The Landeswehr: Germany's Secret War in the Baltic and the Birth of Latvia and Estonia

In the winter of 1918, four empires had just collapsed, and on the amber coast of the eastern Baltic, every force the collapse had released was converging on a single piece of ground. Into this vacuum marched the Baltische Landeswehr — the Baltic Territorial Army — a military force as contradictory as the world that created it: German-funded and German-commanded, yet nominally Latvian; built to defend a new republic, yet organized to destroy it.

The Landeswehr is the story of the fourteen months in which this force swept through the forests and farmsteads of Courland, seized the capital of a country it had been hired to protect, marched north toward Estonia in pursuit of a German empire the armistice had cancelled, and was finally broken at the medieval castle town of Cēsis by a national army nobody had expected to exist.

Elton Martyn reconstructs this extraordinary episode with the full resources of narrative history — tactical precision, intimate character portraits, and moral seriousness about violence and its costs. Here are German barons commanding the last charge of a seven-century aristocracy, Latvian colonels maintaining impossible neutrality to preserve their nation's only military unit, British officers transforming a compromised instrument into a legitimate army, and expelled Freikorps veterans carrying the Baltic's rage westward into a Germany on the edge of catastrophe.

This is where the twentieth century's character was being decided.