The Fortress: The Siege of Przemyśl and the Making of Europe's Bloodlands

by Alexander Watson

In the autumn of 1914 Europe was at war. The battling powers had already suffered casualties on a scale previously unimaginable. On both the Western and Eastern fronts elaborate war plans lay in ruins and had been discarded in favour of desperate improvisation. In the West this resulted in the remorseless world of the trenches; in the East all eyes were focused on the old, beleaguered Austro-Hungarian fortress of Przemysl.

The great siege that unfolded at Przemysl was the longest of the whole war. In the defence of the fortress and the struggle to relieve it Austria-Hungary suffered some 800,000 casualties. Almost unknown in the West, this was one of the great turning points of the conflict. If the Russians had broken through they could have invaded Central Europe, but by the time the fortress fell their strength was so sapped they could go no further.

Alexander Watson, prize-winning author of Ring of Steel, has written one of the great epics of the First World War. Comparable to Stalingrad in 1942-3, Przemysl shaped the course of Europe's future. Neither Russians nor Austro-Hungarians ever recovered from their disasters. Using a huge range of sources, Watson brilliantly recreates a world of long-gone empires, broken armies and a cut-off community sliding into chaos. The siege was central to the war itself, but also a chilling harbinger of what would engulf the entire region in the coming decades, as nationalism, anti-semitism and an exterminatory fury took hold.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World War I, Military History, War, European History, Russia

346 pages, Hardcover

First published October 31, 2019

About the author

Alexander Watson is Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London.

I'm a historian interested in the conflicts and catastrophes in Europe during the 20th century. I've written three books, all on the century's 'seminal catastrophe' - the First World War. My books have all won major prizes, have been widely reviewed and are unusual in focussing on the side for far too long simplistically perceived as the war's 'baddies' - the Germans and Austro-Hungarians.

My book 'Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914-1918' (Penguin and Basic Books, 2014) is an epic narrative of the First World War written - for the first time - from the perspectives of the Central Powers and their peoples. The Wall Street Journal called it 'truly indispensable ... a history as much of the emotions that hardship and war produced as of politics or diplomacy'. The Sunday Times named it 'The History of Book of the Year' for 2014. 'Ring of Steel' won the Wolfson History Prize, the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, the US Society for Military History's 'Distinguished Book Award' and the British Army's 'Military Book of the Year Award'.

'The Fortress: The Siege of Przemyśl and the Making of Europe's Bloodlands' (Allen Lane, 2019 and Basic Books, 2020) is my most recent book.
It tells the moving story of the First World War's longest siege - a dramatic campaign that opened the horrors which would ravage twentieth-century East-Central Europe. 'The Fortress' won the US Society for Military History's 'Distinguished Book Award' and was a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Prize in Military History and the British Army Military Book of the Year Award. It was a BBC History Magazine 2019 and Financial Times 2020 'Book of the Year'. The Times praised the book as 'a masterpiece ... It deserves to become a classic of military history.'

My first book, 'Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918' (Cambridge University Press, 2008) explored how armies and soldiers on both psychologically endured and kept on fighting through four years of horror on the Western Front. The book won the Institute of Contemporary History and Wiener Library's Fraenkel Prize.

Reviews

[Geevee · Rating 3 out of 5]

What is the difference between Troy and Przemyśl?
In Troy the heroes were in the stomach of the horse and in Przemyśl the horses are in the stomach of the heroes.
[A Przemyśl joke - page 161 and notes to page 161 on page 289]

The Fortress: The Great Siege of Przemyśl is a useful work by Alexander Watson that covers what was the longest siege during World War One that saw the Austro-Hungarian army defeated by Imperial Russian.

Mr Watson's work covers the background to the siege both from a military, but importantly historical, political and ethnic viewpoint. We read of the Russians' envelopment and the Hapsburg plans for blocking their enemy's progress to the need to hold the city and its fortified area at all costs. There are good insights into both armies commanders and plans and how their tactics fitted with or responded to events and wider strategy.

The author offers a good overview of the Przemyśl fortifications from their designs and construction in how they were interlocked and inter-dependent. This information is supplemented with discussion on how the Austro-Hungarians undertook [some] modernisation but also how modern technology saw these plans and designs less assured. Communications, logistics and notably artillery are covered. This latter when coupled with better ammunition, range-finding and recoil systems and adapted tactics indicates how time and technology left the city's defences less than able to cope with a determined siege.

An ever present undercurrent in the book is, and as we have seen from prior to WWI to the siege and then into WWII and beyond, the racial tensions, hatred and murder that seems to regularly take place based on religion and religious beliefs. Here the author provides good information but - and this is where my three stars starts to come home - for me this important aspect of the story is not explored better as the siege's end and immediate aftermath.

Likewise with the siege itself, there is much to learn and understand on the participants, including first-person accounts/quotes, but the fighting, life in the trenches and probing of these defences could have been for me more; especially where the Russians' are concerned. Food and ammunition are covered well and really do hint at the dreadful state of life in the city's fortifications and in the city itself.

There are 2 good appendices on the organisation of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian armies - I would suggest reading these immediately after the introduction - and almost 90 pages of sources and references. Maps are acceptable but more would have helped the overall text. Illustrations/photos within the text and a further 30 photos in plates are included.
My copy was a Penguin paperback published 2020.

Overall, this is a very welcome and enjoyable (from a history reader's viewpoint) that covers a siege that has few accounts in the English language. In closing my review I would heartily recommend this review by fellow Goodreads member Charles. He encapsulates my thoughts within his own excellent review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Abeselom Habtemariam · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘’These peasant soldiers are in death, as in life, anonymous. The empires for which they fell would within just a few years both lie in ruins. Yet the violence unleashed by their war would live on.’'

As far as an amateur history enthusiast, such as myself, is concerned, reading a book written exclusively about a besieged fortress city on the Eastern Front of the first world war is as niche as it gets. I have been intrigued with the history of the siege of Przemyśl, ever since I read my first book on the first world war. In the ensuing years, I read a lot on it, but never dipped into a book solely dedicated to the siege. The Fortress: The Great Siege of Przemysl, marks the first book I read, primarily written on Przemyśl during the first world war.

Przemyśl was the third-largest fortress city in The Austria-Hungary Empire, after Kraków and Lemberg (Current day Lviv, Ukraine). The siege of Przemyśl, can in actuality be viewed in three separate phases. The First phase (September 18, 1914 - October 9, 1914) is a failed siege by the Russians on the fortress. The Second phase (November 6, 1914 - March 2, 1915) is the longest and much more successful siege undertook by the Tsar’s army. The third and final phase (May 18, 1915 - June 3, 1915) was the relief operation the joint forces of German and Habsburg armies took up against the Russian occupying forces.

Przemyśl’s siege is a pivotal episode of the war that influenced some key events that succeeded it. Lasting a total of 181 days, the longest siege of the first world war in Europe, the defence of the fortress was commanded by the experienced General Hermann Kusmanek von Burgneustädten (Kusmanek for short). Located along the river San and at the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, the city is an opening into the Great Hungarian plain through the Łupków, Dukla and Uzsok passes. What's more, it lies at the heart of the south and east-west rail links of Galicia, making it a vital artery for troop and supply mobilisation. All these logistical realities contributed to Przemyśl being chosen as an ideal location for building a modern fort.



The book begins by giving an elaborate history of Przemyśl from medieval times to the early 20th century. The most significant part in the context of this book’s scope is perhaps the city’s history from the middle of the 19th century onwards. Przemyśl’s origins as a site for modern fortification began during the Crimean War (October 16, 1853 - March 30, 1856). Although, it has to be said, most of the work done on it was cursory until 1878. Plans to build a stellar fortress were discussed on and off, depending on the Habsburg Empire’s relations with Russia. By 1914 however, the fortress was rendered mostly obsolete owing to the advances with regard to artillery technology in the intervening years.

The subsequent chapters chronicle the role Przemyśl played in the early days of the war. After the humbling defeats the dual monarchy suffered in 1914, they needed some respite to reorganize and perhaps coordinate their army’s movement with the Germans. For this, they desperately needed time. Thus, Przemyśl became the last hope in delaying the pursuing Russian army. By the time the Russians arrived for the first time, there were 131,000 inhabitants and 21,000 horses within the fortress. Kusmanek found the lack of cooperation between battalions of different nationalities, a huge hindrance. The garrison was made up of mostly third-line Landsturm and honvéd units that were far less equipped and trained than the Common Army.



Watson goes into the design of the forts in some detail. His admirable writing extends to capturing the ethnic tensions within the garrison, disregard for civilian lives, the harrowing realities of daily life for the occupants, the improvisation and ingenuity of civilians and soldiers, the final demolition plans before surrendering, the brutal administration of the city under Russian occupation, return to Habsburg rule in June 1915 and eventual hand over of the city to the newly formed Polish Republic in 1918. For some reason or other, the relief operation of the siege by the joint German and Austro-Hungarian armies and The Gorlice–Tarnów offensive is not covered as extensively as the other phases.

Przemyśl’s surrender in March 1915 was highly consequential. In St. Petersburg, it brought about hope that the war in Eastern Galicia would end soon. In Austria-Hungary, the narrative was one of an honourable defeat that nonetheless inflicted a massive loss to the Russian army. Contradicting their earlier assertions, Viennese newspapers now played down the strategic importance of Przemyśl. A month after the fortress fell, Italy, who had been neutral thus far, would join the Entente alliance, sensing Austria-Hungary’s increasing fragility. This would add an enormously bloody front to the already excruciating war.



Preservation of the fortress, despite the huge damage it suffered after the war, has left an imposing ruin. Today statues, cemeteries, memorials and a museum portray the shared pool of memories, lores and importance of Przemyśl and its association with the Great War. On the excellent YouTube channel The Great War, there is a video here of the tour of present day Przemyśl that gives a clearer visual portrait of the fortress.

Watson’s writing is targeted towards the upper-intermediate history reader, and as such it’s a relatively effortless read while maintaining a credible scholarly standard. It’s written with the consultation of archival sources from Poland, Hungary, Austria, Ukraine and Russia as well as published primary sources, secondary sources and unpublished dissertations. The appendices at the end of the book are helpful for readers who might not be familiar with the Eastern Front of the first world war. Moreover, there are an abundance of pictures and maps that capture the Przemyśl of the Great War. As a historian primarily focused on Austria-Hungary, Watson’s sources naturally gravitate towards Habsburg points of view. Although there are discussions of sentiments and accounts from a Russian angle, I still would’ve liked to see a bit more.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Military history of the siege of the Austro-Hungarian city of Przemyśl (now in Poland) by Tsarist Russian forces during WWI.

My dead tree, format, hard back was a modest 346-pages which included footnotes, appendices and an index. It had a UK 2019 copyright.

Alexander Watson is a British historian and author of military and political history. He is the author of three (3) non-fiction books on WWI. This was the first book I’ve read by the author.

