The Austrian Officer at Work and at Play

This chapter, I warn the reader, will not so much be a chapter as a book review.

On the search for personal experiences of the Danish campaign of 1864, during which, in default of great battles, Austrian arms came with high honours out of many fierce encounters, my thoughts first turned to Lieutenant-General M——, who a few years after meeting J6rome Bonaparte in battle—as he put it—had taken part in the Schleswig-Holstein “excursion,” being then lieutenant in the so-called “Belgians,” i.e. the regiment of which the King of the Belgians was honorary colonel. But M——, unluckily for my purposes, is no raconteur, and although the “Belgians” had brought back from Denmark almost more laurels than any other regiment engaged, professed not to be able to remember anything worth recording.

A few days after this negative result, while I was looking round desolately for other sources of information, a note from the all too modest lieutenant-general brought me what I wanted, viz. the title of a book newly republished, in the nick of time for me, by the man who had been staff-officer of the Commander-General Gablenz, and for the genuineness of whose descriptions M——, as eye-witness, can vouch, evidently thankful to be relieved of the necessity of taxing his own memory. Here, in a series of marvellously vivid word-pictures, I found all that I required.