IT MAY SURPRISE YOUNGER READERS, familiar only with a Germany that is proud to be pacific, not to say pacifist, that the Germans were once notorious as among the most militarised societies in history. The Prussians, in particular, were mentioned in the same breath as the Spartans and Romans.
That reputation was acquired mainly between the mid-18th and the mid-20th centuries. As Peter Wilson reminds us in his formidably erudite Iron and Blood, earlier eras were more likely to admire the Austrians and Swiss for their martial prowess. Swiss guards were popular not only with popes but other potentates, while Austria only ceded its primacy after its defeat at the hands of the Prussians in 1866.
That conflict was one of the three wars of German unification whereby the quintessential Prussian Junker (landowner) Otto von Bismarck created the first modern German state. His chosen method, which
