The Eastern Front

'The First World War from a refreshingly unfamiliar angle . . . masterly' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times <BR><BR>'Compelling . . . The Eastern Front is essential reading' Margaret Macmillan, Financial Times<BR><BR>'A masterwork . . . This is the history of the Eastern Front I've waited all my life to read' Simon Sebag Montefiore<BR><BR>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<BR><BR>***********<BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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 twentieth century, and the current war in Ukraine.