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While Austria-Hungary dominates Nasza wojna, the German Empire takes central stage in Alexander Watson's fine study of the Central Powers, Ring of Steel. Watson refers to his book as the ‘first modern history’ of Austria and Germany at war, a somewhat ungenerous assessment, given that Holger Herwig's 1997 The First World War: Germany and Austria–Hungary (republished in 2014) has long been considered the standard work on the subject.Footnote ³ Herwig's work, however, is more concerned with the traditional fields of strategy, military operations and high politics, for which it will remain indispensable, while Watson's book, like Nasza wojna, is focused on German and Austrian society in wartime. Like Borodziej and Górny, Watson illustrates the impact of the war on the peoples of two empires as well as the way these same people likewise influenced the manner in which the imperial states mobilised for, fought and otherwise endured the conflict. His key argument is that, in both Austria–Hungary and Imperial Germany, the war was a genuine ‘people's war’, fuelled in part by the voluntary support of a population that, rather than being manipulated from above, engaged in a process of popular ‘self-mobilisation’. The solidarity and support that underpinned the war efforts, however, was fraught with weaknesses and cracks from the outset, cracks that were strained, tested and eventually split open. In Germany, the fundamental weakness was class antagonism, while in the Habsburg lands, Watson echoes Nasza wojna’s contention that the stresses of the war fatally exacerbated tensions between national groups. Among the strongest chapters in the study is Chapter Two, which covers the outbreak of the war and brilliantly shows how the subjects of Franz Joseph and Wilhelm II came to support a common cause in the days and weeks before the war broke out. In a superb evocation of the July crisis, Watson illustrates how grim resolution, fear, uncertainty and, late in the month, excitement all powerfully coursed through in that fateful month. Watson argues that this inchoate and conflicting welter of emotion catalysed into mass support for the war because of a widespread belief that the coming conflict was fundamentally defensive.

In Austria–Hungary, this belief obviously stemmed from Franz Ferdinand's assassination, while in Germany, Russian mobilisation was widely perceived as a threat to all Germans and to the German state. Fears of annihilation, Watson argues, created a fund of support – not to be confused with enthusiasm – on which both states would draw support for four exhausting years. ‘War enthusiasm, had it been the main drive’, Watson argues, persuasively, ‘would probably not have carried the German war effort beyond August 1914. . . . [But] the desire to defend the homeland, on the other hand, proved a remarkably stable base on which to mobilise a people’ (73). In other words, the German and Austrian governments played crucial roles in encouraging and channelling the popular emotions that the war called forth, but they did not create them. In subsequent chapters Watson then reveals how both states lost this public support because they were unable to adequately manage the food supply (which may, in any event have been impossible). Bringing together and building upon the foundational work of Maureen Healy on Vienna and Belinda Davis on Berlin, Watson shows that disruptions in the food supply and the consequent shortages, especially in urban areas, generated widespread suspicion and resentment that corroded the social solidarity which had been forged in the face of a common threat.Footnote ⁴ In Germany, the middle class felt bitter towards the wealthy, while the workers resented everyone, including fellow workers with extra rations. City dwellers, meanwhile, nursed collective grudges against farmers, who they believed were driven primarily by greed and self-interest, while the farmers themselves resented government intrusions and hungry city folk. All of this was present in Austria–Hungary as well, but with the added problem that class resentments were overlaid with ethnic ones; Hungarians in particular came in for opprobrium, given Hungary's extensive control over its own agricultural products, of which it sent little to the rest of the Dual Monarchy. In both empires the disruption of food supplies fatally weakened social cohesion and eroded public trust in the state, resulting in a poisonous concoction of anger and envy and a bitter sense that so much had been sacrificed in vain. Watson concludes that this poison inexorably seeped into post-war political life, contributing to the ailments, both domestic and foreign, that made Europe so volatile and unstable in the years after 1918.

