The Other Wars: The Experience and Memory of the First World War in the Middle East and Macedonia 110878206X, 9781108782067

In this insightful and revealing study, Justin Fantauzzo uses a wide range of documentary and visual sources to explore

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The Other Wars: The Experience and Memory of the First World War in the Middle East and Macedonia
 110878206X, 9781108782067

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
List of
Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I Experience
1 Soldiering
2 Touring
3 Meaning
4 Forgotten
Part II Memory
5 Public Memory
6 Private Memory
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Other Wars

In this insightful and revealing study, Justin Fantauzzo uses a wide range of documentary and visual sources to explore the experience and memory of British and Dominion soldiers who fought in the Middle East and Macedonia during the First World War. He shows that not only was the experience of these campaigns markedly different to their counterparts on the Western Front, but so too were the memories and portrayals of these campaigns in the interwar period. Fantauzzo’s analysis highlights the disparities and contradictions that exist in the experience and memory of war and helps us to rethink what the war meant to the soldiers who fought in this region, how soldiers understood the war itself and how it was remembered. Justin Fantauzzo is Assistant Professor of History at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada.

Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare General Editor Jay Winter, Yale University Advisory Editors David Blight, Yale University Richard Bosworth, University of Western Australia Peter Fritzsche, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Carol Gluck, Columbia University Benedict Kiernan, Yale University Antoine Prost, Université de Paris-Sorbonne Robert Wohl, University of California, Los Angeles In recent years the field of modern history has been enriched by the exploration of two parallel histories. These are the social and cultural history of armed conflict, and the impact of military events on social and cultural history. Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare presents the fruits of this growing area of research, reflecting both the colonization of military history by cultural historians and the reciprocal interest of military historians in social and cultural history, to the benefit of both. The series offers the latest scholarship in European and non-European events from the 1850s to the present day. A full list of titles in the series can be found at: www.cambridge.org/modernwarfare

The Other Wars The Experience and Memory of the First World War in the Middle East and Macedonia Justin Fantauzzo Memorial University of Newfoundland

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108479004 DOI: 10.1017/9781108782067 © Justin Fantauzzo 2020 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2020 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fantauzzo, Justin, 1985– author. Title: The other wars : the experience and memory of the First World War in the Middle East and Macedonia / Justin Fantauzzo. Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2020. | Series: Studies in the social and cultural history of modern warfare | Expanded and revised version of author’s thesis (doctoral) – University of Cambridge, 2014 titled: British soldiers’ experience and memory of the Palestine campaign, 1915–1918. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019027961 (print) | LCCN 2019027962 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108479004 (hardback) | ISBN 9781108782067 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Great Britain. Army – History – World War, 1914–1918. | World War, 1914– 1918 – Great Britain. | World War, 1914–1918 – Commonwealth countries. | World War, 1914–1918 – Campaigns – Middle East. | World War, 1914–1918 – Campaigns – Macedonia. | Soldiers – Great Britain – Psychological aspects. | Soldiers – Commonwealth countries – Psychological aspects. | Memory – Social aspects – Great Britain. | Memory – Social aspects – Commonwealth countries. | Commonwealth countries – Armed Forces – History – World War, 1914–1918. Classification: LCC D517 .F36 2020 (print) | LCC D517 (ebook) | DDC 940.4/ 150922171241–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027961 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027962 ISBN 978-1-108-47900-4 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction Part I

page vi vii 1

Experience

1

Soldiering

17

2

Touring

50

3

Meaning

93

4

Forgotten

139

Part II Memory 5

Public Memory

167

6

Private Memory

205

Conclusion

220

Bibliography Index

226 244

v

Figures

1.1 Yeomanry camp at Bir el Mazar after khamsin, Sinai, April 1917 page 22 1.2 Camp of the Transport Section, 2/20th Battalion, London Regiment, Vardar, Macedonia, spring 1917 39 1.3 Punch, 19 December 1917 48 2.1 Group of British soldiers on horseback and camels in front of the Sphinx, Giza, Egypt, 1915 66 2.2 British soldiers touring the Temple Mount, Al Aqsa mosque, Jerusalem, Palestine, 1918 70 2.3 British and French soldiers at the Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem, Palestine, 1918 75 3.1 ‘The New Crusaders’, December 1917, Chronicles of the White Horse 119 3.2 Australian Light Horseman with Jewish girl, Rehovot, Palestine, 1918 122 3.3 ‘The 8th Crusade’. 10 December 1917, Liverpool Echo 125 3.4 British soldier standing guard on the Mount of Olives, Jerusalem, Palestine, 1918 128 3.5 Ariel Varges, British soldier with Arab refugees at base camp, Baghdad, Mesopotamia, 1917 133 4.1 D. J. A. Dickson, Mesopotamia Day poster, 1917 145 4.2 ‘Ever Glorious Profession of Arms’, July 1917, Chronicles of the White Horse 148 4.3 ‘Finish Johnny!’, Christmas card, 8th Field Survey Company, Royal Engineers, 1918 161 5.1 ‘What He Did in the Great War’, April 1917, Chronicles of the White Horse 178

vi

Acknowledgements

Writing one’s first book is a formidable task. Revising a doctoral dissertation, soliciting (begging for) input from friends and colleagues, navigating a publisher’s submission guidelines, responding to the comments and criticisms of peer reviewers, securing copyright permissions and licences, all make for a long process. But by the end of that process, when the reality sinks in that years of labour have not been in vain, the feeling is overwhelming. This is the proudest moment of my career, and a moment that owes so much to so many people. This research began when I was a doctoral student at Darwin College, University of Cambridge. There, I focused on the experience and memory of the Sinai and Palestine campaigns and was fortunate that Jon Lawrence chanced supervising a raw, undisciplined Canadian student who had much to learn not only about the First World War and British society but also about history as an academic discipline. Peter Mandler and Adrian Gregory provided additional guidance. Funding from the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust, Darwin College, the Royal Historical Society, and the Faculty of History made early research possible and living in Cambridge feasible. As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Windsor (Windsor, Canada), my research expanded. As I read more diaries, letters, and memoirs written by soldiers who had fought in Macedonia and Mesopotamia, the similarities between those campaigns and the ones fought in Sinai and Palestine were striking. Research continued after I joined the Department of History at Memorial University of Newfoundland (St John’s, Canada), where I benefitted from additional funding from my institution. It was a risky decision to spend years expanding my doctoral dissertation when the easier option, especially in a competitive job market, would have been to revise and publish the dissertation as it was. I hope the reader agrees with my choice. This research was assisted by the hard-working staff of the Imperial War Museum, the Museum of Military Medicine, the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College London, the Liddle vii

viii

Acknowledgements

Collection at the University of Leeds, the Middle East Centre Archive at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, the Australian War Memorial, the State Library of New South Wales, the Alexander Turnbull Library at the National Library of New Zealand, the Christchurch City Libraries, the Kippenberger Military Archive at the Queen Elizabeth II National Army Memorial Museum, and the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University. My thanks to friends and colleagues who read drafts of this book and to the supportive and patient staff of Cambridge University Press. Sorry for so many emails. For permission to reproduce documentary material in this book, I thank the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, the Trustees of the Museum of Military Medicine, the Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College London, and the Middle East Centre Archive at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. I also thank Nigel Malthus for allowing me to quote from the papers of Cecil Malthus, held at the Christchurch City Libraries in New Zealand. For permission to reproduce images used in this book, I thank the British Library Board, John Ansley and the Marist College Archives and Special Collections at Marist College (Poughkeepsie, USA), the Punch Cartoon Library/TopFoto, and the wonderful staff of Image Sales and Licensing at the Imperial War Museum. I regret to inform the reader that images to accompany Chapter 6 were not possible due to copyright concerns. Part of Chapter 2 was previously published in ‘Rise Phoenix-Like: British Soldiers, Civilization and the First World War in Greek Macedonia’, in Joseph Clarke and John Horne (eds.), Militarized Cultural Encounters in the Long Nineteenth Century: Making War, Mapping Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Part of Chapter 5 was previously published in ‘Ending Ottoman Misrule: British Soldiers, Liberal Imperialism, and the First World War in Palestine’, Journal of the Middle East and Africa 6, 1 (2015). Part of Chapter 6 was previously published in ‘Picturing War: Soldier Photography, Private Remembrance, and the First World War in Egypt and Palestine’, Journal of War and Culture Studies 10, 3 (2017). Every effort has been made to contact the relevant copyrightholders of material in this book. In the event of any error, the publisher will be pleased to make corrections in any reprints or future editions. Finally, special thanks are due to the people who have most impacted my career and my life. To Robert L. Nelson, who threw a lifeline to me when the academic sea was dark and stormy, where would I be without

Acknowledgements

ix

your professional support and encouragement? To my family, who have bent over backwards to support me, nothing I say here can ever match the opportunities your support has allowed me to pursue. And to my partner, Katie, who has packed her bags and moved more times than she would have liked to, I love you.

