What was the First World War about? What was it that persuaded millions of men to risk ending in gruesome pileups of shattered corpses? The mechanisation of warfare, the huge growth in destructive firepower of artillery, and the willingness of generals to sacrifice untold numbers of troops in the illusory hope of the “breakthrough” that never came — all this produced the most shattering conflict the world had ever known. Nothing in the history of humanity up to that point had produced such overwhelming man-made horrors.
A century later, many of us, looking back, can barely see the point of it all. On Remembrance Day, we are sometimes told that it was a matter of resisting the triumph of “German militarism.” But whereas the necessity for combatting Nazism still convinces most of us of the case for the Second World War, justifications for the first slip ever further into a murky realm of uneasy ambivalence.
If you had asked soldiers on the western front in 1914 what they thought they were up to, some of the French poilus might have said they were defending the republic and seeking to redress the balance after the humiliating defeat by Prussia in 1871. But by 1917, after three years of carnage, such rationalisations no longer carried conviction: mutinies broke out all along the line. Tommy Atkins might have declared at the start of the war that he was fighting for “king and country.” Whether the “Diggers” from the Antipodes said the same after the nightmare of Gallipoli is doubtful. At any rate, after the event, patriotic rhetoric rang less true than the grim realism of Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for a Doomed Youth” and Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That.
All the more so in the case of the Russian muzhik compelled to fight for an empire that treated him as just one step up from an animal. Or the conscript in the Austro-Hungarian armies whose ribald cynicism in the face of wartime propaganda is brilliantly captured in Jaroslav Hašek’s Good Soldier Schweik. Why should a Pole or a Ukrainian in Habsburg uniform thrust his bayonet at a Pole or a Ukrainian in Russian uniform? The answer was far from clear.
On the eastern front, four empires, Russian, Habsburg, German and Ottoman, confronted one another in what each regarded (or came to regard) as a struggle for survival. That, at any rate, was how leaders and elites saw it. But this attitude did not always percolate down to troops in the front line. Upon acquaintance with the quotidian vexations and torments of modern warfare — uncertain food supply, inadequate medical attention, leaky boots, freezing cold as winter set in, dust and mosquitoes in the summer, mud, mud, mud in the spring and autumn, and the company of rats at all seasons, not to mention the ever-present threat of death or mutilation — common soldiers became not so much concerned with the survival of empires as with their own survival or that of their comrades in arms. In all the armies they grew increasingly resentful, ill-disciplined and, by the later stages of the war, prone to mental breakdown, tempted to desert and susceptible to calls for revolution.
Nick Lloyd’s The Eastern Front is the second volume of a trilogy on the history of the First World War. The first, The Western Front (2021), covered territory familiar to many English-speaking readers. Winston Churchill called his history of the eastern front, at any rate its American edition, published in 1931, The Unknown War. So it has largely remained, at any rate in the west (Churchill’s book, unlike his earlier The World Crisis, did not sell well).
This book lacks the hard-headed strategic commentary of Basil Liddell Hart’s classic history of the war (1930), no longer in print but still well worth reading. Lloyd’s is more narrowly focused on military operations than more recent one-volume works such as those of Gerd Hardach (1977), Niall Fergusson (1998) and David Stevenson (2004). But it is painstakingly researched and a cracking read.
Unlike the Western Front, which, from the autumn of 1914 until the end of the war, stretched in a continuous line from the English Channel to the Alps, there was not one eastern front but several. In East Prussia in 1914–15 the Germans defeated the Russians in epic battles at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes but failed to exploit those triumphs and push through to a decisive victory. In central Poland and Galicia, Habsburg armies, aided by the Germans, confronted the Russians in a war of movement that swung to and fro between 1914 and 1917. Further south, Russia and Austria-Hungary, with their respective subalterns, engaged in what has been called the “Third Balkan War” (though the first two, essential to an understanding of the third, are barely mentioned here). Greece and Rumania wavered in their allegiances, while Bulgaria and Austria-Hungary engaged in pitiless onslaughts on Serbia. Further west, Italy decided in 1915 to renounce her treaties of alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary and, hoping for postwar territorial aggrandisement, launched attacks against what Churchill later called Austria’s “soft underbelly.”
