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The two world wars have generated an almost incomprehensible amount of historical writing, but have also posed a historiographical problem: they have “stunted debate and frozen German military history”, as Peter Wilson puts it. Historians imagine that all German military history is rooted in Prussia; and they write mainly about battles. The existing literature focuses on the period between German unification in 1871 and the Third Reich’s destruction in 1945, to which all roads are seen to lead.

In defiance of this orthodoxy, Wilson’s astonishingly detailed new book is a military history not merely of Germany, but of all parts of Europe that were populated by German speakers, notably Switzerland, from 1500 to the present day. Every aspect of the armies and navies of German Europe is considered: the men (and later women) who served in them; their uniforms, weaponry, recruitment, pay and treatment; the relationship of the military with rulers and politicians; and the wars themselves.

Wilson has already published two highly acclaimed histories that feed into this one: Europe’s Tragedy, about the Thirty Years War, and his 2016 epic, The Holy Roman Empire. His new book takes its title from the speech by Otto von Bismarck to the budget committee of the Prussian Diet in 1862, in which he declared that “the great questions of the day” would be decided by Eisen und Blut – “iron and blood”. The speech is routinely misquoted as Blut and Eisen, and Wilson debunks the “caricature” of Bismarck, and Prussia, that proceeded from it, reminding us that the politically embattled Bismarck actually failed to secure any increase in military spending, plunging Prussia into a constitutional crisis.

Wilson’s method is both chronological and, within each epoch, thematic. He begins by describing the warlords of the constituent parts of the Holy Roman Empire and their need for collective security against potential threats from neighbouring powers, which in the 16th century meant Turkey and Italy. Then he deals with the infrastructure of war: how an army, 500 years ago, was formed, and how it was commanded and controlled.

Some of these armies were, in the context of the time, enormous. In 1474-75, the Holy Roman Empire put 35,000 men into the field against Burgundy. It was the nobility who ran the armies of central Europe, and in their role as magnates, decided how to conduct wars; it was their vassals who became the poor bloody infantry when an army had to be raised. The link between militarism and the aristocracy was as indissoluble in the territories controlled by the Habsburgs as, centuries later, it would be in Prussia.

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