Firstly, this is an intermediate-level text on WWI on the eastern front. It would be very helpful for a reader to have a firm background on early-20th Century Military and Diplomatic history and WWI to fully appreciate this book. In addition, I recommend reading the book’s Appendices after the Introduction and before the body of the work.

The backbone of Watson’s narrative was a traditional chronological account: sketching the character of the Hapsburg (Austro-Hungarian) and Tsarist (Russian) leadership, the seesawing conflict in the Russian invaded Hapsburg province of Galatia from August 1914 thru June 1915, and the invasion's effect on the fractious population and Hapsburg army. The effect of the invasion on the fortress city of Przemyśl being the illustrative focus. (Przemyśl surrendered in March 1915 after a siege of 133 days.)

Some chapters pause the action, to discuss early 20th century, eastern, European politics, others discuss cultural and social questions in the multi-ethnic Galatian borderland. (I prefer "borderlands" vs. the sub-titular "bloodlands".) The borderland was home to: Poles, Ruthenes (now Ukrainians), Germans, Hungarians, and Jews. The book’s narrative sets up a description for the Hapsburg army’s failures and a central political story for the ethnic conflict in eastern Europe later in the century.

The effect of reading this book is that of a good lecture course for a student with the right background.

Watson is a good writer. The narrative was very clear and factual. Descriptions of combat were well done. In a few places his narrative was imaginative. In fewer it was bitingly funny, although not throughout. For example, anecdotes from newspapers, diaries and memoirs were used to provide context. Some were quite interesting as well as amusing. I was reminded of The Good Soldier Švejk reading them. Yet, the use of anecdotes felt flat to me. They could have used a little literary polish. However, the general tenor of the book was measured and academic.

Use of maps was OK. Sorely missed was a street-level map of Przemyśl and a detailed, geographic map with period place-names of the Galatia-area of conflict. (Galatia is now split between Poland and The Ukraine with many name changes.) Where was the Hapsburg radio/telegraph station located in Przemyśl? How many klicks was it to Lvov (now Lviv, Ukraine) from Przemyśl? Use of architectural diagrams was good. Use of tables and charts was non-existent. Organizational charts for military units would have been very helpful vs. the textual descriptions. (A picture is worth a thousand words.). The photographs provided were good.

The narrative was almost exclusively Hapsburg-centric. If I have a problem with this book, it was that (I’ve come to believe) modern war involves men and machines. The organizational problems of the Hapsburg's army were large. Their war leader, Fieldmarshal Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf was a liability. None of his campaigns during the war were successful. The army in almost all respects was hamstrung by the politics of the dual monarchy. General Hermann Kusmanek von Burgneustädten the Przemyśl garrison commander and the officer corps were a flawed product of this defective organization. Watson did a good job of describing this in the narrative (if you read the appendices before you began the book). However, the training and arming of the army was only incidentally mentioned in the narrative. Unit designations and descriptions were bantered about. It took great concentration for me to create a picture of the defenders. Considering the military operations detail invested in the narrative, I never understood why Watson never included a Table of Organization and Equipment (TOE) for both the Przemyśl garrison and the besiegers? The Tsarist invasion force received less attention. Although, Watson held the Tsarist Army in greater esteem, but with only a brief explanation for this opinion. The Hapsburg-allied 'gold standard' fighting force for the eastern front- The Imperial German Army received no discussion at all.

I also felt there was missing a sustained sense of what life was like for the Habsburg subjects besieged in Przemyśl, and in occupied Galatia. Likewise for their Russian besiegers and occupiers. The cherry-picked anecdotes for life within the besieged city of: soldiers, storekeepers, sexworkers, bourgeois gentleman and madams, spys, and medical personnel were helpful. For example, the rise in the cost of food and the element of starvation was particularly well done, although there was less information for the countryside and other Galatian cities. However, a key point of the narrative was the divisive effect of the occupation and besiegement of the multi-ethnic (and implicitly multi-religion) Galatian and Przemyśl populations. The Hapsburg and Russian military interaction was clear, but the interactions between the communities was less clear. I did not buy into an internecine struggle. That is, other than Jewish persecution.

Finally, narrative-wise there was still a lot of story after the fall of Przemyśl. However, the wind came out of the book’s sails with that ending of the siege well before the ending of the book. Several key points (to me) introduced post the fall of the fortress received scant attention. For example, I would have liked to have read more about the Imperial German army's reconquest of the city. The politics of the Austro-Hungarian/German military relationship always being of interest to me. Finally, the fate of the garrison that surrendered to the Russians was eerily familiar to a student of WWII.

Sieges are as old as warfare; from the siege of Troy to Fallujah (2016). This book contains some good history writing. However, it assumed the reader was knowledgeable about early 19th Century, eastern European military and diplomatic history. (I barely qualified.) I personally thought that the twin narratives of military history and history of ethic cultural strife made the book to be uneven.

The military and engineering aspects of the siege were straightforward and should be interesting to any student of military history. Military capability comes from the receipt of national resources (both material and organizational) and their transformation into warfighting capabilities. The Hapsburg warfighting capabilities were only effective in the most limited fashion in enabling the empire’s leaders to impose their will on their Tsarist opponents in Galatia. In terms of an example of Military Effectiveness this book is worth the read.

Watson’s point that WWI was the ignition point for eastern European, toxic ethnic strife that hasn’t ended even today fought with the operational-level, military history of the siege focal point for my attention. Its clear the Tsarist invaders first imported pogroms into the Galatian borderlands. It was fertile, neglected ground. However, the failures of the reconquest and post war interregnum in eastern Europe to solve the stirred ethnic tensions then and now were not properly addressed.

I also thought hanging the story on the siege ended the book too quickly. There were many, interesting pages still to go, when the main, narrative focal point was removed. (Never surrender to the Russians-- ever.)

Still, this would be a worthy read for an interested and prepared student. The western front of WWI gets the most popular attention. The eastern front was not a sideshow for millions of folks (properly volks). This book was a good adjunct to a study of WWI in a part of the world that is under represented. I am putting Watson’s Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I , a more general read on the eastern front during WWI on my to read list.

Readers may want to read The Eastern Front 1914-1917 by Norman Stone (my review) before reading this.

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Empires Collide.

The Fortress: The Great Siege of Przemysl by Alexander Watson is the epic tale of the longest siege of the First World War. Beginning on 14th September 1914, the reader can see that it is one of the very early clashes of the war, before the horrors and stalemate set in, which we all so readily associate with this fateful conflict. It is almost like the last touch or battle of the old world before so much disappeared and changed.

This was clear, as tactics concerning the use of the new artillery which could be loaded and fired without repositioning (allowing fire rates to dramatically increase), machine guns which gun devastate infantry like no combat had ever seen and trench warfare which baffled commanders in how to break down, were all utilised for the first time with shocking consequences. Conrad von Hötzendorf, the Austrian chief of staff believed in the very early stages that sheer willpower of the infantry solider would be enough to overcome the enemy. This had disastrous consequences, even claiming the life of his son. By the end of the siege tactics had massively developed, for example, first the Russians and the Austrians utilised night offensives, even removing all bullets to ensure rifles did not go off to alert sleeping enemy soldiers.

Przemysl was one of two major fortress towns in Galicia, (north eastern Austria-Hungary and now southern Poland) with the other being Krakow, further west. Reinforced in the late 19th century as a safeguard against Russia it became the Habsburg’s version of Stalingrad in WWII. The fortress must hold at all costs, not only strategically, but also symbolically. When it was finally lost to the Russians in March 1915 it was politically a disaster for the Austrians, destroyed the moral of their armies and civilian population and encouraged neighbouring states, such as Italy and Romania to enter the war against time to stake their claim in different Habsburg lands. For the Russians, it cost too much and came too late. They had already suffered colossal defeats to the Germans in the north (Tannenberg being the most famous), whose attentions were turning south. When the Germans retook the city soon after they found it abandoned without a fight.

The story of Przemysl is one typical of a siege in certain ways, the starvation, the debauchery, the desperation are all played out. However, the end of the siege does not end the suffering. As Watson explains the area is in the so called ‘Bloodlands’ and would encounter trauma, violence and misery for over 30 years. The worst was yet to come. The calmer and happier it days of old Habsburg Przemysl have be bled forever from the region, but some of the old buildings survive and with this book the memory lives on too for all those who suffered in such as nonsensical war.

[happy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this an interesting read. Before reading this, I really didn't know anything about this battle.

The beginnings of the story start in the 1870s, when the Austro-Hungarian command realized that they need to defend Galicia for possible attack from Russian and picked the city of Przemsyl as the place to fortify. In spite of a nearly 40 yrs to prepare, when war came, the fortifications themselves and the artillery placed in them were obsolete. That says nothing about the men who were assigned to man the place who were at best 2nd line troops.

The story is mainly told from the Austro-Hungarian side. The incompetence of the Austrian High command is really well illustrated. For such an important lynch pin in the defensive belt of Galicia, the fortress city was remarkably under supplied. The defending troops were also at best 2nd rate.
In the opening days of WWI, the city was taken under siege twice. The first time, in September of ‘14 the defenders managed to beat off a direct attempt to take the city by storm. The Austrians managed to relieve city in October, but they suffered major battlefield reverses and it was again put under siege in November. In the second siege, that lasted until late March of '15, the Russians never bothered to attempt to storm the city, they just sat down and starved the defenders out. The author surmises this is because the units assigned to besiege Przemysl the second time were of inferior quality (reservists). The first line troops were needed elsewhere.

The author does a good job of describing the shortcomings of the defenders, yet at the same time praising their efforts. He makes the Russians sound as the second coming of the 1860's Prussian Army, esp in the September battles (I think he overdoes it here. I think that the Russian successes were more reflective of the capabilities of Austro-Hungarians than the tactical/fighting abilities of the Russian Army.)

When the city was relieved in Oct, much of the supplies were used to replenish the relieving Field Army, the supplies (both ammo and food) were not replaced in a timely manner. In November, the Field Army again was defeated and the Russians again put the city under siege. There was less than 1/2 of the supplies the Austrian commander thought he needed. With the lack of supplies, withstanding a lengthy siege very difficult to say the least - yet the defenders lasted a good 5 months.

The author highlights the polyglot nature of the Austro-Hungarian Army and some of the morale problems that engendered, esp as the siege drew to a close. Desertion became a major problem esp with Galician troops. The virulent antisemitism that rife of both sides of conflict is well documented. The author's opinion is that this antisemitism presaged what happened to the Jewish population of the area some 25/30 yrs later when the Nazis arrived. In addition to the antisemitism, the general religious intolerance of Christian sects for other Christian sects, and the Austrian suspicion of the Ruthenian (ethnic Ukrainian) population and the problems THAT caused are also well done.

