For six months, from October 1914 to March 1915, Fortress Przemyśl was front-page news. It enjoyed a strategic position at the intersection between the San and Dniester Rivers and stood as a guardian to the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. Since the seventh century, it had been a place of contention among Moravia, Kiev, Poland-Lithuania, Hungary, and Austria. Russia twice besieged it in the first year of the World War I, eventually forcing its capitulation. Hailed by historians as the Verdun of the East or the Stalingrad of World War I, Przemyśl today is “merely a relic to visit in Poland and its history is basically unknown” (339).

Graydon Tunstall, Senior Research Lecturer at the University of South Florida and author of the bone-chilling book Blood in the Snow: The Carpathian Winter War of 1915 (2010), stunningly brings the Fortress's saga in 1914–15 back to life. Using mainly Austrian military documents, but also some Polish materials, Tunstall unravels the tragedy of Przemyśl's brief but bloody fame. When Russian forces crushed Chief of the General Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf's disastrous thrusts into Poland at the two battles of Lemberg in August and September 1914, Przemyśl was first plundered by the retreating Habsburg Third Army and then besieged by nine tsarist infantry divisions and two cavalry divisions. The Fortress was thrust into the forefront of the Eastern Front: the Russians needed to neutralize it in order to storm the Carpathian passes and to debauch onto the Hungarian plain, thereby ending the war; and the Austrians regarded it, along with Fortress Kraków, as the vital bulwark of their strategy to conquer Russian Poland. The Fortress's moral, political and symbolic value further enhanced its centrality in Austrian and Russian strategic considerations (114).

The initial Russian siege featured violent artillery and infantry assaults. Tunstall spares the reader no details of the suffering of the 130,000 soldiers and 30,000 civilians under siege: hunger, disease (typhus, cholera), frostbite (among troops clad only in summer-issue uniforms in -15° C weather), and alleged “treason” on the part of the local Ruthenian citizenry (53, 169). The second Russian siege by the tsarist Eleventh Army, in contrast, was slow and systematic: starvation. The Habsburg Monarchy's miserly funding of military railroads and artillery before 1914 had left Przemyśl in a precarious predicament.

Tunstall's main thesis is that General Conrad's “obsession with liberating the fortification during both sieges” (22, 241) stemmed from political and emotional considerations: its surrender would be tantamount to the defeat of the Habsburg Army and the end of the Dual Monarchy. It would likely cause a public panic at home and dishonor the ancient and noble officer corps. That “obsession,” shared by Emperor Franz Joseph as well as by Archduke Friedrich, the army's nominal commander, nearly destroyed the Austro-Hungarian (k.u.k.) Army in three Carpathian offensives that Conrad launched in winter 1914–15 to relieve the fortress. That campaign, summarized in Chapters 6 and 7, has been brilliantly analyzed in Tunstall's Blood on the Snow.

On March 16, 1915 General Hermann Kusmanek, the fortress commander, decided to break out of the ring of steel in a southeasterly direction, mainly to reach Russian supply depots for his starving army. Tunstall recalls the doomed effort in painstaking detail: the burning of almost 7 million kronen in paper money, the blowing up of bridges and warehouses, the destroying of artillery pieces and machine guns, the shooting of the remaining horses, and the torching of much of the city to the ground. While hailed in Vienna as “a shining example of glory for the army” (276), the breakout on March 19 claimed another 10,000 soldiers killed or wounded. Kusmanek surrendered the fortress and its 117,000 soldiers and 20,000 laborers to General Leonid Artamonov on March 22, 1915. The saga of Fortress Przemyśl ended on June 3, 1915 when troops of the German Eleventh Army stormed its remnants.

Along with the earlier work, Blood on the Snow, this book not only solidifies Tunstall's place as a first-rate historian of the Habsburg Army, but it finally lays to rest the many postwar heroic memoirs and histories of the k.u.k. Army in the Great War. Thanks to Tunstall, we now have a much clearer and more focused account of General Conrad's disastrous leadership in 1914–15.