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"In September 1914, less than a month into World War I, the Russian army laid siege to the multiethnic fortress city of Przemysl, the Hapsburg Empire's most important bulwark against an invasion of Central Europe. For six months, the city's ragtag garrison bitterly resisted, winning critical time for the Habsburg Army to regenerate and denying the Russians a quick victory. But in March 1915, in a deathblow to Hapsburg prestige, the city fell to Russian occupation and over the war's remaining years, descended into ethnic hatred and bloodshed. In The Fortress, historian Alexander Watson tells the riveting story of the pivotal battle for Przemysl, showing how it marked the dawn of total war in Europe and how it laid the roots the bloody century that followed in Europe's East. In the common telling, the First World War evolved slowly into a vicious war of attrition. But in Przemysl, radical violence came with stunning immediacy. Brutal combat, lethal epidemics of cholera and typhus, aerial bombing, civilian starvation, and vicious persecutions motivated by racial prejudice were all integral to the fortress-city's early war experience. Most ominously, around and later in the city the Russian Army perpetrated the first ambitious program of ethnic cleansing in the region-decades before the totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin came to power. The violence that war unleashed in 1914 would ultimately come to consume both the Hapsburg and Russian empires, mutating and radicalizing as those empires disintegrated. Vividly told, and with close attention both to the unfolding of combat in the forts and trenches and to the experiences of civilians trapped within the city, The Fortress offers an unprecedentedly dramatic and intimate perspective on the Eastern Front's horror and human tragedy."--

This account of how German and British soldiers endured the horror of the First World War argues that at the heart of armies' robustness lay natural human resilience. It explains why the British outlasted their opponents by examining and comparing German and British soldiers' motivation, morale and coping mechanisms. --from publisher description

AbstractThis article examines the officers who led the Habsburg Army during the First World War. It highlights the complexity of their identities, demonstrating that this went well beyond the a-national – nationalist dichotomy in much historiography. It also argues that these officers' identities had a profound impact on how their army functioned in the field. The article first studies the senior command in 1914–16, showing how its wartime learning processes were shaped by transnational attitudes. These officers had belonged in peace to an international military professional network. When disaster befell their army at the outset of the First World War, it was natural for them to seek lessons from foreign armies, at first from their major enemies, the Russians, and later their German allies. The second half of the article explores the changing loyalties of the reserve officers tasked with frontline command in the later war years. It contends that the officer corps' focus on maintaining social and educational standards resulted in an influx of middle-class junior leaders whose conditional commitment to the Empire and limited language skills greatly influenced the Habsburg Army's record of longevity but mediocre combat performance.

This article reassesses German junior officers' performance in the First World War. Contrary to current historiography, it argues that the peacetime corps's social elitism was successful in ensuring a militarily effective, naturally paternalistic and conscientious leadership. The infamous wartime Offiziershaβ (`officer hate') did not derive from social segregation between ranks but was rather a form of the `front—rear' tension common to all belligerent armies, aggravated by material shortage. Despite training and organizational difficulties, the successful dissemination of the corps's aristocratic values to wartime-recruited officers maintained good inter-rank relations within combat units, enabling the army to endure four years of gruelling warfare.