All in all a good, well researched and informative read about a scarcely known, yet important battle

Solid 4 stars

[Jamie Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even for people with an interest in the First World War, the siege of Przemyśl is usually little more than a footnote. What I knew of it was summed up in two facts: it was the longest siege of the conflict, and if it had been captured in the first assault Austria might have been knocked out of the war in the first six weeks. After the disastrous battle of Galicia from 23 August to 11 September the Austrian forces were in chaotic retreat, and only the fortress, astride key east-west road, rail, and river connections, kept the Russians from pouring onto the plains of Hungary.

First, a word on pronunciation. In German it was Premissel, and was pronounced as it was spelled, but in Polish it is Przemyśl and is pronounced something like "Shemeshu." It had been a fortified location for centuries, but the fortress itself was not started until 1856, and its construction sped up or slowed down depending on funding and Austro-Russian diplomatic relationships. By the outbreak of the First World War military thinking had moved beyond fixed fortifications, which could usually be pounded into rubble by siege artillery (as happened to the Belgian forts in the first days of the war) or simply bypassed. Przemyśl‘s location, on a flat plain between mountain ranges, meant that it could interpose itself in the event of a quick thrust into Hungary, but it was vulnerable to being outflanked to the north or encircled and besieged, as in fact happened, twice.

The fortress of Przemyśl, the last hope of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the Autumn of 1914, was at least outwardly an imposing defensive complex. Seventeen main forts, eighteen smaller intermediate or forward forts, and two lines of trenches were positioned around its 48-kilometre (30 mile) outer perimeter. The forts were mostly obsolete designs, a lack of funds had limited upgrade, and nearly a third of their artillery dated from 1861, but their squat frontages, steep escarpments, and wide ditches still exuded menace. (p. 81)

The Austro-Hungarian army was commanded by Chief of the General Staff Franz Conrad, who was widely admired before the war for his planning abilities. When put to the test of battle, however, he was deficient in all respects, remembered today as one of the worst generals in a war that had many poor ones. “Conrad was that most dangerous of men, a romantic who believes himself a realist.” (p. 52) He knew the Austro-Hungarian armies were not prepared for a major conflict, but nevertheless repeatedly pestered the emperor to start military actions, in some sort of Götterdämmerung that would bring the empire down in a blaze of fire and glory. There was plenty of fire, but World War I showed that modern industrialized warfare is anything but glorious.

Like many of his peers, Conrad believed wholeheartedly in what the French would call offense à l‘outrance, that courage and élan could overcome any obstacles. It seems insane to us today, thinking that sending lines of men moving at eighty paces per minute into artillery, machine gun, and quick firing rifle fire was the right solution to any tactical problem, let alone the solution to all of them, but it was standard infantry doctrine in all the world‘s armies in 1914. Conrad was even more committed than most. "Conrad, like most commanders of the day, was a firm advocate of the offensive, but he stood out for his uncompromising belief in the ability of sheet willpower to conquer the fire-swept battlefield. In Conrad’s conception, artillery was not needed to clear a way forward. His 1911 regulations asserted that physically tough, determined, and aggressive infantry could alone decide the battle." (p. 62-63)

And so, he sent his armies, not yet even fully mobilized, into eastern Galicia. Russian generals do not get a lot of respect for their management of the war, but many of them had fought against Japan ten years earlier, and had learned important lessons about managing armies in the field. The Austrian generals were confused, issued contradictory orders, allowed themselves to be outflanked, and had their attacks smothered by artillery fire. Their officers, ordered to lead from the front and wearing distinctive yellow gaiters, suffered extravagant casualties, even when compared to the heavy losses of the rest of the infantry. The battle was a disaster, and the Austrians lost so much of their artillery and logistics train that they were dependent on the Germans for the rest of the war.

Przemyśl was manned mostly by reservists, most of them of the oldest class that could be mobilized, men ages 37-42. They watched their defeated armies stream past the city in disarray. The fleeing soldiers did not stop to reform their ranks until they were 90 miles west of the fortress, and the Russians were coming.

The first siege lasted from 24 September to 11 October 1914, and the defenders acquitted themselves well. Even though many of the forts were obsolete, the Russians had no siege artillery, nothing larger than a few 8” guns, and were unable to crack the fortifications. They managed to overrun one fort, but were trapped there by arriving reinforcements, and all the survivors surrendered. The trench lines were like many other World War I trenches, where soldiers labored under barely tolerable conditions, but they did manage to hold off Russian attacks.

Defeated armies are always looking for someone to blame, and to the Austrians there were plenty of potential targets. In 1910 Przemyśl was the twentieth largest city in the empire, with a population that was about 50% Polish and Roman Catholic, 30% Jewish, and 22% Ukrainian (known then as Ruthenes), who were mainly Greek Catholics. Though many of the Ukrainians were nationalists, and hated the Russians, to the Austrians they were just “little-Russians” and potential traitors, and they were treated with appalling cruelty and casual murder. “The Habsburg army’s suppression of both real and imaginary Russophiles had horrified Tsarist commanders. Though unable to grasp its full extent – they were roughly correct in estimating that 10,000 Ruthenes from the province had been interned, but greatly underestimated the number of those executed, at 1,500 .” (p. 168-169)

With the help of the Germans under Hindenburg the siege was briefly lifted, but when Hindenburg lost the Battle of the Vistula River near Warsaw and was forced back the Austrians army once again withdrew to the west of Przemyśl. At this point the fortress should have been abandoned; it had served its purpose of blunting the Russians' initial assault, and with the Austrian armies reformed and in reasonably good shape there was no further danger of a breakthrough, and certainly no reason to subject over 100,000 soldiers and thousands of civilians to the uncertain fate of a siege. However, Przemyśl’s successful resistance had been one of the only bright spots in the early months of the war for Austria. The government and the press had endlessly praised the heroism of the defenders, and abandoning it would have been a serious blow to morale. More seriously, as far as Conrad was concerned, it was likely to cost him his job, so the defenders would stay, encouraged by promises that they would soon be relieved again. The Russians returned and renewed the siege. This time they were content to starve the garrison out.

By 9 November the siege had been resumed. The Russians made some advances, particularly north of the city, but could afford to just wait until the food ran out. As with so much else in the war, the Austrian military was unprepared. There were too many civilian mouths to feed, and not enough food had been stockpiled, nor had winter uniforms arrived during the brief lifting of the siege. “In the second half of November, the temperature plummeted to 1.7ºC (1.4ºF), and, with the troops still in summer uniforms and wearing worn-out boots, casualties with severe frostbite started coming in from the perimeter trenches.” (p. 184)

And then, in one last appallingly stupid move, the garrison was ordered to attack, but not an attempt to break out to the west, but to attack into the Russian lines to the east. It was hopeless to expect that older, out of shape men on the verge of starvation could succeed, and indeed it was pushed back everywhere with heavy loss of life. Its apparent purpose was murderously romantic, designed to be an act of supreme sacrifice that would make Przemyśl stand out in history for its heroic martyrs (and conveniently distract people from the incompetence that had put the garrison in this hopeless position). Three days later, on 22 March 1915, the remaining troops, 117,000 men, surrendered.

The Russian occupation was noted mainly for its brutality. Russian nationalism considered all places that were even minority Russian to be part of greater Russia. They proceeded with a ruthless and heavy-handed approach. For instance, schools were required to teach Russian and students to study Russian history. The Ukrainians were mainly Greek Catholics, who recognized the authority of the Pope in Rome but kept the Eastern Rite; the Russians converted many churches to Russian Orthodox and arrested and deported the leading priests. They similarly deported the city leaders, who were mostly Poles, because it was expected that they would resist assimilation. Russia’s plans were clear:

In Galicia, it was just conceivable that, as a sop to Poles and to Russia’s French and British allies, the annexed west of the province might be joined after a successful war to Russian-ruled territory in a new “Polish” administrative unit with very limited autonomy. However, in the east of the province, in lands that included both Przemyśl and Lwów, ambitions were far more extreme. Here, the Russian army was intent on undertaking the very first of the radical programs of ethnic cleansing to ravage Eastern Europe in the twentieth century. (p 157)

And the Jews, as always, suffered the most. “The chief of the [Russian] general staff, General Nikolai Ianushkevich, was a particularly vicious and obsessive anti-Semite, and he sat at the center of the occupation regime’s anti-Jewish policy. Urged on by Stavka’s Diplomatic Bureau and influential local Russophiles, from late September he started to plan the expropriation of Galician Jews’ landholdings.” (p. 167) Ianushkevich was one of the more loathsome characters in the whole sad story the Russian occupation. “To remove Galicia’s Jews from the protection of international laws, he cynically proposed that all be compulsorily given Russian citizenship. This would 'legalize' the robbery, for as Russian subjects in a war zone rather than foreign subjects under occupation, Galician Jews would lie entirely within the legal jurisdiction, and at the scant mercy, of the Russian army.” (p. 168)

I took the time to look up Ianushkevich’s fate: “Retired from active service after the February Revolution, at the start of 1918 Yanushkevich was arrested in Mogilev and sent to Petrograd but was killed by his guards en route.” Good riddance.

The Russians would not hold Przemyśl for long, being ejected by the Germans during the Gorlice–Tarnów offensive, and by 3 June it was back in Austrian hands, where it would remain until the end of the war.

It is worth recalling for a moment the nature of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It was inept, corrupt, and frequently harsh to minorities, but it was fundamentally a multi-cultural entity and recognized itself as such. The Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews in Przemyśl did not always live in harmony, but they co-existed more or less peacefully, partly because they all knew that the the empire would punish violence toward any particular ethnic group. That concept of live-and-let-live was already fraying at the start of the twentieth century, with the rise of nationalism, and the end of World War I destroyed it completely. This book’s subtitle, The Siege of Przemysl and the Making of Europe's Bloodlands is a reference to Timothy Snyder’s 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. “The hatred and violence unleashed in East-Central Europe by the First World War simmered and spat for decades before exploding in a crescendo of unimaginably vicious bloodshed.” (p. 203)

It was a new world, harsher, crueler, subservient to violent dogmatic ideologies that fostered an us-versus-them attitude. Przemyśl became part of the newly reconstituted state of Poland at the end of the war, and today sits in the far southeast corner, close to the border with Ukraine, but by the 1920s the old accommodation of other peoples was no longer to be seen. The Ukrainians were pressured to leave, and expelled if they resisted. The Jews were discriminated against and, once the Second World War arrived, almost wholly exterminated by the Nazis. “Przemyśl never regained the civility that had been shattered by war in 1914. To be sure, ethnic tensions had predated the conflict, but life now had been cheapened, and the stakes were higher in a world of nation-states. Jews and Ukrainians were no longer subjects of a multinational empire, but instead the distrusted and disadvantaged minorities of a state built for Catholic Poles.” (p. 303)

This book brings to life a long overlooked part of World War One. It is both a gripping account of the sieges, with the hardship and suffering endured by both sides, and a look at how Europe slipped from centuries-old multiculturalism to absolute and uncompromising forms of rabid nationalism. It is worth reading both for its military history and its societal insights. Highly recommended.

