It was not much more than a century ago that the large imperial states of Europe started World War I, the Great War.  This is not an unimaginable expanse of time: my paternal grandmother turned 20 in 1914; a former English teacher, she helped see to my education and lived until 1978, when I was in college.  So it is not time, but the Great War’s profound cataclysm, that makes it hard for us to understand the world before. Technology makes the gulf seem wider.  In documentary films of the conflict, there are horses everywhere. Even though the militaries used railroads whenever possible, and at a crucial point all the taxis of Paris were summoned to ferry troops twenty miles to the front, this was very much a war of infantry and cavalry against machine guns and heavy artillery. The mismatch was one reason for the ghastly toll.

We live in very different circumstances today, but there are parallels.  In 1914, acquisitive empires plunged themselves into the Great War and, having underestimated their opponents, found themselves stuck for years at previously unimaginable cost.  In The Eastern Front (Norton, 2024), the second volume of a planned trilogy on the military history of the Great War, Nick Lloyd gives us an invaluable and well-written account of the war’s most complex—but least familiar (at least in English)—theaters.  In Eastern and Southern Europe, the suffering was unredeemed; the empires all collapsed.

Imperial Interests

Given his military focus, Lloyd summarizes the war’s root causes only briefly.  Many writers have told that story well, from Barbara Tuchman to Margaret MacMillan. Most of the Great War’s belligerents chose to participate, in many cases with the enthusiastic support of their citizens.  And they mostly acted for cynical purposes, to expand or defend sometimes-hallucinatory imperial interests.  (You may wish to consult good political maps of Europe before and after the war.)

Austria-Hungary did suffer a serious blow to imperial authority when Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the very old Emperor Franz Josef, was assassinated by terrorists in Sarajevo, Bosnia—a recently “annexed” province of the Habsburg empire—on June 28, 1914.  This seemingly obscure location was a global hotspot of the time. Several small countries had sprung up in the Balkan region as the power of the Ottoman empire drained away during the 19th century, and two recent Balkan wars over territory made the Austrians both jealous and nervous. Austria’s own annexation of Bosnia in 1908 was a controversial and aggressive act. Franz Ferdinand had hoped to rule as a moderate reformer, and to quell ethnic unrest in the empire’s Slavic population by granting greater autonomy. But after the assassination, the empire’s hawkish leaders chose, without stopping to consider evidence, to blame the government of independent Serbia for the attack.2  It was clearly true that Serbia had not suppressed—at least not successfully—the extreme nationalists within its borders who had organized the attack in order to frustrate, lest Franz Ferdinand’s efforts to strengthen Austria’s foothold in the region.  In that respect, the nationalists succeeded. For it didn’t really matter to Austrian leaders whether the Serbian government was directly involved, because their real goal—like that of US anti-communist activities in Latin America during the Cold War—was to suppress ethnic nationalist movements on their southern flank that could threaten the empire from without and from within.3    

Many chances to confine the conflict were passed over.  Germany enthusiastically supported Austrian plans.  Austria issued a 48-hour ultimatum to Serbia that, perhaps, no independent nation could have accepted. (Serbia tried its best.)4  Serbia’s ally, imperial Russia, was outraged and Tsar Nicholas—having no desire for a larger war—appealed to his cousin, Wilhelm II of Germany for calm.5 To no avail. Then the Russian government, strongly encouraged by nervous French leaders, and calculating that it would be better to fight a war before Germany could further extend its military buildup, mobilized its forces. 

Germany took Russia’s mobilization, a threatening step short of an attack, as justification to implement its longstanding plan to break the encircling alliance of Russia, France and Great Britain (the “Entente”) by wiping out the French army first before finishing off the Russians. So little did Serbia’s alleged provocation matter that the German leadership demanded that Austria hold off on invading Serbia in order to help against the Russians.6 (Austria would split its armies instead.) Germany’s strategy did not leave France much choice, although France’s mutual defense treaty with Russia probably would have obligated it to come to Russia’s aide even if Germany had attacked eastward. The British government was still reluctant to send troops to aid France, but Germany’s invasion through neutral, bravely resistant Belgium persuaded the doubters. Remarkably, German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg admitted in a speech to the Reichstag that the attack on Belgium violated international law.7  Weeks later, German occupying forces torched Louvain, Belgium and its irreplaceable medieval library, citing civilian resistance; the German military governor told foreign diplomats that “the population has fired upon our troops, and now of course we must destroy the city.”8 Nonetheless, the British and French stand against German aggression fit neatly within their long-term interest in discouraging German encroachment on their colonial plans in the Middle East and India—a key goal of their entente with Russia. 

