Victory at the Alamo cost Santa Anna more than he admitted. His pre-dawn assault on 6 March 1836 sent roughly 1,800 men against a garrison of fewer than 250, and it went hard. The columns lost formation in the dark and bunched against the north wall; men were hit by fire from their own crowded ranks as well as by the defenders' cannon, which were loaded with scrap iron and cut swaths through the attackers. Estimates of the Mexican dead and wounded run from several hundred to well over five hundred. Santa Anna waved the losses away as a trifle, but his own officers understood they had traded some of the army's best soldiers for a single ruined mission — six weeks before San Jacinto.

King & Country's set gives four fallen soldados, sprawled where the volley and the canister caught them at the foot of the walls. They wear the Mexican line uniform — dark blue coatees with red facings over white campaign trousers — and their muskets and bayonets lie scattered around them, shakos with their red-white-green pompoms rolled off into the dirt. Placed at the base of a wall with Santa Anna's Laddermen still climbing and S.A.A. Soldier Charging Forward and S.A.A. Soldier Advancing Firing pressing on behind, the set turns a firing-line diorama into the assault as it actually looked — the cost lying in the front rank while the attack goes forward.

Model: RTA143 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 4 piece set