Ihate the war and all that it brings: the killing, the pain, the piggishness, the pillaging, the corpses, the amputations, the dead horses – not to forget the rape,’ the Austrian foreign minister Klemens von Metternich told his friend Wilhelmine von Sagan. War’s only positive feature, he observed, was its ability to numb the senses to the immense misery it caused. The congress that drew up the postwar peace settlement at Vienna in 1814-15 began peripatetically, with European envoys and ministers trailing along through the debris of the vying armies as they fought their way towards Paris. And this meant, among other things, that the key decision-makers were confronted in the most visceral way with the scale and human impact of the war. For months they traversed an immense crime scene.
