The war on the Eastern Front was a racial war, fought between Slavs on the one side and German peoples on the other. The front was vast, stretching from the Urals to the Alps, fought over brutal terrain by armies moving fast and living off the land. Many of the horrors of twentieth century warfare were initiated here: the first ever use of chemical weapons [months before Ypres on the Western Front], mass expulsions of civilians, the scapegoating and targeting of Jews.
The Italian front with Austria-Hungary was said to be perhaps the bitterest of the entire war. Soldiers fought in the harshest environments, perched on mountain tops, living in caves, enduring avalanches and frost-bite as well as the usual hazards of war.
On the Eastern Front, the alliance system was put under the severest test of the whole war: Germany felt betrayed and let down by Austria-Hungary - "shackled to a corpse" - which in turn came to look on Germany as her "secret enemy." Yet it was alliances which kept this bitter war going. In 1915 Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria invaded Serbia. The entire Serbian nation fled over the mountains in Albania. Over a third of her entire population died in the First World War.
