The Eastern Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918

Writing in the 1920s, Winston Churchill claimed that the First World War on the Eastern Front was "incomparably the greatest war in history." In The Eastern Front, the second volume of his trilogy on the war, historian Nick Lloyd demonstrates that the conflict in the East was more fluid than that in the West, but no less deadly. Colliding on battlefronts up to three times larger than those in France and Belgium, the armies of Russia, Austro-Hungary, Germany, and the Balkan states fought on a vast scale and in a way that would have been unthinkable on the stalemated Western Front. Drawing on the latest scholarship, as well as eyewitness accounts, diaries, and memoirs, Lloyd narrates the destruction of old empires and the rise of the Soviet Union, showing how the war forever changed the region's political order. The Eastern Front is a gripping historical narrative that will transform our understanding of these cataclysmic events.