of the Perry project. If you are interested in this period you will know that Michael Perry is now currently working on a third plastic set currently, ie Bavarian Infantry. So the news is that I have been commissioned to make masters of the Bavarian four- and six-pounder guns for this period. I've promised Michael that these masters will be in his hands before the end of this year at the latest. These will be the most accurate models of these little-known but distinctive guns available to the wargamer in any scale. 

I am able to update you a little bit more on the progress of this popular but ever-so-slowly-appearing range. Michael, whose range it is, says he is very conscious he needs to do more to complete the French army, not least Zouaves, Turcos and the remaining cavalry. I have mentioned to him the need for some generals for both sides, and horse artillery crews. Anyway, we haven't seen anything at all since being shown the "3-up" masters for the rank and file Bavarians in April, despite it being over a year since the last metal packs. I think work has been focussed on completing the plastic Bavarians, but my guess is that their release (by the end of 2024?) will be accompanied by some metal (Bavarian) packs. Would it have been better to complete the main armies before starting the Bavarians? Absolutely, imho, but artists have to go where inspiration takes them. 

On top of this I don't think it's giving too much away to say that Michael hasn't been in the best of health for a couple of years. However I am pleased to hear that the trouble has turned out to be of a less serious nature than first thought, and Michael is positive about being fighting-fit once again before too much longer. So there's good reason to see the FPW range as moving forward more swiftly again soon. 

So, on with the Ancient Greek buildings:

I researched the buildings for this period and culture and was pleased to find plenty of information online, based on archeology, reconstructions and surviving fragments. As with all vernacular architecture the materials had to be available close by and for free. But the way those materials are put together varies from one culture to another. In this case we have stone bases, tapered inwards slightly, with upper walls reminiscent of the torchis method.

The roofs were flat because this isn't an area with a great deal of rainfall or snow. They were based on a layer of logs covered with a mixture of mud, dung aand straw. In modern reconstructions they always appear darker than the walls. The inhabitants apparently used the roofs as a living space, accessing them by ladders.

These buildings are designed to work together as a group, a village or whatever, rather than being large individual models.

I added quite a few details in this courtyard and on the roofs: jars, amphorae, baskets, mats, etc.

The wicker mats were made of real wicker, so to speak, so they look quite convincing. I wove them out of coconut fibres around thicker vertical strands. 

These buildings were made specifically for the Trojan wars, so part of the Mycenean Greek culture. But the styles of construction wouldn't have changed over centuries. Hence they are suitable for Greece and Asia Minor over the whole ancient period and into the Byzantine era.

Something of a picnic seems to have been laid out here. I expect that watching heroic combats, inspired by the gods, still called for a few snacks...

This building is based on modern reconstructions of a small temple from the Mycenean culture.

We're Back!

I know, it's been six months. And blogs are dying like flies. So you would be forgiven for thinking Hand Built History had gone the way of all flesh. But nope, the show is back on the road, with enough material for about three more posts after this one.

So what has kept me from feeding the blog so long? Loads of things and nothing much. Heath issues (nothing terrible, touch wood). Been working hard on my Franco-Prussian rules. Don't enjoy the process of photographing my stuff as much as some folks do? Slothfulness mostly. Thanks anyway to those of you who have been in touch during this downtime. But HBH is back in the groove now. So without further ado:

An Unexpected Turnup

Some of you might remember me musing wistfully, a couple of years ago, about the "projects that got away", the models I had made for customers and got no photographs of. I meant three particular sets of things back then: a German village done as a commission for Jonathon Marcus, a layout of Basque/ Northern Spanish buildings and a group of  ancient Trojan buildings. Both the latter being done for (or with) my late friend Mark Sturmey. 

Jonathon Marcus got in touch with some great pictures of the German village, which you can see if you click on that "label" in the right-hand sidebar. Then some photos (of mixed quality) emerged of the Basque setup, from a demo game which Mark did at the Reading show. But neither hide nor hair of the Trojan stuff. 

However recently I was alerted by my friend Martin Gane that wargames buldings looking a lot like mine were for sale through Hinds Figures, who trade in second-hand wargames figures mostly, but also some books and terrain items. It did turn out that Mark's collection had been moved on in this way. His numerous wargames armies had been bought, mostly by a well-known UK gamer, but the vanished buildings were being sold (at insultingly cheap prices, ahem!) by Hinds via their Ebay page. Evidently the Spanish buildings had been split into four lots and the Trojan stuff into two. Someone had already snapped up one Trojan lot plus the very detailed Basque church. Martin himself picked up two more lots of Spanish buildings. And I took the plunge and re-acquired the remaining one lot each of Spanish and Trojan things.