Introduction

Charles Cyril Ammons was eighteen years old when the First World War broke out in July 1914. A self-proclaimed intellectual with socialist and pacifist political leanings, he was, at first, unsure what to make of the war. On the one hand, Ammons had read Bernard Shaw’s sensational pamphlet, Common Sense About the War. Shaw’s pamphlet managed to convince him that the conflict was a struggle between capitalist and imperialist empires over market control. Germany, Ammons reasoned, had acted like other ‘Western Imperialists’ in the nineteenth century by forcing its way into the Balkans and Eastern Europe. The only difference in 1914 was that the Kaiser had arrived late to the party. For Britain to punish Germany was ‘hypocritical’, he thought. On the other hand, Ammons couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something different, something more mendacious and troublesome, about Germany’s behaviour on the world’s stage. As much as he wanted to believe that Shaw was right, that the working classes of Britain and its empire would only be serving the interests of industrial tycoons and high society if they enlisted, his position on the war slowly changed. After months of gloomy winter weather, continuing news stories about atrocities in Belgium, and a number of close friends joining the colours, Ammons decided to enlist in May 1915. After failed attempts to enlist in the Royal Naval Air Service, a field company in the 47th (2nd London) Division, and the Royal Engineers, he was finally accepted into the London Mounted Brigade Field Ambulance. As much as he had hoped to and expected to take part in the liberation of German-occupied France and Belgium, Ammons instead boarded a troopship destined for the Mediterranean Sea. Writing in his unpublished memoir fifty-five years after the war ended, he remembered that as the troopship chugged eastward, the sun beating down on the ship’s deck and the splashing water noticeably warming, he realized that he was heading neither to France nor to the Dardanelles. Alexandria was the ship’s port of call. The thought of spending the rest of the war in Egypt, far from the fighting on the Western Front, was ‘somewhat saddening’, he 1

2

Introduction

recalled, ‘the Orient seemed alien and hostile while Malta’, the final place the troopship was anchored, was ‘the last of Europe’ he saw for some time.1 Ammons’ story would have been relatable to most British and Dominion soldiers: scepticism about the war turning into a worldwide conflict, perhaps even a personal conviction against the usefulness of war, the sudden realization that Germany posed a grave threat to the international order after its invasion of Belgium, and the conclusion that each and every man in the British Empire had to do his part to stop the march of the Kaiser and the German Army.2 Where Ammons’ story differs is that he did not end up in the trenches of France and Flanders with German soldiers opposite him. Instead, he was sent away from the Western Front and away from the war he had signed up to fight. Ammons found himself first in Macedonia fighting the Bulgarian Army and later in Palestine fighting the Ottoman Army. This book is about the experience and memory of the nearly two million British and Dominion soldiers, men like Ammons, primarily from Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, who spent most or all of their war outside the Western Front. They fought in the Middle East, in Egypt, Sinai, Palestine, and Mesopotamia, and in southeastern Europe, in Macedonia; the ‘side-shows’ of the war, as Lloyd George had called them.3 The fact that so many British and Dominion soldiers saw little or none of the fighting in France and Flanders is far more important than has been previously recognized. Belgium and France were foremost in the minds of mostly young British and Dominion men when they rushed to enlist in August and September 1914 or afterwards.4 Germany’s invasion and occupation of Belgium and northeastern France was the main way that the war was understood and given meaning throughout the British Empire. Belgium and France were lands that had to be liberated from German occupation to preserve international law and, in the words of historian Sophie de Schaepdrijver, Belgium was the ‘living embodiment 1 2

3 4

Papers of Charles Cyril Ammons, unpublished memoir, Museum of Military Medicine, Corps Archives, RAMC/1599. Ammons’ motivation to enlist broadly fits the reasons Adrian Gregory has described, although he joined much later than what Gregory has identified as the first wave of enlistment in Britain in August and September 1914. See Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 32. D. Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George, vol. VI, 1918 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1937), 185. Gregory, Last Great War, 70–111; Catriona Pennell, A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Peter Simkins, Kitchener’s Army: The Raising of the New Armies, 1914–16 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 138–62.

Introduction

3

of the right-against-might values that the West was ostensibly fighting for’.5 Belgium and France, according to clergy, were where a cataclysmic struggle between good and evil was being fought.6 Belgium and France were places where British and Dominion men, in an effort to protect their own homes and families, and to prevent the ‘rape of Belgium’ from becoming the ‘rape of England’ or the ‘rape of Wales’ or the ‘rape of Australia’, were to make a stand and stop the march of militarism.7 Not only was the British Empire’s motivation for fighting the war dominated by the Western Front and Germany’s bid for continental supremacy, but also the brutal conditions of the war in France and Flanders became some of the war’s defining features. Muddied, ratinfested, waterlogged trenches, most notably at Ypres, and vicious, relentless artillery shelling were thought to represent a new kind of twentieth-century, industrialized warfare. Daniel Todman has even suggested that mud became symbolic of the war’s futility in Britain.8 Casualties also mattered. That men had fought, been wounded, and/ or died was paramount both during and after the conflict. For British society, the war’s ‘greatness’, as Todman has explained, went hand in hand with a ‘morbid revelling in mass fatality’ and an ‘amazement with vast catastrophe’.9 Scale and numbers were significant, and by most measures the war in the Middle East and Macedonia fell far behind the Western Front. The peripheral campaigns did not seem ‘great’ at all. In other ways, too, the Western Front dominated interwar society. As Jay Winter has argued, as the war moved in-between history and memory, society no longer remembered the defeat of the Central Powers as a worthwhile achievement of British, Dominion, and Allied arms. The cost of the war and a determination not to repeat the foolishness of global armed conflict, not the war’s victorious outcome, preoccupied the 5

6

7

8 9

Sophie de Schaepdrijver, ‘Occupation, Propaganda, and the Idea of Belgium’, in Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites (eds.), European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 268. Albert Marrin, The Last Crusade: The Church of England in the First World War (Durham: Duke University Press, 1974); Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade (New York: Harper One, 2014). Nicoletta F. Gullace, ‘The Blood of Our Sons’: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 39; Ilana BetEl, ‘Men and Soldiers: British Conscripts, Concepts of Masculinity, and the Great War’, in Billie Melman (ed.), Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870–1930 (London: Routledge, 1998), 81. Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2010 [2005]), 1–41. Todman, Great War, 67.

4

Introduction

thoughts and convictions of most men and women.10 While some representations of the war in popular culture, such as in films, fiction, and juvenile literature, continued to depict the war as a heroic clash of arms, the war’s victories, including the Hundred Days Offensive, as Gary Sheffield has explained, seemed in retrospect more like losses.11 Two decades after the start of the war, the experience of fighting on the Western Front had also eclipsed all other wartime experiences. The ‘popular definition of culturally legitimate war experience’, as Janet Watson has pointed out, ‘had narrowed to that of the soldier in the trenches: young junior officers or possibly men in the ranks, preferably serving in France or Belgium, and almost certainly disillusioned’.12 From that point onwards, the brooding, hypersensitive war poets of the Western Front reigned supreme. They continue to do so to this day. The central place of the Western Front both during and after the war raises a serious question: How did the millions of British and Dominion soldiers who only briefly or never set foot in France or Flanders, but instead fought in the Middle East and Macedonia experience and remember the First World War?13 Their battlegrounds were not the trenches of Ypres or Loos, but the rippling sands and punishing heat of Sinai, Palestine, and Mesopotamia, and the rock-strewn, desolate, and malariainfested valleys of Macedonia. Diseases and illnesses, from malaria and sandfly fever to dysentery and sunstroke, wounded and killed them in large numbers, not artillery shelling or handheld explosives. Instead of taking occasional leave home – more of an option for British and Irish soldiers than ANZACs – or billeting in the estaminets of France, they took leave to a number of fabled cities such as Cairo, Jerusalem, and Baghdad, as well as more modern, cosmopolitan metropolises such as Alexandria and Salonika. For the most part they didn’t fight Germans. They fought 10 11

12 13

Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (London: Reaktion, 2000), 146–85; Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory: The First World War: Myths and Realities (London: Headline, 2001); Janet S. K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 191–2. Watson, Fighting Different Wars, 186. I have not included British soldiers who fought on the Italian Front, although I’m certain that many of the same arguments could apply. While the fighting conditions along the Italian-Austrian border presented their own challenges and were different from those on the Western Front, the Italian Front was so close to the main battlefront of the war, British soldiers were fighting mostly Austrians, and Italy was as European in character, although markedly different visually and culturally from Britain, as France and Belgium. In short, Italy was familiar and close enough to the Western Front, whereas the other, non-western battlefronts were not.

