The definitive history of the Eastern Front in the First World War, from the acclaimed military historian and author of Passchendaele and The Western Front

In the second volume of his landmark First World War trilogy, Professor Nick Lloyd tells the story for the first time of what Winston Churchill once called the ‘unknown war’: the vast conflict in Eastern Europe and the Balkans that brought about the collapse of three empires. Much has been written about the fighting in France and Belgium, yet the Eastern Front was no less bloody. Between 1914 and 1917, huge numbers of people – perhaps as many as 16 million soldiers and two million civilians – were killed, wounded or maimed in enormous battles that sometimes ranged across a front of 100 km in length.

Through intimate eyewitness reports, diary entries and memoirs – many of which have never been translated into English before – Lloyd reconstructs the full story of a war that began in the Balkans as a local struggle between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, and which sucked in Russia, Germany and Italy, right through to the final collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918. The Eastern Front paints a vivid and authoritative picture of a conflict that shook the world, and that remains central to understanding the tragic, blood-soaked trajectory of the entire twentieth century, including the current war in Ukraine.