This is a truly international book. The editors have managed to collect articles from scholars from no less than nine countries. The more is the pity that they do not focus on a common topic in a comparative perspective. As it is, the table of contents reads more like the random results of a “call for papers” with no very specific guidelines. The title of the book is somewhat misleading: true, the articles deal with Central and Eastern Europe, but very few of them deal with politics or military experience. Maybe the way the editors phrase it in their summary: “the general umbrella of war-time experiences” (and their postwar reflections) fits better. Further, not all the contributors present findings of their own current research. Many are content with summaries based on secondary literature.

Inevitably, in any collection like this there are some very informative pieces and some that are less likely to be included in that category. Among the former, Isabelle Davion (Paris) does indeed adopt the comparative approach in her survey of the monuments—and the debates—dedicated to unknown soldiers in the successor states. She also points to a problem facing all scholars of the era and the area: the dissolution of empires impeded the collection of reliable statistics. As a result one can observe “unbelievable gaps between the different demographic assessments” (226). Joanna Urbanek (Gdansk/Brussels) analyzes the rivalry between rival veterans’ associations of Pilsudski and Haller in interwar Poland. Pilsudski's legionnaires were “witnesses rather than actors” in his coup d’état in 1926 but enjoyed a disproportionate share of the spoils afterward (253). Jan Szkudlinski (Gdansk) provides an interesting comparison between the behavior of invading German armies in 1914 and 1939.

There are a couple of pieces on the experiences of soldiers from the Trentino. Once those Italian subjects of the Habsburg monarchy happened to be taken prisoner by the Russians, they were subject to the same pressures and incentives as the other non-German nationalities to switch sides and join the Entente. Alessandro Salvador (Siena) concludes that “they did not participate in a process of national liberation or independence but were most passive subjects,” unlike, for example, the Czechoslovaks (87). But then, his numbers prove that the percentage of Czechoslovaks who lined up for the legion was hardly bigger than those from the Trentino. Kathryn Densford (Washington, DC) notices that refugees from Galicia were regarded as “invaders rather than fellow citizens” in Moravia (55). There was no reason to expect anything else within a multiethnic empire. Francesco Frizzera (Trento/Eichstätt) points to the iniquities of the internment camps for citizens from ethnic groups supposed to be unreliable. True enough, but they hardly played “a significant role in the process of disintegration of the Habsburg Empire” (61). On the contrary, the one group probably hit hardest by population displacement during the war years, the Ukrainians, were the only non-German group whose representatives did exhibit a certain willingness to stay within the Habsburg orbit in October 1918.

The pieces dealing with soldiers’ mentalities present the reader with a dilemma. The results come as no great surprise, but then we still need some evidence before we can jump to the conclusion that what we have always assumed anyway is true: that the soldiers who sent field postcards (Georg Grote, Dublin) worried about relatives and farms, not politics. (Rather surprisingly, a great number of censors still made a living far from the front by drawing often exaggerated conclusions from reading them.) The writings of British soldiers sent to Russia in 1918 (Steven Balbirnie, Dublin) suggest that they adopted “a colonial attitude” and had no very high opinion of the organizational skills of the Russians, whom they regarded as no longer wholly European (156). (A look at the map might have proved them right.) Many of the contributions abound with references to the “Orientalization of Russia” or “the invention of the East.” Leaving aside the current revival of East-bashing among progressive European Union intelligentsia, the interesting question is not the arrogance of Western beati possidentes toward less happy lands, but the way these perceptions shifted over time. Who would have thought that the creature comforts of Bucharest were suddenly praised all over the Central Powers by insiders in 1917/18?

The editors are certainly right in their concluding paragraph to point out “that state exercised control over its own citizens rose during the war and did not go back to the prewar levels” (263). But why is this supposed to have had contradictory effects on societies in East Central Europe? State power could obviously be used by movements of widely different origins. Once you welcomed revolutions, counterrevolutions surely were just as legitimate—even if old-fashioned liberals rightly abhorred both of them.