Introduction

5

the Ottoman Army in Sinai, Palestine, and Mesopotamia and the Bulgarian Army in Macedonia. The campaigns in Sinai and Palestine, Macedonia, and Mesopotamia were all part of the British Empire’s global war effort. To save the remnants of the retreating Serbian Army and following Bulgaria’s decision to enter the conflict on the side of the Central Powers in October 1915, with Greece and its pro-German king thought to be nearing the same decision, a combined British and French force landed at and occupied the Greek port city of Salonika. The British Salonika Force (BSF) and the French Armée d’Orient remained in Salonika and along the Greek-Bulgarian border until September 1918, when the two forces, combined with the Serbs and smaller forces of Italians, Russians, and Greeks, broke through the line and routed the Bulgarians and their German allies. One day after Britain declared war on the Ottoman Empire in November 1914, a detachment of Indian soldiers landed at Fao in southern Mesopotamia to safeguard the oil refineries at Abadan. Between 1915 and the end of the war, British and Indian soldiers steadily advanced through Mesopotamia, capturing Basra and Baghdad (although not without setbacks), until the Ottoman Empire’s capitulation in October 1918. Regarding the war in Sinai and Palestine, the protection of the Suez Canal, through which troops from India and the antipodes travelled to the Western Front or Gallipoli, was vital. By 1916, British war strategy, partly motivated by two failed Ottoman raids on the Canal in January and February 1915, sought to protect the Canal by pushing the line deeper into Sinai. After David Lloyd George became prime minister in December 1916, Palestine along with the campaigns in Macedonia and Mesopotamia were given new prominence in British war strategy. The clear defeat of Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire stood out against the failures and pyrrhic victories on the Western Front. Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire were the first two of the Central Powers to withdraw from the conflict. The Allied breakthrough in Macedonia in September 1918 had unlocked the road to Sofia and threatened Istanbul.14 The Egyptian Expeditionary Force’s (EEF) victory at Megiddo and its march towards Aleppo in September and October 1918, alongside the British-Indian Army’s consolidation of the area surrounding Baghdad, opened up the possibility of an offensive into eastern Anatolia.

14

Matthew Hughes, Allenby and British Strategy in the Middle East 1917–1919 (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 41.

6

Introduction

To be sure, the intensity of combat in Sinai and Palestine, Macedonia, and Mesopotamia ebbed and flowed between periods of fierce, almost relentless fighting, and weeks, if not months, spent on infrastructural improvements, garrison duty, and behind-the-lines training exercises. Casualties in Palestine, especially the two failed attempts to capture Gaza in March and April 1917, were as devastating as combat on the Western Front.15 At Kajmakč alan and Dobro Pole in Macedonia, Allied and Bulgarian casualties numbered in the tens of thousands.16 The nearly five-month-long siege and surrender of the 6th (Poona) Division at Kut al-Amara in Mesopotamia ended on 29 April 1916 with 23,000 British and Indian casualties; it was the largest surrender of British arms since Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781 and would not be matched until Arthur Percival’s Malay Command in Singapore was overrun by Japan in 1942.17 But these numbers, while appalling in their own right, pale in comparison to the losses on the Western Front. The German Spring Offensive resulted in over 200,000 casualties; the final Allied Hundred Days Offensive ended with nearly 300,000 British casualties; while by the end of the four-month-long Battle of the Somme, British and Dominion forces had suffered 400,000 casualties. Nor had the campaigns in the Middle East and Macedonia, excepting the calamitous surrender of Kut al-Amara and perhaps the Second Battle of Gaza, suffered from the bungling ‘donkeys’ and ‘butchers’ of the Western Front.18 Edmund Allenby, the commander in chief of the EEF from July 1917 onwards, and Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maude, who commanded the British-Indian Army in Mesopotamia from August 1916 onwards, were lionized both during and after the war, Allenby as ‘The Deliverer of Jerusalem’ and Maude as ‘The Liberator of Bagdad’.19 Like Allenby and Maude, Lieutenant General George Milne, commander in chief of the BSF, was highly popular with ex-servicemen. Carving out a place for the war outside the Western Front was a difficult task for other reasons, too. After the war, the question of who could and could not claim to have sacrificed during the war was met by a multitude of voices. Disfigurement and dismemberment produced 15

16 17 18 19

James E. Kitchen, The British Imperial Army in the Middle East: Morale and Military Identity in the Sinai and Palestine Campaigns, 1916–18 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 46–53. Richard C. Hall, Balkan Breakthrough: The Battle of Dobro Pole 1918 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 75, 137. Nikolas Gardner, The Siege of Kut-al-Amara: At War in Mesopotamia, 1915–1916 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). Alan Clark, The Donkeys (London: Pimlico, 1961); John Laffin, British Butchers and Bunglers of World War One (Gloucester: Bramley, 1998). Mary R. Parkman, Fighters for Peace (New York: The Century Co., 1919).

Introduction

7

a mass of ex-servicemen who laid claim to a special place in interwar society.20 Indeed, soldiering had changed notions of citizenship and civic participation.21 Regional pride also resulted in distinct, local identities.22 Especially in mourning, interwar Britain revealed the divisive nature of remembrance. Armistice Day activities between 1919 and 1946, as Adrian Gregory has shown, highlighted the contesting visions of honouring the war dead, which were fed by differences in class, gender, religion, and combatant status.23 Over the past two decades, the British Empire’s wars outside the Western Front have received increased scholarly attention. Military histories have narrated the campaigns.24 Studies have focused on the experience of soldiering in Egypt, Sinai, Palestine, and Macedonia.25 Other works have told the story of the wars in the Middle East in chronological fashion and with extracts from soldier diaries, letters, and memoirs to lend a voice from below to the narrative.26 Works on grand strategy, politics, logistics, and the wartime need for natural resources, such as oil, have also considered the Middle East.27 Works on soldiers and religion have considered Palestine, both from the perspective of personal patterns of worship and references to the campaign as a twentieth-century crusade.28 Works on wartime medicine and the colossal efforts taken to 20 21 22 23 24

25

26 27

28

Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Gullace, ‘The Blood of Our Sons’. Helen B. McCartney, Citizen Soldiers: The Liverpool Territorials in the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Adrian Gregory, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day 1919–1946 (Oxford: Berg, 1994). David L. Bullock, Allenby’s War: The Palestine-Arabian Campaigns, 1916–1918 (London: Blandford Press, 1998); Anthony Bruce, The Last Crusade: The Palestine Campaign in the First World War (London: John Murray, 2002); John D. Grainger, The Battle for Palestine 1917 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006); John D. Grainger, The Battle for Syria 1918–1920 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013); Charles Townshend, Desert Hell: The British Invasion of Mesopotamia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011). Woodfin, Camp and Combat; Kitchen, British Imperial Army; Alan Wakefield and Simon Moody, Under the Devil’s Eye: The British Military Experience in Macedonia 1915–1918 (Barnsley: Pen and Sword Military, 2011 [2004]); Terry Kinloch, Devils on Horses: In the Words of the ANZACs in the Middle East 1916–19 (Auckland: Exisle Publishing, 2016 [2007]). David R. Woodward, Hell in the Holy Land: World War I in the Middle East (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2006). Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, The Logistics and Politics of the British Campaigns in the Middle East, 1914–22 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Coates Ulrichsen, The First World War in the Middle East (London: Hurst and Company, 2014); Rob Johnson, The Great War and the Middle East: A Strategic Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Timothy Winegard, The First World Oil War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016). Michael Snape, God and the British Soldier: Religion and the British Army in the First and Second World Wars (London: Routledge, 2005); Eitan Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon

8

Introduction

eradicate illnesses such as malaria and other tropical diseases have also considered the war’s non-western spaces, as have studies of cross-cultural interactions in the Balkans.29 Yet none of these works have fulfilled the potential of looking at the wars outside the Western Front alongside each other. This book is the first full-length study to consider the experience of soldiers outside the Western Front comparatively, and the first, to this author’s knowledge, to explore the memory of the campaigns through the eyes of ex-servicemen and, once again, in comparison to the other peripheral fronts.30 And it makes sense to compare them and not treat them separately. Contemporaries certainly did. Lloyd George pushed for offensives in Macedonia, Mesopotamia, and Palestine to relieve the British Empire’s commitment to the Western Front and to find an indirect path to victory, one which did not compel Britain to defeat the German Army in France and Flanders.31 Other diplomats, politicians, and advisors, such as Leo Amery, Sir Henry Wilson, and Herbert Samuel, concerned with the war’s global implications, considered Egypt, Palestine, and Mesopotamia central to the British Empire’s lines of communications and the protection of India. All of the peripheral fronts were at the heart of the debate between a western, direct approach to the war and an eastern, indirect approach to the war, that historians have characterized as a strategic and policy battle between ‘easterners’ and ‘westerners’.32 Even military commanders in charge of the peripheral campaigns, such as General Sir Archibald Murray, the commander-inchief of the EEF from March 1916 to June 1917, weighed the importance of all of the British Empire’s peripheral campaigns on the war’s outcome. Murray wrote that ‘Palestine, Egypt, Tanganyika, West Africa, and Mesopotamia mattered not’ if the war was lost in France and

29

30

31 32

Press, 2005); Bar-Yosef, ‘The Last Crusade? British Propaganda and the Palestine Campaign, 1917–18’, Journal of Contemporary History 36, 1 (2001), 87–109. Eran Dolev, Allenby’s Military Medicine: Life and Death in World War One Palestine (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007); see ‘War Against Nature: Malaria in Salonika, East Africa, and the Middle East’ in Mark Harrison (ed.), The Medical War: British Military Medicine in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Eugene Michail, The British and the Balkans: Forming Images of Foreign Lands, 1900–1950 (London: Continuum, 2011). One of the few exceptions is Eugene Michail, ‘“A Sting of Remembrance!”: Collective Memory and its Forgotten Armies’ in Jessica Meyer (ed.), British Popular Culture and the First World War (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 237–57. Hughes, Allenby and British Strategy, 23–42. David French, British Strategy and War Aims 1914–1916 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986); Brock Millman, Pessimism and British War Policy 1916–1918 (London: Frank Cass, 2001).

