The deepening conflict did help sharpen national consciousness.

From The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century by David Reynolds.  Page 8.

The deepening conflict did help sharpen national consciousness. On the Eastern Front, prisoners of war were separated by nationality and then formed into special units to fight against the empire they had previously served. The Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) organized a Polish Legion, as well as special Finnish and Ukrainian units to fight against the tsar. The Russians formed their Habsburg prisoners into Polish, Czech, and Slovak units. Their Czech Legion was bloodied at Zborov in Galicia on July 2, 1917—in itself a minor engagement but elevated into a founding national myth because the Legion routed several Czech regiments that were fighting for the Habsburgs. The result of all this was a keener sense of national identities right across eastern Europe, as well as a brutalized soldiery who would eventually form the core of postwar paramilitary groups.