All that is not to take account of additional eastern fronts where Allied armies engaged the Ottomans in Gallipoli, the Caucasus, Mesopotamia and Palestine — but these are not covered in Lloyd’s book: presumably they have been held back for his final volume which, we are promised, will deal with “the wider war.” All systems of organisation, of course, have their advantages and disadvantages: Lloyd’s has the drawback that the Ottomans, at any rate in this volume, get short shrift — actually no shrift.
This is a solid, old-fashioned military history. Lloyd’s aim, he writes, is “to present the war as it appeared to those at the highest echelons of command and leadership; to show how they tried (and often failed) to achieve their goals; and to leave any judgement to the reader.” His task in this volume is more complex than in the previous one, as he has to keep many more balls in the air simultaneously. He performs this feat deftly, switching from one to another without losing control of his central narrative.
Lloyd does not help much with the conundrum of the purpose (or purposes) of the war. In fact, he barely addresses it. He opens with a perfunctory prologue recounting the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914; then, as in his first volume, he plunges headlong into a narrative of military events. Of course, we can refer to the vast literature on causes of the war, notably Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers (2012) and Perry Anderson’s just-appeared Disputing Disaster (2024). But still it would be helpful here to have some indication of where this author stands on how it all began.
Where Lloyd excels is in analysis of the strategic thinking of the war leaders and in set-piece descriptions of great battles. What emerges most strikingly is the resentment of nearly all commanders on the eastern fronts at the inadequacy of the means with which they were compelled to fight: too few men, guns, shells, rifles, ammunition and boots. Typical was the exchange in October 1914 between General Stepa Stepanović, commander of the Second Serbian Army, and his superior, General Radomir Putnik. Regretting his inability to supply more guns, Putnik sought to stiffen his subordinate’s resolve with fine words: “If we lack artillery, we have to resist with rifles alone,” adding “Courage, my friend, courage.” To which Stepanović responded bitterly, “I have never lacked courage but give me the means to fight.”
Those were sentiments that, in substance, were echoed by generals on both sides of the lines in this conflict over the next four years. In 1916, the Italian commander, Luigi Cadorna, reacting furiously to efforts by the King and the prime minister to dislodge him, burst out: “My arch-enemies are not the Austrians. But don’t think that I lose any sleep. I’m fine, thank God, and I shall shake the dust off my shoes, always ready, after all, to pack my bags and leave immediately for Rome.” He remained in command for another year, presiding over an endless sequence of futile bloodletting on the River Isonzo.
At critical points, some generals were so convinced of the rectitude of their positions that they defiantly disobeyed orders. For example, in June 1916, the Russian chief of staff, Mikhail Vasilyevich Alekseiev, ordered his subordinate, General Aleksei Brusilov, to delay a planned offensive. Alekseiev said that he spoke with the authority of the Tsar. Brusilov refused point-blank and demanded to speak to the Tsar himself. When told that the emperor had gone to bed and could not be woken, Brusilov snapped back: “The Commander-in-Chief’s slumbers are no business of mine and I have no intention of thinking anything over.” He launched his offensive a few hours later.
By far the most consequential of the wars among the generals were those between the Austrians and the Germans. The Austro-Hungarian chief of the general staff, Field Marshal Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, probably merits the title of most disastrous military leader on either side in this war. Time after time, he led his men into calamitous defeats, for which, as Lloyd comments, he “blamed everyone but himself.” Again and again, he had to turn to his German ally to save his bacon. On one occasion, when Conrad went to see his German counterpart, Erich Falkenhayn, to appeal for support, an accompanying officer wrote that the “boss doesn’t have it in him to speak forcibly with Falkenhayn, always like the naughty schoolboy towards the teacher upbraiding him.”
