The Eastern Front

Reviews

Artillery shells that only dent the frozen earth, mountainsides burning in the summer sun, the drone of aircraft over the wheat fields of Ukraine, whole armies in headlong retreat, flamethrowers and poison gas, and a cavalry general slipping away in the night to shoot himself in the head – this is the story of the First World War’s Eastern Front told on a Homeric scale. Nick Lloyd gives us not only a compelling account of warfare on the ‘long front’ from Riga to Thessalonica but also an intimate and disturbing portrait of the fighting taken from regimental histories, diaries, and the testimony of the dead Nick Lloyd brilliantly pulls together the manifold strands and brings to life the dark realities of an often ignored but hugely important theatre which paved the way for the horrors of World War II An exemplary study of a much-neglected subject. Nick Lloyd is at the very top of his game. . . . A fabulous historian. Nick Lloyd searingly recreates the battlefields of the Eastern Front, Italy, and the Balkans in this taut, thrilling history in which he deploys all of his marvelous gifts to maximum effect: biography, political analysis, and operational military history. On a vast canvas extending from the Baltic coast to the Mediterranean, Lloyd depicts the strategic seesawing between the alliances and its dreadful impact on the troops of the line. Nothing was ever quiet on the Eastern Front as is vividly demonstrated in Nick Lloyd’s magisterial history of World War I waged in the fields, mountains, and marshes of eastern Europe. The warfare that produced the fall of two empires and the socialist revolution that shook the world is presented here in all its horror and complexity by a master storyteller and an expert in the field. A huge achievement. Nick Lloyd’s readable and compelling narrative takes his reader into the vast geographical expanses of Eastern Europe, Italy, the Balkans and Macedonia, showing how consequential these lesser known fronts were to the struggle of 1914–18. Lloyd brings all his formidable skills to bear in The Eastern Front, blending an authoritative synthesis of the written literature with cutting-edge research to craft a gripping narrative . . . A masterpiece of First World War history. This masterly history makes well-known events feel refreshingly unfamiliar . . . One of the great strengths of Lloyd’s account, a masterly synthesis of sources from various countries, is that unlike many of the war’s participants, he never loses sight of how it all began Nick Lloyd reminds us in The Eastern Front, his . . . highly-detailed and meticulously researched book, the consequences of the fighting in the central and south-eastern European theatres were profound for the future of the continent – indeed, of the world Compelling . . . The Eastern Front is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the history of that troubled region up to and including the present Lloyd has produced a strategic and operational narrative that proceeds chronologically without ever losing coherence as it switches from one sector to another . . . rigorous in its determination to remain comparative Expand reviews