Long part of what Winston Churchill once called a “forgotten war,” the titanic fights on the eastern front of World War I have until recently received little attention from historians. While scholars have begun to bring the political, social, and cultural history of the conflict in Eastern and Central Europe into our understanding of the war, its military history remains shrouded in generalizations. For those who read Alexander Watson's new book on the Russian siege of the Austrian fortress at Przemyśl, these generalizations will begin to disappear. Perhaps as no other historian of the war, Watson has achieved the first sustained and readable investigation into how the military side of this conflict worked, writing what is at once a military history as well as a history of the militaries that prosecuted the war and the social and cultural environment in which they fought. In this sense, this book is especially strong on the Habsburg army.

Broadly, this is two books in one. As a military history of the siege of Przemyśl it is deeply impressive. The author's attempt, however, to convince the reader that this siege forms an integral part of Europe's “Bloodlands”—a designation that does not lack for controversy—is less convincing.

The book begins with a brisk but very well-done history of Przemyśl, its mix of peoples and cultures. It then really hits its stride as it describes how the city and the fortress complex, of which the city was its heart, developed together in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The descriptions of the complex—how an individual fortress worked, the obsolescence of its artillery and the attempts to correct for this, and the vulnerability of the emplacements to Russian artillery—are nothing short of masterful. In most books, these types of details can put even the most determined reader to sleep, but this material is essential to understanding the story Watson is telling, and he pulls the reader effortlessly through it. Drawing on an array of sources, Watson then takes us into the grim reality of war, siege, and survival in Galicia from the start of the war in August 1914 to the end of the siege of Przemyśl in late March 1915. From the temporary liberation of Przemyśl in October 1914 (which ironically led the advancing Habsburg army to drain the fortress's supplies) to the massive slaughter of the fortress's remaining horses to extend food supplies during the siege (calculated to the exact day), Watson shows us the dark reality of life inside the besieged fortress. He also elucidates the paranoia that gripped the Habsburg army. Fear of spies lurking among Ruthenian peasants and soldiers proliferated to the extent that the commander of the fortress, General Hermann Kusmanek von Burgneustädten, refused to notify units about a planned breakout in March until less than a day before they were to embark on the doomed attempt. Watson ensures that readers grasp a sense of the scale of the fighting around Przemyśl. Nearly 117,000 soldiers went into captivity when Przemyśl was surrendered—but only after the entire military infrastructure of the fortress was systematically destroyed, the remaining horses killed, the munitions detonated, and all the bridges in the city over the River San demolished. The juxtaposition of the scale of such conflagrations during World War I with the supposedly “massive” conflicts of our day in places like Afghanistan should give the contemporary reader pause.

Watson also rightly reminds us that at this point in the war the Habsburg army had quickly moved on to older conscripts, who were put into reserve formations and then moved rapidly, sometimes with minimal training, to the front. He has a keen eye for what that meant for the soldiers defending Przemyśl; these were soldiers with much to lose and many ties to break: families with children, businesses, careers. It adds a critical generational perspective on the types of pressures that coursed through the forces trapped in Przemyśl. Watson evinces less understanding for the various high-level commanders on the Austrian side, though in describing errors by those such as Conrad, he sometimes veers into a type of judgmental strain that has been only too typical of military history of the war to this day. As Watson no doubt knows, World War I was not a war with “easy” answers, even for those at the top. It was, after all, a war that confounded the most clever and intelligent leaders, and the Habsburg Empire's military establishment proved no exception to this.

In essence: so far, so good. Unfortunately, however, there is a less satisfying part of the book. This part rests in the other argument that Watson attempts to make about East Central European history more broadly—an aspect made clear with the title's reference to Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands (New York, 2010). Watson's argument is that already in 1914 one could see the beginnings of the types of ethnic and nationalizing violence that would later absorb all East Central Europe by World War II. In this argument, Watson especially looks to the nationalizing and antisemitic policies of the Russian occupation administration in Galicia and to its nine-week possession of Przemyśl (a rather short time to transform the city) after it was surrendered on 23 March 1915. Various local forced population movements also come into play here, as pursued by both the Russian and Habsburg armies in Galicia in 1914 and 1915. And of course, Watson describes some horrific scenes in the book, but he generally relies on the emotive force of such atrocities and then quickly makes a big leap to warn darkly that this is just a foretaste of what is to come. At other times he backpedals to stress that we cannot really see imperial Russia's occupation of Galicia as the equivalent of the Soviet Union's occupation of parts of the province from 1939 to 1941. In an epilogue that feels a bit bolted on, Watson then tries to bring these leaps together by running through the fate of Przemyśl from the collapse of the Habsburg Empire through World War II. The result could have been better. One rather wishes that Watson had done more to interrogate the logic behind the violence of the Russian and Habsburg armies in Galicia on its own terms, instead of racing forward to connect it to the “Bloodlands” frame. This reader was left unconvinced by this part of the book.

With that, the author could have dispensed with the “Bloodlands” line of argument altogether. On its own, a socially and culturally infused military history of the siege of Przemyśl, bounded by masterful control over the military technical aspects of the siege and wrapped in a beautifully written and readable package, is an extremely valuable contribution to the history of the war. It is the only book of its kind out there, and herein, title aside, lies its true value. For this reason, I can heartily recommend this book for specialists and nonspecialists alike, even if its broader claims were both unconvincing and unnecessary. It is a terrific work of history.