To his surprise, this reviewer came across information about this book on page 3 of The New York Review of Books issue of February 27, 2020, on the right side of the page, from top to bottom, a place of value since the subscriber sees this advertisement as soon as they open the issue to the table of contents. Of course, the placement of the ad about a book is a matter of commercial decision making—certainly Basic Books paid top-dollar to put it there. The surprise is that a book about East Central Europe got that prized spot. Imagine a book that deals with that pivot of Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Ruthenian, Ukrainian, and Russian historical and military interests in what is now Southeast Poland, specifically the 1,000-year-old city of Przemyśl. The top of the ad begins with the term “Shatter Zone” and the bottom with the statement, “It [the book] recaptures one of the most terrible episodes in a terrible war which [. . .] presaged even greater horrors to come.”The book claims that the siege of Przemyśl was the first act in a play which stretched from 1914 to 1951, from the beginning of World War I to the death of Taras Chuprynka, the last leader of the UPA (Ukrainian Partisan Army) by the Soviet internal control forces in 1951.The Fortress is a truly magnificent work, the very best one can hope for in historical science. It contains 367 pages of text, notes, bibliography, index, and 30 photos in the center section, also there are 8 illustrations and 4 maps plus maps of the fortress itself inside the front and back covers. Citations from archives in Warsaw, Kraków, Przemyśl, Budapest, Vienna, Jerusalem, Lviv, and London are found in this book and materials in German, English, Czech, Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and Hungarian turn up. There are 469 footnotes and two appendices discussing the 1914 organization of the K.u.K. (Kaiserlich und Koniglich / Imperial and Royal) Austro-Hungarian Army and Imperial Russian forces.The author of The Fortress, Alexander Watson, is a professor of history at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and the author of two other books about World War I, the well-received, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Army, 1914–1918 and Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I. The latter was also published by Basic Books and was used by this reviewer in his studies of World War I.The point of all the above is to convince the reader that The Fortress is solidly buttressed with a huge collection of sources—one cannot conceive of another book that deals with this period that surpasses the historical writing skills of the author.What, then, is this book all about? As already mentioned, Przemyśl is an old city where East meets West, Orthodox and Roman and Greek Catholic bishoprics were established here and numerous churches, along with synagogues, were built too. Poles, Ruthenians, Tatars, Transylvania Vlachs, Cossacks, and even Swedes fought over the Przemyśl area until 1772 when Austria got the territory in the First Partition of Poland. At that time Przemyśl was inhabited by Poles, Jews, Germans, and Ruthenians. But what are we dealing with here?At the beginning of World War I, on the Eastern Front, the massive Imperial Russian Army, that enormous steamroller, began its advance which was supposed to end in Berlin. After a short offensive which was quickly stopped the Austro-Hungarian Army was thrown back on the defensive and the idea to fight out a Russian war on the plains of Galicia east of Lviv was put into effect. Soon enough, however, the rather unfortified Lviv fell, and the Russian forces plan to sweep along the northern edge of the Carpathian Mountain Range on the route Lviv, Przemyśl, Jarosław, Rzeszów Jasło, Biecz, Gorlice, Tarnów, and on to the Fortress of Kraków from which the Russians would jump off to Berlin to knock Germany out of the war as quickly as possible, was put into effect.The fly in the ointment or better the cork in the bottle was the Fortress of Przemyśl. In the second half of the nineteenth century, or more precisely after the Crimean War and the rise of Russian supported Pan-Slavism, when relations between Austria-Hungary and Russia turned negative, the Austro-Hungarian War Ministry of the Dual Monarchy started to look into protection of its North-Eastern flank in Galicia. Eventually, 1871, the Ministry seized on Przemyśl as the best blocking location for a fortress to protect western Galicia and the mountain passes of the Carpathians which led into the Hungarian Kingdom. An enormous heavily fortified magazine of military supplies, food, and medical materials plus a large garrison would be set up there.The Fortress discusses the geo-strategic location of Przemyśl, its military importance. The city is on the main east-west rail line from Kraków to Lviv and on to Brody and the Russian Empire. The railway line itself is oddly constructed, it comes in a great curve from the north, from Rzeszów and Jarosław and swings in a semi-circle towards the east, crossing the San River in the center of Przemyśl to a railroad station which to this day is in Habsburg style. The fortress had 60 installations 130,000 soldiers when the Great War started.In mid-September 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Army was in a rout/ retreat, the remnant of some 1.2 million sent into the field to slug it out on the plains. Civilian were told to leave the city but not enough of them did creating a supply problem when the city became besieged. About three million Imperial soldiers (not all of them ethnically Russian) were approaching to attack the fortress complex which was composed of seventeen main forts and eighteen smaller ones and on the outer edge there were two lines of trenches in a rough circle of thirty miles/forty-eight kilometers. The garrison of the whole complex, by mid-August 1914 was made up of Landstrum and Hoved soldiers (Austro-Hungarian reserve militia units). These fighters were a hodge-podge of nationalities, Austrian German, Czech, Slovak, Poles, Rusyns, Ukrainians, Hungarians, and Romanians, although the language of command was Austrian military German.Then began the defense of the Fortress, under the command of Lieutenant-General Hermann Kusmanek von Burgneustadten, who had arrived in May 1914. We cannot go over the whole of this work, chapter by chapter, because after all why summarize what we are encouraging the reader to read. Suffice to say there are seven chapters, The Broken Army, The Heroes [the defenders], Storm, Barrier, Isolation, Starvation, and Armageddon—the Fortress fell on March 22, 1915—and an Epilogue. The Russian troops pinned down there were free to move to the west toward Kraków, which had not been taken in the Fall 1914 offensive. However, at the beginning of May 1915, in the great battle of Tarnów-Gorlice the German and Austrian forces made a breakthrough which drove the Russians back to eastern Galicia for the rest of the war.Meanwhile back at Przemyśl the Russian took out their revenge on the surrendered garrison in various ways and most were shipped deep into the Russian Empire. Especially bad was the fate of the Jews of Przemyśl city and province who were all expelled to the east in the first ethnic cleansing in modern European history.Przemyśl ended up in resurrected Poland in the inter-war years, but the River San became the border between the Nazi and Soviet zones of occupied Poland in 1939. At the end of the war Przemyśl was just inside the border between People's Poland and Soviet Ukraine.What then, would a purchaser of this book expect to find? The very best book about the city of Przemyśl before and during World War I that has been written in any language this reviewer reads.For those interested in World War I, the Eastern Front of World War I, ethnic violence, military affairs, and the whole shatter zone and the bloodlands of East Central Europe, this is the book for you. An extraordinary tour de force.