The Little Medal

Weeks ago, my wife dragged out a bunch of stuff and we gleaned the items for garbage or to save.

So in the middle of this batch....is this German medal of sorts.

The only thing my wife knew....from her family (Germans)....this had been passed down, and stored in some cabinet in the basement.  No one knew much of anything, and didn't care to know much of anything.

Well.....I'm never one to pass by a possible story.  So I dug into the medal.  Thirty minutes of research came to a couple of brief facts.

This is a German military medal from brief war of 1864 between Denmark and Prussia (with their friends at the time....the Hapsburg Empire).

The war was fairly short....starting in March of 1864 and winding up in October 1864.  For the Danish people....it was a fairly messy adventure, with Prussia easily winning.  The outcome brought two major areas of Denmark's control....over to Prussia and the Hapsburg Empire.

It's best to note this while on the topic....whatever property the Hapsburgs won in this adventure.....was a momentary thing.  Within a short period of time.....Germany triggered a war with the Hapsburgs, and took the former Danish property over.

The medal?  It came years later.  It's a curious thing, but it was a artillery medal given to the members of some unit from Brandenburg.

It was German custom for a fair number of wars....to come up twenty to thirty years after the event, erecting monuments and statues and awarding older guys medals.

In this case, I can only imagine that some younger member of my wife's family....went off in search of an adventure of sorts, drafted himself into this artillery unit, and rode the train up north to participate.  He made his way safely home after the war, and probably sat there for years and years....telling the war stories over the great defeat of the Danes.  It may be....after a while....everyone in the family was sick of the war stories, and thus no one really cared much for the medal business.

Anyway, I convinced the wife to keep the medal.  It is worth some minor cash on the medal market....but frankly....who remembers this stupid Denmark-Prussia-Hapsburg one-year war?