Post
by Ronan the Librarian » Wed Feb 04, 2009 11:33 pm
According to Charles Grant's two-volume work "Armies and Uniforms of Marlborough's Wars", in Austrian service there were the seven regiments of Walloons, the Alt Heister-Nigrelli and the Lorraine infantry regiments, and the Schlick dragoon regiment. Elsewhere, the Leibregiment of Osnabruck; the Boufflers, Firmacon and D'Asfeld dragoons of France; the Genovois dragoons of Savoy; at least one horse and seven dragoon regiments, and one infantry tercio in the Phillipian Spanish army; and at least one infantry tercio in the Portuguese army.
It was a notoriously difficult colour to produce at that time, not only because it involved dyeing the fabric twice (blue, then yellow), but also because it was a difficult colour to "fix" - often fading to a very dark, or very light colour depending on whether the blue or yellow dye had predominated. (Even in the Napoleonic period, Russian uniforms could vary from black to a bronzish, yellowy-green - the latter was often called "philamott green" in the British Army, from the French "feuilles mortes" - dead leaves.) It is important to note that there were similar problems with green paints, and it is quite common for this colour to turn dark blue in paintings of this period, so it is quite possible that a number of uniform paintings have been misinterpreted over the years.
One of the moderators of the WD3 forum ("Gungnir") lives in a part of the Low Countries where a lot of green cloth was manufactured in this period (possibly explaining its use by Walloon regiments). A great deal of green cloth was bought from this region by Russian merchants and apparently, one of their little tricks was to use the difficulty in balancing the process to get a better price. They would order large amounts of green cloth in advance, and then when they were shown samples, they would refuse to buy it because the colour was "not right". They would then send in an anonymous agent to "take it off the manufacturer's hands", and when they got it back home, sell it on to the relevant authorities in Russia at the full price.
Ssshhhhh!!!!!