In the second volume of his landmark First World War trilogy, Professor Nick Lloyd tells the story 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 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, 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.