In the spring of 1814 Scott took an American brigade to a camp at Buffalo and drilled it for ten hours a day out of the 1791 manual of the French revolutionary army, throwing out officers who could not keep up and enforcing camp discipline of a kind the army had not previously bothered with. When the brigade marched into Canada that summer it was wearing gray short jackets, for the unheroic reason that there was not enough blue cloth — the uniforms meant for Buffalo had been sent somewhere else. At Chippawa on 5 July, Phineas Riall looked across the field at the gray and concluded he was facing militia, whom British regulars held in open contempt, and came on accordingly. He was not facing militia. Scott's men stood, maneuvered under fire and broke the British line, at a cost of 60 killed, 249 wounded and 19 missing against roughly 108 British dead, 319 wounded and 90 taken. Two stories grew out of that afternoon and both need a light touch. The 6th Infantry's motto is "Regulars, by God," and the exclamation is traditionally put in Riall's mouth — but there is no contemporary record of him saying it. And the tale that West Point cadets wear gray in tribute to Chippawa is a legend, quite possibly started by Scott himself; the reasons given in 1815 were practicality and cost. The victory was earned in a drill field over ten-hour days. The color was a quartermaster's failure. The romance appears to have been the general's own work, which is entirely in character for a man they called Old Fuss and Feathers. The figure is Scott himself and so not in gray — a general officer's dark blue coatee heavy with silver lace, epaulettes, crimson sash, white breeches and boots, bicorne in hand, sword drawn. He is worth having on a shelf because he connects things: the army he built in that Buffalo camp is the one the U.S. Infantryman of this war belonged to, and the professional standard he insisted on outlived every officer who resented it. On the water the same season, Commodore Perry had already given the United States the lake. And a measure of what Scott came to mean to the generation after him is that one of the Union's best corps commanders at Gettysburg had been named after him at birth — Winfield Scott Hancock. Model: 10113 / W. Britain / 1/30 scale / matte finish / 1 piece set
