The Royal Veteran Battalions were what the army did with the men it had finished using. Pensioners, invalids, soldiers worn out or broken by service but not yet dead — kept on the books for garrison duty in the quiet places so that fit men could be sent where the fighting was. Nobody expected anything of them. Their own commanding officer at St Joseph, Captain Charles Roberts, described his detachment as debilitated and worn down by unconquerable drunkenness, which is not a thing an officer writes about troops he has hopes for. On 17 July 1812 those troops took the first British prize of the war in North America. Roberts landed two miles from Fort Mackinac with forty-seven men of the 10th Royal Veteran Battalion, three Royal Artillerymen, a hundred and fifty Canadian and métis fur traders and voyageurs, three hundred Ojibwa and Ottawa warriors and a hundred and ten Sioux, Menominee and Winnebago — his regulars outnumbered better than twelve to one by allies fighting for reasons of their own. They dragged a 6-pounder through the woods to a ridge overlooking the fort. Inside were sixty-one American artillerymen with seven guns under Lieutenant Porter Hanks, who did not know his country was at war; the notification had gone out by ordinary post on 18 June and had not arrived, and he found out from a captured trader named Michael Dousman. The gun on the ridge fired one round. A flag of truce went down. Hanks surrendered, the garrison was paroled, and nobody on either side was killed.

The figure is one of those veterans in marching order — red coatee with white facings and lace, cross-belts and breastplate, white breeches, black gaiters, and the stovepipe shako of the 1812 pattern with its plume, musket and bayonet held ready. A month after Mackinac fell, its capture helped bring Native allies to General Isaac Brock at Detroit, where a second American garrison gave up a second fort. Getting both of them back took the Americans two more years and a great deal more blood, most of it spent under William Henry Harrison. And the men who actually handed over Fort Mackinac wore the uniform of the U.S. Artilleryman — sixty-one gunners in a fort nobody had told about the war.

Model: 10198 / W. Britain / 1/30 scale / matte finish / 1 piece set