"La Haye Sainte 3D" Topic

Nice!

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Amicalement
Armand

Wow, that is nice.

Main page link seems U/S…what are we seeing? A 3D image reconstruction, with huge roof tiles or plans for 3D printing?

Switch through pictures, here you can see printed in different scales.
Last painted on gamebord is 28mm

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Club Les-Compagnies-D-Ordonnance

Yes, I too thought the roof-tiles, and indeed the detailing around the farmhouse windows, a bit too big/dominant. Probably works better at the smallest scales, assuming it is a "blueprint" which can be reproduced to any size. The painting was good.

Happy you like it boys!. (smile)

Amicalement
Armand

The dimensions are nothing like the real thing.

No gaming building has real dimensions. How to play with it, if has ??

But advance of 3d printing and modular, you can make it larger…

The Airfix La Haye Sainte is a different scale in every axis and none of them is the purported 1/76. That's why it works so well as a wargames building. It fits the table without dominating it.

The real LHS would. I suspect that quite a lot of wargamers' misapprehensions about Waterloo come from having looked at wrongly-proportioned LHS models.

You can zoom in on and measure LHS' current footprint very accurately on Google Maps. In most cases this is unchanged from 1815.

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The south flank wall, from the corner that abuts the road to the corner of the Great Barn, is just over 47 metres (155 feet). The Great Barn itself is 34m long. The west face, from south-west to north-west corner, is 58m (191 feet). The north flank is 51m (166 feet) and the east flank wall that runs along the road is 50 metres (165 feet).

The inside of the courtyard is about 1,500 square metres or roughly 16,000 square feet, not including the south-east corner.

LHS was biiiiig. If you factor in the range to which musketry could reach from its walls, then it's a 250m wide obstacle in the middle of the battlefield. In 1/72 it should be about two feet square.

The only critique I would offer of that model is that the treatment of where the Great Barn (southern flank) meets the stable block (west flank) looks incorrect. AFAIK in 1815 the western end wall of the Great Barn was level with the inside wall of the stable block. The stable block also didn't run as far south. It ended short of the Great Barn and between the two was a short section of wall with a door in it, which the defenders burnt for firewood the night before. Since the battle the Great Barn has been extended to the west and the stable block to the south so that they meet but in 1815 they did not.

The jury is still out on colour schemes is it not?

Very useful, 4th Cuirassier. I've read elsewhere that, at least with regard to the building complexes themselves, LHS and Hougomont were actually similar in size; similarly, don't several contemporary pictures show LHS as being white-washed, or similar?

Yes indeed. I take the look from today, but as I said, 3d print, modular etc, large barn shorter etc. Any layout no problem ..

@ Robert

Re relative size I would not be surprised, certainly in terms of the enclosed areas. Another thing not widely appreciated is how far in front of Wellington's line Hougoumont was. It is south-west of La Haye Sainte. Most people's mental picture including mine is that it was level with LHS or perhaps slightly to the north-west.

IIRC correctly there are sources that show LHS with whitewashed and plain walls, and slate roofs and red-tiled roofs. All of these pictures are contemporary paintings / prints or nearly so. I reckon one can justify a number of schemes.

@ jensutkremp

Very clever if you can do that!

Agree entirely about this kind of " mental picture" re. LHS and H., and also have worked to correct the kind of perception I had about the relative positions of Ligny, QB, Wavre, Namur, and Mont St Jean itself; to some extent, a long habit of looking at schematic plans may be to blame.
. How common are slates in this part of Europe, historically at least? In some countries both slates and tiles are encountered, one or other being more common in different parts.

It has slates now. Back then, who knows. I did once come across one related tidbit though. Roads were typically black because coal dust and coal chippings were used to "seal" them, not very effectively. In use, the central bit soon got muddy but the edges as far as any ditch or verge were usually coal-dust black. Who knew?

No gaming building has real dimensions. How to play with it, if has ??

By dimensions I don't mean the overall size but the lengths, widths and thickness of the objects that make up the buildng. To me, many of these onjects seem to be oversized. Not to scale.

The walls look OK but the tiles on the roofs are about 3 times too big I think. The borders of the windows look too heavy.

So if I were to use this model I would cut the roofs off and replace them with model railway tile sheets.

Regarding how to play with big models, all my games use individually based figures, whether it is WW2, 18th century or Dark Ages. My battles are big skirmish games. So I like to use scenery that is close to the same scale as the figures.

By way of added info re the colour scheme, here are a couple of contemporary water colours.