Sources and Structure

9

Flanders.33 The conditions of soldiering were similar, motivations were imperially minded, and all were secondary or worse to the Western Front. Sources and Structure In comparing both the experience and memory of the British Empire’s wars in the Middle East and Macedonia, this book uses a range of sources, almost all of which were written by soldiers themselves, from archives in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. It makes use of wartime diaries, correspondence, poems, songs, soldier-produced newspapers, articles penned by soldiers in popular journals, periodicals, and the press, as well as unpublished and published memoirs. This book also uses visual sources, such as regimental emblems and soldier photography, to help explain experience, and post-war, commemorative scrapbooks to help explain memory. Admittedly, most of my sources are British rather than Australian or from New Zealand, and the war in Egypt, Sinai, Palestine, and Macedonia features more prominently than the war in Mesopotamia. Furthermore, I should make clear that this book is explicitly and exclusively about the experience and memory of British and Dominion soldiers. It does not deal with how the British and Dominion publics viewed these campaigns, except when necessary to make sense of a soldier’s comments or to enhance my argument, or how the British and Dominion publics remembered these campaigns. This book covers the period between 1914 and 1939. It is divided into two parts. Part I looks at the experience of war outside the Western Front, focusing on soldiering, touring, how British and Dominion soldiers found meaning in being away from the Western Front, and the fear of soldiers that the home front had either forgotten that they were fighting, suffering, and dying away from France and Flanders, or that their wars were ‘picnics’ and a lesser form of wartime sacrifice compared to fighting the German Army on the Western Front. Part II turns to the memory of the campaigns outside the Western Front and shows how ex-servicemen were ‘agents of memory’, as Jay Winter and Antoine Prost have labelled soldier memoirists, who were keen to overturn any negative opinion of the part they played in the war. As we will see, how ex-servicemen remembered the war in public and in print, in the form of memoirs, differed considerably from how ex-servicemen remembered the war in private and in photographs and memorabilia, in the form of commemorative scrapbooks.

33

Quoted in Johnson, The Great War and the Middle East, 59.

10

Introduction

In Part I, Chapter 1 explores the experience of soldiering in the Middle East and Macedonia. Fighting outside the Western Front presented many unique hardships, including fierce combat that could, on occasion, rival the slaughter on the Western Front, such as at Gaza or Ctesiphon, harsh climatic and environmental conditions, geographic isolation, the threat of insects and tropical diseases such as malaria and sandfly fever, and fractured links to home, as mail took much longer to arrive, if it arrived at all, and leave home was rarely granted. The main point of this chapter is twofold. First, in addition to cataloguing the hardships of soldiering in the words of those who fought, this chapter reveals that soldiers in the Middle East and Macedonia constantly, almost obsessively, looked to the Western Front when considering their lot in the war and judging whether they had it ‘soft’ or ‘hard’. Second, by comparing their campaigns to the war on the Western Front, soldiers were trying to prove both to themselves and to those at home that fighting outside the Western Front was not a lesser sacrifice, that they had suffered as much or worse than their comrades in France and Flanders, and that, in turn, they had done their ‘bit’. Chapter 2 presents the other side of soldiering outside the Western Front: tourism. In particular, this chapter argues that perhaps no other British Empire soldiers during the war embodied the dual identity of soldier-tourist more than the men who fought outside the Western Front. This was especially true of soldiers in Egypt, Palestine, and Macedonia, who dealt with long stretches of inactivity and whose soldiering involved more work on infrastructural improvements and other general labouring than their counterparts on the Western Front. Soldiers were keen to visit and tour the sites of both Old and New Testament Christianity, ancient Egypt, Islam, and the non-western world’s cosmopolitan, multicultural cities, such as Alexandria, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Salonika. Yet, almost to a man, they were left disappointed by what they saw. Incorporating historian Gabriel Liulevicius’s idea of the ‘imperial mindscape’, which he used to explain how German soldiers encountered and interacted with Eastern Europe on the Eastern Front, this chapter argues that British and Dominion soldiers did much the same, particularly in the Middle East and Macedonia. And further like German soldiers in the east, British and Dominion soldiers also offered a ‘prescription’, a fix, for the problems of poor civil infrastructure, shoddy architecture, filth and squalor, and immoral commercial practices that seemed to them to dominate everywhere from Alexandria to Salonika; that fix was some form of British imperial rule or influence. As this chapter explains, what soldiers saw while touring the Middle East and Macedonia

Sources and Structure

11

directly contributed to how they found meaning in being away from the Western Front. After examining the two sides to the experience of warring outside the Western Front, soldiering and touring, Chapter 3 looks at how soldiers made sense of fighting Ottomans and Bulgarians instead of Germans, and what these campaigns meant to them during the war. Many soldiers, especially in the early days and months of the campaigns in Egypt and Macedonia, were fed up at being ‘exiled’ from the Western Front. Others felt embarrassed not to be contributing to the war against the German Army and the liberation of Belgium. So far from the Western Front, they had to find a different meaning for their campaigns. Some soldiers found meaning in the safety that the war outside the Western Front seemed to offer and the knowledge that fighting in Palestine or Macedonia meant a greater chance of surviving the war and returning home. This makes sense when one considers that so many soldiers were first and foremost civilians, either volunteers in the New Armies, enlisted men under the Derby Scheme, or conscripts. Others, however, mostly pre-war regular soldiers, were more concerned about the negative effect that fighting outside the Western Front would have on their military careers. Yet finding meaning, as this chapter argues, had to go beyond emotions of embarrassment, safety, or concerns over career mobility. To find that deeper, more serious meaning, this chapter shows that soldiers made one of the only arguments they could: that they were contributing to the wider, global war effort. In Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Macedonia, then, as will be shown, they presented their part in the war as contributing to the overall defeat of the Central Powers. Other meanings were also found, such as crusading against kultur and the ‘terrible Turk’, liberating Arabs and Jews from Ottoman misrule, and bringing the benefits of western civilization to the supposedly backward peoples of the Middle East as well as to the Greeks who, at some point, soldiers argued, had fallen behind the rest of Europe. In both this chapter and in Chapter 5, it is impossible not to see in the writings of soldiers and ex-servicemen an argument for Britain’s imperial project; that, to them, the war and the aims of British liberal imperialism were compatible and mutually reinforced each other. Empire still mattered. Part I concludes with Chapter 4 and an examination of the idea of the ‘forgotten army’. Whether in Palestine, Mesopotamia, or Macedonia, soldiers during the war were absolutely certain that their part in the war – their suffering, as explored in Chapter 1, and their contribution to the wider war effort, such as the liberation of Palestine or Mesopotamia, as shown in Chapter 3 – had gone unnoticed by the home front. In some

12

Introduction

ways worse was their fear that those at home had badly misrepresented the war outside the Western Front, recognizing the only ‘real’ war as the one being fought in France and Flanders while those in the Middle East and Macedonia were on a ‘picnic’. Again, the Western Front was foremost in the minds of soldiers away from it. This fear became more serious in the war’s final two months, as soldiers in the BSF, alongside their French, Greek, and Serbian allies, forced the surrender of Bulgaria, while the EEF’s northward drive to Aleppo knocked out the Ottomans. In both cases, soldiers in Macedonia and the Middle East argued that it was their campaign that had set in motion the downfall of the Central Powers and, ultimately, the armistice with Germany and an end to the war. In Part II, Chapters 5 and 6 consider the memory of the campaigns outside the Western Front. Chapter 5 looks at the public memory of the campaigns as expressed in the memoirs of ex-servicemen. It argues that ex-servicemen in the interwar period still believed that they had been forgotten by the general public, despite a number of popular culture and commemorative representations of their campaigns. Then, using Winter and Prost’s argument about ex-servicemen memoir writers as ‘agents of memory’, it argues that ex-servicemen used their memoirs as a tool with which they tried to persuade the public that they, too, had suffered and sacrificed during the war. In this way, this chapter links back to Chapters 1 and 3. Furthermore, this chapter investigates the proliferation of crusading rhetoric in the memoirs of ex-servicemen who fought in Palestine, arguing that most soldiers did not use the language of religious, holy war but instead of liberal imperialism and a crusade on behalf of western civilization. This chapter also returns to the soldiers’ ideas, shown in Chapter 3, that their campaigns had brought civilization to the Arabs of Mesopotamia and the Greeks and that, once again, it was they who had actually won the war. Crucially, these themes arose again after the war but for different reasons, emphasizing the need to consider wartime writings as separate from post-war memoirs. Finally, Chapter 6 is a brief investigation of the private memory of ex-servicemen. It uses an entirely different source than memoirs, and one not meant to influence public opinion at all: scrapbooks. This chapter makes two arguments. First, it argues that ex-servicemen scrapbooks were spaces of private memory. They were, to borrow from Pierre Nora, sites of memory. British and Dominion soldiers who had photographed the war and spent most of their service on the war’s non-western fronts, in Egypt, Sinai, Palestine, Macedonia, and Mesopotamia, had the chance to remember their war differently. Indeed, they had to remember

