Forgotten Wars

Włodzimierz Borodziej and Maciej Górny set out to salvage the historical memory of the experience of war in the lands between Riga and Skopje, beginning with the two Balkan conflicts of 1912–1913 and ending with the death of Emperor Franz Joseph in 1916. The First World War in the East and South-East of Europe was fought by people from a multitude of different nationalities, most of them dressed in the uniforms of three imperial armies: Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian. In this first volume of Forgotten Wars, the authors chart the origins and outbreak of the First World War, the early battles, and the war's impact on ordinary soldiers and civilians through to the end of the Romanian campaign in December 1916, by which point the Central Powers controlled all of the Balkans except for the Peloponnese. Combining military and social history, the authors make extensive use of eyewitness accounts to describe the traumatic experience that established a region stretching between the Baltic, Adriatic, and Black Seas.

'Only recently, historiography has re-discovered the Eastern Front of the Great War. This brilliant volume not only examines this untold story of the war itself comprehensively, but it pictures how people in Eastern Europe – soldiers and civilians – experienced it. A must-read for any scholar interested in the First World War.' Jochen Böhler, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, 'Kaleidoscopic, narrated with the immediacy of a hand-held camera, Forgotten Wars offers a fresh and compelling panorama of the Great War in Central and Eastern Europe. This magisterial history by two outstanding Polish scholars, lucidly rendered in Jasper Tilbury's crisp and vivid translation, deserves to find a wide audience.' Christopher Clark, University of Cambridge, 'The Eastern front was marginalized in the general historiography of the World War I, and the Western front still dominates the European cultural memory. In this brilliant book, Borodziej and Górny bring the Eastern front back and combine new academic approaches towards the military, social, political and cultural history.' Boris Kolonitskii, European University at St Petersburg, 'Forgotten Wars recovers a long neglected, yet deeply transformative history of people living and dying on the Eastern Front. Bringing to light the shared experience of senseless death, disease and hunger-driven misery that made that old military and political hierarchies obsolete, the authors help us to imagine how shattering the experience of the Great War was for ordinary soldiers and civilians.' Malgorzata Mazurek, Columbia University, 'Of all the new histories of the First World War, this is the one that is the one that serious readers should pick up first. This is a new synthesis, bringing together the entire region in all of its variety, exploring the history of the empires and the experiences of the people. It will be discussed for many years to come.' Timothy Snyder, Yale University

Włodzimierz Borodziej is Professor for Contemporary History at the University of Warsaw. Maciej Górny is Professor at the Tadeusz Manteuffel History Institute of Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw.