In both size and ferocity, the fighting on the eastern front from 1914–17 outdid even the western front. So why, asks Nick Lloyd, has eastern Europe become the forgotten theatre of the First World War?
It was “incomparably the greatest war in history. In its scale, in its slaughter, in the exertions of the combatants, in its military kaleidoscope, it far surpasses by magnitude and intensity all similar human episodes.” Winston Churchill wrote these words in the early 1930s, in his six-volume chronicle of what was at the time the most terrible conflict of them all: the First World War. But Churchill didn’t have the trenches of France and Belgium in mind when committing this particular description to print. He was instead referring to the titanic battle for supremacy that unfolded in eastern Europe.
Today, when we think of the First World War, images of blood-soaked battles of the western front almost immediately spring to mind. This terrible deadlock has come to define how historians, and the public more generally in the west, have understood the conflict. Bloody and seemingly inconclusive clashes – at the Somme, Verdun and Passchendaele – have become instrumental to the memory of what George Kennen called “the great seminal catastrophe” of the 20th century.
But the First World War was always much bigger than the western front. It stretched out into the Middle East, across Africa, on the high seas. It spilled over into the European colonial possessions in east Asia. And it triggered a four-year cataclysm across East Prussia, Poland and Galicia, as the Allies, led by the Russian empire, embarked on a mighty struggle with the Central Powers, dominated by Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Although the outcome of the First World War would ultimately be determined in the west, its origins can only be understood by looking at the power dynamics of eastern Europe and the Balkans.
A blank cheque
When a Serbian nationalist gunman murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, it sparked an international crisis that drew in the great powers. Russia moved to protect Serbia (its chief ally in the region), while Germany offered Austria-Hungary a ‘blank cheque’ to deal with the Serbs once and for all.
