At the time I ordered the pack of Austrians from Pendraken, I also ordered a pack of French fusiliers. (I did forget I would need grenadiers and voltigeurs in order to be able to do a full battalion and that has proved frustrating).
Here are a few work in progress pictures.
The Eagle bearer and drummers.
Information on drummers in 1809 is a bit sketchy. It appears there was a lot of leeway and many colours would have been used. For this test I simply reversed the red and white on the turnbacks and lapels.
There is also a bit of debate about the nature and numbers standards and even eagles carried by each regiment. It appears that from 1808(and I'm not sure when in 1808) an instruction was given that only the 1st battalion of each line regiment would carry an eagle and a flag, but this took some time to be implemented so may not have been universally applied by April/May 1809.
Here is a sample of the fusiliers. The lighting today is not good. I have not highlighted the blue. I have decided on the highlight colour I will be using but as it will be a mix and I don't want to do these until I can do the grenadiers and voltigeurs at the same time.
I had a little trouble with the pompom colours. The well known green, light blue, aurora and violet scheme for differentiating the fusilier companies dates from 1810. In 1809 an earlier scheme of dark blue, aurora (pinky orange), violet and crimson was used.
Structuring my French battalions also proved to be a challenge. I am not going to worry about the theoretical difference in strength between the French, Austrian and Hungarian units. In my set up, line units are all going to be 32 figures. So a French battalion will consist of the following figures; 4 Grenadiers, 6 fusiliers with dk blue pompoms, 3 fusiliers with aurora pompoms with a'command' group of 3, then 6 fusiliers with violet pompoms, 6 fusiliers with crimson pompoms and finally 4 Voltigeurs.
