The Leipzig 1813 project

As I've told in one of my previous posts, I'm planning to make a couple of diorama's of the Battle of Leipzig. Here are the first steps.



Obviously I am not going to build a huge table with 500.000 soldiers on it, I'll have to scale everything down. But before we get to the actual building of any diorama (yes I did started painting already), I had to do some research.

Doing research is something I really enjoy about scale modelling. Where certain battles are fought, what kind of troops did the army's deploy, what kind of equipment they used, etc.

One thing I don't like about the Napoleonic era, or any other pre-20th century conflict, is the lack of photographs. Yes, I know there are a lot of pictures made in the American Civil War and they are very interesting, but it's just a bit harder to get inspiration for a diorama without any real photographs.

So, instead of photographs, I went out looking for stories and eyewitness reports of the Battle of Leipzig. This turned out to be great fun. Reading about the soldiers (mostly officers ofcourse) who actually took part and what they experienced is stunning.

The other thing what I needed was maps, tactical views of the battlefield itself. This turned out to be even more fun, because the amount of information about this battle keeps amazing me. After I found the right maps on the internet I needed a list of every regiment, squadron, corps and battalion that took part in this massive 3-day battle. I'll post a couple of links to the websites I got most of the info from.

Many thanks to the people who gathered the information for those websites.

http://www.napoleon-series.org/

http://www.napolun.com/mirror/web2.airmail.net/napoleon/Leipzig_battle.htm

Get forward, damn your eyes!