The years of Bismarck's wars, from Königgrätz to 1870, seen by the people caught up in them, with the Iron Chancellor himself looming over every drawing room and barrack square - the man whom, as one character says, you either swear by or swear at. Clotilde Graves, who wrote as Richard Dehan, finished it in the first winter of the Great War, working from the yellowed newspaper records of 1870 while the guns of the fleets rattled her windows, and her preface makes plain what the book was meant to say about the new Germany. Her Boer War novel The Dop Doctor had been one of the great bestsellers of 1910. Fifty-nine plates of soldiers at rest, on the march and under fire, from Vernet and Meissonier to the retreat from Moscow, follow the trade of arms across the century that made Bismarck possible.