A nineteenth-century battlefield ran on sound as much as sight. An infantry regiment took its orders from drum and bugle — the long roll to form up, the beat that set the marching pace, the calls that wheeled a column or halted it — and the drummer's steady cadence held a formation together in smoke thick enough to hide the man at your shoulder. When Santa Anna's four columns moved on the Alamo in the cold dark before dawn on 6 March 1836, they stepped off to the drums, some 1,800 men closing on the walls in the last minutes before the firing began. Regimental musicians were often boys, marching unarmed in the ranks with everyone else.

King & Country's figure catches the drummer in mid-stride, sticks in hand and the drum swinging at his hip. He wears the musician's "reverse colours" — a red coatee where the line wore blue, its collar and cuffs faced in dark blue, the sleeves laced with white chevrons that marked the bandsman — with white crossbelts, a brass drum-carriage plate on the chest, and a black shako topped by a red-white-green pompom in the national colours. The drum has a brass shell and red-painted hoops; his white trousers are torn through at one knee from the campaign road. Set him at the head of Marching to Battle (Set A) and Marching to Battle (Set B) to build a marching-column diorama, beating the advance for General Santa Anna's infantry.

Model: RTA139 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set