Sources and Structure

13

it differently. Their war, as we have discussed, bore little resemblance to the conflict on the Western Front. Moreover, ex-servicemen who had fought outside the Western Front were making their scrapbooks at a time when commemorative activities across the British Empire were breaking ground for tributes to ex-servicemen and women in the form of cenotaphs, statues, and memorials, few of which mentioned the wars outside France and Flanders.34 Ex-servicemen used scrapbooks as a way of actively constructing a past that was both recognizable and acceptable to them. For some soldiers, that meant picturing the war as a relentless struggle against the Ottoman or Bulgarian armies, and the harsh climatic and environmental conditions of the Middle East and Macedonia. Others pictured the war as an exciting episode of travel. Others still simply pictured the war in chronological order, slotting their personal experience of the war into the narrative. Last, this chapter will also show that there was a clear divide between ex-servicemen’s public memory, as expressed in memoirs in Chapter 5, and private memory, expressed here. While publicly ex-servicemen made a number of claims that were meant to compete with the Western Front, including an equality of suffering on the battlefield, crusading against Ottoman oppression, liberating Arabs and Jews, coming to the aid of the Serbs, civilizing Middle Eastern and southeastern Europeans, and playing a decisive part in the wider war effort, none of these themes, except the other war’s climatic and environmental difficulties, are reflected in scrapbooks. Ex-servicemen’s scrapbooks are almost entirely about the lighter side of their wartime experience, namely travel, tourism, and camaraderie. Taken together, this book’s six chapters make clear that not only was the experience of the First World War in the Middle East and Macedonia markedly different from that of the war in France and Flanders, but also the memories of these campaigns were different. Moreover, from the start of the First World War to the end of the interwar period, soldiers fighting outside the Western Front were endlessly concerned about and fearful that their sacrifice didn’t measure up, and that their ‘bit’ in the war was never known and subsequently forgotten. Indeed, they struggled to show those at home that their war was a worthwhile contribution to the defence of King and Country and the defeat of Prussian militarism and kultur. This anxiety affected how they experienced soldiering and touring and how they assigned meaning to the campaign; it birthed the feeling of being mispresented and forgotten throughout the war and at its end; and it 34

Alex King, Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance (Oxford: Berg, 1999).

14

Introduction

affected how they chose to remember their campaigns after the armistice. By including the soldier’s story of the Western Front alongside its counterparts in the Middle East and Macedonia, a greater appreciation of the interwar debate in Britain and the Dominions on the war, on service, and on memory emerges.

Part I

Experience

1

Soldiering

The daily routine in connection with the horses along with the ever present sand and terrible heat is enough to dishearten anyone. We had two or three days of 124 degrees in the shade, and there was no shade. Now what do you think of that? Is it any wonder that we are all anxious to get out of Egypt? Every day the temperature is 100 degrees or more and we have to go out and work in it. There is lots of work in connection with the Light Horse, particularly on Active Service. All our supplies have to be carted about from place to place, both for the horses and ourselves, stables and tents are cleaned daily, horses fed, watered and groomed, stable Piquet . . . All these small jobs are done in the scorching sun and sand, and to make things worse there is no comfortable rest to look forward to when its [sic] over. Just throw yourself down in the dirty sand of the tent and let the flies chew your ears off.1 Private Oliver Joseph Burke Clarke, Letter to Family, Sinai, August 1916

In my 40-lb tent in the East, Where we lived with the bird and the beast, To evade old King Sol, You dig down like a mole, About five or six feet deep at least; Then you make a nice hole for your feet, Which gives you a table and a seat; Oh there’s not the least doubt, It’s a proper knock-out In my 40-lb tent in the East. If you ever come out to the East I’ll invite you one day to a feast, And if you dont [sic] swear At the flies that are there, I shall reckon you’ve passed for a priest. Then, what with the spiders and fleas, 1

Papers of Oliver Joseph Burke Clarke, Clarke to Nickie, 9 August 1916, Australian War Memorial (AWM) PR00054.

17

18

Soldiering You’ll imagine you’re in the D.T.’s. Oh! if you could but see The mad antics of me In my 40-lb tent in the East.2 Sapper Bill Evans, The Tigris Mercury, Mesopotamia, March 1916

In Winter! Slush and slimy slop And sodden boots – it ain’t much cop! Trenches dank and dugouts damp, Miles of mud to make a camp The old sun hides his face away – One’s washing can’t be done to-day, And ‘Oh for Summer’s’ all we say In Winter.

In Summer! Dust and filth and sweat, Shirts wet through and bites, you bet! Dugouts hot as hell, and flies Get on one’s face and in one’s eyes. The old sun blazes down all day, The dust storms come from every way, And ‘Oh for Winter’ then we say In Summer.3 RANEFER, The Moonraker, Macedonia, October 1917

Whether in the Middle East or Macedonia, British and Dominion soldiers experienced some of the war’s worst non-combat hardships. In Sinai and Palestine, soldiers laboured and fought under ‘scorching sun and sand’, as Private Clarke put it. Much the same conditions affected those fighting in Mesopotamia, as Sapper Bill Evans made clear. In Macedonia, cold, wet, and wintry days turned abruptly and often unexpectedly into hot and steamy summer days, transforming dugouts and trenches into sweltering ovens. Mosquitoes and flies plagued the men on all three fronts, carrying with them crippling and potentially fatal diseases such as malaria and debilitating sicknesses such as sandfly fever. On all three fronts, too, homesickness was widespread. Sinai and Macedonia looked nothing like the lush green of England, Scotland, and Wales, and the apparent absence of modern agriculture and farming put Sinai and parts of Palestine far behind the cultivated fields of Australia and New Zealand. Leave home was constantly on the minds of soldiers, but due to logistical problems, shortages in Allied shipping, and the German submarine threat, few ever made it back. The comforts of home, or at least something resembling home, like the estaminets and behind-the-lines life open to 2

The Tigris Mercury, 2 March 1916, NP.

3

The Moonraker, 1 October 1917, 30.

Soldiering

19

men in France and Flanders, were also missing. Letters took weeks if not months to arrive, if they arrived at all, while the contents of parcels looked better on departure than arrival. To be sure, all soldiers, on all fronts, in all armies, suffered hardships during the First World War. British and Dominion soldiers on the Western Front were faced with their own set of harsh environmental and combat conditions. Waterlogged, muddy trenches in Flanders, most notably at Ypres, became one of the war’s defining features. Mud was symbolic of the war’s futility.4 Winters on the Western Front were bitterly cold. The winter of 1916–17 was especially bad. The soil turned rock hard; soldiers’ clothing and blankets froze; and cases of frostbite, exposure, and trench foot were endemic. Trench and attritional warfare also had to be endured. This chapter does not seek simply to recover the lost experience of British and Dominion soldiers fighting in the Middle East and Macedonia. Others have accomplished this task admirably.5 Instead, this chapter seeks to understand the conditions of campaigning in Sinai, Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Macedonia in order to provide context for the meaning of the war (Chapter 3), the feeling of being forgotten (Chapter 4), and how the experience of the war was remembered in postwar writings by British and Dominion ex-servicemen (Chapter 5). The physically demanding and emotionally frustrating experience of fighting in the Middle East and Macedonia was central to the claim made by soldiers that they had contributed equally to the empire’s war effort. While there was no single war experience in the Middle East and Macedonia, much as Edward C. Woodfin has argued of the campaign in Sinai and Palestine, most British and Dominion soldiers fighting in the Middle East and Macedonia looked to the Western Front when considering their lot in the war and judging whether they had it ‘soft’ or ‘hard’. As bad as the conditions were on the Western Front – and most soldiers knew something about them, either through stories told by comrades and family members who had seen the front or because they had fought there before being transferred further afield – soldiers fighting the British Empire’s other wars were certain that their part in the world war also was a struggle. They, too, soldiers wrote in diaries and in letters home, had experienced the worst war had to offer, and had suffered hardships as bad as or worse than those in France and Flanders. But soldiers in the Middle East and Macedonia grumbled about their hardships for 4 5

Todman, Great War, 1–41. Woodfin, Camp and Combat; Kitchen, British Imperial Army; Townshend, When God Made Hell; and Wakefield and Moody, Under the Devil’s Eye.

20

Soldiering

a reason. In a war in which service, and maybe even citizenship and national and communal belonging, was defined as having fought, suffered, and sacrificed for the empire, British and Dominion soldiers away from the Western Front seemed to be out of harm’s way and doing little, if anything, to defeat Germany and liberate occupied France and Belgium. By cataloguing, detailing, and stressing the physical and emotional hardships they faced, and by comparing the conditions of their war to the Western Front, soldiers showed that they had contributed equally to the war effort and had done ‘their bit’. Climate and Environment Although combat could, at times, be as brutal outside the Western Front as on it – battalion casualty rates at the Second Battle of Gaza in April 1917 rivalled those at the Somme – for most soldiers, the weather, good or bad, was the focus of attention.6 Jessica Meyer’s Men of War has shown that British soldiers on the Western Front wrote endlessly about the weather and environmental conditions they faced. Similarly, Ilana Bet-El has demonstrated that most British men drafted into service ‘were actually fighting two wars – with the Germans and with the weather, without it always being clear which was considered the worse’.7 Soldiers fighting in campaigns outside Europe in the twentieth century paid particular attention to weather, environment, and other hardships posed by campaigning so far from home and often in unfamiliar climates and environments. American and Australian troops in the South Pacific during the Second World War battled through dense jungles, extreme heat and humidity, and diseases such as malaria and dengue fever. Soldiers in the British Eighth Army in North Africa during the Second World War, as Jonathan Fennell has shown, were as fixated on weather, climate, and environment as the British and Dominion soldiers in the Middle East during the First World War we are about to explore.8 In Sinai and Palestine, with the hot, summer heat came dust and sandstorms. Khamsins – dust and sandstorms between March and May, produced by a hot southerly wind – ravaged the desert for up to fifty days. Moments of cool turned into heat, breezes into gusts, and 6 7

8

Kitchen, British Imperial Army, 52. Jessica Meyer, Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 49–50; Ilana Bet-El, Conscripts: Lost Legions of the Great War (Stroud: Sutton, 1999), 90. Eric Bergerud, Touched with Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 55–104; Jonathan Fennell, Combat and Morale in the North African Campaign: The Eighth Army and the Path to El Alamein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013 [2011]), 124–50.