[Bill Kupersmith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this account of one of the greatest sieges in modern warfare a few weeks before the American debacle in Kabul, which provided an ironic contrast. Having listened to Prit Buttner's Collision of Empires, I actually knew how to pronounce the name of the city in the title, which sounds like Pshimmy Shill to me. From September 1914 till late March 1915 (with a brief respite in November when the siege was broken) the Austro-Hungarian forces held the city and surrounding fortifications. The Austrian supreme commander (who seldom went near the front) Marshal Conrad managed to squander his better equipped and fitter units on fruitless assaults on stronger Russian formations, leaving the last line of defence of Galicia in the hands of second line and garrison units previously scattered far and wide throughout the Habsburg Empire: Galician reservists, Polish militiamen, Bohemian Uhlans, Tyrolian mountaineers, Hungarian national guardsmen and reservists. It also featured one of the earliest applications of aerial warfare operations by both sides.

Though the Russians had much superior artillery, fortunately they lacked the kind of heavy siege artillery that the Austrians had lent the Germans for use against the Belgians. Most of us get our stereotype of the Austro-Hungarian forces - at least of their Slavic units - from The Good Soldier Schweik. Actually this motley superannuated collection of defenders seem to have performed well so long as supplies lasted, repulsing Russian attacks on the outer perimeter forts.

The story was clearly narrated with good photos and maps that made it easy to track the course of the siege. One feature which was probably not the author's idea but the editors. It is assumed that the reader (presumably American) is a provincial boor unacquainted with the such highfalutin foreign pseudo-sophisticated affectations as kilograms and kilometers so on every single page we are offered samples of such beauties as 'about 50 kilometers (30 miles)'; '25 kilometers (15 miles)'; 'temperatures soared up to 45 C (113 F)' so that even the half-educated reader who managed to pass high-school science will feel the mind-numbing effect of being treated as a total idiot for pages on end. I do pity the hapless drudge who had to copyedit this book.

That a polyglot collection of semi-invalids could better defend Przemysl than America managed in the case of Kabul is a melancholy reflection and as it is now on the border between Poland and Ukraine, we may hear of it again soon. It remains on the fault line between Western Latin Christianity and Orthodox Christianity - the latter enjoying the imperial patronage of Vladimir Putin. The Bloodlands designation may not yet be entirely historical.

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I consider myself reasonably well informed when it comes to the First World War, but this book focuses on a blind spot, the Eastern front. I suspect that there are a lot of armchair historians who have the same blind spot, and know about Brest-Litovsk, Tannenberg, and not much else. As a corrective, I picked up this history and I’m glad that I did. It relates the story of Przemysl – pronounced something like Pee-yem-ish or Pyem-ish – now a small city in farthest southeastern Poland, but once a significant city in Habsburg Galicia, and an important military site with a ring of over a dozen major forts protecting access to the Austro-Hungarian heartlands.

If you’re a history nerd, you’ll know that by the late 19th century, the idea of a solitary fortress had given way to chains of forts and fortlets, positioned for mutual support and often ringing important cities or garrisons. Verdun, for example, was not a single fort, but a series of some two dozen forts and strongpoints arranged around the town in a crescent. Przemysl was similar, with a score of major forts arrayed in an outer loop, with an inner loop of fortlets and batteries protecting the city core. Unlike Verdun, the fortifications at Przemsyl were dated by the time war broke out – the Habsburgs lacked the resources to keep up with the fin de siecle’s rapid advances in artillery. They also lacked the resources to kit out their forts with up-to-date artillery of their own. This was to prove problematic.

The leadership of the “Kaiserlich und Koniglich” military also proved problematic. Conrad von Hotzendorf, the chief of the Austro-Hungarian army, was apparently motivated in most things by his forbidden love for a married woman. As in, he pushed for war and made decisions about when and where to fight based on how impressed he thought she’d be. Not surprisingly, Conrad von Hortzendorf was very, very bad at running a gigantic industrial war. On a smaller scale, the commander of the fortifications, Lieutenant General Hermann Kusmanek von Burgneustadten (thankfully referred to as Kusmanek throughout the book) acquitted himself rather better than his commander, though that’s a low bar. Kusmanek was more or less competent. He was also indifferent to the sufferings of many of the civilians who lived in his jurisdiction, and actively suspicious of the loyalty of many of the minority groups living in or near Przemysl; Jews and Ruthenes (now known as Ukrainians, which term then had political connotations) came in for particular scrutiny and ultimately, harsh treatment. This indifference and suspicion did little to help his predicament. Oh, and he also ordered a doomed-to-fail breakout attempt at the last possible moment, but the breakout attempt was aimed in the wrong direction. He was concerned with his image (he struggled on to the end!) and not with the lives of his men.

As for the siege itself, read the book. Lots of horses get eaten (horse pate!), and horse bones get ground up and used as a filler in bread. Ammunition runs low, the troops – many of them old reservists and facing old reservists on the Russian side – grow weak and despair. There’s heroism, cowardice, and farce. Airplanes bomb things, mostly ineffectively but they make quite an impression. Airplanes also take letters out, to great joy. A newfangled radio station transmits to headquarters. There are observation balloons, sallies into enemy lines, and many instances of nervous breakdown. It reminds me of the movie Stalingrad, and feels surprisingly modern.

The siege itself is only the first layer of the onion. The deeper layers delve into “the making of Europe’s bloodlands,” as the subtitle of the book indicates. Readers may find familiarity with Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands helpful. Bloodlands, which I have reviewed and which I recommend, examines the gruesome fate of a portion of Central-Eastern Europe during the Second World War. Watson, while nominally telling the story of a fortress twice besieged, shows the reader that the genesis of the Bloodlands’ campaigns of racial murder and ethnic cleansing of WWII have their roots in the chaos and bitterness unleashed by WWI.

Life before the war in a multi-ethnic, politically jumbled empire was socially hierarchical and sometimes tense, but peaceful and prosperous. In Habsburg Europe, Austrian Germans were at the apex of society, with the feisty Magyars (Hungarians) agitating for increased autonomy and then preeminence. Other ethnicities occupied lower rungs on the social ladder, though they often identified on a sectarian basis rather than on an ethno-linguistic basis: Poles (Catholic), Ruthenes (Greek Catholic), Jews. Once the war broke out, mutual distrust and paranoid fear of 5th columnists spread rapidly, with Jews and Ruthenes coming in for the worst treatment at the hands of their fellow citizens. At various times, priests were strung up for no crime at all, and Jews were beaten and murdered in ugly demi-pogroms.

What surprised me the most was the viciousness with which the Russians treated the occupied lands during their brief moment in charge. Fortunately for the occupied, the Russians were comically ineffective and lacked the force of will to implement the changes that some of them wished to impose – Great Russia to the Carpathians! – but their racist policy of Russification doubtless would have met with a perverse nod of approval from many a Nazi.
A well-crafted look at the moment the glories (such as they were) of 19th century civilization fell over the abyss, descending into barbarism and madness. Recommended for students of military history, WWI, Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust.

Tidbits:

• If you’ve read anything about the First World War, you’ve almost certainly encountered descriptions of the “Christmas Truces” of 1914 along the Western Front. I was surprised to learn that the phenomenon was, if not universal, then at least not limited to pick-up soccer games between the British and the Germans. Here’s a note left in no-man’s-land by the Russians: “Gallant knights!... At so great a holiday as Christmas Eve we wish you and your families the best and that you return healthy to your nearest and dearest. We shall not disturb you on Christmas Day as you eat your supper and talk of your loved ones. As a mark of our fraternal greetings we break this holy wafer with you. Your comrades outside the Siedliska forts.” Watson writes that the notes often accompanied small gifts of things like sausage, sugar, and bread, badly needed by the garrison.

• “By the time the occupation ended in the summer of 1915 with the Russian army beaten back by German and Habsburg forces, 50,000 Jews had been forced out of Galicia into the Tsarist Empire. A similar number had been herded around the province, often after attempts to push them across the battle lines had failed. Russian aspirations and actions in Galicia were deeply ominous – and not just for fearful citizens watching from behind the Fortress’s walls and worrying about their immediate future. Though the Tsarist army lacked the state direction necessary for a genocide, and divisions within its leadership lent its policy a chaotic quality, its occupation served as a forerunner for later totalitarian projects. The vision of a “Russian“ land in Galicia was, if less bloody, as utopian as future German and Soviet invaders’ racial and class designs. The ambition to perpetrate the cultural extermination of the Ukrainian people, the venomous anti-Semitism, and the deportation of entire communities had roots in the nineteenth century but looked forward to a far more ruthless twentieth. Most momentous was the paranoid and racialized thinking that already ruled on the eastern front in 1914-1915.”

• Dumdum bullets. The Russians sent a note to Kusmanek accusing the besieged of using dumdum rounds, or “bullets with a hollow or soft nose designed to expand or shatter on impact, inflicting horrendous wounds.” These rounds were illegal under international convention. They threatened to execute any Habsburg soldier caught with the ammunition. Kusmanek responded furiously that he would have two Russian POWs shot for every Habsburg man executed. Amusingly we read that “…a circular was hastily sent to all garrison units ordering the return to magazines of so-called expanding practice rounds, which, although illegal, were in limited use at the front.”

• Vae victis. I can’t resist a bit of Rome in a history of WWI. The Russian general who accepted the surrender of the garrison flew into a rage when he realized that the Habsburgs were scuttling their fortifications: “Though [the surrendering officers] explained that the Fortress’s destruction program had already been completed, the Russian general warned them that if they were wrong, he would have them shot. The two Habsburg officers were disarmed and held captive for twenty-four hours. When they protested that such treatment contravened international law, [the Russian commander] ominously retorted that he was indifferent to legal niceties. “Vae victis,” he told them, quoting with unintended irony the barbarians who had sacked Rome in the fourth century: ‘Woe unto the vanquished.’ “

[Dabarlow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay, since we are all on quarantine I stayed up far too late to finish this book because it is such a compelling read. The narrative is such that I got completely lost in following the actions of these men (and a couple of women). The two things I enjoyed the most were 1) the extensive level of notation. The book itself only runs 300 pages but then there are an additional hundred of citations. That's awesome. 2) I think the author did an excellent job of portraying the forces at work in the conflict. While he was clearly writing from the perspective of Austria-Hungary he weaved in the story of their Prussian allies as well as their Russian enemies.
What I didn't like - there weren't enough maps! For the action taking place near Przemysl I could easily reference the maps at the front or back of the book. However, when describing some of the action that took place further afield but still had an impact I was scrambling to find reference. I know a lot of military history texts can get bogged down in maps but I think this one could have benefitted from a few more.

[Anton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always find reading about the Great War somewhat painful due to the massive waste of life and the destruction of Europe's soul and beauty, and no part depresses me as much as Austria-Hungary's conduct in the war. I intensely hate Conrad von Hötzendorf and despise the men who enabled him. Thus, The Fortress was a very upsetting read.

