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

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

• 
  Geevee

  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

  
  

  ‘’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

  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.
• 
  happy

  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

  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.
• 
  Anthony

  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.
• 
  Bill Kupersmith

  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

  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.’ “
• 
  Anton

  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

  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.
• 
  Thomas Waldman

  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

  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

  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

  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。
• 
  Charles Haywood

  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.]
• 
  Stuart Fleet

  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.
• 
  Roger Burk

  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

  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.
  
• 
  Kabaal van Napels

  Important and relevant story, but not a page turner.
  
  “The Fortress: The Great Siege of Przemysl” by Alexander Watson is a retelling of the longest siege of the first world war and the shadow it casted on the horrors of the second world war and later. Przemysl was a strategically positioned town in Galicia in the southeast of current day Poland. Back in 1914 it was the most Eastern fortress of Austria-Hungary and the gateway to central Europe. For the Russians therefore a key objective to capture the fortress and knock Austria-Hungary out of the war. Without giving too much away, the siege of Przemysl turned out to be one of the key moments of the first world war in the east.
  
  Watson has done a great job with this 250-page book to draw attention to this key battle, largely unknown to people in the West. “The Fortress” is full of detail, yet it was not a page-turner for me. I thought the story took a long time to take off, making me struggle to keep my attention. Although this is military history, I found the most interesting part of the book the description of how the war and the siege destroyed the multi-ethnic, multi-faith and multi-national civil society in these border areas. Both Austria-Hungary and Tsarist Russia contributed to this tragedy. However, the attitude and behaviour of the Russian military towards the people in the conquered areas as well as the treatment of its own soldiers in 1914 are not that different from its actions in Ukraine these days. Sadly, one has to conclude some things never seem to change. It makes “The Fortress” an important and a relevant story.
  
  All in all, I can recommend this to anyone interested in the history of both world wars or the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe.
• 
  Andreas

  The siege of what? All attempts to sound out the fortress' name remained unsuccessful so I looked it up: Shehmihshuhl. I had heard about the fortress, but I didn't really know more than that over a hundred thousand soldiers went into captivity when the city fell in early 1915. It was just another disaster in a series of defeats for the Austro-Hungarian Army during the first few months of the Great War. All that is changed now after reading this book.
  
  The book showed the distrust of the various ethnicities in Galicia. Austria-Hungarians distrusted the Jewish and the Ruthene populations. The Russians distrusted the Ukrainians, the Poles and the Jews. That was leading to atrocities against the perceived enemies and the Jews got the worst of it. It also set the stage for what later was to become the so called Bloodlands. I didn't know that there was a difference between Ukrainians and Ruthene, that the Poles suppressed the Ruthene and the Jews even before the war, and that the main differences between all the various groups were rather religious than nationalistic.
  
  The description of the daily life in the fortress, the hunger, diseases, the appalling behavior of the officer corps towards their men, hopes and shattered hopes really make this a great read. Before reading this I was thrown aback that so many soldiers surrendered, but after reading the book I am amazed they held out for so long in those harsh conditions. The book ends with looking beyond the siege and towards present day, hitting the major points of the town's history.
  
  I liked the author's style and will definitely read his other WW1 book the Ring of Steel.
• 
  Mike

  A true story from World War One about which I knew nothing, this is a riveting account of Przemsyl, the Galician fortress that found itself on the front line of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when Russia attacked. A multi-ethnic location held together under the loose alliance of nationalities that were gathered within the Habsburg dominions, the account tells of how its relative harmony was shattered by the privations of war, the successful battle for its defence (an incompetently led defence force seeing off an arguably more incompetent set of attackers) and the Russian siege.
  
  The latter contains all the juicy details of privations you could ever wish to read. People are forced to go hungry, eat horses and just about anything that's even vaguely nutritious, while waiting for a relief army that never arrives and facing the inevitability of being overthrown. Desperate times result in an all-too typical resort to committing atrocities against certain ethnic groups, the city's Jewish communities as always coming under attack. Przemsyl is never the same again. Things seem as though they can't get any worse, and then they do exactly that.
  
