S.A.A. Soldier Charging Forward

The Mexican Army that climbed the walls of the Alamo in 1836 was a Spanish colonial army that had become Mexican through fifteen years of independence — its organization, its drill, its uniform style, and its officer corps all inherited from the Royal Spanish forces that had garrisoned New Spain for three centuries. Senior commanders like Santa Anna himself had served in the Spanish royalist army before turning against the Crown in 1821; junior officers were trained at the Colegio Militar in Mexico City on a curriculum still shaped by French Napoleonic models, the manual of arms still using the same drill positions — "shoulder arms," "high port," "charge bayonets" — that French infantry had carried across Europe under Bonaparte. The Mexican line battalion of 1836 was structured almost identically to a French regiment of 1812: eight battalion companies, one grenadier company, one cazador (light) company, the same column-and-line tactical doctrine, the same emphasis on close-order discipline and the bayonet attack. What the Mexican Army had, it had borrowed from a European military tradition older than the republic that fielded it. This King & Country figure shows a Mexican line infantryman at the high port — musket held diagonally across the body at chest level with the bayonet pointing up and forward, the standard infantry position for moving over uneven ground or pressing against an obstacle while keeping the bayonet ready to swing down to the charge. The pose is one of the manual of arms positions drilled into every Mexican recruit at the Colegio Militar's training depots and the regimental ranks at San Luis Potosí before the army marched north. He wears the standard infantry order — tall black shako with brass eagle, yellow band, and tri-color pompom; dark blue coatee with red collar and cuffs; white cross-belts; white trousers visibly worn through and patched at the knees from the long march from central Mexico; huarache sandals. He runs in the same column as the S.A.A. Soldier Running Forward at the bayonet charge ahead and the S.A.A. Soldier Advancing Firing putting a snap shot through the smoke beside him, behind the Mexican Army Flagbearer carrying the colors to the wall. Model: RTA133 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set