The musket in this soldier's hands was almost certainly British. The Mexican Army of 1836 was largely armed with India Pattern Brown Bess flintlocks purchased as surplus from Britain after the Napoleonic Wars — a .75-caliber smoothbore that had served the British line from the 1790s through Waterloo and across the colonial garrisons of the postwar empire. By the time the Mexican government bought them out in the 1820s, many of the muskets were already a generation old and well-used. Mexican-pattern copies and the older Spanish Real Fábrica de Toledo muskets filled out the rest of the small-arms inventory. The result was an infantry army carrying a mix of weapons in varying states of repair, with paper cartridges of inconsistent powder quality and flints that often failed to spark on the second strike. The Mexican soldier on the assault columns at the Alamo loaded and fired a weapon his counterparts at Waterloo would have recognized, and the rate of fire he could maintain — perhaps two rounds a minute under the best conditions, less in the smoke and confusion of the night assault — was the constant tactical limit on what his army could do.

This King & Country figure captures a Mexican line infantryman in the chaos of close combat — bayonet fixed and the musket level for a shot taken on the move, the body bent forward into the firing stance, the shako already shot from his head and rolling on the ground at his feet. The bare-headed figure with the heavy beard is the diagnostic story element: K&C has captured the moment of disorder that the wall assault actually was, the soldier still in the fight despite the literal removal of his regulation headgear by a passing rebel ball. He wears the standard Mexican infantry order — dark blue coatee with red facings, white cross-belts, white trousers, and the huarache sandals that marked the line regular's actual march footwear. He stands in the column behind the S.A.A. Soldier Running Forward at the bayonet charge and the Santa Anna's Laddermen carrying their scaling ladders, under the command of General Santa Anna directing the assault.

Model: RTA142 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set