I like siege books as a genre and this is one of the better ones I've read. Watson truly makes Przemysl and its people come alive on the page and his descriptions of the hunger, the cold, the desperation, and the exhaustion are vivid enough that I felt them as I read. Even though the conclusion is foregone the narrative kept me constantly on edge. Simply excellent.

What didn't work as well was the attempt to use the siege of Przemysl as some sort harbinger of later genocides in the region. I suppose what he's saying is factually correct but the thesis felt tacked on because the holocaust sells more books, something I feel is supported by later editions of the book carrying the dramatic subtitle "...and the making of Europe's bloodlands." Nevertheless, good book.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

First World War Eastern Front historian Alexander Watson has gifted us with this fascinating narrative of life and death on that front; specifically: the town of Przemysl (yes, another Eastern European location that lacks vowels), today in Poland, but in 1914, in Austria-Hungary's province of Galicia: ethnically, your typical Slavic borderland with a large Jewish population. Przemysl guarded a major crossing of the San River, which divided Galicia into its component halves, and had been a fortress since the Middle Ages. During WWI, the town suffered two sieges by the invading Russians, one successful, the other not. Watson examines the armies, the battles, the civilians caught in between the huge militaries that ravaged the land, and portrays the violence and ethnic frictions as forecasts of the horrors that the Eastern European borderlands (Przemysl today sits almost exactly on the frontier between Poland and Ukraine) would suffer over the coming years at the hand of various totalitarian governments. It's also a charmingly local look at how a town coped with (or didn't) the horrors of war. Fascinating stuff.

[Anthony J Bridges · Rating 5 out of 5]

Illuminating

A piece of history that was new to me. Vividly described and painfully pressed as a market for what would happen in 1941. The distrust between various communities, religions and ethic/linguistic groups is carefully and painfully, for the participants, explained. I suspect the Eastern Front of WW1 is not well known to us because obviously it wasn't "our" battlefield with our kids of life but also because the events 20 years later are more potent.

[Rafa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Empiezo con anécdota. Lo primero que hice al coger este libro fue ver como demonios se pronuncia realmente "Przemyśl" y resulta que lo he estado pronunciando mal toda mi vida es algo así como “Shemisel”, que cosas.

Vayamos a los mollar, este es un gran ensayo sobre una de las campañas clave en el primer año de guerra en Centroeuropa. Pero, sobre todo, un libro de como la estupidez humana puede elevarse hasta cotas insospechadas, como podemos caer hasta lo más bajo del salvajismo y lo que es peor, como de fácil es romper algo que funcionaba, comunidades multiétnicas que convivían sin demasiados problemas fueron llevadas al odio por intereses espurios creando cicatrices que aún no han cerrado y no sabemos si cerraran algún día.

[Monica San Miguel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Estupendo ensayo sobre el origen de la Gran Guerra, cuando explica las tensiones en esa zona podría trasladarse casi al dedillo a la guerra actual contra Ucrania, porque el futuro es pura Historia; la descripción del sitio de la fortaleza de Premysl no puede ser mas pormenorizada, de hecho para mi gusto toda las descripciones de las escaramuzas y batallas se me hacen un poco pesadas pero para quien le guste la estrategia militar no le va a faltar detalles ni fuentes; además algunas situaciones de absoluta incompetencia de los mandos hasburgo, sino fuera por el numero de muertos que causaron, casi provocan risa. En definitiva, un gran trabajo de investigación

[Andrew Leeder · Rating 2 out of 5]

412 read. Would’ve put this at 2.5 if I was not constrained by the 5 star system. Felt good to get out of the comfort zone of ww2/civil war. Was illuminating how cheeks the Hapsburgs were at the whole WW1 game. Serves them right they don’t exist 3 years later. Was a little slow and in the weeds. For a siege spanning 7/8 months the action was less than I hoped. Good not great.

[Shrike58 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not my first trip to this particular rodeo, having previously read Graydon Tunstall's "Written in Blood," never mind other examinations of the terminal stages of the Habsburg Empire. Watson's particular genius, though, is to place the "fortress" of the title in its social, geographical and military context. From there, Watson then considers how the eastern front of the "Great War" was a conflict that did not end in November of 1918 and, in some ways, has still not ended. Witness the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian struggle. Besides telling a gripping story well Watson has distilled down a wide, and often inaccessible, literature for a more general audience. Highly recommended.

Originally written: July 8, 2020.

[Thomas Waldman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant!

Captivating, fast-paced and crystal clear. Powerfully conveys not only the incredible, sometimes utterly astounding, events of the siege in 1914-1915 (not least countless military follies) but how, in this complex multi-ethnic region, the divisions (within and between states and communities, across ethnic and religious lines) exposed by the fighting foreshadowed many of the horrors of the twentieth century.

[Monty Milne · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent study of an important siege. I’ve known about the importance of Przemysl for many years (although it’s only relatively recently that I learned how to pronounce it). The details, however, were unknown to me until I read this.

The book is excellent at contextualising the siege within the racial and political tensions of the region. The poor Ruthenians were the victims of many atrocities carried out by the Austro Hungarian army – despite the fact that they were themselves Austro Hungarian subjects. The large Jewish population of Przemysl was victimised by the Tsarists, although that was of course nothing compared to the horrors that would follow in the next conflict. Many Austro Hungarian soldiers fought with great courage and tenacity and were badly served by their atrocious commander, who comes across as a mendacious tyrant ruthlessly throwing away the lives of his men to secure his own reputation as a “hero.” Sadly, it seems to have worked, at least in the short term. The siege of Przemysl ought to be as well known as the Marne, the Somme, or Verdun, but of course most of the history I have consumed has a West-Front-centred bias. It was good to read this – and to be thankful that one did not have to endure the suffering of the soldiers or civilians involved.

[Peter Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a pleasant enough book, bit probably one that you'd only ever read once.

On the plus side:

it's clearly written and easy to follow
sheds light on a lesser known episode of this war
is interesting in itself

On the negative side:

A guide as to how to pronounce Przemysl would have been appreciated
It is Habsburg centric - it would have been nice to hear more from the Russian side of the battle
better maps would be useful
a few up to date photos of the remains of the fortresses would have been a nice touch

[WaldenOgre · Rating 3 out of 5]

这个故事的格局太小了，史实的戏剧性又不够强，所以读起来只是觉得平淡。

而针对前一问题，作者在全书末尾，试图通过作战双方在该地区实施的种族清洗这条线索，引出直至二战结束后的一条更大的历史脉络。但问题在于，这个主题太重要了，不是这么三言两语能说清的。更何况，但凡对这个主题感兴趣的读者，都完全可以去读另一些重要得多的作品。那这样的安排，就显得比较累赘了。

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

1/8/2022 Updating this review to be more critical and less humorous and mean:

Alexander Watson hates slavs. He is deeply mistrustful and fearful of them. Watson is never not reliving the Cold War. 30 years later, his obsession has led him to writing a book that (ironically, given the subject matter and at least the lip-service paid to the evils of ethnic tension and racial bias) argues that the very nature of the slavic people is to be monstrous, that they have betrayal and self-serving murder deep in their bones, their blood.

"The Fortress" sets as its focus and backdrop the fortress city of Przemysl on the eve and in the first 8 months of World War One. It details the 2 separate sieges the Tsarist Russian army perpetuates against the fortress, and the fighting, starvation, paranoia, and racially-motivated purges and murders that took place both in Przemysl and the surrounding countryside of Galicia (now largely modern day Poland with some chunks in Ukraine.) Devotedly researched and lavishly detailed, Watson uses a mixture of statistics, statistical analyses, and not a small amount of misleading statements and hyperbole to heighten the drama and tension he is recounting. With regard to this Primary Focus- that is, the sieges of Przemysl and the hardship the civilians and defenders endured- "The Fortress" is an engaging and edifying read.

But "The Fortress" has subtitle, and this subtitle betrays Watson's real thesis, the one whose arguments are largely crunched into two measly half chapters and haphazardly scattered around when the narrative allows. "The Making of Europe's Bloodlands."

Watson's real drive with this book is less an account of the siege and more about the racial divides and ethnic cleansing perpetrated in the region, generally referred to in the text (and hereafter in this review) as East Central Europe. Watson's thesis is this: that the ethnic cleansing and hate crimes committed against both the Jews and Ruthenes (Ukrainians) of Galicia (and to a lesser extent the Poles) in the opening months of the war, from Fall 1914 into Summer 1915, presaged the greater and more horrific purges that would be inflicted on Poland and Ukraine during World War Two.

This is heavy subject matter, and as always when reading such things it's important to examine the author's intent, biases, the language used. Watson provides ample opportunity and evidence with which to do so, and frankly it's pretty damning. Right off the bat, Watson reveals his particular biases towards the elite, the "bourgeoisie." I part this is obviously because many of the records he had access to were written by people of this class. Yet, it goes beyond lush depictions of the lives they led and the hardships they endured. Watson is careful to never judge, to always quietly excuse, to never paint with a broad brush even when the elite are obviously complicit in the suffering unleashed on the fortress. This becomes even more obvious when Watson talks about the lower classes, the poor and peasantry. This he does by oscillating between crass pity, cold disdain, and a fair amount of patronizing. To Watson, this rabble are often just mouths to feed and casualties to tally. And of course, brave troop-respecter that he is, Watson is careful to always separate the soldiery from them. Whatever deprivation the civilian population was suffering, the soldiers obviously had it worse. Even the poorest, stupidest, oldest soldier of Austria-Hungary has more value to Watson than single civilian (unless that Civilian is part of the intelligentsia or has some amount of wealth to them.)

Watson reveals even more biases, the real crux of the matter, when he talks about the myriad peoples of the Hapsburg Empire. Austrians (germans) and Hungarians are the civilized outsiders to the region, brought their by the needs of the war. They observe the alien behavior of the "lesser" peoples of the empire from their place of prominence. They rarely commit atrocities, and when they do Watson allows them to hide behind "paranoia", puts them at a remove thanks to their coming from more civilized parts of the empire. In contrast the slavs- the Poles, Ruthenes (Ukrainians) and eventually the Russians) are shown as barely able to contain their barbarity. They commit atrocities and they do so with bare provocation, often because of low-minded nationalist ideals i.e., that only Poles can trust Poles etc etc.

This is where Watson begins seeding the idea that slavs are always chaotic evil. Unlike the noble germans and Hungarians, who take action through some kind of logic the people of Galicia are superstitious, backwards, and willing to be cowed by those above them. The Austrians and Hungarians increasingly distrust their slavic soldiery, and rather than attempt to examine how foolish this was, Watson instead depicts touching and human scenes of solidarity (Russians giving the defenders gifts on Christmas; Russians and their Polish/Ruthene enemies laying down their arms and digging up potatoes together in no-man's land to stave off hunger) as deeply sinister.

