The Fortress: The Great Siege of Przemysl

"I’m a person who is pretty averse to military history, on the whole. I find it rather dull and technical and detailed and quite masculine, in a way. At the same time, I’ve become more interested in a certain type of military history that seems to be having a golden moment. It’s about strategy, it’s about tactics, it’s about contingent elements and deals a lot with humanity. I think it was Michael Howard—the great military historian who died just last month—who made the point that many of the most important works of literature in western culture, going all the way back to the Iliad , have been confrontations with war. We think of great novels, like War and Peace , or the plays of Shakespeare . War has been absolutely at the foundation of these because it’s where humanity reveals itself most. And although Alexander Watson’s The Fortress: The Great Siege of Przemysl is plainly written by a historian who understands the technical details of war and the nature of strategic warfare, what’s so fascinating about it is the human story. I’ve always taken quite a romantic view of the Austro-Hungarian (or Habsburg) Empire and its various permutations. That’s probably coloured by the novels of people like Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig. This book reveals just how tawdry its end was, full of bitterness, ethnic violence, rivalry, incompetence and decadence. Przemysl is on the southeast edge of what is now Poland, where it meets the Ukraine. The Habsburg forces were in retreat from a dominant Russian Tsarist army in 1914-1915 and certain elements of the army ended up at a crucial strategic place, this fortress. There is a Hungarian Landsturm regiment there which is competent and professional but also ruthless. But many of the soldiers are middle-aged and not well trained. A lot of people are from the eastern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, particularly the Rusyns, an ethnic group that comes from what is now the Ukraine. You see the clashes between the Hungarians and the Austrians, who are the leaders of this empire, and the Rusyns and other ethnic groups who are on the fringes of it. “What I’ve looked for is books based on real, serious scholarship that would genuinely appeal to that elusive creature, the intelligent general reader” And what Watson teases out—and I think he does this very, very effectively—is that the terrible horrors that take place in this part of the world during the 1930s and 1940s and the Second World War have their blueprint in this moment of the breakup of this single empire into ethnic groups. It becomes a real horror show, made all the worse by the sheer incompetence of the Austrian chief of the general staff, General Franz Conrad Von Hötzendorf. He is a catastrophe, inhumane and decadent. Decadent is a word I’d use again and again. Watson absolutely brings this all to life—and death, I suppose. There’s an awful lot of death. The conditions are horrible and insanitary, there’s disease, there’s violence, there’s interethnic fighting. He paints it with the most vivid colours, but it’s an awful scenario and it becomes a portent of what is to come in what Timothy Snyder called the Bloodlands of Eastern Europe. It’s absolutely staggering and again it’s pointing towards what’s to come. It’s a complete catastrophe and you see, in this one place, an empire just break down. It’s no longer fit for purpose and it disappears. And they’re fighting the Tsarist army, which is itself going to disappear in a couple of years’ time. It’s a clash of empires that will both soon be gone and replaced by something that’s perhaps even more terrible. It’s an incredibly well-written and vivid book about a terrible episode in modern European history. That’s absolutely true. Eastern Europe is still a complete mystery to most Britons. With the Brexit debate and everything else that’s been going on for the last three-and-a-half years, what’s apparent is how few Britons have any knowledge of Eastern Europe, Central Europe and indeed Europe as a whole. The historian Roger Moorhouse has talked about how for Britain and France World War II began on September 3rd 1939—but for people in Poland it actually began on September 1st. We’ve neglected this whole aspect of Eastern Europe, much to our peril, really. Phenomena like the emergence of Viktor Orbán, or the Law and Justice party in Poland, appear a mystery. But many of the people of Central and Eastern Europe went through a whole series of existential crises during the 20th century. There’s the First World War, as detailed in Alexander Watson’s book. The Second World War was even more catastrophic, as revealed in books like Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands . And then there was the occupation by the Soviet Union and the rebellions in 1956 in Hungary and in 1968 in Czechoslovakia. Then there was the breakdown in 1989. This is a very, very, very different history from the relatively stable 20th century of somewhere like Britain or the United States. That the phenomenon of Eastern and Central European politics comes as a surprise reveals just how ignorant we are of this area’s history."