In September 1914, less than a month into the First World War, the military destiny of the Habsburg Empire hung in the balance. Only weeks after Vienna had declared war on Russia on Aug. 23, the Austro-Hungarian army suffered a catastrophic setback when the Russian army repelled an early Habsburg offensive. With the Russian troops now advancing toward the Habsburg province of Galicia, all that stood between them and near-certain victory was Przemysl, a fortress city in the eastern marches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Although virtually unknown in the West today, Przemysl was Vienna’s most important bulwark against a Russian invasion of Central Europe. Located in the southeastern borderlands of today’s Poland, the heavily fortified city was home to some 46,000 Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish citizens of the Habsburg empire, the third most populous state in Europe on the eve of the war. Przemysl also had a large garrison of about 130,000 soldiers from across the empire who manned the two enormous concentric rings of armored fortifications built around the city.
Technical innovation in artillery had rendered many of these fortifications obsolete by 1914, but Przemysl still constituted a formidable barrier to Russian advances into the heart of Habsburg territory. When the Russians attacked in mid-September and attempted to storm the fortress, the garrison successfully halted the advance and covered the retreat of the Austro-Hungarian army. But although the full military collapse of the Habsburg army had been averted, the inhabitants of Przemysl found themselves cut off from military aid and food supplies.
A renewed Habsburg offensive pushed the front back briefly, temporarily relieving the fortress, but the Russians rallied. Bloodied by their first attempt to take the fortress, the Russian commanders decided against another attempt to take the city by force. Instead, they would starve Przemysl into submission. On Oct. 8, the Russians began a second and much more prolonged siege — one that would only end in late March 1915, when the garrison capitulated to the Russians, dealing a major blow to Austro-Hungarian military prestige and leaving Vienna more dependent than ever on the military strength of its German ally.
The Battle of Przemysl, the subject of Alexander Watson’s excellent new book, The Fortress, was one of the major military clashes of the Great War, but it is largely forgotten today. It was the longest siege of the entire war and had a significant influence on the course of the conflict. The fortress blocked the Russians’ path, denying them an early victory over Austria-Hungary and significantly prolonging the war.
Watson’s book is much more than an operational history of the battle. Instead, he situates the siege of Przemysl within the broader context of the war on the eastern front, while offering a harrowing account of the effects of total war on the inhabitants of this once-thriving and multicultural city. Within weeks of the beginning of the siege, the garrison, now largely cut off from food supplies, was reduced to eating horse meat and bread adulterated with sawdust, wood shavings, and other substances. Soldiers collapsed from starvation and exhaustion. “The fortress garrison became a zombie army,” Watson writes.
Ill-prepared and poorly executed attempts by the Habsburg army to relieve the fortress did not improve the situation. On the contrary. A winter offensive ordered by the incompetent Austro-Hungarian chief of staff, Conrad von Hoetzendorf, led to the catastrophic loss of some 670,000 of his soldiers.
The longer the siege of Przemysl lasted, the more desperate the situation became for its inhabitants. By the first week of March 1915, food supplies inside the besieged fortress were exhausted. Most of the horses that could be spared had been eaten; even mice and rats had disappeared from the streets. Driven to despair, the starving garrison attempted an improvised breakout that collapsed in less than five hours, with some units losing between half and two-thirds of their men. When the Habsburg garrison finally surrendered on March 22, 1915, more than 100,000 troops and civilians went into Russian captivity. A fifth of them never returned.
Watson tells the story of wartime Przemysl and the impact of the conflict on its inhabitants with great empathy and an impressive eye for detail. Moving elegantly from military grand strategy to the microhistory of the siege, Watson is particularly interested in the swift unraveling of civilization under conditions of war. Before 1914, Przemysl had been one of the many thriving multiethnic cities of Central Europe. Within weeks, the very fabric of ethnic plurality came undone. According to Watson, it was here, in the early days of the First World War, that some of the characteristics of “total war,” including ethnic cleansing, racial hatred, and the deliberate targeting of civilians, first emerged. The events that unfolded in and around the fortress city, Watson contends, were like a “weathervane for the harsh winds of the twentieth century,” previewing later violent ethnic conflicts that blurred the lines between combatants and civilians.
The first noncombatant victims in the battle for Przemysl were the Ruthenians, an East Slavic minority of the Greek Catholic faith who were suspected by the Austro-Hungarian military authorities of secretly siding with the Russians. As the Russians began to advance on Przemysl in early September 1914, Habsburg troops started to hang Ruthenian civilians as a warning to others not to assist the enemy. The killings soon spread to the fortress itself, where, on Sept. 15, some 46 Ruthenians were savagely attacked and murdered by a civilian mob in response to the beginning of the siege.
Once the Russians had taken the fortress, a new wave of repression began. Members of the Polish elite, suspected of aspiring to their own independent state, were imprisoned or murdered, while other inhabitants of the city perished as forced laborers. The occupation army embarked on a policy of “Russification,” deporting those whose ethnicity or religion seemed incompatible with the objective of turning Przemysl into a Russian city. Jews in particular were subjected to public humiliation, ritualized violence, and even murder. Some 17,000 were deported from the city and its environs.
Watson highlights the plight of these minorities as part of his wider argument that the ethnic cleansing campaigns of the First World War ended centuries of largely peaceful multireligious and multiethnic cohabitation in Central and Eastern Europe. For decades to come, the region would be Europe’s “bloodlands,” caught in a vicious cycle of ethnic revenge killings and racial engineering, culminating in the horrors of the Second World War.
Watson wears the immense scholarship underpinning this book lightly. His writing style is crisp, and the book is full of illuminating detail about how the war affected different kinds of historical actors. This should come as no surprise. Watson’s previous book, Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914-1918, was widely acclaimed and won a number of important awards, as did his previous work on combat morale in the German and British armies. The Fortress is another fine achievement. It should be read by anyone wishing to understand how the First World War created a terrible legacy of violence that shaped the 20th century.
Robert Gerwarth is professor of modern history at University College Dublin and director of the Centre for War Studies. He is the author of The Vanquished: Why The First World War Failed to End.