It was a pleasant if slightly strange feeling to unpack these models which I had built but not seen for about twelve years, and not had decent photos of either to remember them by. We will be coming on to the Trojan things in the next post, but we'll start with:

Basque Buildings

In my humble opinion someone got themselves a heck of a bargain with the Ebayed Basque Jesuit church, judging by the prices being asked for the other lots, but good luck to whoever it was. There's one or two pictures of that model if you click on the "Spain" label.But the rest of this project is now either back with me or with Martin, who was kind enough to take some nice pictures and send them over. 

Village dwellings in the distinctive, rather dour, style of northern Spain. The whole setup was partly made by me and partly by Mark and myself jointly. The two structures here were originally constructed as a single L-shaped building as part of a town. On re-acquiring this I decided it wouldn't really fit with my notoriously small village layouts, so I cut it apart and re-worked things a tiny bit to create two smaller houses.

Thes models were mostly built from the Wills sheets as I've often described, with a few of my cast doors and windows. The walls use the "Random Stone" sheet, which makes a change form the standard stonework sheet. If I'm to be picky, the chap who originally sculpted this sheet was a bit careless of how stone walls are "coursed" by the mason, but it all drybrushes up very satisfyingly.

These three buildings can now go in the big box with my other Spanish stuff. One day I'll get to play with them.

This building is what's called a horreo. To be seen across most of Spain, they are storehouses for grain and other produce. The stone "mushroom" legs are to make it hard for rats and other critters to get in. I made this little model as a present for Mark.

The last three photos are by Martin Gane Here we have a town block, which Mark and I put together very much as a joint effort. Good memories. We aimed to show the three building styles common in this part of Spain: stonework, timber framing with brick infill, and rendered stone with some faint pretension to a neo-classical style.

The back of the same block. There was also an old tower and other small items in the town display, which you can see if you click on the sidebar "label". 

Finally a tradional Basque farmhouse, a basseri, which was another one I made for Mark as a present. These farmhouses worked on the principle of "a whole farm in a single building", common across much of Europe but totally contrary to what we expect in Britain or the US say. In this case, the little door you see in the centre was for animal access to a byre or stable. The living quarters are upstairs, with a balcony to take the sun. The covered place at the front was a covered outside work area, where you could sit to mend things or do rustic crafts. Tools were hung around this area and you should be able to see at least a sickle and a tiny saw which I made to go here.

The Defenders of Lorraine

Off to a rather slow start to 2024 here at Boadle Towers. I had finished two 1870 French line regiments and started to do a flag when I was brought to halt by some virus, bug, flu, Covid or whatever the heck it was. That knocked me out for about three weeks, so I've only just finished the flag (see below) and got round to photography. Even then I didn't quite summon the energy to properly compose shots of all the Lorraine village stuff being defended by the new French. That will have to wait, but in the meantime here's the figures and the flag. And a small offer, if my approach to doing the flags would be of help to anyone else doing 1870.

By the way, please note that my email address has changed, though the old one will still find me for the moment. The updated address is now on the profile page. 

Here's the 32nd Line marching boldly towards the invaders. France had some 102 line regiments dressed identically except for a too-small-to-read regimental number on the kepi band. The uniform (almost) reflects the french tricolour and in painting these I focussed on producing bright, clear colours. In particular when you paint the piping on the kepi it's possible to end up with something untidy and "muddy", which I was determined to avoid.

Another characteristic was the mountain of field kit which the French soldier carried piled up on his back. This approach had come about from campaigning victoriously around the world in the decades before 1870: from the Sahara to the Baltic, from Mexico to China. Every soldier carried the means to shelter himself and to cook his rations. The Prussians had never needed to give a thought to this, reckoning to just pile into the nearest barn, which actually worked better when campaigning in well-populated areas, which was the case in 1864, 1866 and 1870-71. The Perry figures show all the proper kit very nicely; it's just a little bit fiddly to paint. This unit has got a "cantiniere" from the metal command pack. The job of these ladies was to provide the soldiers with tots of brandy from the barrel they carried, although there are many tales of them helping the wounded under fire, bringing up ammunition and so forth. They were dressed in a feminised version of their regiment's uniform.

With the plastic figures of the two packs you can create units doing one of three things: marching, charging and firing line. Here the 77th are blazing away with their long-range "Chassepot" rifles. In the open, a firing line would mostly be prone at this time, but when there's a little bit of cover, such as the walls around a village, you would have seen the men both standing and kneeling. The poses in the plastic packs do allow a dynamic mix.

