The Eastern Front by Nick Lloyd — truth bombs

Who outside central Europe knows the first world war battles of Przemyśl, Lemberg (now L’viv) or the dozen or so on the Isonzo river? For most of us the war is epitomised by Verdun or the Somme, the images those of the trenches on the western front. Some may know about Tannenberg, the great German victory over the Russians in 1914, or the Allied failure at Gallipoli in 1915. But for the most part the eastern front is seen as a sideshow to the main event.

Drawing on a wide range of sources, Nick Lloyd, professor of modern warfare at King’s College London, shows just how wrong that view is. We are used to the casualty figures in the west: 900,000 dead from the British empire; more from Germany or France. The number of those who died in the east may be even larger if civilians are included. Some two million Russian soldiers alone died there and 1.2mn from Austria-Hungary. Serbia started its war with Austria-Hungary with an army of 420,000; by 1915 it had 140,000 left. At the end it had lost more men in proportion to its population than France.

The Eastern Front moves easily from big strategic issues to the human beings, both powerful and powerless, who were caught up in the great catastrophe. Lloyd’s compelling narrative shows massive armies moving across a vast theatre of war, from the Baltic to the eastern end of the Mediterranean, as three great empires — Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Germany — and their smaller allies threw themselves against each other. (Perhaps for reasons of space, he does not include the Ottoman Empire or say much about the Baltics, which has the unfortunate effect of leaving the two ends of the eastern front dangling.) 

Until near the end, neither side was able to win a decisive victory. True, there were victories in individual campaigns, but these did not conclude the war. If anything they encouraged generals to keep dreaming of decisive battles. What they got was the collapse of the regimes they served.  

Lloyd concentrates on those in charge to tell his complex story. They are a mixed bag. Standing at well over six feet, Russia’s first commander-in-chief, the Grand Duke Nicholas, looked the part but had trouble making up his mind. The hapless tsar, Nicholas II, appointed himself as his successor and so contributed to the doom hastening towards him. The chief of the Austrian general staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, sketched out brilliant manoeuvres on paper but ignored such key practicalities such as having enough trains in the right places to get his armies into position or keep them supplied. The top Italian general, seems to have hated his own government almost as much as he did the Austrians. Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, the victors of Tannenberg and who ended up in effect running Germany, were, for all their faults, competent —as was the Russian Aleksei Brusilov.

Usually chosen more for their birth than their abilities, the generals, like those in the west, had for the most part prepared to fight another, shorter, offensive war. This was in spite of the mounting evidence, in the 1904 Russo-Japanese war for example, about the growing power of the defence thanks to new technology, such as rapid-firing artillery and machine guns, and the hideous costs of frontal assaults.

All too often, the orders on all sides were fantastical. Men must attack enemy lines and forts audaciously, no matter how inadequate their equipment and how strong the opponents’ positions. Cavalry were to charge, just as they had in the 18th century. And headquarters frequently issued orders which, owing to hopelessly inadequate communications, were outdated before they arrived.

In some respects, the war on the eastern front resembled the slow grinding one in the west. There were trenches and forts there too and over time the military devised new weapons to overwhelm the defenders — the first use of poison gas was in the east — and new tactics, such as massive artillery barrages. The much greater distances in the east meant the network of trenches could never extend across the whole front, and so the war remained more the one of movement that prewar plans had hoped for.

As the war dragged on and costs mounted, there were ferocious disagreements between different headquarters and among allies over strategy. Was it better for the Central Powers to strike Russia in the north or the south or along a wide front? Or, as the German high command argued, was the war going to be won or lost in the west and should resources be concentrated there? The Allies also had their own debates between easterners and westerners.  

As the fighting swung back and forth across the centre of Europe, ravaging the land and its peoples, smaller powers were drawn in — Serbia, Romania and Italy on the side of the Allies, and Bulgaria the Central Powers. Civilians suffered on an even greater scale than in the west. Advances and retreats followed each other in grim succession.

The first world war came to an end in the autumn of 1918 but peace did not come to the east

By the midpoint of the war, morale among the troops on both sides was collapsing. “We are no longer men,” wrote one Italian soldier after yet another unsuccessful battle on the Isonzo. “We are one with the earth.” On the other side the Austrians were also suffering. “The only thing really covering the lines to be held are the bodies of our heroic defenders,” says a colonel quoted by Lloyd. 

As the last great Russian offensive petered out in the autumn of 1916 the famed Imperial Guard threw themselves through a marshy valley in a vain attempt to capture a key railway junction. Their dead lay everywhere. As Lloyd comments: “It was an omen of ill fortune. Tsarist Russia had made its last charge.” 

Austria-Hungary and the smaller powers were reaching the end as well. Only Germany’s armies still held together well. In March 1918 after the conclusion of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the new Bolshevik rulers of Russia, Germany saw, at least on paper, its empire expand hundreds of miles eastward and north.

The first world war came to an end in the autumn of 1918, but peace did not come to the east. Fighting continued in the Baltic states as well as among competing forces in Ukraine, and also between Russia and the newly emerged state of Poland, until the mid-1920s. And the war’s legacy lasted much longer. Austria-Hungary disappeared, to be replaced by often antagonistic nation states; Russia went down the road of a brutal and paranoid dictatorship; Italy chose fascism; and in the Germany of the 1920s and 1930s some, including Adolf Hitler, saw the east as Germany’s future empire.  

The second world war brought large-scale war again to the east as well as the horrors of the Holocaust. Today, in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin dreams of regaining the territories including of course Ukraine that Tsar Nicholas and his ancestors once ruled. The Eastern Front is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the history of that troubled region up to and including the present.

 The Eastern Front: A History of the First World War by Nick Lloyd Viking, £25, 448 pages

Margaret MacMillan is emeritus professor of international history, University of Oxford

Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen