“Writing in the 1920s, Winston Churchill believed that the First World War on the Eastern front was ‘incomparably the greatest war in history. In its scale, in its slaughter, in the exertion of the combatants, in its military kaleidoscope, it far surpasses by magnitude and intensity all similar human episodes.’”
From Lloyd’s panoramic, geopolitical view of the conflict, Churchill was correct.
In the twenty first century there are many gaps that Lloyd fills in historical knowledge. His prose ranges from the heights of the diplomatic world and the sure-footedness of the military historian to the lightness of an early twentieth century novelist of the realist school:
“Closeted with his chief aides at his summer residence at bad Isul, Frank Joseph took daily walks around the palace grounds, wearing the blue-grey service uniform of a junior officer, comforting himself with the thought that war was inevitable.”
These vignettes are the heart beat of Lloyd’s historical vision. He is as good with the minute particulars as the vast vistas of the mountains and plains of Eastern Europe.
At a geo-political level, the book describes the rise of Serbia, the waning of the Habsburg world, and the indomitability of Russia, a country to be feared, in its Leninist and Stalinist phases later, as a threat to liberal democracy.
If the Western Front in England is seen as a terrible conflict in terms of waste of life, the Eastern front provided greater daily casualties. In four weeks of campaigning the Habsburg army lost as many as 250,000 soldiers through death or severe wounding, with up to 100,000 taken prisoner.
The nature of warfare was more fluid than in the West with the use of cavalry, far different in the main, from the embedded warfare in the trenches. There was a continuity with grandfathers’ battles at Austerlitz or Leipzig. Swords and sabres were drawn for conflict. Riderless horses were mad with fear. Rifles and ammunition, at the heart of modern warfare, were in short supply.
The book excels in new details from the Balkans to Galicia, aided by several maps that introduce unfamiliar town and cities as well as new regions for future historians.
As in the Second World, the enemies of Russia had underestimated how difficult any invasion towards Moscow would be, without the basics of adequate footwear and clothing, never mind more advance weaponry. Mud, snow, and ice could dominate any battlefield like nothing else and destroy the credibility of a high command.
Any Cop?: After Norman Stone’s pioneering study, The Eastern Front (1975), Lloyd’s trilogy will dominate historical thinking for the next generation. In one section, Lloyd references Tolstoy and there is that kind of panoramic depth here from the view of an historian.
Richard Clegg
Bookmunch 