The wars in question may be less “forgotten” than when this volume first appeared in Polish in 2014 as one of a pair, the second covering 1917 to 1923. The centenary of World War I ensured that the eastern front and the multi-national empires (Romanov, Habsburg, Ottoman) are now better understood. Yet the issues involved in re-thinking the Great War as a European or global war—rather than as a western front war waged mainly by Britain, France, Germany and the US—remain acute, especially given the proliferation of publications over the centenary. The authors, highly regarded Polish historians a generation apart (sadly, the senior of the two, Wlodzimierz Borodziej, died in 2021), offer us a valuable response to that challenge.
Using many sources unfamiliar to readers without Polish, they discuss the war in eastern Europe and the Balkans in three parts: fighting at the fronts, life in the home societies, and occupation. Eschewing conventional military, diplomatic, and political history, they focus on combat history “from below” and on social and cultural history. As a result, they make important points and raise stimulating questions both comparatively between the different states at war in eastern Europe and (by way of similarity or difference) with the dominant western front. Familiar questions relocated in this new geographic framework reap suggestive answers.
Amongst other things, the authors show how despite different physical conditions and the Russian retreat in 1915, the eastern front was in essence like that in the west, mostly static and shaped by the defensive dominance of industrial firepower. It was part of the system that enveloped Europe as a whole. The Macedonian front, which they largely ignore, makes the same point. They also show how political and cultural mobilization (propaganda, the press, war exhibitions) affected eastern, as it did western, Europe and found a ready response in societies that were far from “totalitarian.” They make the valuable point that negative mobilization against the internal enemy was especially fraught in Austria-Hungary with its multiple minorities.
They underline how, even before 1917, living conditions declined precipitously compared to the western Allies, though with differences between town and country and various regions. They do not fully prove their interesting claim that occupied regions remained better fed than the occupiers’ home societies. Nonetheless, their third section, on occupations, makes an important contribution to the debate on the war aims of Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. They are broadly correct to conclude that urgent wartime needs prevailed over longer-term imperial or colonial programs. But their contention that the Austrians and Germans had a “liberal” goal in trying to “civilise” what they regarded as “semi-Asia” is debatable. There may have been no direct link to later Nazi goals but the “civilising mission” of European “liberal imperialism” in Africa and Asia is rarely given such benefit of the doubt.
A book of this scope inevitably raises more questions than it can answer. Less attention is given to the Balkans than the eastern front. German rule in Ober Ost (Lithuania, part of Latvia, and Belarus) is largely ignored, though it is where the military developed its colonial policies most fully. In fact, within this book there is a more tightly focused study: of Poland during the Great War. Already partitioned, then invaded and occupied by Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary in 1914–16, subject to hardship and forced labour, and resurgent in 1918 as a nation-state—Poland exemplifies the authors’ themes and often furnishes their most compelling examples.
The time frame of the book, 1912 to 1916, reflects the two-volume conception of the Polish original. If 1912 makes a better beginning (with the Balkan Wars of 1912–13) for the Balkans than for eastern Europe, 1916 is a way station for both. The eastern front continued for nearly another year, as did the occupations of Poland, Romania, Serbia, and elsewhere until 1918. The mid-point of the war does not explain how, in the concluding words of the authors, “the era of nation-states began.” Volume two does that. But this reviewer has learned that Cambridge University Press has no plan to translate and publish it. That is a pity. English language readers are left without the argument of volume two on why the time frame of the Great War, as well its geographical scope, needs to be extended. In short, they only have half the story.
