''Superb on the human consequences of war, ravishing in its evocations of wartime life'' The Times
''Compassionate and thought-provoking history'' Daily Telegraph
Less than a month after it marched into France in summer 1870, the Prussian army had devastated its opponents, captured Napoleon III and wrecked all assumptions about Europe''s pecking order. Other countries looked on in helpless amazement. Pushing aside further French resistance, a new German Empire was proclaimed (as a deliberate humiliation) in the Palace of Versailles, leaving the French to face civil war in Paris, reparations and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine.
Bismarck''s War tells the story of one of the most shocking reversals of fortune in modern European history. The culmination of a globally violent decade, the Franco-Prussian War was deliberately engineered by Bismarck, both to destroy French power and to unite Germany. It could not have worked better, bu
