The Eastern Front

A History of the First World War

By: Nick Lloyd

Narrated by: Mark Elstob

Brought to you by Penguin.

The definitive history of the Eastern Front in the First World War, from the acclaimed military historian and author of Passchendaele and The Western Front

In the second volume of his landmark First World War trilogy, Professor Nick Lloyd tells the story for the first time of what Winston Churchill once called the 'unknown war': the vast conflict in Eastern Europe and the Balkans that brought about the collapse of three empires.

Much has been written about the fighting in France and Belgium, yet the Eastern Front was no less bloody. Between 1914 and 1917, huge numbers of people - perhaps as many as 16 million soldiers and two million civilians - were killed, wounded or maimed in enormous battles that sometimes ranged across a front of 100 km in length.

Through intimate eyewitness reports, diary entries and memoirs - many of which have never been translated into English before - Lloyd reconstructs the full story of a war that began in the Balkans as a local struggle between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, and which sucked in Russia, Germany and Italy, right through to the final collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918.

The Eastern Front paints a vivid and authoritative picture of a conflict that shook the world, and that remains central to understanding the tragic, blood-soaked trajectory of the entire twentieth century, including the current war in Ukraine.

Please note: audio files have been updated as of May 2024.

©2024 Nick Lloyd (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

This masterly history makes well-known events feel refreshingly unfamiliar . . . One of the great strengths of Lloyd’s account, a masterly synthesis of sources from various countries, is that unlike many of the war’s participants, he never loses sight of how it all began (Dominic Sandbrook)

Compelling . . . The Eastern Front is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the history of that troubled region up to and including the present (Margaret MacMillan)

Nick Lloyd reminds us in The Eastern Front, his . . . highly-detailed and meticulously researched book, the consequences of the fighting in the central and south-eastern European theatres were profound for the future of the continent – indeed, of the world (Simon Heffer)

Nothing was ever quiet on the Eastern Front as is vividly demonstrated in Nick Lloyd’s magisterial history of World War I waged in the fields, mountains, and marshes of eastern Europe. The warfare that produced the fall of two empires and the socialist revolution that shook the world is presented here in all its horror and complexity by a master storyteller and an expert in the field. (Serhii Plokhy, author of The Russo-Ukrainian War)

Artillery shells that only dent the frozen earth, mountainsides burning in the summer sun, the drone of aircraft over the wheat fields of Ukraine, whole armies in headlong retreat, flamethrowers and poison gas, and a cavalry general slipping away in the night to shoot himself in the head – this is the story of the First World War’s Eastern Front told on a Homeric scale. Nick Lloyd gives us not only a compelling account of warfare on the ‘long front’ from Riga to Thessalonica but also an intimate and disturbing portrait of the fighting taken from regimental histories, diaries, and the testimony of the dead (Martyn Rady, author of The Habsburgs)

An exemplary study of a much-neglected subject. Nick Lloyd is at the very top of his game. . . . A fabulous historian. (Roger Moorhouse, author of The Forgers)

Nick Lloyd brilliantly pulls together the manifold strands and brings to life the dark realities of an often ignored but hugely important theatre which paved the way for the horrors of World War II (Adam Zamoyski, author of Napoleon)

The Eastern Front

Brilliant narration of a long neglected subject, it narrates the personalities and not just events! Thanks!