I mount my figures on what some would regard as unfashionably ( or unfeasibly) small bases: 45mm x 40mm for six figures. This is for two reasons. Firstly it's more realistic. Soldiers in close order throughout the 18th and 19th centuries formed up elbow to elbow, so less than two feet per file. At our scale, even the 15mm width I give them is quite loose, but many gamers use 20mm frontage, or even more with open areas on each base, never mind sabot bases and other whatever. Each to their own of course, but I try to avoid "overbasing" because it's unrealistic. Secondly, without going into the obvious arithmetic the smaller your bases for a given size of unit the larger area your tabletop represents, and I want to do big battles.

I planned to do a flag which could be printed off for multiple line units, so my method was to start with an image of an 1812-pattern flag, the pattern of which was broadly copied for the Second Empire colours. I scanned it into the PC, blew it up to almost A4 size, printed it off and then overpainted the whole thing to equate specifically to the 1853-pattern flag carried by the 32nd Regiment. (This flag was captured when Metz surrendered and photographed later on, so we can be certain of its historical appearance.) The colours are on the dark side and I used buff for where the gold will end up. So here's what that looked like (complete with my workings-out). Now there's a lot I could say about the slightly differing patterns of flag used by French line infantry in 1870, but I'll spare you. My approach was to do one single, 100% accurate flag and then just fudge the details for the other regiments. The size of script used for the list of battle honours (different for every single unit and not always even known) is such that when reduced they won't really be legible, hence will do for any unit!

The painted flag was then re-scanned and sized to suit 28mm figures, the colours brightened a bit and the flag copied to produce a printout sheet of six flags. I then painted metallic gold over the appropriate areas and wrapped the flag around the pole using dilute PVA. You want the flag to be sufficiently soaked to bend freely into soft folds, without actually falling apart. Once dry I highlight the areas of red, blue and white which would catch the light. Finally I give the whole thing a coat of PVA, partly for strength and partly because I figure the flags were of silk and would have a slight sheen to them. 

So that's my method of doing flags. If you think this printout might be of help to you in doing French line flags for 1870, please email me (note new address on profile page) and I will send it over as a Word document. You can then print off a set of flags to the size you prefer and finish them to your taste.

Last Bits of the Lorraine Villages

This is certainly going to be the last post here before Christmas, so I wish you all a very pleasant and peaceful Christmas! Since my last blog update I have done a couple of additions to the Lorraine village project. I did then start off to add a couple of further things (barricades and plants growing up the walls), but somehow the mojo took me elsewhere and I've been painting French 1870 infantry. One unit is done and the second is well under way, so I hope to manage a final post for 2023 showing the village units assembled and defended by their "rightful owners", the soldiers of France!

For your entertainment today we have a batch of small trees all based on pins, which will complement the village units, and some of the previously shown houses which have now had various forms of battle damage added to them. Here's the trees. I made a batch of twenty using my often-described methods. Twelve have a sort of dark olive-ey foliage which is what we see in the "Panorama of Rezonville", then there's four each in two brighter shades. A detail I spotted in the panorama was the trunk of one tree struck and shattered by a shell.

When I made the boundary walls there were lots of collapsed sections so I thought it would be more consistent to have some of the buildings also damaged by the hail of Prussian shellfire. I looked at the battle damage shown in paintings and had a think about what types of damage might be seen. I decided there were four effects to model: bullet strikes on the rendered walls, broken windows, shellholes in the walls and the same in the roofs.

The bullet strikes were made by bodging a sharp point through the walls, teasing out a bit of the plaster with the scalpel point and then re-doing the hole to keep it crisp. Finally a little bit of dark wash is painted into the upper part as shadow.

Broken windows were modelled by pushing the scalpel point carefully through the clear plastic glazing. First you aim for a star shape, then cut out a small section or two in the middle of the broken pane. 

I gave half a dozen of the existing houses a shellhole or two. I used pieces of the trusty Wills stonework sheets, carefully cutting out entire stones to produce a hole with irregular edges. Then a slightly larger hole is cut in the existing wall, which is thinned out from inside and the stone hole glued behind it. 

Finally I addressed the dramatically shattered sections of tiled roof, which we frequently see in the paintings. These were more challenging in modelmaking terms, so I only did a couple. It would be easy to just cut a hole in the tile sheet and insert a grid of woodwork, but I like to work out what would be going on in more detail. I researched how the roofs were constructed in Lorraine and worked from that, using styrene strip for the rafters. I carefully carved some whole tiles out of the same material and integrated them with the edges of the cast tile sheets. The idea is to reveal how the pan-tiling was constructed, with vertical rows of "unders", then the joints covered by vertical rows of "overs". When I painted the tiles I did the previously-covered parts in a lighter colour, presuming they would have escaped the smoke and grime which darkened the visible parts. This may have been over-thinking it! Nevertheless I am pleased with how these details have come out. 