While social decay in Germany and Austria and its consequences for the post-war world are at the core of Watson's narrative, his book ranges far and wide, taking in the battles, occupations and political decisions that were also crucial to the history of the Empires at war. Watson is an excellent writer and has moulded all of this material into a lively and engaging narrative that will no doubt become the standard work on the subject (though Herwig's book will still remain indispensable, as it covers military operations in greater detail). Watson is also an impeccably fair-minded historian, analytically detached without being cold or indifferent to his subjects’ humanity. This is evident, for example, in his treatment of Erich Ludendorff, the villain of many histories of the Great War, who comes across in Watson's book as strange and brutal, but also somewhat pathetic; it is hard not to feel a twinge of pity when reading that the exhausted General's doctor prescribed singing in order to calm his shattered nerves as the war ground to its bloody end. Nor is there a better treatment of Brest-Litovsk available in English. Watson is critical of what he sees as German expansionism, but he also notes that

This may seem obvious to Polish or Ukrainian historians, but such an accurate description of what actually occurred at Brest-Litovsk is seldom, if ever, to be found in German- or English-language accounts of the war, where it is brushed off as yet another example of brutal German annexation (of ‘Russian’ territories) that prefigure Nazi ambitions in Eastern Europe.Footnote ⁵

What makes this such a compelling summary of Brest-Litovsk is that Watson situates it within the broader context of Central European history – that is, within the political and social upheavals and disruptions revealed in panoramic fashion in Nasza wojna. The book would be stronger if Watson took a similar approach to other elements of his analysis, for it is precisely a broad picture of Central European turbulence, and the way the two Empires were embroiled in it, that has the greatest potential to enrich our understanding of the course of the war and the decisions made while it raged. For example, it has long been established that elements within the German political–military establishment and their allies within the right-wing, nationalistic civilian population harboured dreams of sweeping annexations to follow from a German victory. These desires for annexations – which were by no means universal, and which never assumed the form of a concrete and coherent policy – are commonly referred to in the scholarship as Germany's ‘war aims’. Watson discusses these ambitions, and, somewhat disappointingly, does not challenge the reigning scholarly consensus that they were driven by two forces: first, a desire by German elites to defuse, by means of conquest, growing pressure from below to reform the German political system; and, second, that Germany's imperial ambitions had been thwarted abroad and so found an outlet within Europe itself.Footnote ⁶ As the example of Brest-Litovsk shows, however, situating Germany's strategic and political calculations within the Central European context within which they unfolded suggests alternate ways of interpreting them. Watson's treatment of the ‘border strip’ is a case in point. The Germans, it is well-established, intended to annex part of pre-war Russian Polish territory and, possibly, to ethnically cleanse it of its Polish and Jewish inhabitants.Footnote ⁷ Watson discusses these plans and roots them firmly in the established historiographical tradition of cunning elites and imperial appetites needing to be slaked, though he also gives the genuine fears stirred by Russian incursions into East Prussia their due. But what is missing from this analysis is the important fact that the border strip would have been adjacent to Prussia's Polish territories, home to a sizable Polish minority. This minority overwhelmingly supported National Democracy, a Polish political movement which proclaimed allegiance to Russia and sought to unify Prussian Poland with Russia and Austria's Polish territories. Well-founded anxieties about loyalty and fifth columns, and about the consequences for Germany should a Polish state emerge in Central Europe, also fed Germany's calculations about its border zones; but the reader will come away none the wiser about this, a particularly puzzling omission in light of the fact that Watson (judging by the bibliography) reads Polish.Footnote ⁸

Picking up on this theme of borderland anxieties and violence, Joshua Sanborn's Imperial Apocalypse gives a broader sense of the impact of the war on Russia's border territories and illustrates the forces at work that might have encouraged states, and multinational empires in particular, to find ethnic cleansing an alluring solution to what they saw as a serious strategic threat. A welcome addition to the paltry (but growing) English-language scholarly literature on Russia in the First World War, Imperial Apocalypse integrates first-hand perspectives on the cataclysm from the point of view of officials, soldiers and civilians – voices that have long been absent from the broader English-language literature – and also provides short but excellent accounts of key battles. Sanborn then ambitiously situates these accounts into a broader argument on how the Russian Empire failed to master the various social, economic and political forces that threatened to destroy it from within during the war.

Sanborn's able illustration of the Russian state's struggle against chaos and disintegration gives the book its analytical and narrative core. He begins by illustrating the often terrifying confusion and disorder that beset the Russian Empire, particularly in its western territories, from the very outset. The imposition of martial law in large swathes of the empire, for example, caused enormous bureaucratic complications that thwarted the ability of officialdom, military and civilian, to deal adequately with the numerous problems involved with maintaining a semblance of public order and basic public services. One symptom of this was a wave of looting and violence directed by Tsarist troops against their own civilians (though Sanborn singles out the Cossacks, with good reason, as the primary instigators). Another source of tension were the numerous nationalist movements within the Empire, which Sanborn shows had grown restive in the years immediately prior to the war. Still, he notes that, despite the clumsy failings of the state and the social and cultural fissures within the imperial polity, Russian society remained, for the first year and a half of the war, resilient and loyal.

This loyalty and resilience were dealt a shattering blow with the Great Retreat of 1915, when the Central Powers launched a series of attacks that managed to drive the Tsar's armies out of Habsburg Central Europe. The trauma and fear triggered by the Russian defeat and evacuation of its western territories contributed to a surge in ethnic violence, both at the front, where German and Jewish subjects of the Tsar fell victim to both spontaneous attacks and organised deportations, and on the home front, where strikes and riots frequently took on a heated anti-German character. Sanborn shows that, beginning in 1917 and continuing into the post-1918 period, the empires’ subject nationalities, abandoning their earlier loyalty, began to assert themselves against the Tsarist government, which would feed into the overlapping civil wars of the so-called ‘post-war’ era. Sanborn also powerfully illustrates the extraordinary violence that swept through the Empire as it – and its army – collapsed. ‘Robbery, murder, violence, and all kinds of other disorder became commonplace occurrences’, Pavel Skoropadskii observed, with ‘neither women nor small children . . . spared’. ‘And this’, he added, ‘was amongst a population that was sympathetic to them’ (222). It is helpful to have such scenes in mind when thinking about German soldiers and statesmen looking eastward and figuring out what might come of it all – and where it might end.

Against this story of instability and collapse Sanborn illustrates the ways in which the Russian state tried, and failed, to stabilise itself. Again, he sees the Great Retreat as a major turning point. Crucially, Tsar Nicholas initially responded to pressures from below by dabbling with reforms, but then changed his mind and eliminated them, a devastating blow to public confidence in his rule. Some officers in the Russian military as well as civilian professionals, such as medical doctors, recognised very early on that their government was ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of the war and threw themselves headlong into the task of remedying its shortcomings. Sanborn refers collectively to these patriotic elites as ‘progressive technocrats’ and shows how they utilised civil associations like the Union of Towns and Union of Zemstvos to bridge society and the military. The results were often impressive; for example, civilian organisations stepped in at the war's outset when the inadequate military medical system was overwhelmed by the unprecedented casualties, providing care and hospital space for the flood of wounded soldiers who arrived from the battlefields. Such efforts contained, but could not prevent, the empire's collapse, and, moreover, brought the seeds of illiberal repression with them. Sanborn argues that medical quarantines, for instance, represented a form of surveillance and state control, which would help lay the foundations for the Bolsheviks.

All of this enriches our understanding of the Russian Empire at war, and Sanborn's book should be read by specialists in both the history of the First World War as well as the history of Russia. Historiographically it fits most comfortably with works such as Peter Holquist's Making War, Forging Revolution, which argued for a continuum linking Russia's experience in the Great War with the events of the Revolution and Civil War.Footnote ⁹ It will also complement current works in progress by scholars such as Ke-Chin Hsa, Jonathan Gumz and John Deak on the Habsburg Empire's attempts to mobilise its society for total war. Sanborn has a more ambitious historiographical goal, however, as he asks us to consider the collapse of the multinational Empire as an episode in what he repeatedly calls ‘decolonisation’, and the war as ‘a war of European decolonisation’ (3). While he does not spell out precisely what this means (he defines it as a process with certain discrete steps), he argues that Europe's land empires should have been included in Erez Manela's Wilsonian Moment, which analyses the impact of national self-determination on Europe's overseas colonial possessions. In essence, then, Sanborn is asking us to abandon the distinction between continental European empires, like those of the Habsburgs and Romanovs, and overseas dominion in places like Africa and Asia. This would, in turn, render the First World War a variant on the wars waged in places like Kenya, Vietnam and Algeria after the Second World War. It is an intriguing idea, but the argument is not developed quite systematically enough to be convincing.

