GNW Swedish Liv Dragoons

 

 So the next unit of Swedes that the basing department has passed me back is the Liv Dragoon regiment. I have two units of these as it is was a big regiment and in some cases was split into two wings of 3 or more squadrons.

The Swedish Dragoons looked and fought no different to standard cavalry, they may have had drummers rather than Buglers and carried a swallow tailed standard rather than square but other than that you would never know.

Like the guard foot the Guard Dragoons fought in nearly all the major battles and led from the font. The Uniform was a very simple blue faced blue. Colours quite popular in Swedish horse.

All of the figures are from Ebor, however I decided to add a little variety by changing some of the figures used.

The first four shots show both units together and the aerial shot gives a good impression of the tight , shallow Swedish wedge formation.

In this first unit I have substituted the bugler with a drummer in true dragoon fashion. I have also swapped the standard Swedish Cavalry officer for a figure from the generals pack who fits in quite well. Just means they look slightly different to the other units with Ebor command packs.

This left me with a spare officer and bugler. I had already painted the Ebor King Charles figure, however my paint job was not as good as I would like and the King in his early twenties looked more like he was in his forties. So I demoted him to Colonel of Dragoons, drilled out the sword hand of the officer to accept a standard pole and had a different command base again. I think it looks OK.

This takes me up to 5 units of Swedish horse, so almost half way. I do think they look nice used together in two ranks as well. Again for a little variety I used a couple of different horses. The other thing I have purposely done is used paler coloured horses.  Many countries during this period preferred dark horses for heavy cavalry, the darker the better, the Swedes adhered to this stereotype. This did mean that dragoons could potentially have access to some decent horse flesh but would use horses of paler colours (I understand this was partly the origins of the famous Scots greys) so I used pale browns and greys for all but the officers horses. Again just means they look slightly different.

That's it for the Swedes for now, couple of units of Poles to share coming up.

Taking a slight break from Great Northern War and currently painting some Sikh Wars troops for a change, I will share an update on this in the near future.

Thanks for reading.