Wednesday 22 May 2019

For God and Kaiser



A great 600 page plus doorstop of a tome and an excellent overview of the armies of Austria from the Thirty Years War until 1918.

I will freely admit that I am a huge fan of the BalkanWargamer blog. The reason is very simple as the blog is chock full of information about the military history of my favourite part of the world – The Balkans themselves and the surrounding area. I should also point out the BalkanDave – the author of the blog – is an all round top bloke aside from being a veritable goldmine of information about the region.

Recently he reviewed the above book on his blog (see the link in the previous paragraph) and so following on from this I decided that it would be a good investment for the library. BalkanDave has a far better knowledge of the area than I and so I was confident that it would be a worthwhile acquisition. I was certainly not disappointed! 

Austria, along with Russia, has maintained a frontier with the Ottoman Turkish Empire for pretty much all of the period the book covers so it was inevitable that I would need to look at 'the other side of the hill' to place my planned armies into the proper context. The Minifigs Marlburian component of Eric's collection has a reasonable number of Austrian figures therein and I plan to use these against the Turks in due course so having some reading material about the period, albeit very much from an overview perspective, was a necessity.

I have always considered the Austrians to have something of the underdog about them in the various wars they took part in - seemingly slow to start but getting better as events unfolded. Diverse, colourful and a list of opponents that featured just about everybody means that the Austrians will work rather nicely as a protagonist in my planned early 18th century Balkan set up.

Now that I own the hardback version I am sorely tempted to get the Kindle edition for the daily commute and my forthcoming holiday - it would certainly be easier to carry around!

8 comments:

Robert (Bob) Cordery said...

David,

If the Kindle edition isn't too expensive, I'd go for it.

All the best,

Bob

Tim Gow said...

Damn - that looks tempting!

Ray Rousell said...

Sounds interesting?

Jim Jackaman said...

That does look like a very useful book.

David Crook said...

Hi Bob,

I seem to be doing this rather a lot these days - buying a hardback version and then thinking about the Kindle edition! Hardbacks will always have first place for me but the convenience of a Kindle for the commute and travelling is hard to beat!

I also rather like the occasional 0.99p items that Amazon flag up - the latest of which was Crete by Antony Beevor.

All the best,

DC

David Crook said...

Hi Tim,

"I can resist anything except temptation...."

All the best,

OW

David Crook said...

Hi Ray,

My thoughts entirely!

All the best,

DC

David Crook said...

Hi Jim,

It certainly is in a detailed primer kind of a way.

All the best,

DC