Book Description

Excerpt from The Realm of the Habsburgs Some of us can remember the easy-going pre 1866 days - the closing. Epoch of the older regime when the pick of Austria's crack regiments could be seen doing garrison duty as far west as Frankfort-ou the-main. The Austrians, Prussians, and Bavarians mounted guard on alternate days. But people had no eye for the cold mechanical Prussian goose-step, and for those raw, beardless Prussian recruits, who looked so fagged, and were said to have such a distressing time of it under the iron discipline of the brutal drill sergeant. The uniforms of the latter, too, were dull to look upon; they fitted badly, and emphasised the angularity of the big bones of the wearers. We did not then know that the Austrians, besides being picked troops, were long-service men, who naturally contrasted favourably with Pomeranian recruits. And who could help admiring the well-knit Austrian - many of them swarthy fellows from the Italian provinces of Lombardy - who seemed to combine the natural grace of the Southern with the chivalric bearing of the flower of the Teutonic race? About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.