The drummer was the voice of the French infantry battalion. Verbal orders carried no further than thirty yards in the noise of musketry; the drum could be heard at a thousand. The French Imperial army carried this principle further than any contemporary military service, with a substantial regimental music establishment: drummers and fifers at company level, drum-majors and fife-majors at battalion, full regimental bands attached to senior regiments. The drummer's calls were the army's language: La Diane for reveille; Le Pas Ordinaire for the regulation march pace of seventy-six steps a minute; Le Pas Accéléré for one hundred; La Marche du Drapeau when the colors moved; La Générale to summon the battalion to arms. The most famous and most feared was Le Pas de Charge — the rapid double-beat cadence that signaled the bayonet attack, the call British memoirists in the Peninsula remembered as one of the iconic sounds of the Napoleonic Wars, advancing across the field with the French columns. Drummers themselves were exempt from carrying the musket — they were combatants only in last resort, equipped with the brass-hilted briquet short sword for personal defense — and their uniform mirrored their regiment's pattern in reversed colors, the regimental coat color used for facings and the facing color used for the coat.

This King & Country figure shows a French light infantry drummer advancing forward at the company's pace — drum at the hip with both sticks raised mid-beat, eyes turned to the officer at the head of the column for the order that will change the cadence from Pas Accéléré to Pas de Charge. He wears the légère regulation: dark blue coat with red collar, cuffs, and turnbacks; red epaulettes; white waistcoat; white breeches; black tall gaiters; tall black shako with red plume and red cords. The white cross-belt over the right shoulder carries the drum sling; the briquet short sword hangs at the left hip — the drummer's only weapon, never a musket. The drum itself is the French regimental pattern: brass shell, white rope tensioning, painted blue and white head. He marches in the same column as the F.L.I. Kneeling Priming His Musket figure and his kneeling-rank brothers reloading at cover, advancing past the European Walls and Gates toward the European Farmhouse — the kind of fortified position the Pas de Charge would have been called against on the way into Hougoumont or La Haie Sainte.

Model: NA532 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set