Russians in particular get the hilarious (and not to mention pseudo-fascist) portrayal as being dangerous, hypercompetent, bloodthirsty villains that also can't seem to win a lasting victory against the fortress, have armies full of even more ill-equipped and undertrained militia, and are wholly unprepared for assaulting the formidable city. Here is where Watson lays the hyperbole on thick, as he erroneously claims several times that the Russians are the most powerful army in Europe, a statement he repeatedly disproves with no hint of irony. Indeed, Watson seems unaware that the actual text appears to show any Russian victory has more to do with Hapsburg incompetence across the board (not just with the imbecilic Austrian head of war Conrad.) And of course, while Watson sidesteps this for the purpose of the drama, anyone with cursory knowledge of WW1 can tell you that for the majority of the war Germany found itself fighting (and fairly often winning) on 3 fronts, including against Russia.

When the capital G Germans finally show up in the summer of 1915, they are portrayed as ubermensch superheroes. They are polite, they pay for everything (unlike the slavs who are shown perpetually robbing each other and the civilians who they are supposed to protect) and they awe everyone around them. Intentionally and provocatively, Watson evokes Nazi imagery as he describes a scene of German soldiers goose-stepping on parade to cheering crowds.

As for the Jews of the tale, Watson always goes above and beyond to depict them as the ultimate victims of the violence being committed on both sides. He's careful to provide statistics and to show evidence that whatever the hateful slavs believe about the Jews they live alongside, these beliefs are not justified. Even here, however, Watson's biases cannot be avoided. He time and again focuses more on the hardships suffered by the wealthiest Jews- again Watson has already revealed his sympathies towards those with capital above those without- and this is further colored by the way Watson uses racial depictions. Curiously, when considering the specific Jews he centers on and his portrayal of the nietzschean Germans, one can't help but think Watson doth protest too much. What is his angle here? Is it really to discuss the horrific anti-Semitism, or does this fall within the typical (and distinctly English) neoliberal fashion of claiming to be against anti-Semitism while perpetuating systemic abuses and quietly admiring the Germany of the first half of the 21st century?

Again, Watson does not seem to be over the Cold War. In the first half-chapter where he outlines his thesis on the so-called Bloodlands, Watson describes the Tsarist policy of ethnic cleansing that they unleash on occupied Galicia, largely with the intent of driving out Jews, forcefully absorbing Ruthenes as "Little Russians", switching the language of school, business, and government to Russian, and converting all to Russian Orthdoxy. Watson is careful to clarify that this Tsarist cleansing is not nearly as brutal and inhumane as later purges would be. Even still, much of the cleansing is depicted as being helped (or at the very least unhindered) by the other slavs of East Central Europe, who are all more than happy to sit idly by and wait for a chance to take advantage of their Jewish neighbors. Even as Ruthenes and Poles feel no national solidarity with the Russians, Watson seems to indicate that this hardly matters when solidarity against a perceived enemy is on the table.

In the Epilogue, where the other half-chapter dedicated to this thesis lies, Watson brings it all home and truly lays his cards on the table. At the end of WW1, what do the Ruthenes and Poles do with their newfound freedom but unleash bloody civil war against each other; why wouldn't they considering their slavic blood? When now-Poland is divided in half (and neatly so is Przemysl) by the Nazis and Stalinist Soviets, the book posits this is old hat. There's already been decades of death and destruction, what's a few years more?

Importantly for Watson, this sets the stage for the grand finale of his thesis. After stating that the Nazis and Soviets were the "evil empires of Europe" (outdated at best and revealing of Watson's ideological predilections), Watson once again begins doing his darnedest to throw slavs under the bus. In this case, Soviet-occupied Poland is a horror show where the Russians again impose the Russian language on all, absorb the slavs as they can, supposedly commit 500,000 murders against ideological opponents and (to Watson, worst of all) land and property is once again redistributed from the wealthy to the destitute. Watson erroneously claims that those 500k deaths in particular are worse than anything the Nazis did in East Central Europe. In this way he for some reason sets the stage to downplay the horror of the Nazi occupation.

And a few paragraphs later again disproves his own statement when he describes the tens of thousands of murders that took place when the Nazis first occupied the region, the tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) more as the Nazis began Operation Barbarossa and invaded Soviet territory, and then acknowledges that approximately 475,ooo Jews from East Central Europe were carted to just one death camp in Poland (implying but never outright stating that more were carted to other death camps, and that many other "undesirables" were also victimized in this way beyond Jews.) Anyone with a single brain cell and a calculator can tell you that those numbers indicate far worse atrocities committed by the Nazis. And yet Watson insists on this contest, and on painting the Soviets as more heinous, more vile.

He drives this point home by finally casting the Russians (and slavs in general) as the ultimate true villain by drawing direct parallels between the Tsarist policy of ethnic cleansing and the later Nazi one. While he does walk this back and makes it clear he's not claiming the Nazis were inspired by the Russians, his comparison is once again intentionally provocative. Watson's vendetta must be satisfied, and he must at all costs show that slavs are evil, the true evil of Europe and possibly the world. He's not over the Cold War.

As a coda to this review, I also want to draw attention to the way Watson views socialism and communism. As should be obvious when reading the above, Watson is clearly someone who believes in the laughably false claims of the Victims of Communism organization. He begins by describing the Bolshevik revolution with a hilarious and frankly embarrassing vitriol; in fearful language he decries the "horrific" socialist policy of appropriating ill-gotten wealth, land, property from the rich industrialists and autocrats of the collapsing Russian empire; the takeover of industry by the worker; the establishment of public housing and a social safety net. Watson, a slave of capitalism and a true end-of-history neoliberal, shows how afraid he is of the power of caring for others... what could be more evil than that? Why of course the hated slav.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 4 out of 5]

I suspect not one in a thousand Americans could locate Galicia, a historically-important area spanning what is now southeastern Poland and western Ukraine, on a map. To be fair, Galicia is today not on most maps, since it’s not a country, and never has been. It is, or was, a land of many ethnic groups, ruled by the Austrians from the 1700s until 1918, and before that by the Poles. In the middle of Galicia lies Przemyśl, now a Polish town near the Ukrainian border. During the early days of World War I, Przemyśl was repeatedly the scene of ferocious battles, which are the topic of Alexander Watson’s The Fortress. The history offered here is vivid and compelling, and it also usefully illuminates today’s Russo-Ukraine War.

The Austrians had acquired Galicia as part of their gains from the First Partition of Poland, in 1772, where Russia, Prussia, and Austria each took chunks out of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Galicia wasn’t all that desirable; it was poor, largely agricultural, and hard to defend because it had a long eastern frontier with Russia that lacked any natural geographic barrier. In order to prevent the Russians, in case of war, from overrunning the northern Habsburg domains through Galicia, the Austrians finally decided, in the middle of the nineteenth century, to fortify Przemyśl.

The astute reader will ask why in 1772 Galicia had no border with Ukraine, if Przemyśl now borders Ukraine, not Russia. It’s because Ukraine is an brand new country, with zero history as an independent nation, which only came into existence in 1991. The Ukrainians are essentially the Kurds of Eastern Europe—a people whose nation never existed except in the minds of a people, or at least in the minds of the intellectual class. But unlike the Kurds, the Ukrainians ultimately succeeded in their nationalist aspirations, a topic to which we will return.

Becoming a fortress did not mean the Habsburgs built a giant castle in the center of Przemyśl. Rather, they ringed the town, at some distance, with earth-and-masonry forts, thirty-five of them, with trenchworks in-between. (A virtue of this book is excellent drawings, especially of individual forts, which make the narrative much easier to understand.) The town itself housed a large garrison and was used for central storage. But nothing much happened for decades, and most of the forts and their guns became obsolete, though some were modernized in the years leading up to 1914.

Meanwhile, the town continued as a town. Roughly, the people who lived there were fifty percent Polish, twenty-five percent Ruthenian, and twenty-five percent Jewish, the same percentages as in all of eastern Galicia. What is a Ruthene, you ask? Few call them Ruthenes anymore, but the Ruthenes, in the most common use of the term, are what are now called Ukrainians, who like many other groups first came to ethnic consciousness in the nineteenth century. As Watson notes, “ ‘Ukrainian’ at this time denoted a political stance: a conviction that Ukrainian-speakers were a distinct nation.” (He wrote this book in 2017; he might not say that now, because it implies some might not consider the Ukrainians a distinct nation.)

Most Galician Ruthenes spoke Ukrainian; nearly all were Greek Catholic (one church of what used to be called “Uniates,” churches with Orthodox liturgy and practice but which recognize the authority of the bishop of Rome). Who we think of as Ukrainians today also include a closely-related group, Ruthenes living in the Russian Empire east of Galicia, Ukrainian-speaking “Little Russians,” who similarly came to ethnic consciousness in the nineteenth century, but who are nearly universally Eastern Orthodox. This split, not very obvious to outsiders, continues in the modern Ukrainian nation.

Other than with respect to administration, civilian and military, the Austrians, comfortable with a multi-ethnic empire, did not try to change the ethnic composition or flavor of what had been Polish lands, nor did they interfere much with the Ruthenes. The Austrians, Poles, and Ruthenes got along reasonably well, although Polish national consciousness (not new in this case, rather ancient) was also on the increase. Intermittently Galicia featured political squabbles between Poles and Ruthenes, but little violence (even if a Ruthene did assassinate the Polish governor of Galicia in 1908).

In September of 1914, a few months into the war, the Russians captured Lemberg (the Austrian name for Lvov/Lviv, now in Ukraine), the administrative capital of Galicia, about sixty miles to the east of Przemyśl, and then quickly occupied all of eastern Galicia. They intended to ultimately formally incorporate the area into Russia; the Russians viewed both the Ruthenes and the Little Russians as Russian, and they actively suppressed Ukrainian nationalism, which they viewed as a threat, or at least as a nuisance. Przemyśl, however, was a harder military nut to crack than Lemberg, and it had to be done to allow further Russian advances, into western Galicia.

Therefore, the Russians invested the fortress. Watson very clearly lays out all the relevant players, the military situation, and the conditions of the civilian inhabitants of the city, drawing on numerous primary sources. He also does an excellent job explaining the internal dynamics of the Austrian army—as was often the case with the Habsburgs, units were polyglot, with the enlisted men rarely speaking German, the “language of command,” and frequent tensions arising among different ethnic groups. Most of the officers were middle-aged Polish and Austrian reservists and most of the enlisted men were peasant Poles or Ruthenes. The elite units were the Hungarians from the near south, across the Carpathians. They were, according to Watson, very brave and very haughty, which pretty much sums up Hungarians in my opinion too. The presence of Hungarians was natural; at this time, the border of Hungary was much closer to Przemyśl. The Hungarians (who occupied a higher status in the Dual Monarchy, the combined thrones of Austria and Hungary, than did Poles or Ruthenes) disliked the Russians, whom they blamed for crushing the 1848 Hungarian Revolution, and by fighting in Galicia sought to keep the Russians out of Hungary.

