It was “incomparably the greatest war in history. In its scale, in its slaughter, in the exertions of the combatants, in its military kaleidoscope, it far surpasses by magnitude and intensity all similar human episodes.” Winston Churchill wrote these words in the early 1930s, in his six-volume chronicle of what was at the time the most terrible conflict of them all: the First World War. But Churchill didn’t have the trenches of France and Belgium in mind when committing this particular description to print. He was instead referring to the titanic battle for supremacy that unfolded in eastern Europe.
Today, when we think of the First World War, images of blood-soaked battles of the western front almost immediately spring to mind. This terrible deadlock has come to define how historians, and the public more generally in the west, have understood the conflict. Bloody and seemingly inconclusive clashes – at the Somme, Verdun and Passchendaele – have become instrumental to the memory of what George Kennen called “the great seminal catastrophe” of the 20th century.
But the First World War was always much bigger than the western front. It stretched out into the Middle East, across Africa, on the high seas. It spilled over into the European colonial possessions in east Asia. And it triggered a four-year cataclysm across East Prussia, Poland and Galicia, as the Allies, led by the Russian empire, embarked on a mighty struggle with the Central Powers, dominated by Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Although the outcome of