This popular history offers a passionate account of Austria-Hungary's self-destructive instigation of World War I and its army's disastrous opening campaigns in Serbia and on the Eastern Front. The Habsburg leadership is unambiguously the villain of Wawro's narrative. Emperor Francis Joseph, whose mutton-chopped features today gaze benevolently out from Viennese tourist kitsch, is exposed as the man guiltiest of bringing down horror on the heads of Europe's peoples. Geriatric and out of touch, he was “a butcher” (383). His key military commanders, General Staff Chief Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf and the leader of Habsburg forces in the Balkans, General Oskar Potiorek, were aggressive, indolent, incompetent, and vain. Wawro argues forcefully that together they were responsible for early reverses that would doom the Habsburg army and its German ally to inevitable and awful defeat.

The first chapters of the book provide a challenge to Christopher Clark's recent arguments placing Serbian nationalist ambitions, and more broadly great-power rivalry and miscommunication, at the center of the causes of war in 1914, as well as to older works blaming the Germans for pushing their Habsburg ally into conflict. Following in Samuel R. Williamson's and John Leslie's footsteps, Wawro restores independent agency to Austro-Hungarian diplomacy in the fateful month after Franz Ferdinand's assassination. However, not everyone will accept his explanation for the empire's move to war. Undoubtedly, he is right that Habsburg insecurity, belligerence, and imperial pretentions in the Balkans played a part in sparking hostilities. Yet the international scene was arguably even more threatening for Austria-Hungary, and its diplomats certainly more anxious, than he recognizes. By 1914, the empire faced a resurgent Russia building military alliances in the Balkans and a great-power concert that had ceased to regard the Habsburgs as an indispensable factor for Europe's peace.

The book's uncompromising portrayal of the empire as a decaying state brought by internal nationality conflicts to the brink of dissolution already in 1914 will also be heavily contested. With the Austrian Reichsrat closed and the Hungarian parliament functioning only through gerrymandered elections and intimidation, the empire was undergoing a political crisis. Yet recent research by Pieter M. Judson, Jeremy King, Tara Zahra, Daniel Unowsky, Laurence Cole, John Deak, and others has highlighted both previously overlooked sources of loyalty in the empire and the fact that, although they shouted loudly, nationalist activists had not achieved anything like ideological hegemony. These historians' findings on the power of dynastic celebrations, the state bureaucracy's stabilizing activities, pro-Habsburg military culture, and the importance of anationalism even in highly nationally contested Habsburg localities, find no resonance in A Mad Catastrophe.

The book is more surefooted, and indeed breaks new ground, in its well-paced account of the war's chaotic and bloody military operations on the Eastern Front and in the Balkans in 1914. Conrad's and Potiorek's staggering ineptitude was first exposed decades ago by Norman Stone and Rudolf Jeřábek. Wawro not only retells the generals' story with panache, but through impressively deep research into the unit diaries and files of the Emperor's Military Chancery held in Vienna's Kriegsarchiv, as well as diplomatic records in British, French, German, and US archives, illuminates other causes of Austria-Hungary's early military disasters. The impact of chronic peacetime underfunding on the army's artillery, equipment, and manpower is given excellent coverage. Fascinatingly, Wawro also explains why the force found it so difficult to recover from its initial defeats. The High Command quickly recanted (in public, if not in practice) from the reckless offensive tactics it had disseminated in peace, and instructed its units to imitate the more skillful Russians. Yet Habsburg formations often proved incapable of learning. The speed with which their professional officers and scarce career NCOs had been wiped out retarded their ability to adapt. The rank and file, utterly demoralized after their heavy defeats and doubting the efficacy of their leadership, too often would rather flee than fight.

Wawro also reveals the exceptional brutality of the Austro-Hungarian military leadership. To punish and tame failing units, decimation (the execution at random of one in every ten soldiers) was being ordered already in 1914. Officers were told to shoot disobedient men on the spot. Even more significant, the force perpetrated severe atrocities against civilians. The Supreme Commander, Archduke Friedrich, ordered at the end of September 1914 that “whole communities guilty of treasonous behavior should be struck down with maximum ruthlessness” (231). In Serbia, Potiorek similarly demanded “no quarter” for guerrilla fighters and instructed his men to “wipe out the village that harbored them and publicize the event widely” (142). The ensuing massacres, which encompassed not just enemy civilians but very many of Francis Joseph's own subjects, cast doubt on the oft-repeated claim that the German army's more infamous atrocities in Belgium were exceptional. Like its ally, the Habsburg army embraced a military culture that overvalued force, instrumentalized civilians, and dictated the use of extreme violence to achieve its objectives.

A Mad Catastrophe is an eloquent history of one of World War I's underresearched belligerents and its opening military operations. Though those familiar with the latest research are unlikely to agree with his portrayal of the peacetime Habsburg Empire, Wawro does much to improve understanding of Francis Joseph's military and its first ruinous campaigns. His book is perhaps at its best when recounting the individual experience of battle and the plight of the force's sick, physically overstrained, and terrified troops outmatched on the Drina River or routed at Lemberg. Yet beyond that, his work helps to explain how the army, once thought of solely as a centripetal force, contributed significantly to the Habsburg Empire's destruction.