This is a massive book: 506 pages of text; eighty-nine pages of references and bibliography; seventeen maps, all of them full page or more; and forty-two illustrations. It is also an important book, and it is easy for the reader to follow Nick Lloyd’s argument. The Eastern Front is a major corrective to how most readers here and in the United Kingdom, France, and the United States understand the Great War, as it was once called.

I have been studying and thinking about World War I, professionally, since I started my doctoral studies in 1972. I have never given much attention to the Eastern Front, barely understanding the war that involved the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the German Empire, and millions of soldiers. The war raged all over eastern Europe, Italy, and the Balkans, across nations, in a conflict that involved the massive movement of huge numbers of soldiers that is unimaginable to those who know the story of fighting on the much more static Western Front.