The Ottoman empire weighed its options but wound up siding with the Germans, who had been so helpful with railroad construction and military preparedness.  They even got the Caliph to declare an Islamic jihad, cynically and somewhat confusingly, against only the Christians that it didn’t like.9  Italy delayed but was persuaded to join the Entente in 1915 in exchange for promises of postwar booty—including the port of Trieste and other territory on the Adriatic.10  Romania and Bulgaria each jumped in for similarly opportunistic reasons—on opposite sides.

The US stayed neutral, prudently hoping to avoid hostilities and maintain its rapidly growing trade.  After Germany’s attacks through and upon Belgium, however, this self-interested neutrality was not viewed by all as a wholly virtuous posture.  The US did join the Entente powers later and for a different reason, mainly in response to Germany’s 1917 submarine campaign against transatlantic shipments to England.

The Price of Bravery

Lloyd picks up the saga as hostilities commence on the Eastern Front. Using memoranda and correspondence from half a dozen countries, Lloyd provides a vivid year by year, battle by battle, explanation of the strategic concerns and great frustrations of the military leaders, with each other and with their political leaders.  Military histories can be overly focused on outcome: triumphalist or moralistic. Lloyd avoids those traps: once the decision had been made to go to war (for better or worse), the means and results of its conduct became the most important political issue in every country.  By providing evidence of how each country’s generals sincerely tried to achieve its political goals, he shows how plans for quick and decisive victory turned into a struggle for survival.  No one chose a four-year war; it was like a grave they dug one shovelful at a time. 

As the elder General Moltke would have predicted, plans quickly went off track on all sides. Every general thinks their front or situation is most critical and requires diverting resources from elsewhere; everyone complains that they have too few soldiers, inadequate arms, food and supplies; the enemy before them is always imminently threatening and fearsome.  The German central command, wildly frustrated with their failure to break through on the Western Front, nevertheless continued to prioritize it, despite the objections of the hugely successful Eastern Front generals and arguably at the cost of achieving decisive victories in the east. The Austrian armies, catastrophically weakened in fighting with Russia in the early phases, repeatedly had to beg the Germans for assistance and became junior partners almost immediately.  After the Russian armies were forced into long retreats by the Germans, and facing increasing political protest at home, Tsar Nicholas took the drastic step of replacing his respected (but indecisive) uncle Grand Duke Nikolai and taking direct responsibility himself in September 1915.  (Things did not improve.) 

Italy’s entry into the war on the side of the Entente also required Austria to split its armies even further; yet Austria succeeded in fending off the full force of Italian offensives for three years. Even though his costly offensives repeatedly failed to break through Austrian lines, Italian General Luigi Cadorna simply blamed the civilian government for failing to give him everything he needed, and he defied their invitations for a war council—until a devastating rout at Caporetto in 1917.  He would say that this, too, was not his fault.11 

The war featured bravery on all fronts; battlefield reports regularly praise their opponents’ strength and courage under fire and in horrendous conditions.  “I came to know the Serbs as the best soldiers in the Balkans,” wrote German General August von Mackensen.12  The unsuccessful Italian attackers fought “with the courage of a lion” at Isonzo, Austrian General Svetozar Boroevic told a reporter, “even if the regiments lose all their officers, this does not stop the soldiers from advancing to attack with the utmost contempt for death.”13  In an early, and rare, case of failure by the German army at Gumbinnen, a Russian officer admired “the utter contempt for death displayed by the brave sons of Germany.”14  The words of the soldiers make the consequences of this bravery all too clear.  “We are no longer men,” an Italian soldier’s letter says, “we look our companions in the face: they look like ghosts; they look at us: we look like ghosts to them.”15

