Publishers Weekly
02/24/2020
In this well-researched chronicle, Watson (Ring of Steel), a history professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, contends that the September 1914–March 1915 siege of Przemys l, a “fortress–city” in the Habsburg Empire province of Galicia (now Poland), altered the course of WWI. By holding out against the Russian imperial army for six months, Watson writes, the garrison’s 130,000 ethnically diverse and mainly middle-aged defenders allowed the Habsburg army to regroup after a series of early defeats, preventing a swift conclusion to the war. But Przemys l’s eventual capitulation, after some 800,000 soldiers had been lost in efforts to relieve the besieged city, “inflicted a hammer blow to the prestige of the Habsburg Empire” and “embolden neutral powers to join its enemies.” Watson blames Habsburg army general staff chief Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf for failing to modernize Przemys l’s defenses to withstand advances in ordnance technology, and for leaving the Galician frontier “frighteningly exposed to Russian attack.” Once the siege begins, Watson renders Russian and Austro-Hungarian military maneuvers in rich detail, and draws on firsthand accounts to document the terror and suffering of Przemys l’s civilians and soldiers. Military history enthusiasts will relish this detailed retelling of the WWI battle. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
"The Fortress takes us into the tense, claustrophobic atmosphere of the front-line in a crucial few months of the war...Watson's book is an impressive telling of a story almost entirely unknown, and it makes clear how much we have yet to learn about the first world war away from the western front."—Mark Mazower, Financial Times
"Watson's splendid book combines great evocative power (and flashes of sharp humour) with the ethical authority of the best history writing. The story it tells is unsettling, because it resists any attempt to encompass the death and violence of war within a narrative of redemption. It recalls instead a war that never really ended, but rather spilled out into cascades of further violence whose toxic effects are still with us today."—Guardian (UK)
"Watson's account of these men's experience of battle is a brilliant distillation of their letters, diaries and memories. The voices of the siege convey its horror and the terror of men who had to endure it and suppress their fear of death... The vividly written and well-researched The Fortress is a masterpiece. It deserves to become a classic of military history."—The Times (UK)
"[The Fortress] is excellent history, a marvelously readable, though tragic, story of its time and of how the clock can be made to turn backwards under siege conditions; and in its account of the Habsburg commanders' unshakable vanity, philandering and cockiness it has plenty of modern resonances as a parable of arrogant exceptionalism, imperial conceit and perilous isolationism."—The Daily Telegraph (UK)
"The Fortress is based on extraordinarily impressive research, yet is also vivid, imaginative, and humane. It recaptures one of the most terrible episodes in a terrible war, which — as Watson rightly argues — presaged even greater horrors to come."—David Stevenson, London School of Economics and Political Science
"Przemysl, Habsburg Austria's easternmost fortress, lay in Galicia, a flat borderland between the turbulent German, Austrian, and Russian empires. Watson reconstructs the Russian siege in engrossing detail, and also proves that the eastern 'bloodlands' later ravaged by the Nazis and Soviets had already been desolated once before — during World War I and its chaotic aftermath, when the Russians and Austro-Hungarians, desperate to hold Galicia, taught Hitler and Stalin how to weaken and destroy unwanted peoples like the Jews or Ukrainians."—Geoffrey Wawro, author of A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire
"Przemysl is best known for its challenges to orthography and pronunciation. But Watson contextualizes the history of this remote Habsburg fortress-city from its beginnings as a strategic pivot to its development as a focal point for overlapping imperial and nationalist aspirations. The defining event was the great siege of 1914, whose everyday routines and long term consequences Watson presents with a verve and clarity making this a must read for students of the Great War in the east."—Dennis Showalter, professor emeritus, Colorado College
"There is a great deal more to this book than an account of the longest siege of the Great War, one that stalled the Russian advance and saved the Central Powers from defeat in 1914. It reveals, in microcosm, everything that was mad, bad and dangerous about the Austro-Hungarian Empire in its final stages... This is a hugely enjoyable book that anyone seeking to make sense of the dark side of 20th century Europe would do well to read."—Adam Zamoyski, Literary Review