Against the expectations, or the fears, of the Austrians, the fortress held. Local leadership was good (though Watson is cutting about the foibles of some of the higher-up Habsburg commanders, directing the battle from afar and letting personal reasons cloud their judgment), and the men outperformed. When the Russians first arrived and demanded the fort’s surrender, its commander, Hermann Kusmanek, responded “I find it beneath my dignity to grant a substantive answer to your insulting suggestion.” The Russians responded by trying to storm individual forts, to break the defensive line. The town itself was not much directly targeted, but the siege was very hard on the villages located close by the town; most were emptied and destroyed, either by the Austrians or, for the ones further out, by the Russians, and the villagers became refugees in an area already packed with refugees. And although the forts mostly performed well under bombardment, Watson talks a good deal about was once was well-known, now rediscovered in the Russo-Ukraine War—one of the most terrible experiences for a soldier is to be helpless under an artillery barrage.

Fighting was intermittent, but as always in such situations, fantastic rumors were everywhere, and fear of the “internal enemy,” a related phenomenon, ran rampant. This meant Ruthenians were under suspicion—not for Ukrainian nationalism, but for being sympathetic to the Russians, which some were. In this fevered atmosphere, the Austrians executed hundreds or thousands of Ukrainian-speaking civilians, under drumhead martial law or simply informally. Watson tries to draw a line from these events to the total wars and civilian massacres that characterized the twentieth century, but this is strained. Americans have just forgotten the costs of war, and that in any war where a fifth column may be perceived, real or not, suspicion and cruelty are the norm. Calm rationality is in very short supply in wars, and the worst, as well as the best, elements in man’s nature are always brought out by war.

Fortunately for Przemyśl’s defenders, after a month, in October, a Habsburg army arrived to relieve the fortress, and the Russians withdrew. The fortress had served its purpose, to prevent the Russians precipitously sweeping westward, and the victory was valuable to the Habsburgs for morale purposes, given the various setbacks they suffered elsewhere early in the war. Soon, however, the Russians were back, because as a result of the larger currents of war, the Habsburgs had had to withdraw and regroup. Nonetheless, the Austrians decided not to abandon the fortress, even though it no longer was urgently needed to block the Russians, in part because they feared losing it would reverse the earlier morale boost gained from resisting the Russians successfully. Przemyśl was therefore left with a garrison of 130,000 men, 30,000 civilians, and inadequate supplies of food and winter clothing. The Russians settled in for a long siege, largely dropping the more aggressive storm tactics they had used in September when in more of a hurry.

The siege proceeded as one would expect—slowly starving defenders; intermittent attacks on individual forts; defended fiercely but less fiercely as the defense wore down; unsuccessful Habsburg attempts, in midwinter in the mountains, to relieve the fortress (costing total casualties of 670,000 men); a doomed attempt to break out; and, ultimately, capitulation in March of 1915—after the Austrians destroyed all the infrastructure in the town, including the crucial bridges, along with as much of the forts as they could.

The Russians promptly began to Russify the town, even though it was now mostly degraded as a fortress. Already by May, however, the Germans, far more efficient than the Austrians, arrived with modern weaponry (such as the massive mobile howitzer “Big Bertha”), and the Russians departed in haste. For the rest of the war, Przemyśl was irrelevant. In 1918, in the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian lands, it went to Poland, a country again after more than a hundred years. In a harbinger of future troubles, Ukrainian nationalists promptly tried to seize the city by violence, a minor happening in the Polish-Ukrainian War of 1918–1919, a forgotten episode, one of innumerable spasms of violence that characterize this volatile area of Eastern Europe, and always have.

But forgotten by whom? By Americans, to be sure. But not by Poles, and not by Ukrainians, and not by Russians. This little war was fought between Poland and two briefly-existing entities, the West Ukrainian National Republic, formed by Galician Ruthenes out of parts of the Habsburg domains, and the Ukrainian People’s Republic, formed by Little Russians from parts of the Tsar’s domains. These two entities were created by Ukrainians who saw their chance to achieve nationhood in the chaos at the end of the war. They only lasted a few months. The West Ukrainians lost and were soon absorbed by Poland. The Ukrainian People’s Republic was defeated by the Bolsheviks and their lands remained part of Russia.

The next few decades featured chaos and blood in all this area of Eastern Europe. Through all this, the Ukrainians, or at least their intellectuals, continued to be keenly interested in an independent Ukraine. During World War II, the Molotov Line, the division between National Socialist Germany and Soviet Russia after their joint partition of Poland, ran right through the middle of Przemyśl. The Ukrainians therefore allied and fought opportunistically, with both and against both sides as they saw to their benefit, while at the same time trying to cleanse lands they hoped to own of Poles and Jews. Thus, they eagerly cooperated with National Socialist murder of millions of Polish Jews (as discussed in Robert Browning’s Ordinary Men), and in the latter years of World War II, they themselves murdered somewhere around 100,000 Poles in the borderlands of Poland, in what is now western Ukraine. This strategy paid off. The Soviet Union kept the part of Poland it had grabbed (I visited Lvov immediately before the end of the Soviet Union, and it is very visibly a Polish city), and retained the areas coveted by the Little Russians. The Soviet province of Ukraine, which is more or less what constitutes the modern independent country of Ukraine, included those areas and also included smaller parts of Hungary, Slovakia, and Rumania. And it included a lot fewer people who were not ethnically Ukrainian, because most of those were dead or had fled (but it included a large number of people who considered themselves Russian, not Ukrainian, part of the cause of the current troubles). It’s not pleasant to contemplate, but ethnic cleansing usually works.

My personal axe to grind in this is the part of Hungary that ended up as part of Ukraine. In 1919, Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia was detached from Hungary and handed to the new country of Czechoslovakia. Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, Kárpátalja in Hungarian, had been part of Hungary for a thousand years, and it should go back to Hungary, the sooner the better. (Viktor Orbán, though no doubt he would officially deny it, has been less than subtle in communicating this desire, along with the desire for the return of other stolen Hungarian lands, such as Transylvania.) In fact, for a brief time in the late 1930s and during World War II, Hungary did regain Kárpátalja (my aunt was born in Huszt, one of the major towns there, where my grandfather worked as a physician for some years), but after Hungary lost again in World War II, the land was handed to the Soviet Union, and in 1991 to the newly-created Ukraine, where it remains, for now.

Of all the lands taken from Hungary a hundred years ago, Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia seems like the most likely to be restored, given that the current Ukrainian state seems unlikely to survive in anything like its current form. Most likely after the Russians defeat the Ukrainians, the Poles will take back western Ukraine (both for historical reasons and as a buffer against the Russians), the Russians much or all of eastern Ukraine, and the brief history of Ukraine will be effectively over.

Still, I have some sympathy with the Ukrainian desire for their own homeland. That the Ukrainians are likely to lose everything for which they worked for two centuries is the fault of America, of course. Or, rather, it’s the fault of the illegitimate Regime which, for now, rules America. The Regime is the sole ultimate cause of the war, the result of a combination of its hubris, lies, and ignorance, and the Regime has repeatedly chosen to prolong the war, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives (which would be many more, and include civilians, not just soldiers, if the Russians stopped being far more restrained than we were in Afghanistan and Iraq), when it could easily be ended by negotiation and a settlement that recognized who the regional power is, namely Russia. If we had just fulfilled our 1990s promises to Russia and not meddled in an area that does not concern us and in which we have no vital interest, none of this need have happened.

This is obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together, but low-quality discourse (meaning that not informed by history, only informed by low-IQ propaganda that contradicts itself from one day to the next) dominates the entire West, on both this topic and every other topic of public importance. For example, the idea that the Russians want to conquer Europe, so we must fight in Ukraine, is among the dumbest things I have ever heard. (And even if it were true, who cares? A Europe under Russian sway would be preferable to what we have now, dying globohomo Europe under American sway, and would not negatively affect the real interests of the American people in the least.) It is certainly annoying that due to the propaganda machine that bathes every moment of our existence, it is hard to get any reliable information about the war. I’ve said for eighteen months that everything we read in the media about the war is total lies, which has been proven true again and again (though you can get bits and pieces of facts from less-censored Twitter, even if those too have to be viewed with a jaundiced eye). But the broad outlines are obvious—none of the Regime’s enormously costly efforts to stop the Russians, militarily or otherwise, have had any notable impact, despite each new escalation being billed as a “game-changer.” The Russians are slowly winning, and improving their position both relative to the Ukrainians and to the Regime with massive increases in industrial output and strengthened alliances outside those countries controlled by the Regime. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are suffering terribly, and disproportionately to the Russians. Only a fool or a liar could say otherwise.

Even worse, the Ukrainians don’t have any choice in either fighting or losing the war, because Ukraine is in no way a sovereign nation, as Orbán was pointing out the other day. Any nation totally dependent for its defense, organization, and revenue . . . [Review completes as first comment.]

[Reza Amiri Praramadhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Continuing with the theme of military incompetence, World War I is a period in which incompetence was in abundance, with tragic consequences. In this book, we visit Przemysl, a place that is insignificant today. However, during the World War I, it was the site of the longest siege of the war. Even then, most people would not know about this fact when talking about the World War I. This book sought to shed more light on this event.

During the World War I, Fortress Przemysl is under the rule of Habsburg Austria-Hungary. Austria-Hungary army was famous for its incompetence, mostly due to the peacetime political arrangements that rendered it useless during the War. As a mechanism to keep domestic public order, command in Austria-Hungary is really complicated. Its commander talks mostly in German, while the troops talk in whatever local languages they came from. As Habsburg Empire was multicultural, it could range from Slovak and Magyar to Romanian and Ruthenes (now Ukrainian). Reflecting on this multiculturalism, Przemsyl was also a multicultural city. Situated in Galicia (now part of Poland), the city sits in the peripheral of Austria-Hungary Empire. In it, various religious and ethnic groups lived together, mostly harmoniously (albeit with some simmering underlying prejudices, as the book showed).

The trouble came as Austro-Hungarian troops was repulsed from Galicia, due to its woeful unpreparedness compounded by the brilliantly stupid leadership of Franz-Conrad von Hotzendorf, probably one of the biggest military dunce in military history of the world. Under his leadership the troops were carelessly thrown into hell, while he busied himself trying to impress his much younger girlfriend. And fortress Przemysl was one of the victims of his follies. After the Austro-Hungarian army retreated from Galicia, the garrison of Galicia, successfully repulsed one Russian army attempt to storm the fortress. Its garrison, filled with old men and midddle class clerks and professionals, was forbidden to retreat. The Russian army encircled the fortress and thus began the story of tragic bravery. The life in the opposing area under occupation of Russian Empire was no better, since the military government embarked on ethnic cleansing and pogroms that prophesied events in years to come.