In September 1916, when Falkenhayn, suffering from severe toothache, was replaced by Paul von Hindenburg, the Austrians in effect surrendered their sovereignty: all the Central Powers’ forces were now subordinated to the supreme command of the German Kaiser and his duopoly of military dictators, Hindenburg and the “First Quartermaster General” (he invented the title for himself), Erich Ludendorff.
Overcoming his declared inclination to “leave any judgement to the reader,” Lloyd can hardly avoid indicating his own assessments. He shows some sympathy for Falkenhayn, whom Liddell Hart called “history’s latest example of the folly of half-measures; the ablest and most scientific General — ‘penny wise and pound foolish’ — who ever ruined his country by a refusal to take calculated risks.” Lloyd portrays him somewhat more generously as one of the few strategists who saw the big picture and tried to balance his forces accordingly. Alekseiev and Brusilov are awarded brownie points and Lloyd rightly presents a gold star to the German general August von Mackensen, “a soldier of remarkable talent.”
Military history these days is understood to encompass much more than fighting. It has broadened to take account of such matters as industrial mobilisation, war finance, public health, propaganda, intelligence and the experiences of civilians in the age of “total war.” As early as the 1920s the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace began publication of a pioneering series on the economic and social history of the Great War. Completed by 1937 in no fewer than 152 volumes, this remarkable enterprise tackled such topics as “The Land and the Peasant in Rumania,” “Food Control in Hungary” and “Effects of the War upon Russian Industries.” In this generation, historians such as Norman Stone, Avner Offer, and John Boyer have shown how attention to socio-economic underpinnings can strengthen understanding of military outcomes. Little of that is reflected in Lloyd’s book. In this respect, it compares unfavourably with Alexander Watson’s Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914–1918 (2014), which covers much of the same ground but with greater attention to those fundamentals.
As for the issue of war aims, we are given little more than passing references: to Italy’s demand in 1915 for territorial expansion at the expense of Austria, as her condition for entering the war at the side of the Allies; to Hindenburg’s ambition to create a German empire in the east; and to Russia’s insistence, as voiced by foreign minister Paul Miliukov after the February revolution in 1917, on securing the “transfer” of Constantinople and the Straits.
Like its first volume, Lloyd’s history is based on (mainly published) sources in many languages. Lloyd’s “command and control” of disparate materials is assured; his narrative is fluent, often gripping; and his historical judgement generally sound (though too much attention is accorded to Rasputin). The evolving viewpoints of the various capitals are summarised dispassionately. Greek, Bulgarian, and Rumanian perspectives are not ignored (the bizarre comedy of the hundreds of thousands of inactive French and British “gardeners” of Salonica is well described).
The book itself is produced to a high standard, with excellent, often unfamiliar, illustrations. But the seventeen maps are a disappointment: too few of the locations mentioned in the text are shown — a particular defect given that most English-speaking readers would be hard put to situate many of them. Moreover, the book lacks a list of alternate placenames: not every schoolboy knows, for example, that the city known to Austrians as Lemberg was the same place as Polish Lwów, and modern-day Ukrainian Lviv.
To judge from its first two volumes, Lloyd’s is shaping up to be the most accessible, lucid and coherent (but narrowly military) history of the First World War. Its most formidable competitor, Hew Strachan’s authoritative Oxford history, ranges more widely. But Strachan’s first volume, To Arms, takes some 1200 pages (no more than eighty dealing directly with the eastern front) to cover the early part of the war. That appeared in 2001: we still await its successor. By contrast, a mere three years separated the appearance of Lloyd’s first two volumes. So we may look forward with keen anticipation to the third.
The end of this volume, like its beginning, is precipitous: the narrative closes abruptly with the Austro–Italian armistice on 4 November 1918. The reader is left, like the viewer of the Bayeux tapestry, feeling that the last frame has been lost. What are we to conclude from this chronicle? A brief epilogue does not solve the problem. Let us hope that in his final volume Lloyd will vouchsafe some considered reflections on the meaning of all that went before. •
The Eastern Front: A History of the First World War
By Nick Lloyd | Viking | $65 | 642 pages
