Truth and Fantasy and Toy Soldiers

As long as I was reorganizing my old toy soldier armies back into 6 figure units now that I have figured out how to manage a table with sufficient 5" grid squares, and working on expanding my opposing conventional mid-19thC armies, I decided to revisit the "enemy" for my Canadian army.  I don't want to refight the actual Fenian raids since this is about playing a wide variety of scenarios as the mood takes me but the "Fenians" are starting to look a bit too much like the US army and I don't want to go there either.

Archive photo from April.

While I was pondering an alternative look for the "Fenian" invaders, I remembered another option, the one that provided my first wargame enemy back in the days of Black Watch Cadets, Airfix and Featherstone. I'll let this extract from an old, archived, Department of National Defence document about exercise-royal-flush explain:

In Exercise Royal Flush, there was a general reference to the enemy force mobilizing in the Montreal area. It must be made clear that this is a Cold War era exercise where the enemy force was referred to as FANTASIANS, a force based on Warsaw Pact structure and equipment. This scenario was created for realism in a Cold War environment and has nothing to do with the political situation in Canada......The reference to a Fantasian army in the Montreal area was for scenario purposes only. In other words, an artificial scenario is superimposed on actual maps."

"An artificial scenario superimposed on actual maps"... Yeah! That's what I wanted! Now I can start designing uniforms for the Fantasian Republican Guard as well as continuing to add to the Canadian Toy Army.

Not only are Governor-General's Footguards finally up to full strength but, they have a bugler!

which made me think of this bit from the irreverent  Perth Conspiracy's 1970 album, amazing what will stick in your mind over the decades (click on image below : 

"and then I heard it...the BUGLE cry......"