Climate and Environment

21

stagnant dust into whirling, rough projectiles. O. H. Best of the Royal Signal Company described the claustrophobic effect of the khamsin at Weli Sheikh Nuran. Today is perfectly foul. I woke at 6.30 when it should be cool + pleast, with mouth + eyes full of dust, sand + flies crawling all over my face in a desultory manner. Add to this a choking feelg as if one were shut up in an airtight oven of small dimensions, a brazen sky carryg a slowly mang stream of fine dust + you obtain a faint idea of a Khamsin. The heat increases by leaps + bounds . . . one feels on the verge of collapse, as it feels as if somethg will burst inside me. At abt 8a.m. comes the blessed relief of perspiration + for a minute one can breathe again. Then the insufferable heat shows it is not such by getting worse each min. Food one cannot look at, a pipe is no relief as one’s mouth is dry + dusty. The water is hot + wooly + flies crawl abt one as one tries to drink. You try to wash + the water (v. little) is covered with dust + rubbish, as is towel, soap . . . one hacks good chunks out, flies + sand settle on these + so on . . . One wraps oneself up in blanket to keep the dust off, but it merely sifts it + directs it. Then it is too hot + one casts it off, filling the air with dust in doing so.9

Australian Captain Henry Stanley Davis of the 46th Battalion, writing from ‘Somewhere on the Sinai Peninsula’, as he put it to his family, endured ‘a devil of a sandstorm’ for three consecutive days in April 1916. ‘You couldn’t see more than a few yards’, he explained, ‘even if you had just cleaned the sand out of your unfortunate eyes. It was very punishing on any bare parts of your body’.10 It was ‘impossible to eat anything without taking in large quantities of sand’, and tens of men, he continued, were troubled by sand colic, an intestinal obstruction triggered by ingesting sand. Letter writing became an exercise in frustration. ‘The sand is horrid’, Lieutenant Colonel Randolf Baker of the Yeomanry Mounted Division wrote to his brother. ‘I am writing this lying on my valise until the remains of the sand storm going on can’, ending his correspondence prematurely in illegible, broken handwriting.11 L. G. Moore of the 2/15th Battalion, London Regiment, also stopped midway through his letter. Noticing the poor state of his penmanship, he explained to his parents that ‘this is due to the fact that our usual afternoon sandstorm is blowing and every now and then I have to stop and blow the sand off the paper. So please excuse and remember that I should undoubtedly do better if I could only be free from interruption.’12 9 10 11 12

Papers of Lieutenant O. H. Best, Best to Unknown, 17 May 1917, Imperial War Museum (IWM) Documents.1699. Papers of Captain Henry Stanley Davis, Davis to Family, April 1916, AWM 2DRL/0547. Papers of Lieutenant Colonel Sir Randolf Baker, Baker to Robert, 31 January 1916, IWM Documents.3723. Papers of L. G. Moore, Moore to Parents, 19 September 1917, IWM Documents.12814.

22

Soldiering

Figure 1.1 Yeomanry camp at Bir el Mazar after khamsin, Sinai, April 1917. IWM Q 50822

Military activities were also affected by the khamsin. Bell tents had to be tended to near constantly to prevent them from collapsing (Figure 1.1). Trenches had to be dug to a depth of seven feet, deeper than those on the Western Front. The sides often caved in from a strong gust of wind or loose piece of earth, forcing soldiers into a never-ending process of digging, waiting, and redigging. The work was ‘heart-breaking’, wrote one soldier, ‘trenches are completed one day and often fall in the next’.13 Marching was also made more difficult. Private H. T. Pope of the 2/15th Battalion, Prince of Wales Civil Service Rifles, trudged along towards Weli Sheikh Nuran, his ‘feet sinking into soft sand at every step and exerting every ounce of strength to keep up with the pace. Fellows cursing and swearing everywhere. So thick was the dust’, he wrote in his diary in bewilderment, ‘that if a person had been shaking a cork mat in one’s face it could not have been worse. It got in our nostrils and down our 13

Papers of A. M. McGrigor, diary, 22 April 1916, IWM Documents.9984.

Climate and Environment

23

throats and covered every exposed portion of our bodies with thick dirt.’14 Men unaccustomed to the punishing heat had trouble acclimatising. At Basra, Lieutenant Ilay Ferrier of the 48th Bombay Pioneers found the heat ‘perfectly awful in the day. One simply drips the whole time’, he wrote to his mother, ‘we have all given up attempting to keep clean. It is a dripping wet climate + with the thermometer at 111 degrees F in the shade you can imagine how we enthuse over daily work + war!’15 Similar temperatures were experienced by British and Indian soldiers of the Punjabi Regiment near Nasiriyah.16 In the Struma Valley, cold, frosty mornings changed to hot, humid afternoons. ‘Heat in the sun is 120 degrees and that’s how it seems to go on’, wrote A. E. Denley of the Royal Flying Corps in his diary, ‘Talk about extremes! England cannot be compared with this climate’.17 In the Jordan Valley, summertime temperatures exceeded even the hottest days in Egypt, Sinai, or Macedonia. The evaporation of the Dead Sea in summer released a heat wave of humidity, weighing down the air. Soldiers in the Machine Gun Corps recorded temperatures of 132 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade in May 1918. Defensive emplacements were delayed by continual halts in the work and men falling out with heat exhaustion, unable to continue digging.18 By August, Australians in the 12th Light Horse Regiment recorded temperatures of 143 degrees Fahrenheit.19 Efforts to reduce soldiers’ exposure to heat had mixed results. Pith helmets were issued to soldiers in Sinai in March 1916 and spinal pads to cool their backs.20 Working hours were changed to the late evening and early morning, but protective gear and orders to limit working hours were only effective if soldiers earnestly adopted tropical equipment and conformed to the labour schedule. Some soldiers did not. ‘There are always a few cases of sunstroke’, one British soldier noted in his diary. Most of the cases were ‘traceable to carelessness’, he explained, ‘without a hat for a few minutes or working hard in the midd. of the day’.21 Collapsible canteens and shacks, designed to shield soldiers from the sun and sandstorms, more often created oven-like conditions. Men of the Shropshire Yeomanry, garrisoning the Suez Canal in 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Papers of H. T. Pope, diary, 30 July 1917, IWM Documents. 6877. Papers of Ilay Ferrier, Ferrier to Mother, 19 May 1916, Liddle Collection (LC) LIDDLE/WWI/MES/031. Papers of Stanley Van Buren Laing, Van Buren Laing to Wife, 20 July 1915, LC LIDDLE/WWI/MES/058. Papers of A. E. Denley, diary, 5 January 1917, IWM Documents.7804. Papers of F. A. Spencer, Spencer to Ruth, 29 May 1918, LC LIDDLE/WWI/EP/078. Papers of Major Philip Arthur Chambers, diary, 4 August 1918, AWM 1DRL/0196. Papers of H. C. Brittain, diary, ND, IWM Documents.12696. Best to Unknown, 17 May 1917, IWM Documents.1699.

