Quotes from Geoffrey Wawro

Prussians were singularly well prepared in other areas as well. They invented the "dog tag" in 1870: an oval disc worn by every soldier bearing his name, regiment, and place of residence.

To knit army and nation together, they issued each soldier with twelve stamped postcards so that he could write to his loved ones throughout the campaign.

French soldiers literally drank the entire day, beginning with wine (un pauvre larme – "a little teardrop"), progressing to spirits (le café le pousse-café), climaxing with a gut-searing brandy (le tord-boyaux – "the gut-wringer"), and ending with la consolation, a sweet liqueur that the French soldier sipped as he lay in his bunk contemplating the next day's exertions. Far from imbuing the army with an ésprit

Hôtel de Ville, where French republics were traditionally proclaimed from the balcony.

major in the 1st Division added. That major always took a large number of shirkers for granted, relying throughout on that "certain number of men who can be depended upon, as a general thing, to begin and end all military operations.

In the days after Sedan, Prussian envoys met with the French and demanded a large cash indemnity as well as the cession of Alsace and Lorraine.

Edmund Burke: "When things go wrong we are always tempted to ask not how we got into this difficulty, but how we are to get out of it . . . to consult our invention and to reject our experience." Yet, Burke concluded, such thinking is "diametrically opposed to every rule of reason, and every good principle of good sense.