Battlefields of 1866 Author:Edward Dicey General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1866 Original Publisher: Tinsley Bros. Subjects: Austro-Prussian War, 1866 Germany Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free t... more »rial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: TO THE SEAT OF WAR Pardubitz, Bohemia, July 28. Forty hours have passed since I left Berlin; and now, after innumerable stoppages, halts, interruptions, breakdowns, and delays, I have got thus far upon my journey. To me the transit seems incredibly slow and wearisome; but to many of my military fellow-travellers, who have been in constant travel up and down these Austrian lines, the fact of having accomplished so long a distance in so short a time is regarded as a miracle of locomotive celerity. After all, everything is comparative; and if you have been accustomed to travel at the rate of two miles an hour, journeying at the speed of eight appears to be the ne plus ultra of locomotion. Even in ordinary peaceful times, travel along these Bohemian and Silesian railroads must always be tardy at the best. They are single-track lines, and, with the customary slackness which characterises all Austrian enterprises, the system of telegraphing from station to station the arrival and departure of the trains has not yet'been brought into force. It follows that the trains have to proceed very slowly, in order to have time to pull up in case they see another train advancing in the opposite direction. What the state of things is now, when all day, and every day, trains of immense length, filled with soldiers and army stores, are passing to and fro, can be imagined tolerably well by any person who conceives what would be the condition of affairs on the Brighton line on the occasion of the Easter-Monday Volunteer Review, supposing there w...« less