In the second volume of his landmark trilogy about the First World War, Professor Nick Lloyd tells for the first time the story of what Winston Churchill once called "the unknown war": the large-scale conflict in Eastern Europe and the Balkans that led to the collapse of three empires.

Much has been written about the fighting in France and Belgium, yet the Eastern Front was no less bloody. Between 1914 and 1917, an enormous number of people—perhaps as many as 16 million soldiers and two million civilians—were killed, wounded, or maimed in massive battles that sometimes stretched across a front as long as 100 kilometers. Through intimate eyewitness accounts, diary entries, and memoirs—many of which have never before been translated into English—Lloyd reconstructs the full story of a war that began in the Balkans as a local conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, and dragged in Russia, Germany, and Italy, all the way to the final collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918. The Eastern Front paints a vivid and authoritative picture of a conflict that shook the world, and this conflict remains central to understanding the tragic, blood-soaked course of the entire 20th century, including the current war in Ukraine.