24

Soldiering

May 1916, recorded a temperature of 120 degrees Fahrenheit inside their bell tents.22 Major Van Buren Laing of the Punjabi Regiment, digging trenches near Nasiriyah, heard that his and his comrade’s replacements, a company of Territorials, had one soldier killed and fifteen others, including two officers, knocked out by heatstroke.23 Heatstroke was so common in Mesopotamia, wrote Maurice Nicoll of the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), that it was known as ‘Mesopotamitis or acute debility, or the Fear of God’.24 Yet few medical officers knew how to treat heatstroke. E. H. Cameron, a Midlothian physician in Mesopotamia, received no instruction about heatstroke before leaving for Mesopotamia in 1916. The sight of a comatose heatstroke patient before him, violently convulsing, shocked him.25 In July 1916, Sir Victor Horsley, a renowned physician, professor, and fellow of the Royal Society, died of heatstroke and hyperpyrexia in Amara. Entire brigades could be stricken with heatstroke. As the 5th Mounted Brigade trained near the Wadi Ghuzze in Palestine, sickness rates neared 25 per cent in May 1917. Most of the men had been hospitalised with a ‘touch of the sun’.26 Soldiers manning remote desert outposts and redoubts, a staple of combat in Sinai, had little chance of receiving prompt medical attention if sunstroke hit. Three soldiers battling the Senussi in Egypt died of sunstroke and were left exposed until reinforcements found and buried their bodies.27 Making the heat worse was the lack of readily available, clean drinking water. Men of the 2/5th Battalion, London Field Ambulance, received only one water bottle per man per day, out of which they had to spare some to wash in the morning.28 Near Ramleh in November 1917, some men had less than half a bottle of water per day, to be used for bathing, tea, shaving, and drinking.29 Shortly after the Second Battle of Gaza in April 1917, Sergeant T. B. Minshall of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry recorded how emotionally and physically broken his men were: [W]e were working at full pressure trenching and wiring in the burning sun, the hot winds parched the men’s lips and throats until some were overcome with the 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Papers of W. S. Scott, diary, 14 May 1917, IWM Documents.8203. Papers of Stanley Van Buren Laing, Van Buren Laing to Wife, 20 July 1915, LC LIDDLE/WWI/MES/058. Martin Swayne, [pseudonym], In Mesopotamia (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1917), 49. Papers of E. H. Cameron, unpublished memoir, LC LIDDLE/WWI/MES/019. McGrigor, diary, 21 May 1917, IWM Documents.9984. Brittain, diary, ND, IWM Documents.12696. Papers of H. Empson, diary, 13–14 July 1917, IWM Documents.11943. Papers of E. Catford, Catford to Parents, 10 November 1917, LC LIDDLE/WWI/ EP/008.

Insects and Disease

25

heat and had to be carried to our position. To see fine big strong men crying like little children for water, ‘precious water’, was terrible, luckily I stuck it fine, rushed to my water bottle and relieved some of the unfortunate ones by moistening their lips and allowing them to have a little drink.

Although the water pipeline had been extended by April 1917 to the EEF’s position opposite the Ottoman Army’s trenches at Gaza, water remained a scarce commodity. ‘It is impossible for those at home’, Minshall continued in his diary, ‘who have only to turn on the tap to realise the value of water in these far-away lands’.30 Insects and Disease Inside tents, bivouacs, and mess halls, flies and mosquitoes plagued men. ‘By jove you ought to see the flies’, wrote an Australian officer in the 46th Battalion from Palestine to his father in Drysdale, Victoria. ‘You woudn’t [sic] think there were so many flies in the world’, he wrote in amazement. ‘Our dug-outs are full of them and there’s no chance of getting any sleep unless you cover your face. Its [sic] when you’re trying to eat a bit of bread and jam, tho’ that they reach their limit.’31 In Sinai, men had to fend off flies with one hand while they wrote and ate with the other.32 For men suffering from septic sores in Hebron, flies were drawn to both open and bandaged wounds.33 In the worst malarial breeding ground of the war, the Jordan Valley, the heat combined with the flies and mosquitoes left Terrence Eden of the Armoured Motor Battery feeling ‘almost raw’ and ‘absolutely dead’.34 Flies, not Turks, according to one soldier-author in Barrak, the soldier newspaper of the Imperial Camel Corps, were the real enemy in Sinai and Palestine: There are Turks who sling us bullets, There’s the danger of the bomb, And the gas-cloud that would waft us On its wings to Kingdom come, But the grimmest, deadliest foeman Before whom the bravest Fly Is the MUSCA FURIOSA Whom to meet with is to die.35 30 31 32 33 34 35

Papers of T. B. Minshall, typescript account, April 1917, IWM 86/51/1. Davis to Family, 6 April 1917, AWM 2DRL/0547. Papers of Albany Thomas Frederick Varney, Varney to Parents, 22 May 1916, AWM PR05253. Papers of C. C. M. Millis, diary, December 1917, IWM Documents.1292. Papers of Terence Eden, Eden to Father, May 1918, LC LIDDLE/WWI/GS/1840. Barrak (The Camel Corps Review: The Official Organ or the Imperial Camel Corps), 1 July 1917, 9–10.

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Soldiers who were transferred to Egypt from Macedonia and found themselves in the urban environs of Alexandria and Cairo appreciated the change. In Macedonia, the flies were a ‘worse plague than they ever were in Egypt’, wrote Lieutenant Harold Lake of the Durham Light Infantry, and ‘had to be brushed off the food as it was being put into your mouth’.36 As a soldier-author in The Moonraker, the soldier newspaper of the 7th Battalion, Wiltshire Regiment in Macedonia, phrased it, the flies were ‘as countless as the sandbags’.37 When bully beef cans were cracked open near Lake Doiran, flies came buzzing into tents ‘in a black mass’.38 Mosquito repellent had to be reapplied several times throughout the course of the night by soldiers near Bait Isa in Mesopotamia.39 ‘In this Unholy Land’, wrote a British soldier from Kut al-Amara, flies were ‘the worst enemy. Flies! Flies!! Flies!!!’, he agonised to his parents. ‘There are more on my helmet as I write than ever you have seen on a fly paper. Jam eating is impossible, tea drinking an art, in talking one spits them out and we learn to sleep with our mouths shut.’40 While the incessant buzzing of flies and biting of mosquitoes were annoyances that bell tents, mosquito nets, and repellents could curb, illnesses and diseases were tougher to guard against. On all three fronts, the principal cause of casualties was from sickness and disease. Battle to nonbattle casualty statistics emphasise the problem. In Macedonia, 1:20; in Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine, 1:10; in Mesopotamia, 1:10; in France and Flanders, battle to non-battle casualties were almost on par at 1:1.3.41 Septic sores – cuts and gashes that became infected when granules of sand crept into the wound – hobbled soldiers in the Middle East. ‘Nile Boils’, as British and Dominion soldiers in Sinai and Palestine called them, were painful and hard to treat. J. M. Galloway of the 2/15th Battalion, Prince of Wales’s Own Civil Service Rifles, was troubled by recurring bouts of sores on his face and feet, made worse by diphtheria. Galloway was forced to take twice-daily baths to clean out the infected wounds.42 Men’s faces could be covered entirely in bubbled, infected 36 37 38 39 40 41

42

Harold Lake, Campaigning in the Balkans (New York: Robert M. McBride, 1918), 95; Papers of Edward King, diary, 15 June 1917, IWM Documents.15757. The Moonraker, 1 October 1917, 7. Papers of P. F. F. Spaull, Spaull to Mother and Father, 5 July 1917, IWM Documents.15453. Papers of Lieutenant Colonel G. A. Perreau, Perreau to Mother, 28 June 1916, IWM Documents.20221. Papers of C. E. W. Brayley, Brayley to Family, 6 May 1916, IWM Documents.7599. T. J. Mitchell and G. M. Smith, History of the Great War: Based on Official Documents – Medical Services: Casualties and Medical Statistics of the Great War (London: HMSO, 1931), 56. Papers of Lieutenant Colonel J. M. Galloway, diary, 12 November 1917, IWM Documents.1630.

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skin.43 Cavalrymen in Sinai and Palestine, their hands torn up and blistered by caring for their animals and gripping the horse’s reins, struggled to recover.44 Other soldiers had wounds from bayonet and sword drills and recreational hockey games on sand turn septic.45 In the Shropshire Yeomanry alone, over forty cases of septic sores were recorded in December 1916, thirty cases in May 1917, and over fifty cases in June 1917.46 In the 8th Australian Light Horse Regiment, ‘every second man’, according to one Australian in Sinai in June 1916, had ‘a hand or arm or leg with a bandage’ concealing septic wounds.47 In Mesopotamia, where it was known as a ‘Basra sore’, the condition tended to spread from the legs up to the arms, leaving a bluish scar after healing.48 The problem was serious enough that civilian physicians and infectious disease specialists addressed septic sores in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet.49 Other, less visible sicknesses kept men down, from dysentery and cholera to gastrointestinal inflammations and fevers. Retreating from Serbia after the Battle of Kosturino in December 1915, soldiers in the 10th (Irish) Division filled their canteens with unclean water from natural streams and were hospitalised with dysentery.50 Field hospitals in Ismailia, near the border with Sinai, were at capacity with soldiers suffering from dysentery in June 1917.51 Properly diagnosing and treating soldiers was complicated. In Mesopotamia, where dysentery was usually bacillary (bacterial), emetine salts, a standard treatment, was ineffective. Physicians resorted to gastrointestinal antiseptics, rest, and relaxation. Other physicians administered emetine and hoped that the bacteriologist was wrong and that the dysentery was amoebic (parasitic).52 Patients in the dysentery wing at the 38th General Hospital at Mikra Bay, near Salonika, were also beset by ‘thousands of flies’. ‘The conditions were awful’, wrote Scottish Captain Thomas Brown, in charge of the ward.53 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Papers of F. V. Blunt, diary, 9 November 1917, IWM Documents.2512. Papers of Frank Blake, diary, 5 September 1918, State Library of New South Wales (SLNSW), MLMSS 784. McGrigor, diary, 3 November 1916, IWM Documents.9984; Papers of Lord Hodson, Hodson to Mother, 27 October 1916, LC LIDDLE/WWI/MES/047. Scott, diary, 1 December 1916, 2 May 1917, 20 June 1917, IWM Documents.8203. Papers of Verner Gladders Knuckey, diary, 19 June 1916, AWM PR03193. Swayne, In Mesopotamia, 49. H. Warren Crowe, ‘A Routine Treatment for Septic Sores and Nile Boils’, The Lancet, 192, 468 (1918), 667–9. Wakefield and Moody, Under the Devil’s Eye, 32. Empson, diary, 30 June 1917, IWM Documents.11943. Cameron, unpublished memoir, ND, LC LIDDLE/WWI/MES/019. Quoted in Peter Foster, ‘A Physiologist’s War: Captain T. Graham Brown RAMC (1915–1919)’, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 24, 4 (2015), 364.

