Mr. Lloyd’s excellent book draws on new scholarship and expert studies to revisit the terrain and help us to grasp anew the significance of the fighting there ... As Mr. Lloyd emphasizes at the close of his masterly study, the disastrous events on the Eastern Front left a vacuum in Central and Eastern Europe that contributed to the next world war and to the Cold War that followed.
In his preface, Lloyd writes that "the weight of history still hangs over these lands", but his treatment of Ukraine in the book is surprisingly perfunctory and does not tell us much about how the events of the first World War have directly affected the current war. That caveat aside, this is an authoritative book written by one of the best military historians around.
Even from the Germans’ perspective Lloyd’s boundaries produce a selective view of what they saw as the eastern front ... Equally problematic is the position of Italy in this story ... Lloyd has produced a strategic and operational narrative that proceeds chronologically without ever losing coherence as it switches from one sector to another ... It is rigorous in its determination to remain comparative.
