In the conclusion to this enormous tome, Manfried Rauchensteiner makes the innovative claim that the Military History museum in Vienna, the Heeresgeschichtliche Museum, is now the “central site of memory” for all lands of the ex-Habsburg monarchy (1059). This may be true for anyone wanting to explore the empire's military history in a traditional narrative, although some in Budapest might beg to differ. The claim, however, underlines the type of approach adopted by this ex-director of the museum, Austria's foremost military historian, when tackling the gargantuan subject of Austria-Hungary's last great conflict. Rauchensteiner's history has an inevitable Austrian focus where, despite his best efforts, the war of the Magyars or other peoples away from the “center” is very much a secondary terrain. But this means the reader is treated to a masterly study in the author's real area of expertise. Having richly excavated the Nachlässe of Vienna's war archives, he provides a pacey narrative that concentrates on how the k.u.k. armed forces fought and lost World War I. There is no genuflecting here to the Jay Winter school of cultural war studies. Even so, Rauchensteiner's is the most thorough of recent syntheses on wartime Austria-Hungary. Compared to the works appearing in the centenary year by Geoffrey Wawro or Alexander Watson, it maintains its gravitas and does not try to cover both Central Powers to the detriment of the Habsburg monarchy.

For twenty years, Rauchensteiner's Der Tod des Doppeladlers (Graz, 1993) has been the standard account of Austria-Hungary's Great War. Through meticulous research, especially grounded in the German-language historiography, it is a mine of information and endlessly enticing with its sources and anecdotes. The current work is a revised and updated edition of Der Tod, with five new chapters and, therefore, almost twice the length. One has to ask if this makes it a better book or whether Böhlau should have been stricter in the editing. For although the historiography has been copiously updated with English-language material and many key themes extended, the author often inclines toward rambling discussions, full of vague musings and counterfactual ideas when a more incisive argument is required. The bibliography also suggests a lack of discernment, for a range of new scholarly works is accompanied by too many amateur military histories and graduate dissertations from the University of Vienna.

In terms of the overall argument, the new edition has not substantially altered its central premise about Austria-Hungary's demise. Ignoring those historians, especially American, who have argued that this was a monarchy vigorously evolving as it entered the twentieth century, Rauchensteiner sees a process of slow disintegration that was simply accelerated by the war (15, 1056). In over a thousand pages of text, he gives minimal evidence for such a teleological claim. Rather, he demonstrates quite well that the empire could not manage total war and that Austro-Hungarian dualism, coupled with niggling national frictions, consistently impeded the military authorities' mission. We tend therefore to a view long espoused by past Austrian military historians: that while the army had tried its best, the monarchy was wrecked on the altar of domestic politics. Rauchensteiner, admittedly, does not put it quite so crudely. But his detailed chronicle of events still calls at times for deeper analysis, especially on why the military or civilian perspectives between 1914–1918 might mesh or clash with each other. The High Command's notorious tussle with the Austrian government is well covered (441–56), but when the Habsburg military is prioritized, the absence of a Czech or Magyar dimension begins to show. We learn little, for example, about politics and society on the Hungarian or Czech home fronts, so it is difficult to understand why loyalties there might slowly shift as the war continued.

The strengths and weaknesses of this edition are revealed in its new sections. Most illuminating are those about the death of Emperor Francis Joseph and about the mass population movements the war engendered. Rauchensteiner now makes the old monarch a shadowy backdrop for his book, starting with the 1908 jubilee celebrations and proceeding to the July Crisis where, he argues, Francis Joseph played a key role in the decision for war by effectively abdicating his responsibility. Although the book bizarrely reproduces this section almost word-for-word five hundred pages later (641ff), the subsequent picture of Francis Joseph's “geriatric circle” is the best we now have of his final years. Because the emperor refused to relinquish any powers, yet was unable to fulfill his role, a power vacuum developed that was filled by the military (with disastrous consequences for the dynasty). Francis Joseph in his final years lived in a detached world dominated by daily routine, where he might fall asleep when listening to the chief of staff's report and where most intelligence was mediated through the “nerve center” of his military office (653). It is striking that in his last testament, the emperor thanked his people for their true love toward the dynasty and asked them to be equally patriotic toward his successor; the text of his will took no notice of the war, because it had not been changed since 1901.

Two new chapters explore the serious repercussions that a long war entailed and the frictions it stirred across society. In the chapter about financing the war, Rauchensteiner ably discusses the significance of war bonds, which supplied two-thirds of the regime's income, and notes how it was not just Czechs but also the Habsburg aristocracy who underperformed in subscribing. Telling vignettes illustrate how the state hoped to save money, with the war minister proposing in mid 1915 that all private vehicles be confiscated (3000 “luxury cars” in Vienna for example; 583). But more could have been made here of the sharp cracks that developed in economic dualism, especially the gripes on the Hungarian side. A new chapter, entitled “Lager,” depicts dramatically the chaos produced through the mass movements of population in and out of the wartime empire. The vast number of bodies (refugees, internees, or prisoners-of war) who needed housing in the Austrian hinterland was soon intolerable, and the sudden population mix certainly contributed to souring ethnic relations as the war progressed. Austro-Hungarian prisoners in captivity, whether in Serbia, Siberia, or southern Italy, remained for the authorities a brooding and worrying presence. Rauchensteiner reminds us of how the treatment of prisoners often depended on the enemy's equivalent behavior. His account may be too heavy on statistics and weak on personal memoirs (especially of Czech legionaries), but the sheer scale of the prisoner diaspora from Irkutsk to Asinara shows how Austria-Hungary's planned local war against Serbia had by 1915 become a global struggle with completely unforeseen dimensions.

This book serves as an encyclopedic work of reference for any historian of Austria-Hungary's Great War. It is strongest on grand strategy, the military mindset, and the performance of the Habsburg armed forces, although in the new chapter 30 there is a lost opportunity to probe more carefully why life at the front and troop morale deteriorated. In the end, the dilemma for any historian writing on this subject remains: how best to capture the experience of total war across a multinational empire, which in its diversity defied any unitary Habsburg mission. For all its holes, Rauchensteiner's work is a formidable achievement that takes us far in the direction of explaining the scale of the last Habsburg war.