Lloyd similarly dispels any broad conclusions about the capabilities and competency of the major players.  True, German Eastern Front armies under Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorf were the best supplied and generally prevailed in their region, but the historically maligned Russian and Austrian armies won major battles for territory and respect, and the Italians literally never gave up.  Though they could not match German armaments and logistics, the Russians inspired great fear and respect; for example, an Austrian recalled that its artillery “sounded like heavy railroad trains crashing into each other at roaring speed.  There was a wild raging, rumbling, crashing and splintering that shook you to your very soul.”16  Even the often-disparaged Austrian army showed up. In Lloyd’s words, “[S]omehow the thin and battered Habsburg defenders maintained their positions [in the Ninth Battle of the Isonzo] in what would become a minor miracle of resistance.”17 Before the war’s last stages, the armies were highly disciplined and motivated; there were few examples of “moral failure,” that is, disloyalty or refusals to follow even the most ill-advised orders.  As a result, the war in all fronts featured a terribly repetitive and wasteful series of frontal assaults on entrenched positions, and very difficult, and seldom successful, attempts to encircle enemy forces. 

Regular soldiers died in the millions. Unsuccessful decisionmakers might be sacked or forced to retire, all the way up to the Tsar’s uncle, Grand Duke Nikolai, and German General Helmuth von Moltke (the younger), nephew of the legendary 19th century general. General Samsonov simply shot himself after 92,000 Russian soldiers were forced to surrender at Tannenberg in 1914.  Generals were usually “careful” to launch attacks on entrenched opponents only when they had a substantial advantage in manpower and artillery, but this mass approach inevitably produced horrific casualties for both sides.  It is striking to read, for example, that in one battle alone, at the Masurian Lakes in late 1914, Russian armies lost 100,000 men, including 45,000 taken prisoner, while the victorious Germans lost about 37,000.  In the context of the Great War, this could be considered “a modest sum for the huge damage inflicted” on the Russians.18 The Great War has been estimated to have caused the deaths of nearly 10 million military personnel and over 6 million civilians.19  A better comparison may be the entrenched fighting in the current Russia-Ukraine war; over a four-year period, deaths are estimated at between 250,000 and 350,000 for Russia, and 140,000 for Ukraine.20 

Unlike the Western Front, which after 1914 stayed close to the line of trenches stretching from the North Sea to Switzerland, the rapidly moving Eastern Fronts devasted civilians and civil society wherever the armies ranged. When the outgunned Russian armies retreated some 200 kilometers across the entire front in Poland in 1915, they were ordered to deprive the Germans of supply, burning villages, destroying roads and bridges and any foodstuff they couldn’t take with them. They were accompanied by over 3 million refugees just to that point in the war.  Of course, the Germans had done much the same thing when they had retreated just a year earlier.21  Austria-Hungary, too, had to provide for hundreds of thousands of people displaced in the back-and-forth fighting on its front with Russia.22  The fighting also starkly reduced food supplies for civilians and soldiers alike, by making it impossible to plant crops or pasture animals over wide areas and block much international trade.

Collapse

There is plenty of blame to distribute, for the war’s beginnings, the mass destructiveness of its artillery and infantry battles, the continuation of frontal attacks in the face of repeated failure.  But it’s too easy for us to wave our hands and say that the whole thing was a waste of lives and resources that sensible leaders could avoided. The world is not always blessed with sensible leaders. And even sensible leaders can be faced with impossible decisions when they or their allies are seriously threatened.  At the time, even the liberals and pacifists were committed to the effort (if not necessarily to the tactics).  Barbara Tuchman noted that Emile Verhaeren, Belgium’s leading poet and formerly a self-professed socialist and pacifist, wrote that Germany’s invasion of his neutral country “struck him with such violence that he thought himself no longer the same man.”23  During the long stalemate of the western front, both Britain and France turned to liberal political leaders, David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau, who were among the most strident and uncompromising anti-German voices of their time.

Perhaps the easiest targets for criticism are the repeatedly unsuccessful and incredibly costly mass infantry assaults on entrenched positions, which were repeatedly ordered from Passchendaele on the Western Front to Isonzo on the Italian border to Gallipoli along the Dardenelles.  Nothing was gained in most of these slaughters; they were objectively bad decisions.  But at the time these attacks did have strategic rationales beyond gaining a few hundred meters of territory.  The Russians’ disastrous foray into East Prussia quite possibly saved France in 1914 by causing Moltke to pull German divisions from the Western Front; the French and British would reciprocate by pressuring Germany from the west. The Italians were bribed to attack northward in order to further divide Austro-Hungarian armies.  The British and French did have a strategy to go “around” the entrenchments of the Western Front: it failed at Gallipoli.  

