The creation of this set was inspired by the classic Polish movie “Ash” by Andrzej Wajda, which is well known in the former Soviet bloc countries. In one scene devoted to the storming of Saragosa, Polish infantrymen fight side-by-side with men from engineer units. Despite the variety of 1/72 scale Napoleonic sets currently on the market, the level of involvement of Polish units is still very poorly covered. At the time we conceived the idea of this product only one set, “Polish Uhlans” from Esci (12 mounted men in 4 poses) was available. We decided that this was unfair considering the glorious military past of this great nation. It’s worth keeping in mind that one in ten soldiers of the Grand Armee was Polish by nationality, and their loyalty towards the Emperor left far behind the loyalty of Frenchmen. We won’t however dwell on this as it is well developed in the notes on the back of the set’s box.
The history of this set’s creation is interesting in itself. Our first attempt to make it was undertaken in Odessa in the Ukraine. We gave our figure sketches and some initial money to create the set to a person who preferred to release the set under a different company’s name. So when we came to make our own master models we had to substitute a lot of figures to avoid repeating poses. Finally our own set came to life in January 2002 in Kharkov, Ukraine.
The set consists of 4 sprues, one of which represents engineers (12 poses) with appropriate tools and three others represent the Polish army plus the War Minister of the Great Duchy of Warsaw Juzef Poniatowski, Murat and Napoleon. The uniform details of Marshal Poniatowski and horse furniture were taken from one of his mounted portraits. Napoleon is represented in his classic appearance – field coat and high bicorn. Dashing Murat can’t be confused with anybody else due to the numerous feathers on his hat (it’s a known fact that during his campaign in Russia Murat ordered ostrich feathers from Paris for 27 thousand francs). There are 48 figures in the set plus some accessories.
In contrast to our first set the majority of the figures are in fighting poses. To enhance the realism the infantrymen wear a mixture of greatcoats and uniforms, some of them fighting without shakos since it was fairly easy to loose such a heavy head-dress in the heat of a battle. One of the infantrymen is wearing a bonnet de police instead of a standard czapska.
The engineers wear helmets together with trench cuirasses, some of them over shirts with sleeves rolled. Due to the fact that we concentrate on collectors and diorama-makers with their request for variety, rather than on wargamers who require mostly repeating poses, we included into the set a stretcher party consisting of 5 figures – something that has never been done before. Also we included in the set another group of soldiers raising their wounded comrade, again a rare composition in 1/72 scale.
In keeping with our tradition we put drawings of the figures on the back of the box, but this time owing to the quantity of the figures we managed to depict only 33 of them.