The excitement, romance, and horrors of WWI as seen through the eyes of Karl Schiller, a German poet whirled off the streets of Paris in those momentous summer days of 1914 and thrust into the front lines of battle. Violets for Sergeant Schiller reveals, from the perspective of an ordinary German, why Germany believed war was necessary, and the day-to-day unfolding of the supposedly infallible von Schlieffen Plan.