The great powers’ cynical strategies caused tremendous suffering, but their comeuppance did not prove some kind of moral lesson.  The Western Front eventually produced winners and losers, and the losers had been the primary aggressors.  In that rudimentary sense, some justice may have been done. But in the theaters of Eastern Europe, at equally great cost, the winners on the battlefield did not achieve their political objectives and the regimes that started the war did not survive to finish it.

Lloyd makes clear that the outcome was far from inevitable. As late as the spring of 1918, after three and a half years of war, things actually looked pretty good for Germany and its allies. Germany had made big territorial gains in its fight against Russia, and Austro-Hungarian forces had reduced and chased out the remnants of Serbia’s much smaller army.  Although Russia had the German-allied Ottoman armies on the ropes, its terrible losses to Germany led directly to the 1917 Russian revolution; Lenin’s revolutionary government withdrew from the war and signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk on terms highly favorable to Germany in March 1918.  Soviet Russia’s withdrawal enabled the Ottoman empire to survive (for a time) and allowed Germany to shift more forces from the east to support a new offensive in the west that summer.  

In short, Germany both defeated its opponents and gained a vast territory in the east; elsewhere Russia, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire had at various points made meaningful territorial gains.  Yet none of these regimes survived the war.

What changed?  The planners had anticipated short, decisive wars of a few months’ duration, and were stunned at the casualty figures from the very start.  What proved decisive, though, was the incredible need for supply, for everything from boots and food to artillery and railroad capacity.  Lloyd notes that, as early as December 1914, the Russian armies needed half a million pairs of boots but only forty thousand were in stock.24  In the end, it wasn’t so much that the better-supplied armies prevailed; it was that the less well-supplied countries ran out of stuff.  Hunger and deprivation at home, together with battlefield losses, drained political support from the Austrian and Russian empires, and opposition groups stepped in. Lenin’s Bolsheviks prevailed over several left-leaning opposition groups on the streets of Petrograd in 1917, while long-simmering nationalist parties broke up the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918.  Concerns about losing the race for supplies also drove the Germans to begin U-boat attacks on transatlantic shipments from the US to Britain and France in 1917— and thereby drew the US into the war.  With the addition of hundreds of thousands of US troops, the Entente decisively broke through German lines on the Western Front in the fall of 1918. In that stalemated battle of attrition, economic performance and political alliance, not superior military prowess, proved decisive.

As a result, everything turned around.  Because Britain, France and the US defeated Germany on the Western Front, Germany was forced to give up its Brest-Litovsk territorial gains in the east.  In the absence of German support, Austria-Hungary could not continue. The empire broke up into several smaller states, much as the Soviet Union’s “republics” split up in 1991.  With the collapse of Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman imperial power, vulnerable south Slavic regions banded together to form the new country of Yugoslavia.  Somewhat amazingly, little Serbia, the original target of hostilities, occupied by Austrian forces for most of the war, with the remains of its valiant but decimated armies driven into exile, had fought back and survived to lead Yugoslavia.

With French and British help, the persistent but ineffectual Italians—there were no fewer than twelve Battles of the Isonzo—finally pushed back their starving Austrian opponents in late October 1918.  Their prime minister Vittorio Orlando would leave the Paris peace talks the following year, because the peace treaty failed to award Italy the Adriatic port of Fiume.25  The issue would become a springboard for the rise of Mussolini and his alliance with the Nazis. 

Nor was that all. In the Middle East (the presumed subject of Lloyd’s third volume) the Ottoman sultan surrendered to the western allies, which occupied Constantinople and a small neighboring area, but those allies needed to draw down their exhausted forces and could not hold.  The hero of Gallipoli, Mustafa Kemal (later, Ataturk), who had been sent out to pacify the restive Turkish homeland, formed his own very secular government and army instead.  The sultan abdicated, and Ataturk’s forces crushed the invading allied-supported Greek army in 1922.  Hostilities ended with the Turks’ horrific destruction of the port city of Smyrna and a forced exchange of Turkish Christians and Greek Muslims. 