  It isn't an overly long book, and Mr Watson has produced a fascinating tale, focusing in on what was no doubt one of many barely remembered communities that showed new frontiers in suffering during wartime. It's an important read.
• 
  Mike

  This book is a well done book on a WWI battle that has received scant recognition in the western press. It describes the battle from the prospective of the fortress in the overall war between Austria-Hungary and the tsarist Russian forces. It contains some information from the perspective the 'rank and file' as well. The descriptions of the famine and horrors of war on the eastern front are well done and depict an age when the technology was making a major impact on the way wars were fought, but that the generals were often still imbedded in tactics of an earlier era.
  
  I have read many books about WWI. As an American, most of the books I have read have been about American and English forces fighting on the western front. This one helps fill in some of the gaps. In particular I found the references to the declaration of war by the Italians against the Hapsburg empire to be particular interesting, as wells as the religious strife between the Orthodox Church and the Greek Catholics.
  
  I recommend this book as a good read to any student of WWI History and for those interested in the development of Central Europe and the border tensions we see there today. The events portrayed in the book have had far reaching impacts on the history of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, as well as countries that appeared with the fall of the Hapsburg Empire.
• 
  Paul

  Reading this in the twilight of America's senile would-be Emperor, what stood out to me is the way everyday people suffer for the pretensions of the incompetent and powerful. As a symbol of the Habsburg's reach into Eastern Europe, Przemysl became, according to Watson, one of the first case studies of how total war turns genocidal. As a key cog in the inept leadership of the Austro-Hungarian military, it was set up to fall, and in falling, set up for the enacting of cruelty towards those either or both sides regarded as "others." By turns a recreation of life in a military border-town under the weird contradictions of conservative (Church, Kaiser, and the German language were each particularly venerated) and progressive (Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish, and German subjects lived side-by-side in a stable, if not always easy, balance) that exemplified the last years of Austro-Hungary before the first World War, a military history of a major battle of that war, and a chilling look at how defeat turned to inhumanity, this book is an excellent and very readable look at how the ghosts of the 20th-century continue to rattle their chains.
• 
  Peter

  The heroic, yet sad, tale of how a rag-tag bunch of mostly Austria-Hungarian army rejects are asked to defend a fortified city (now part of Poland) that is swallowed up within the Russian invasion near the start of World War I.
  
  This is also the tale of citizens of different religions and ethnicities living together in peace and relative harmony, although undercurrents of intolerance run deep.
  
  The drama gets big as we watch the Hapsburg (Austria-Hungarian) General Conrad incompetently rush his army into the last war, where they are ripped apart by the Russian artillery (who have had more recent bitter experiences in the Far East). They fall back onto the surprisingly tough fortifications of Przemysl, where there are ordered to hold out as the Russian Army pushes forward into Galicia, burning villages and terrorizing villagers along the way (apparently the Russians have always been like this).
  
  Conditions inside the city are grim, as they try to stretch out three months of rations until the Austria-Hungarian Army can come to their rescue.
  
  And what Russia did to the survivors cannot be unread.
  
  Quite a tale. And a warning.
• 
  Russel Henderson

  A meticulously sourced look at Przemysl during WWI, specifically its two sieges, with looks before and beyond the period. While Watson assumes some familiarity with the language of militaries and specifically of strongpoints, he peppers it with enough human interest that a casual reader’s eyes won’t glaze over. He demonstrates the stupidity of the Habsburg high command and its utter lack of preparation for large-scale combat, and he demonstrates that while the Russians were not the equals of the Germans in 1914 and 1915 they were stronger and better led than their Austro-Hungarian counterparts. No history of the region dealing with the time period 1880-1950 or so would be complete without an ugly reminder of how awful virtually everyone treated the Jews, of course the Nazis but also the Tsarist forces and the other ethnicities with which they lived. It’s not really fair to call the book a monograph, though there is a fine one embedded within it. It’s an excellent English-language addition to our understanding of the Eastern Front in 1914 and 1915.