Lorraine Village Boundaries

Here's the latest stage of the Lorraine villages project, which is finally nearing completion. But first:

Sixty Years of Wargaming

It's been dawning on me over recent weeks that it must now be just about sixty years ago when I had my first wargame with actual rules, at the age of eleven. I had played with toy soldiers since being little, but was getting to an age where I questioned why this Airfix soldier should be arbitrarily knocked down rather than the next one. (Some say I've always over-thought things.) Anyway at the end of the school holidays in 1963 my dad took me to see an exhibition in Manchester -we used to live in Sandbach, Cheshire. It was staged by the British Model Soldier Society and entitled "The Livery of War". After spending hours admiring the large figures in glass cabinets around the room we ended up in front of an American Civil War wargame, based on rules and dice. A card explained how it worked. 

Here was the answer. Excellent news, by having rules of this kind I could go on playing with little soldiers! My dad and I agreed we would make up some World War Two rules and have a game, the first of which must have taken place just about sixty years ago now. I had many epic games with my dad, first WWII, then Franco-Prussian funnily enough, then Napoleonics, and most things since those days. It's fair to say I didn't think this peculiar pastime would be keeping me out of mischief sixty years after I discovered it.

On reaching the 60th anniversary some would be announcing how they celebrated it by refighting Leipzig on a hundred foot square table. But actually I've hardly had a game in months, being too busy building scenery. One of the good things about wargaming actually, is you can pursue the parts of it you are enthused by, changing your focus as the next thing stirs you.  Another sixty years would just about give me chance to do all the things I want to do in this hobby, so fingers crossed.

Lorraine Village Boundaries

Here's all the bits of wall, fence and hedge I've made to enclose the buildings and village bases previously shown. There's forty-two sections altogether.

The hedge sections are like this. The usual rubberised horsehair and dyed granulated cork were used. I worked carefully to get a nice, open structure here, because solid blocks of hedge would only be appropriate for a well-manicured domestic boundary. The hedge sections are in two colours, slightly lighter and slightly darker, though this doesn't show too well on the photos.

Fences are occasionally seen in contemporary images of Lorraine. They seem to have been rough versions of the classic picket fence, and whitewashed from time to time. On this section I made a broken down, overgrown end to the fence.

Walls were the most common garden boundary in Lorraine, and here's a vignette from the Panorama de Rezonville, which shows the look I was after. As with the buildings they were made from rough stone rendered over, but here with an unusual triangular-section top.Note also the blotchy colour and the frequent collapsed sections.

This is my attempt to get the above look. The plan wall is just made from three thicknesses of mounting card, trimmed and filed to get the shape along the top. Both ends of every wall or fence section culminate in a broken down end, a gatepost, or the wall disappearing into a hedge.

A close-up of one collapsed section. I think some of these may have fallen down with age and others in the painting are meant to have been hit by shells. I used the Wills stonework sheets, backed with 2mm styrene sheet and then carved to give stone texture on both sides and at the ends. I made a pile of loose stones from the same materials, styrene strip and a few suitable-sized pebbles.

Sometimes the walls were topped with tiles, so I made some sections accordingly, using strips of ridge tiles left over from the buildings.

Here's an idea of how these sections are meant to be used, enclosing the village bases whilst leaving gaps to suggest gateways. There must have been some sort of gates there once, but the panorama just shows gaps, so I did the same. I think it's possible that troops bivouacing there the night before the battle had actually used them to fuel their camp fires!

This is how closely the boundary sections are designed to fit around the village bases. The outsides have various projections, but the insides are made clean of any interference.

Finally you see how the boundaries look when defended by infantry. The heights of the walls are about 20-22mm, which seems to fit "firing-line" units. In use, the figure bases would be on top of a village base, raising the figures up another couple of millimetres.

Of course there will be buildings in the final version of these village units. And trees, which in fact I've almost completed now. I may go back to a couple of the houses and add some damaged sections to wall and roof, and I am also tempted to make a couple of barricade sections, with carts and furniture piled up to block the road leading into a village. Both of these would look nice, but having spent most of 2023 on these villages I'm not sure it would be time optimally spent. Given that I may not actually have another sixty years of wargaming time to go.