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!