To date, Romanian scholars have ignored Transylvanian folklore dealing with the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the experience of being a soldier in the imperial army. The gap can be explained by the fact that these cultural artefacts did not fit the Romanian nationalist narrative in politics and social science about the importance of ethnic unity. To address this gap, the paper maps out and discusses the images of the Dual Monarchy and especially of the Emperor in soldierly folklore. The main argument is that these images were shaped by the perception of and attempts to overcome the traumatic and often incomprehensible experiences of military service that peasant soldiers had to go through.