A few days and a hundred years ago, on vacation on the coast of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a young painter makes his way down to the beach to swim off a gentle hangover. He finds the bathing-hut unexpectedly shut up; a notice posted on it announces that war has been declared, and lists the dates and places where male citizens are ordered to report for duty. The artist has less than a week to pack up his paints and his bathing suit and get to an unknown town on the other side of the country, and from there, to wherever he’s sent. He feels no hint of excitement at the prospect of war, only revulsion against its destruction. At twenty-nine, he knows who he is: an artist driven to create, who is in the midst of building a career and old enough to feel the preciousness of what he could lose, and to understand what his loss would mean to his parents and friends. The empty beach and the calm sea are utterly transformed; gazing out at the mast of a sailboat, he now thinks, “What a pretty gallows it would make.”

Béla Zombory-Moldován’s remarkable memoir was discovered in private family papers and edited and translated by his grandson, whose introduction and notes help to clarify the complex geopolitics of the Eastern Front. Germany’s principal ally, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a prosperous but internally fraught patchwork of nationalities and ethnicities, torn apart by postwar treaties and local wars into a jumble of independent countries, which would blow up again and again in the ensuing century. Towns and villages that in Béla’s day were Hungarian are now Polish, Ukrainian, Croatian, or Slovakian, testifying to the lasting impact of the war on the region and its ongoing linguistic and cartographical confusion.

As soon as Béla returns to his hotel, he sees those faultlines already opening: Guests who had mingled freely have suddenly grouped themselves around lunch tables by nationality, and the convivial atmosphere has given way to whispers of suspicion. Desperate to get away and to avoid protracted good-byes, Béla leaves the next morning on an overcrowded train, heading home to Budapest, through gorgeous mountain scenery to which the drunk and rowdy passengers, yelling patriotic slogans, pay no attention.

For most readers, the Western Front supplies the stock of World War One images. We think of the trenches occupied by British, French, and German forces, stuck in the mud and waiting endlessly for the signal to go “over the top” into enemy guns. But the front on which Béla finds himself, in mid-September 1914, is still in wild motion, with troops advancing and retreating through thick forests under unpredictable rifle and artillery fire. By virtue of his class status, nationality, and previous military service, he is a commissioned officer, leading a multilingual regiment into the thick of the fighting. He’s by turns enraged by and sardonically resigned to the idiocies of his superiors — from their insistence that his men march hundreds of kilometers under the late-August sun to the front, ensuring that they are blistered and broken by the time they get to the fighting in Galicia, to the order that the digging of foxholes under fire is forbidden, as it “leads to cowardice and undermines discipline.”

Béla escapes the confusion of gunfire in the forest with a miraculous near miss, a bullet scraping the side of his head. With his fellow officers dead or captured, and accompanied by his sturdy and loyal batman, he begins a harrowing journey by cart and on foot, desperate to make it to the last train out of the area. So begins and ends his front-line service, a horrifying few days that, his grandson notes, would haunt him for the rest of his life. In the first two weeks of the war almost half of Austria-Hungary’s fighting force, 400,000 men, were killed or captured, before they pulled back some sixty miles to the Carpathian Mountains. By the time Béla is back in Budapest, the traumatized empire is being forced to adapt to a vastly different war than it imagined (as a symbol of that gulf, officers are equipped with a ceremonial sword, a medieval throwback that is supposed to mark status and military honor, but which only gets in the way.)

The second half of the memoir, which documents Béla’s slow recovery from his injury and his struggle to reconnect with his prewar self, is inevitably less dramatic than the buildup to the firefight. Yet it’s equally moving, as this intelligent and thoughtful writer tries to reckon with the sudden and absolute destruction, “the burning of the world,” that the war represents. Back at his beloved coast, this time on the Italian border, he walks along the seashore and sets himself the near-impossible task of painting a crashing wave, spending hours trying to understand and record its movement. But even this natural haven isn’t safe, when Italy joins the Allies and the kind German family he lodges with is suddenly faced with exile. Béla is no modernist (the scramble of the avant-garde, coffee-house iconoclasts in Budapest to escape conscription is the subject of his sharpest satire) but he comes to realize that art will need some kind of revolution if it is to respond to what, by early 1915, was clearly going to be a much longer and bloodier war than anyone had predicted.