Nick Lloyd professor of modern warfare at King’s College, London, tells the story for the first time of what Winston Churchill once called the “unknown war”: the vast conflict in Eastern Europe and the Balkans that brought about the collapse of three empires.

Although much has been written about the fighting in France and Belgium, The Eastern Front was no less bloody. Between 1914 and 1917, huge numbers of people- perhaps as many as 16 million soldiers and two million civilians were killed, wounded or maimed in enormous battles that sometimes range across a front of 100km in length.  Lloyd reconstructs the full story of a war that began in the Balkans as a local struggle between Austria- Hungary and Serbia, and which sucked in Russia, Germany and Italy, right thorugh the final collapse of Habsburg Empire in 1918. The Eastern Front paints a vivid and authoritative picture of a conflict that shook the world, and that remains central to understanding the tragic, blood soaked trajectory of the twentieth century, and the current war in Ukraine.

 Very few people outside central Europe knows the First World war battles of Przemysl, Lemberg ( now L’viv) or or the Somme. Some however, may know Tannenberg, the great German victory over the Russians in 1914 or the Allied failure at Gallipoli in 1915. We are used to the casualty figures in the west: 900, 000 dead from the British Empire, more from Germany or France, although the number of those who died in the east may be larger if civilians are included. Two million Russian soldiers died there and 1.2mn from Austria-Hungry. Serbia started its war with Austria-Hungary with an army of 420, 000 by 1915, it had 140, 000 left. 

Lloyd explain how massive army moving across a vast theatre of war, from the Baltic across to the eastern end of the Mediterranean, as three great empires- Austria-Hungary, Russia and German and their smaller allies threw themselves against each other. Until near the end, neither side was able to win a decisive victory, although there were victories in individual campaigns, but these did not conclude the war, but what they got was the collapse of the regimes they served.

Russia’s first commander-in-chief, the Grand Duke Nicholas, had trouble making up his mind, the hapless tsar, appointed himself as his successor and so contributed to the doom hastening towards him,. The chief of Austrian  general staff, Franz Conrad von Hotzen-dorf, although sketched out brilliant manoeuvres on paper but ignored key partialities such as having enough trains in the right place 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 needed up in effect running Germany, were for all their faults competent – as was the Russian Aleksei Brusilov.

In the 1904 Russo-Japanese war, 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. Men must attack enemy lines and forts audaciously no matter how inadequate their equipment or how strong the opponents positions. 

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 other 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 had their own debates between easterners and westerners.

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

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, 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 Ukranie, and also between Russia and the newly emerged state of Poland, until the mid-1920s. Austria- Hungry 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 including Adolf Hitler, saw the east as Germany’s future empire.

The Second World War brought large-scale war to the east as well as the horrors of the Holocaust. Today, Vladimir Putin dreams of regaining the territories including Ukraine that Tsar Nicholas and his ancestors once ruled.

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