Sanborn's work is complemented by another new book on Russia's war, David Stone's The Russian Army in the Great War, which fills a major gap in the English-language literature by providing scholars with a thorough account of the Russian army's operations during the war, material for which most scholars have, until now, had to rely on Norman Stone's (no relation, as far as I know) The Eastern Front Footnote ¹⁰ or Winston Churchill's Unknown War.Footnote ¹¹ Drawing on decades of Russian-language scholarship on the Imperial army's operations, Stone's book provides an excellent ‘top-down’ overview of the Russian army in action (though it is somewhat dispiriting that both Sanborn and Stone feel compelled to defend their decision to write about battles in what are, after all, histories of a war). In clear prose, and with the aid of good maps, Stone leads the reader through the key battles and campaigns of the Tsar's army, from the first salvoes to its collapse in 1917. Like most operational histories, Stone's is a bit bloodless and mainly concerned with the movements of large numbers of men and material; but it is also invaluable, for despite what recent trends in the history of warfare might suggest, it is neither possible nor desirable to write about wars and to leave the armies and the fighting out. Anyone writing about the Eastern Front will want – in fact need – to have Stone's book at hand, as there is no equal.

Despite his focus on operational history, Stone has broader ambitions for his book. He wishes to dispel the notion that Russia suffered from any particular disadvantages vis-à-vis the other warring powers, and that the problems it wrestled with differed only in degree, not kind, from those faced by its allies and enemies. This is only somewhat convincing. He makes a good case for parity in terms of weapons, equipment and training, and he further argues that one of Russia's supposed liabilities – its army of illiterate peasants – also had its advantages, given that these same peasants were tough and loyal soldiers. At other times, however, he pushes the argument too far. Stone would have us believe, for example, that the Russian officer corps was not, on the whole, less competent than the officers corps of other states. But as his own narrative (and many others) make clear, the Russian steamroller was driven by an appallingly inept group of commanders. While no country may have fielded truly great generals, it is hard to match, for example, the dismal spectacle of Rennenkampf and Samsonov's nominally joint invasion of East Prussia in August 1914. The two commanders operated independently of one another, refused to cooperate and ignored the operational plans of their superior, Northwestern Front commander, Yakov Zhilinskii, (who was manifestly not up to the task of leading them). Stone argues that the incursion into East Prussia, despite these problems, could have turned out differently than it did, had the Russians not split their armies and gone around the Masurian lakes. He concludes, on this basis, that ‘the inherent weakness in the Russian plan was geographic’ (61). But geography cannot be in and of itself a weakness; failure to take it into account, however, and plan accordingly, is a strategic failure of the first order. Perhaps if this were a singular occurrence, it could be written off as a product of the commanders’ temperaments rather than of some deeply rooted structural factor.Footnote ¹² But as the horrifying story of Alexei Brusilov's 1916 offensive shows – the commander to Brusilov's north, Alexei Evert, refused to launch the attack that was supposed to accompany Brusilov's assault on the Austrian lines, condemning Brusilov's men to die in great numbers for nothing – the ineptitude of Rennenkamp, Samsonov and Zhilinskii were quite typical of Russian officers as a whole. Throughout his book, Stone stresses the role of contingency in history, and rightly so. But when events repeatedly produce the same outcomes, for what seems to be the same reason, then perhaps the actors involved are creating their own contingency.

Ultimately, Stone concludes that ‘one key way in which Russia did not share the experience of other powers was . . . its failure to systematically and comprehensively reorganise its society for war’ (emphasis in original; 5). But this begs the question. As the experience of Europe's land empires strongly suggests, victory in the Great War went to those societies that were best able to muster the economic, human and psychological resources needed to win a war of attrition. For many reasons – from separatist ethnic nationalism within their polities to the complex and sprawling structures of their states – Austria-Hungary, Russia and Germany failed to meet that demand. This should provoke new questions about how and why states such as Britain and France were better able to fight this kind of war. And, given the consequences that resulted when the empires collapsed and fragmented (it is frequently overlooked that Germany did indeed, as its political leaders had worried, lose its Polish provinces after the war), historians of modern Europe would do well to re-examine the Great War's Eastern Front and the role it played in shaping the course of twentieth-century European history.