Army camps in the Seven Years War
I plan to build a few tent bases for my armies, based from the maps from Neil Cogswell’s books. During this period armies are shown always organised in a First and Second Line, each line having left and right wings, usually of cavalry.
The Army camps reflect exactly this organisation, with troops lined according to their expected place in battle. The two lines are normally resting on a well defended geographical feature, like a ravine, a town or something similar.
The drawing below shows an example of a camp. The scale should is not in paces, to bring it in accordance with other maps from Cogswell, it seems to be in some unit where a scale of 100 equals to 200 paces.
The lines seem to be separate by 400-500 paces one from each other, with each battalion occupying a front of about 200 paces, with the cavalry troops occupying a slightly larger space. The Grenadiers seem to be residing with the rest of the battalions, unless explicitly organised in separate battalion of 5-6(?) companies. This appears to be less frequent an usually there in no mention of grenadier battalions in the army camp arrangements.
The artillery park usually sits separate from these two lines in a rectangular arrangement. Headquarters seemed to be hosted in a nearby village. Looking at the Reichsarmee stats, the battalion guns assigned to the first line was generally composed of four guns per battalion, instead of two. In a game I would then assign one additional light gun model every two battalions.
Sometimes these camps are fortified by the means of “bastions”, probably built of earth and gabions.
I plan to build some tents, probably arranged in a linear fashion. I would imagine that 20cm x 7.5 cm should be good to host four tents. Two such bases might be tents for one battalion. I will use Peter Dennis Paperboys’ tents for this.
