Rachel Chrastil: 2 books

For six terror-filled weeks in 1870 German armies bombarded Strasbourg, killing hundreds of citizens, wounding thousands, and destroying landmarks. Rachel Chrastil tells how the city became the epicenter of a new kind of warfare whose indiscriminate violence shocked contemporaries and led to debates over the wartime protection of civilians.

By the end of the Franco-Prussian War (1870--71), Germany occupied one-third of French territory, thousands of Alsatians and Lorrainers had flooded into France, and 140,000 French soldiers had died. France's crushing defeat in the most significant European armed conflict between the Napoleonic wars...