20 Wild Historical Facts That Sound Completely Fake But Are True

During the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, Liechtenstein sent about eighty soldiers to guard a mountain pass near Italy. They saw no combat, suffered no casualties, and returned home safely. A famous story says eighty-one men came back because they had befriended an Austrian liaison officer who accompanied them. Whether he should literally be counted as an “extra recruit” is debatable, but the tiny principality’s final military deployment really did end without a single battlefield casualty. History rarely gets friendlier.