For Brain.

[11B4V]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/re-creating-the-battle-of-waterloo-with-250000-six-millimeter-tall-toy-soldiers/2014/06/12/6a6e3e4a-dd45-11e3-bda1-9b46b2066796_story.html?wpmk=MK0000200

Re-creating the Battle of Waterloo, with 250,000 six-millimeter-tall toy soldiers


Flowers are in full spring bloom outside Bruce Weigle's Alexandria home, but inside it's the dead of winter: January 1871 to be exact.

Weigle is refereeing a step-back-in-time battle from the Franco-Prussian War being waged by Bob Williams and Tim Tilson — pretend Prussian commanders — and Steve St. Clair and Dave Cashin — their faux French counterparts. Dice rolls and data cards determine troop movements and casualties. War without gore.

Occupying a table top in the center of Weigle's "gaming" room is a 6-by-7 foot swatch of 19th-century France: a Styrofoam-and-cloth scale model of the village of St. Quentin and environs that he built himself. The soldiers in play are smaller than a thumbnail, just 6 millimeters tall. Each of them represents 40 men, a practical concession made so the gaming action doesn't spill onto the floor and into the kitchen: Some 70,000 people collided at the real St. Quentin. St. Clair knows it would be a Herculean task to muster comparable toy armies.

"I've done Waterloo," he says.

"Wow!" Williams exclaims.

"All of it!"

By "all of it" St. Clair means he has spent 20 years re-creating one of the world's epic clashes, hand painting each individual 6-millimeter Waterloo combatant in precise historical detail, right down to the colors of the cuffs on the soldiers' teeny regimental jackets.

"Wow!" Williams repeats.

The project has eaten up $30,000 in out-of-pocket expenses and "probably 20,000 man-hours" of St. Clair's time. In 40-hour-workweek parlance, he's close to qualifying for a 10-year Waterloo service pin; this from a guy who scoffs at the notion of painting his own house. He has several thousand figures yet to go because he's doing some in multiple battle poses, but vows to finish long before next June's bicentennial celebration.

Then what? He guesses he'd need an area the size of a volleyball court to put everything on display.

"It's obsessive," admits St. Clair, a divorced father with three adult children. "I'm not sure it's compulsive."

An estimated 200,000 soldiers fought at the Battle of Waterloo, the public spanking that Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, gave Napoleon Bonaparte on June 18, 1815.

Waterloo fascinates St. Clair in part because of "the wide array of uniforms and troops"; about 400 distinct units were involved. Also, the geopolitical stakes couldn't have been higher. In one bloody day an empire came crashing down, bidding adieu to any thoughts of a unified Europe. "There were larger battles, but nothing anywhere this decisive," St. Clair says. "It ended Napoleon's France. Game over!"

Bruce Weigle, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, shares his friend's passion for military history and gaming. He has 31 homemade tabletop terrains stashed in his attic. He sweated the details of the St. Quentin landscape to the point of visiting the battlefield in person. Even Weigle is awed by the "sheer magnitude" of St. Clair's Waterloo accomplishment and patience. If all those soldiers were ever assembled in one place, "it would be the biggest military diorama in the world. Nothing comes close."

Maybe "compulsive" is the right word.

Steve St. Clair set soldiers on a friend's terrain model. (Mike Morgan/For The Washington Post)
Miniature French battalions advance upon the British. (Mike Morgan/For The Washington Post)

The military courses through his veins. Two of St. Clair's uncles fought in World War II, as did his father, who wound up making the Army a career. St. Clair's oldest son served in Army Special Forces. He himself retired from the Army in 1994 as a lieutenant colonel, then temporarily un-retired in 2007 at age 58 and logged 28 months in Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne Division. At night he decompressed by ... painting soldiers. He made sure to bring along plastic bags stuffed with itty-bitty metallic Prussians, a key component of the Duke of Wellington's allied coalition.

[grumbler]

I was one of the people that ran the Waterloo game that Steve started out making these figures for, back at Historicon 2004.  The game table was 28 feet long and 7 feet wide.  Arne Roustad made every building by hand.  We used a figure scale of 10 to 1 and a ground scale of 20 yards to the inch.  And we played in better than real time!

Steve has always had a massive collection.  Just don't ask where the figures all came from...

[Eddie Teach]

I was one of the people that ran the Waterloo game

Naturally, as the lone surviving veteran of the battle.

[11B4V]

I was one of the people that ran the Waterloo game that Steve started out making these figures for, back at Historicon 2004.  The game table was 28 feet long and 7 feet wide.  Arne Roustad made every building by hand.  We used a figure scale of 10 to 1 and a ground scale of 20 yards to the inch.  And we played in better than real time!

Steve has always had a massive collection.  Just don't ask where the figures all came from...

That is cool as hell.

[The Brain]

I read an article in Wargames Illustrated about this guy. Nice collection.