Despite later wars and realignments, the resulting map of Europe would be recognizable to us today.  The almost impenetrable course of the Great War makes it difficult for us to understand the world before.

Legacies

Few people alive today remember the vast public disillusionment that ensued.  In the US, I think only the aftermath of the Vietnam war could come close. And as with Vietnam, memories of emotional reactions to defeat, disappointment or deprivation have lasted much longer than those of strategic decisions or outcomes of battles.

In nearly victorious Germany, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front became a bestseller in Germany and in English translation and was made into an Oscar-winning American movie in 1932.  The principal character joins up enthusiastically in 1914 and survives years in the Western Front trenches, but he is shot dead hours before the armistice took effect at 11 am, November 11, 1918.  The Nazi government later banned the book.

The English translation of the title is, of course, grimly ironic.  The literal translation of its German title, Im Westen Nichts Neues, is ironic in a different way: “In the west, nothing new.”   The German, in other words, emphasizes not that the front is quiet but that there is no change in the grim strategy of entrenchment. 

The British and Americans, who have the best case for having “won” the war, and who did not even fight on their own soil, produced some of the most despairing antiwar literature in the history of the English language. Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Eliot’s “The Waste Land” were inspired directly by the futility and seeming pointlessness of the war.  “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity”  wrote William Butler Yeats in “The Second Coming” (1919).  The poem’s prophesy was not redemption but the awakening of a “rough beast,” and the second world war would prove him correct. 

In Dulce et Decorum Est, British officer and poet Wilfred Owen called the title’s Latin phrase—meaning, in full, that it is good and honorable to die for one’s fatherland—an “old lie.”  He was killed in action in France a week before the armistice.

Again today, some national leaders actively seek to take territory and/or change the governments of other countries. The technology has changed, but history may still have lessons for them about risk and uncertainty.  A century on, Hemingway, Eliot and Yeats are still iconic modernists.  Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, despite their imperialism and Wilson’s overt racism, have enduring legacies.  In contrast, the pre-war leaders who entered to resist German aggression, British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and Foreign Secretary Edward Grey, and French President Raymond Poincaré, have been overshadowed in importance by their liberal, and fiercely anti-German, successors David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau, who came to power during the war and held on to end it.  And the pre-war leaders in central and eastern Europe—Emperor Franz Josef, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tsar Nicholas II, Sultan Mehmed V and his de facto head of the Ottoman government Enver Pasha—belong to an obscure and discredited past.

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Mark C. Jensen is a Boston-area attorney and writer. He is the author of The Labyrinth We Walked: The Cold War Deconstructed (Resource, 2024). He has also served as an officer and board member of nonprofit organizations: the Brookline Community Mental Health Center, Graywolf Press and MassPoetry. More information about the author and his work can be found here.

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NOTES

1 Lloyd, Nick, The Eastern Front (Norton: London, 2024), 37.

2 MacMillan, Margaret, The War That Ended Peace  (Random House: New York, 2013), 566.

3 MacMillan, 554-5.

4 Lloyd, 6; MacMillan, 570.

5 MacMillan, 601-2.

6 Lloyd, 14-15.

7 Tuchman, 128.

8 Tuchman, 319.

9 Baer, The Ottomans (Basic: New York, 2021), 426.

10 MacMillan, Peacemakers (John Murray: London, 2002), 292.

11 Lloyd, 231, 401-2.

12 Lloyd, 179.

13 Lloyd, 198.

14 Lloyd, 34.

15 Lloyd, 196.

16 Lloyd, 251-2.

17 Lloyd, 295.

18 Lloyd, 54-55.

19 Kiger, Patrick, “How Many People Died In World War I,” April 19, 2023.

20 “Russia’s losses in Ukraine rise fast than ever as US pushes for peace deal”, BBC December 29, 2025.

21 Lloyd, 61 (German), 171-2 (Russian).

22 Judson, Pieter, The Habsburg Empire, (Belknap: Cambridge, Mass., 2016), 408-411.

23 Tuchman, Barbara, The Guns of August (Random House: New York, 1962; Ballantine Books edition, 1994), 310.

24 Lloyd, 84.

25 MacMillan, Peacemakers, 308.

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