The fortress The siege of Przemyśl and the making of Europe's bloodlands

Alexander Watson, 1979-

Book - 2020

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