The horrors of the Eastern Front

Ten years ago David Cameron, as prime minister, pledged £50 million for the centenary of the first world war. The focus was on ‘capturing our national spirit in every corner of the country, something that says something about who we are as a people’. Beyond a celebration of the Tommy on the Western Front and a belated acknowledgement of colonial Britain’s sacrifice, it was a missed opportunity. There was little attempt to better understand the region where the war began – and where, according to Nick Lloyd’s exhaustive The Eastern Front, it never really ended.

Indicative of his understandable wariness about penetrating beyond Britain’s comfort zone (he is the acclaimed author of The Western Front), Lloyd begins his massive new military history with Winston Churchill, who concluded that the first world war in the East was ‘the most frightful misfortune’ to befall mankind ‘since the collapse of the Roman Empire before the Barbarians’.