This one shows LHS in the middle distance and it's white with red roofs:

In this one by Taillou, LHS is the subject and it's red-brick with most of the rendering fallen off, with grey roofs:

Here it is with slate roofs and immaculate rendering:

Of the above it's the middle one I tend to believe. The state of the rendering suggests it was painted from life. The first looks to have been sketched in situ then included in the larger composition later with the colours altered, perhaps to make the building stand out. The last gets some other details wrong, such as the gatehouse and the missing mansard windows in the farmhouse roof.

Two additional points which support your view, 4th Cuirassier; JMW Turner visited the area soon afterwards, and made a number of sketches ( and later a painting of the night of the battle itself, with Hougoumont still blazing). One of these is entirely monochrome, but does confirm that the most northerly building, abutting the wall running northwards along the road, had a chimney, as well as indicating the lozenge-shaped detailing on the Eastern gable of the farmhouse. This is seen in the middle view above, but not the lowest. Secondly, although there's not any suggestion of red/brown brickwork, the roof of the farmhouse is shown in a pale blue/grey which implies slates.
From a personal point of view, with regard to choice of colouring, I've got no fewer than three versions of LHS, one a 15mm card version, pre-coloured with whitewash and red tiles, one rather bigger and probably better suited to 1:1 figure ratio, and of course the Airfix "snap together" kit, so good I bought it twice! From another point of view, specifically Turner's from the ridge to East of the Chausee, the steepness of the rise is clear, if perhaps exaggerated slightly. Wellington did claim that the construction of the Lion Mound with tons of earth scraped from the ridge had "ruined my battlefield".

Fascinating, I'd never heard of the Turner connection. Was this the sketch you meant?

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If so that does indeed have some sort of diamond / lozenge shaped detail. I wonder what it was?

Two sketches (I could have made things clearer above). Turner made them during an early stage of his journey down the Rhine in 1817; some had prints made after them, and I'm sure could be tracked down on some Internet site (I have only the most primitive access). Can't get the image you've posted, but the rather pale watercolour of the scene includes a distant view of Hougoumont, a flash of lightning at centre and a flock of sheep – solid-looking, like so many white boulders – in the foreground. The lozenge, however, is only visible in the pencil drawing. Were this a picture or photograph from later in the century I'd guess some kind of repair work done with a large metal plate and heavy-duty bolts, the whole lime washed over; on the other hand, given that it's on the main road, it might simply be a distance-marker. A roadside shrine seems unlikely, unless it's an early example of a memorial to the victim of a traffic accident.

By the way, Airfix certainly departed from every source in providing the farmhouse with a gable window, improving the model.

@ Robert

I think you may be on to something with your distance marker conjecture. According to Google Maps LHS is pretty much dead on 12 miles from the centre of Brussels. The exact distance would depend on the road of course, but this would make it a good place to put such a thing, at a height easily read from inside or atop a carriage.

There is still a diamond-shaped plaque there today. It is in memoriam to the defenders of 1815. There are two further to the south, both to the French.

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The supposition must be that this plaque was fixed over or in place of whatever was already there.

The Airfix is all wrong but happily so, i.e. in ways that make it a much more useful model for wargamers. It's too small, but plenty big enough for 1/76 figures. The windows are at a good height to position figures inside firing through them. Aside from the farmhouse being too big relative to the great barn, it's a perfectly serviceable representation. You can convert it into the Papelotte buildings and ISTR there was once an Airfix magazine article in which someone converted several of them into a Roman villa.

An interesting point in the Google Streetview images of LHS is that if you follow the road north along the eastern perimeter wall, it's clear that it's a retaining wall i.e. the ground level is at the bottom of the wall on the eastern side but at the top on the western side. I wonder if this was so in 1815.

Siborne has La Haye Sainte clad in red brick in both his models. The series of coloured engravings produced by Charles Turner and George Jones (sketched in 1815) have lime washed render. The latter are probably of greatest interest for their visual record of the pre-Lion Mound terrain.

Ground-level may well have been the same two centuries ago; as an uncle of mine said of an old farmhouse & "offices" built just off a minor road and a good thirty feet lower (though about fifty yards away from the road), "see the way they used to build in all sorts of old holes…" So perhaps the lowest reaches of the slope of Mt St. Jean were levelled slightly before the buildings were started, or extended, this levelling not being carried back very far to N of the house.

By modifying and painting any "LHS" model to indicate red brick construction with damaged/decaying render and lime wash, at least some of these variations may be reconciled. Jones was obviously one of the more prolific painters/engravers of Waterloo at that time, being known as "Waterloo" Jones. Thanks re. all observations.

Many thanks!.

Amicalement
Armand

Camped there during the 1985 reenactment. It's a lot smaller than people think.