Kneeling Hungarians

I converted a casting of my standing Hungarian Line Infantryman into the master of a kneeling figure. 

In the original figure the left coat skirt with saber and Säbeltasche comes as a separate piece. This made the conversion relatively easy to accomplish. I cut the standing figure at the waist, glued it to a casting of my kneeling anatomy mannequin, and replaced the lower legs with those of the standing figure. 

As I usually do in similar conversions, when sculpting the missing details, I made sure that the new body pose would accept the original figure’s separate left coat skirt and arms without modification. 

I thus obtained three nice kneeling poses without much effort.

The Austro-Hungarian military of the first half of the 18th Century were relatively slow in accepting the new tactical doctrines that advocated  thin-order deployment and platoon firing, and it seems that in the set-piece battles of the 1740s their infantry still deployed four-ranks deep and delivered volley fire by ranks. As such, all ranks, including the first, would fight standing. 

However, things might have been quite different in a small-action firefight, and since the Hungarians were often employed as regular light infantry, it is almost certain that on occasions they would kneel down to fire their muskets (indeed, the  Bautzener Bildhandschrift of 1762 shows kneeling Austrian light infantrymen (in that instance South-Slavic regular Grenzer) firing from behind trees against a Prussian entrenched camp).