This book offers the first English-language translation of the finest soldier’s memoir to emerge from the Franco-Prussian War, titled With my Rucksack: The Unvarnished Campaign Memoirs of an Infantryman from the Year 1870 by Carl Rückert. Lasting from 1870–1871, this was the war that made the modern German nation and set Europe on the path to World War I, and Carl Rückert offers an unrivalled worm’s eye view of the experiences of common soldiers who fought in it. A Hessian lance corporal in the German army, he was a close observer of daily hardships, class tensions, the...