The Eastern Front
A History of the First World War
Nick Lloyd
North Sydney, NSW: Penguin Random House, 2024
Hardback 672pp RRP: $65.00
Reviewer: Robert Dixon, November 2024
This is the second book of a three-volume history of the First World War. (The first book in the series titled The Western Front was published to critical acclaim in 2021 while the third book is planned to be released in 2027 - it will cover the war in Africa and the Middle East and thus the campaign against Ottoman Turkey.) Much has been written about the fighting in France and Belgium, yet the Eastern Front was no less important for subsequent world history and no less bloody. Between 1914 and 1918 huge numbers of people - perhaps as many as sixteen million soldiers and two million civilians - were killed or injured as a result of war or civil unrest and pogroms. Using official histories, scholarly publications, eyewitness reports, diary entries and memoirs Lloyd reconstructs the full story of warfare in the East of Europe that began in the Balkans as a local struggle between Austria-Hungary and Serbia but eventually involved every country lying between the Baltic Sea in the north and the Black Sea and the Aegean in the south.
In my view this is easily the best one-volume history of the Eastern Front in the First World War that has been published and I whole-heartedly recommend it to anyone interested in this topic. Having said that I do have one puzzle in relation to the book’s subject matter which is that the author includes the fighting in northern Italy as part of the Eastern Front. It is usual for historians to see the fighting in northern Italy as intimately connected to the fighting on the Western Front. One reason for this is that French, British and Italian strategists were in regular communication with each other and often attempted to coordinate their actions. Another reason is that the French and the British were an important source of arms for Italy and also both countries had troops fighting in Italy. In addition, in 1918 two Italian divisions were sent to the Western Front and saw intense combat during the German spring offensive. The author nowhere gives any justification for including Italy in a book covering the Eastern Front. An aside: Having mentioned that the book covers the fighting in northern Italy I ought to immediately answer the question which will have occurred to the reader at this point – Yes, Erwin Rommel is mentioned in the text (though oddly, I think, his name does not appear in the Index).
Compared with the Western Front the Eastern Front is a web of complex and intricate political and military events as a result of the relatively large number of countries involved and the many separate military campaigns that took place. On the one hand we have the ‘Central Powers’ which consisted of the German Empire, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria (Bulgaria joined in the war on the side of the Central Powers in October 1915 having been promised territorial gains in Northern Macedonia should the Central Powers win. However as a result of being on the losing side Bulgaria not only did not gain any territory after the end of the war but ended up losing territory to Greece and Serbia). On the other hand we have the ‘Entente’ which consisted of Great Britain, France, Russia, Serbia, Romania (who declared war on Austria-Hungary in August 1916 hoping to gain the province of Transylvania from Hungary – despite having surrendered to the Central Powers in early 1918 Romania succeeded in gaining this territory after the war under the Versailles Treaty), Italy (following secret negotiations with both sides Italy joined the war against the Central Powers in May 1915 after Great Britain and France promised to support Italy annexing Austrian territory on her northern and north eastern border) and Greece (after a very complicated series of events Greece joined the war in June 1917 and after the end of the war gained territory along the Aegean coastline from Bulgaria). As well as armed conflict between troops of the various countries mentioned above there was a good deal of civil unrest at the time, especially in Russia. All this makes the historian’s task extremely difficult, but these difficulties are surmounted in this superbly written and very informative book. In part Lloyd achieves this by (in the words of the author) ‘presenting the war as it appeared to those at the highest echelons of command and leadership’. As a result, with few exceptions, he avoids discussing in any detail the numerous individual battles which took place. The main exceptions to this include the key battles of Tannenberg (1914) and Caporetto (1917).
After reading the book I feel that I have gained a better understanding of the historical backdrop to the Second World War and also to present-day problems in Europe. I have just one negative comment on the book as a piece of literature. Lloyd’s narrative unfolds chronologically with the result that each chapter (i.e., time period) covers activities in a number of different geographical areas. Unfortunately, the chapters do not include sub-headings to indicate that the text is switching to cover fighting between completely different countries and, as a result, it can sometimes be hard for the reader to follow what is going on.
The book has 506 pages of text, a very user-friendly font size and 89 pages of references and bibliography. The detailed index takes up 32 pages and there are 17 maps and 42 photographs. In addition, there is a very useful nine- page ‘Cast of Characters’. I found that I often needed to refer to this to make sure I knew which country or countries the text was dealing with. There is a lot to be said for sub-headings, I think.
Nick Lloyd is a bestselling English historian and writer. He is Professor of Modern Warfare at King's College London and is based at the Joint Services Command and Staff College in Wiltshire. He specializes in British military and imperial history and is the author of five previous books, including The Amritsar Massacre: The Untold Story of One Fateful Day, Passchendaele - A New History and The Western Front, which was the Sunday Times book of the year in 2021.
The RUSI – Vic Library is most grateful to the publishers for making this work available for review.