These two volumes by younger historians of Habsburg Central Europe expand and revise our understanding of the Czech experience of World War I on both the home front and the fighting front. Richard Lein focuses on the myth of the alleged desertion of members of the 28th, 35th, and 75th Infantry Regiments as part of the national liberation struggle, whereas Rudolf Kučera analyzes the working-class experience in wartime Bohemia.

Lein's dissertation, completed at the Universität Wien in 2011, builds on the recent innovative work of Ivan Šedivý, Martin Zückert, and others. Lein convincingly challenges the notion long propagated in Austria, Weimar Germany, and Czechoslovakia—for very different reasons—that the Czechs were in general reluctant to fight for the Austro-Hungarian army and went over to the enemy at the first opportunity. Lein analyzes two cases. They are the allegedly traitorous behavior and desertion of the 28th Infantry Regiment on 3 April 1915 at the Battle of Esztebnekhuta on the Russian Front, whose members hailed mainly from Prague (the beloved Pražké děti), and similar behavior by soldiers in the predominantly Czech 35th and 75th Infantry Regiments at the Battle of Zborov in July 1917. Lein explodes the myth of Czech wartime treason, a notion long cherished by nationalist Czechs, on the one hand, and condemned by nationalist Germans, who denounced the Czechs for their actions, on the other. In both cases, blame can be laid at the feet of the Habsburg military command, although for different reasons.

Lein marshals an impressive array of primary sources from Vienna and Prague, as well as printed primary documents, dairies, memoirs, novels, plays, and secondary literature to trace the wartime history of the 28th, whose members had made themselves known as Czech nationalists before 1914. Examining the events of the battle and the military's post-battle review of the situation, Lein concludes that rank and file could not be held responsible for the adverse conditions they faced in early April 1915, so the harsh punishment meted out seems inappropriate (199). More difficult to explain than Emperor Francis Joseph's dissolution of the 28th in April 1915, according to Lein, is the fact that the regiment's reestablishment in December 1915 after the first Battles of Isonzo on the Southwest Front has been overwhelmingly ignored in both Czech and German academic and popular literature since the war's end, where the story ends with the regiment's “treason” (201).

In the second half of the book, Lein turns his attention to the Battle of Zborov, in which the “victory” of the Czechoslovak Legionnaires (those Czechs and a few Slovaks who left Russian prisoner-of-war camps to fight on the side of the Entente) over the well-equipped soldiers of the 35th and 75th regiments would be widely commemorated in interwar Czechoslovakia and the Legionnaires on all fronts celebrated as pillars of the First Republic. Lein points out that a decisive part of the Czechoslovak foundation myth was the allegedly decisive opposition of the Czech people, both through desertion from the Austro-Hungarian army and through active fighting in foreign armies. Not only the Germans and the Hungarians of the newly founded state, but also the majority of the Czechs fought on the side of the monarchy during the war. Despite its wide propagation between the wars in official commemorations, film, novels, and schoolbooks, the myth of the Battle of Zborov did not survive 1938. Following the Communist seizure of power in February 1948, the Zborov myth was increasingly relegated to the background because the Czechoslovak Legionnaires had been part of the Tsarist army and latter fought against the Bolsheviks. And, as Lein notes, after 1989 the army leadership rejected the military-historical commission recommendation that the 2 July Zborov battle date again be named army remembrance day in favor of 30 June, the day in 1918 when some 6,000 Legionnaires swore allegiance to the future Czechoslovak state. Why? Because Czech government representatives had to visit the historical site, and they preferred France to Ukraine, where Zborov is today located (420).

Like Lein, Kučera offers the reader an important new interpretation of the Czech wartime experience. This slight volume is part of the Knižnice Dějin a současnosti series, whose high-quality, reasonably priced books are aimed at a broad, educated-academic audience. Following an explanatory introduction, the author sets forth his argument in the subsequent four chapters, which are thematically intertwined around the topic of rationing. In addition to ten well-chosen images to illustrate his arguments, Kučera employs archival materials from Prague, several Czech-language newspapers, published primary sources, and various secondary sources, primarily in Czech, English, and German. Drawing on pioneering research on the Habsburg home front by Maureen Healy, Peter Heumos, and others, the author uses cultural, gender, and social-historical constructs to analyze working-class politics and everyday life in the wartime hinterlands of the monarchy. The situation he addresses is fraught, owing to the food shortages and draconian wartime legislation that resulted in a decrease of worker status and deterioration of worker living conditions. This situation was made worse by yet another form of rationalization: that of the workers themselves as part of the wartime economy.

Kučera examines an important element of the home front wartime rationing experience in each chapter: foodstuff, labor, gender, and political protest. Of particular interest, because so little has been published on the gender history of World War I in the Habsburg lands, is the third chapter, “Mužnost na příděl: Politika gender” (Manhood Rationed: The Politics of Gender), in which the author considers the home front, a “world [allegedly] without men.” Kučera describes the incursion of women into industrial work and the concomitant diminution of male identity markers, for example, male public authority. Moreover, as Kučera reminds the reader, the collapse of the prewar Habsburg social order also signified the collapse of the existing androcentric organized working class, which would later reconstitute itself on different terms. (58).

This very good book is perhaps somewhat misnamed: its focus is not the Bohemian Lands, but rather Bohemia. For example, the excellent discussion in the last chapter of events in Plzeň and Prague, representing two very different cases of organized protest in 1917, might have been enriched with more comparative examples from Moravia and Silesia. The “Bohemia-centric” focus of this book should be reflected in its title.

The utility of both volumes is slightly diminished owing to the Central European practice of providing a list of persons and places rather than an index. Minor complaints aside, these two well-researched and engagingly written books increase our knowledge of the varied Czech experiences during World War I and deserve wide readership.