In the end, the whole hardships were all for naught, since The Austro-Hungarian troops failed to relieve the siege and the garrison ended up surrendering themselves. The struggle continued as Austria-Hungary and Russia beat up each other, ended up too exhausted and ceased to exist by the end of the war. This book, while short, is very, very harrowing experience. I cannot fathom the amazing stupidity of Franz-Conrad von Hotzendorf, and moved by the experience of hardships felt by the troops and civil populaces in Przemysl.

[Mshelton50 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alexander Watson's latest book covers the neglected story of the 1914-15 siege of the Austro-Hungarian fortress of Przemyśl by the Tsarist Russian army. The work adds to the tale of tragedy we know as World War I, but it is also illuminates the ethnic cleansing in eastern central Europe that began with that war. It also speaks to the current Russo-Ukrainian War, to-wit: the Tsarist government that occupied Austrian Galicia -- home to a large population of Ukrainians or "Ruthenes" as they were known in the Dual Monarchy -- spread the myth that the area was "always" a part of "Great Russia," exiled any one with Ukrainian nationalist ideas, and sought to suppress the Greek Catholic Church. Well researched and well written.

[Stuart Fleet · Rating 4 out of 5]

A highly readable account of the tragic siege of this Eastern European fortress city at the start of WW1. It's a sorry tale of fear-driven ethnic and religious division, military and administrative incompetence and...well... being surrounded, blockaded and constantly bombarded by one of the worlds most powerful armies. Fascinating stuff.

[Andrés CM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un libro imprescindible que destaca en su faceta de historia militar pero que no deja de lado los ámbitos políticos, sociales y culturales de unos acontecimientos terribles que marcaron el camino hacia lo que vino después.
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[Richard Sisson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book makes a valuable contribution to the history of the First World War. Much of the scholarship of the Great War focuses on the Western Front, with a rich vein of study of the Dardanelles and Middle East campaigns. The war on the Eastern Front, in the Balkans and elsewhere is much less known, and yet the forces arrayed on the Eastern Front in 1914 were far greater than in western Europe and the conflict in late 1914 was far more fluid, with the front line moving hundreds of kilometres on the outcome of a battle, such as at Tannenburg.

The defence of Prezemysl, during two sieges, in October 1914 and November 1914 to March 1915, probably prevented the military defeat and collapse of the Astro-Hungarian Empire at the beginning of the war. The sieges of the fortress twice delayed the advance of Tsarist Russian armies and drew hundreds of thousands of troops away from the front line where they may have made a difference in the offensives against the damaged and dispirited Austro-Hungarian armies. This book is an account of the sieges, drawing on a vast range of non-English primary and secondary sources, including the journals and letters of me in the garrison, as well as newspaper reporting and official records.

The book paints a rich and exotic picture of the relationships, suspicions, tensions and collaboration between the different peoples, religions and cultures which made up the population and garrison of Prezemysl and the surrounding province of Galicia. In fact, these elements are an important theme of the book - the inter-ethnic conflict that was to become a dominant feature of the region for almost forty years in the first half of the twentieth century. It is well known that the rise of nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contributed to the outbreak of the First World War. In central and eastern Europe the war shattered the multiethnic balance that had existed in many regions and communities for centuries. The Austro-Hungarians suspected their Ruthenian subjects of being pro-Russian because they were fellow Slavs and summarily executed and deported many. The Russians persecuted, not only the Ruthenians, but also the Poles and the Jews of Prezemysl and they tried to Russify the captured city and surrounding area. The author makes the claim that these persecutions and deportations were ethnic cleansing and a precursor to the policies of resettlement and extermination of the Nazis and the Soviets in the Second World War.

This is a well-researched, well-written book. It is easily readable and moves at quite a pace. The text is well-supported by photographs, maps, diagrams of the forts which made up the fortress, and appendices on the the Austro-Hungarian and Russian armies.

I have a few criticisms though. I felt it fell short quite often. It lacked detail, didn't go into military operations in a lot of depth and didn't make a lot of use of the firsthand accounts. I would have liked more at then end of the book about what became of the defenders after the war. How did they get out of Russia then in the turmoil of revolution? There were a few accounts of the experiences of individuals in the Introduction which seemed to offer great promise, which wasn't delivered at the end. Instead, the narrative ends almost a bit flat, with a brief account of the the fate of the Polish and Jewish communities of Prezmysl at the hands of the Nazis and the Soviets in the Second World War. My main criticism is that I found the author highly opinionated, especially in his characterisation, assessment and frequent criticisms of the chief of the Austro-Hungarian general staff and the commander of Prezemysl. Impartiality and objectivity were important elements of the study of history when I was at university, so when I encounter opinion in a work like this, it is disappointing and detracts from its value.

All in all, this book is a good introduction to the early part of the First World War on the Eastern Front, which is well worth the read and whets the appetite for a deeper exploration of the subject and the region.

[Martin Samuels · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alexander Watson has written another outstanding book with The Fortress. Although the First World War is widely associated with the Western Front, with perhaps the odd reference to Gallipoli, Watson serves to remind the reader of the cataclysmic events on the Eastern Front. And the siege of Przemysl during 1914/15 provides the perfect canvass on which to paint his description. Showing both a mastery of the sources, written in a wide variety of languages and scattered now across the archives of half a dozen different countries, Watson also shows a sensitivity and empathy in handling his subject matter. The result is a lively and engaging, yet often profoundly shocking account.

As Watson shows, the campaign that criss-crossed Galicia in 1914/15 was both astonishingly traditional and modern at the same time. As he notes, the siege itself differed in many respects only little from the great sieges of medieval and early modern times, with sallies, shortages of food, and promises (dashed) of relief. In many respects, the views of the Austro-Hungarian chief of the general staff, Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf, were just as old-fashioned. His thinking displayed a vast gulf between what he wished and what was possible, between what he believed and what was real, and between his vision of a nobility of battle and the squalid experience of his troops. The ironic consequence was that the preventative war that he had so often called for turned out to instigate the collapse of his beloved empire and the annihilation of his army, in no small measure due to his own incompetence. Yet the campaign was also shockingly modern. The brutality dealt by the Austro-Hungarian Army to its own citizens accused of treachery simply because they were Ruthenes or Jews, expressed through massed murder, deportations and the burning of villages, could almost read like accounts from the Second World War. Similarly, the breathtaking hypocracy and racism of the Russian invaders, who similarly despised the Ruthenes and Jews and repeated all the same actions as the Austro-Hungarians, except on a larger scale, is horrifying. As Watson shows, the attitudes and behaviours displayed by both armies differed little from those of the Nazis and Soviets 25 years later, the only significant difference being the far greater level of efficiency and direct command from above that was exercised by those later forces.

The book is highly readable, based on excellent scholarship, and moves from the views of the high command down to the experience of the most junior soldier with fluency. If there is any criticism, it is that the book is, like the siege, very focused on what happened inside Przemysl. Although there are frequent excursions into the wider context, it would have been even better had there been a little more from the Russian side, especially in terms of the troops who had to hold the siege. Whereas the defenders at least had the city itself and the many forts around its defences to shelter in, what of the besiegers, encamped in the open terrain around it, through the harsh winter? But these are minor issues. Watson has written an excellent book on an important topic. Very highly recommended.

[Roger Burk · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1914 the town of Przemysl (pronounced "Zhemish," according to a Pole I once met) was an Austrian "fortress city," meaning it was surrounded by a ring of small forts 5-10 km from the center of town. Most of these forts were built in the 1880s and obsolescent, but some had excellent rapid-fire guns of modern design in armored turrets. However, the garrison was made up of older troops not fit for field service, and of a dizzying mix of ethnicities from all over the Hapsburg empire. In September 1914 it was put under siege and assaulted by a Russian army that had driven the Austrians out of most of Galicia. The Russians did not have the huge siege guns that the Germans used to quickly reduce the Belgian fortresses and invade France, so the fortifications endured and the assault failed. In October an Austrian army briefly raised the siege, but in November the Russians advanced again and the ring was closed once more. This time the Russian waited to starve the defenders out. In March 1915 the fortress's food stores were exhausted. There was a feeble attempt at a breakout by the weak and exhausted garrison, but it got nowhere. On the morning of 22 March all the fortification were blown up in great eruptions around the town, and all weapons, supplies, and remaining horses were destroyed. Eight generals and 117,000 troops were taken into captivity. In June 1915 an advancing German army recaptured the town and returned it to Habsburg rule for the rest of the war. After the war the western half of Galicia, including Przemysl, was incorporated in the newly independent Poland; the eastern half went to Ukraine.

There are few stories of heroism in this telling. The author clearly has contempt for the inept and feckless Habsburg officer corps. He frames the tale as the start of the murderous ethnic cleansings that swept over eastern Europe in the early 20th century, first WWI, then the Polish-Bolshevik war, then Stalin, then the Nazis. Galicia had a pretty through mix of nationalities before the war, mainly Poles, Ukrainians (called "Ruthenes" in Galicia at the time), Jews, and Austrian Germans. The Hapsburgs had made some attempt to allow local autonomy and expression of ethnic culture, but when the war started, they deeply distrusted the Ruthenes as Russophiles. There were many episodes of repression, expulsion, and at times murder. Meanwhile, the Tsarist troops regarded the Ruthenes as "Little Russian" rubes who needed to be properly Russified. Of course, the Jews were hated and distrusted by both sides. During their occupation of Przemysl the Russian deported then en masse, setting a precedent for later in the century.

[Bob Lundquist · Rating 3 out of 5]

Central and eastern Europe. Places like Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Ukraine. When World War I hit, it was the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire, and the German Empire. The northeastern part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire was called Galicia and had been fought over for hundreds of years up to and including World War I. It would have been more complete if the earlier history was summarized to set the stage. It is here, in the city of Przemysl, that the Fortress takes place. This whole area of words where, if you are lucky, you get more than one vowel amidst consonants. An area difficult to keep track of. The fortress and the city were an important part of Austria’s defenses, until it was not. The Austrian-Hungarian army was incredibly inept and way out of date. It literally treated men like cannon fodder and gained nothing from the effort.

This book is a good narrative of what happened to the fortress. The subtitle about the bloodlands of Europe are only hinted at in the book. There was a lot of nationalistic and racist infighting going on, especially, of course, scapegoating Jews for the misfortunes and incompetency of others. Russia set the tone for all this by trying to russify the areas they conquered and the deportation of undesirables; nowadays, called ethnic cleansing. It was only with the Nazis that the bloodlands became inundated with human misery even beyond the World War I experiences.

A depressing tale of isolation, starvation, and desperation. However, probably the site of the first air mail service as the surrounded garrison tried to communicate with the outside world. The unrelenting Russian advance that also used men as fodder; they had a lot more to spare. On a smaller scale, similar to Leningrad’s siege in the next great war.