The horrors of the Eastern Front

Ten years ago David Cameron, as prime minister, pledged £50 million for the centenary of the first world war. The focus was on ‘capturing our national spirit in every corner of the country, something that says something about who we are as a people’. Beyond a celebration of the Tommy on the Western Front and a belated acknowledgement of colonial Britain’s sacrifice, it was a missed opportunity. There was little attempt to better understand the region where the war began – and where, according to Nick Lloyd’s exhaustive The Eastern Front, it never really ended.

Indicative of his understandable wariness about penetrating beyond Britain’s comfort zone (he is the acclaimed author of The Western Front), Lloyd begins his massive new military history with Winston Churchill, who concluded that the first world war in the East was ‘the most frightful misfortune’ to befall mankind ‘since the collapse of the Roman Empire before the Barbarians’. Lloyd is quick to reinforce this sentiment, moving briskly through the brutal double murder of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie that triggered war, into the bloody nuts and bolts of the conflagration’s opening campaigns in the shadow of the Carpathians.

There are warning shots of what’s to come in the introduction: the East’s elongated 900-mile front line, with its potential for galloping breakthroughs, and a reference to unimaginable casualty figures – upwards of 2.3 million dead Russians (a sobering thought in the context of today’s Ukraine war) and 1.2 million Austro-Hungarians. But those figures do little to prepare the reader for the minutiae of this slow-motion horror story. Cue rigid imperial mindsets prioritising military valour over the mechanics of war, mismatched alliances that slopped into conflict without coordinating priorities, and instant death on an unprecedented scale.

War was scarcely under way when a first abortive campaign against scrappy Serbia cost shambolic Austria-Hungary 600 officers and 22,000 men.