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Most men suffered from more than one disease or sickness at a time. One soldier in the Berkshire Yeomanry in Sinai was hospitalised with an obscure form of fever, perhaps dengue or yellow fever, myalgia, and malaria.54 An officer in Mesopotamia was sent to hospital with dysentery and paratyphoid fever, and, after recovering from the pair, was infected with malaria and diagnosed with neurasthenia. As Lieutenant W. Sorley Brown of the Lothian and Border Horse, convalescing from haematuria and paratyphoid fever at Port Said, put it, ‘There seems to be no limit to the number of troubles one can contract in Egypt and Mesopotamia and elsewhere in the East.’55 ‘This is a dreadful country for disease’, wrote Major F. St. J. Steadman of the London Field Ambulance from Macedonia to his wife. ‘The following diseases’, he informed her, ‘are prevalent here: Typhus, Malaria, Relapsing Fever, Dengue, Phlebotornus Fever, Blackwater Fever, Cholera, Undulent Fever, Dysentery Hill Diarrehoea, Sprue, Abscess of the Liver, Typhoid, and occasionally Yellow Fever and Plague! Also Heat Stroke and Filaria’.56 Mysterious, unknown illnesses that presented as fever were common enough that the No.1, 2, and 3 Canadian Field Ambulances at the 43rd General Hospital outside Salonika named their soldier newspaper, NYD at 43, after the catch-all medical diagnosis, ‘not yet diagnosed’. Officers behind-the-line weren’t any safer than men at the front. Allenby’s aide-de-camp was bedridden with dysentery in August 1917. He was a ‘skeleton to look at’, Allenby told his wife.57 Captain P. Carrington-Peirce’s ‘Cockney servant’ in the 13th (Western) Division died of dysentery in Mesopotamia.58 General Charles Townshend, commanding the 6th (Poona) Division in Mesopotamia, went down with fever after the capture of Amara and was forced to return to India to recuperate, while Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maude, Townshend’s successor and the capturer of Baghdad, died of cholera and was buried in Baghdad in November 1917.59 Of all the sicknesses and diseases that affected men, malaria was the worst. While the disease was known on the Western Front, where 54 55 56 57 58 59

Papers of W. H. Bowyer, Bowyer to Dorothy, 16 August 1916, IWM Documents.1640. W. Sorley Brown, My War Diary (1914–1919): Recollections of Gallipoli, Lemnos, Egypt and Palestine (Galashiels: John McQueen, 1941), 116. Papers of Major F. St. J. Steadman, Steadman to Wife, 8 December 1916, IWM Documents.18927. Papers of F. M. Viscount Allenby, Allenby to Mabel, 29 August 1917, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives (LHCMA) Allenby 1/8/13. Papers of Captain P. Carrington-Peirce, Carrington-Peirce to Mother, 4 January 1917, IWM Documents.10844. Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 227.

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damaged and destroyed dykes in Flanders led to flooding and cases of plasmodium vivax, a less virulent strain of malaria, the disease reached near epidemic levels in Sinai, Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Macedonia.60 In Macedonia, there were 153,000 hospital admissions for malaria. In Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine, nearly 40,000 men were diagnosed with malaria. In Mesopotamia, around 57,000 soldiers were hospitalised.61 The geographic and climatic conditions of the Middle East and Macedonia made all three fronts malaria hotspots. In Macedonia, Lake Ardzan and Lake Doiran were surrounded by dense plant life, vegetation, and marshes, slowing the flow of water. Stagnant pools of water, either naturally occurring or formed by holes and depressions left in the ground by army lorries and horses, could be found almost everywhere, especially in the Struma Valley.62 As Henry Collinson Owen, the campaign’s official war correspondent, put it, malaria struck British and Dominion soldiers ‘like a scythe cutting grass’.63 Anti-malarial work took place on all three fronts. Mosquito nets, chemical repellents, and body coverings were handed out in Sinai, Palestine, and Macedonia. Quinine was administered as a prophylaxis, much to the displeasure of many men who disliked the taste or suffered severe side effects from the drug. Drainage programmes removed stagnant pools of water in Macedonia and Palestine.64 Despite preventive measures, malaria was a constant threat. At Ain Karim, one member of the 32nd Field Ambulance wrote that soldiers ‘poured in’ with ‘recurrent malaria’.65 In the Jordan Valley, where mosquitoes bred in the millions, malaria rates skyrocketed.66 In contrast to the forward-thinking medical policies put in place by Allenby after his arrival in June 1917, including the use of prominent scientists and entomologists, a massive drainage programme, and malaria diagnosis stations for early detection and treatment, the Ottoman Army’s approach to malaria was woefully ineffective.67 As British and Dominion soldiers moved deeper into territory formerly occupied by the Ottoman Army, they were exposed to areas overrun with malaria. After twenty-one weeks of anti-malarial operations in mid-1918, stretching from the Sharon Plain to the Jordan Valley, 27 per cent of 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

Bernard J. Brabin, ‘Malaria’s Contribution to World War One – the Unexpected Adversary’, Malaria Journal 13, 497 (2014). Mitchell and Smith, Medical Services, 80. Wakefield and Moody, Under the Devil’s Eye, 169. H. Collinson Owen, Salonica and After: The Sideshow that Ended the War (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1919), 184. Wakefield and Moody, Under the Devil’s Eye, 170–2. Papers of W. Knott, diary, 1 November 1917, IWM Documents.7987. Dolev, Allenby’s Military Medicine, 137. 67 Harrison, Medical War, 257.

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malaria cases were relapses.68 ‘Hundreds of Malaria + Dysentery cases every day’ streamed into hospital in the Jordan Valley in July 1918, leaving one soldier to dub the Valley a ‘proper white mans [sic] grave’.69 October 1918 was devastating. Around half of all British and Dominion soldiers in Palestine were hospitalised with malaria’s most virulent strain, plasmodium falciparum.70 Nearly 91 per cent of all deaths that month were caused by disease.71 In Macedonia, the South Nottinghamshire Hussars were reduced to forty-five officers and soldiers. Their ranks were so depleted that they never saw fighting in Macedonia.72 But more than making the lives of British and Dominion soldiers miserable, the prevalence of diseases like malaria and sicknesses like dysentery led soldiers to challenge the belief that they were not sacrificing as much as soldiers who were on the Western Front. One particularly useful way of framing the debate on death, disease, and wartime sacrifice is to use and extend historian Adrian Gregory’s concept of a wartime ‘economy of sacrifice’. According to Gregory, the war had imposed a ‘universal tax’ on the population of Britain. This tax was to be paid in blood, and, supposedly, to be levied evenly across regional, class, and occupational lines. Unsurprisingly, some sections of British society paid a greater price. White-collar workers, for example, suffered disproportionately in the war compared to rural farmhands, and Scotland, on average, lost more men than England and Wales. Within this volatile economy, in which profiteers were singled out for failing to share in the suffering with the rest of Britain, there was some stability. Soldiers were regarded by all as paragons of sacrifice and selfless devotion. They stood well above civil society in Britain’s ‘moral hierarchy’, as Gregory has written. Here, we can modify Gregory’s argument to include a further subset within this unnatural order that also stratified the contribution of British and Dominion soldiers. Death in battle was placed above all else. Following a public request by Liberal MP Percy Molteno, casualty statistics were released by the prime minister’s office and reprinted in the press. To the public, they exposed the unmistakable discrepancy between the scale of death on the Western Front and at the Dardanelles and in the Middle East and Macedonia. In 1916, the liberal Manchester 68 69 70 71 72

This represented 1,965 of 7,271 malaria cases. See Dolev, Allenby’s Military Medicine, 137–9. Papers of C. E. Winterbourne, Winterbourne to Alice and Edgar, 31 July 1918, LC LIDDLE/WWI/EP/094. Harrison, Medical War, 257–8. This represented 922 of 1,010 total deaths. War Office, Statistics, 272–83. Owen, Salonica and After, 184.

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Guardian, for example, published the deaths of British and Dominion soldiers in ‘France’, ‘Dardanelles’, and ‘Other Theatres’, the last category a vague amalgamation of the wars in Sinai, East Africa, Mesopotamia, and Macedonia.73 The Times also separated their ‘ROLL OF HONOUR’ by theatre of war.74 The connection between death, battle, and service was not lost on soldiers, as C. E. Winterbourne made clear in a letter to his siblings, Alice and Edgar, in Leeds. You will be pleased to hear that we have got a Lieut Reader mentioned in despatches, + N.C.Os + men thanked for recent work, while we have had a Sergt + Corpl promoted to Commissioned rank. There may eventually arrive some more honours, but we are so very unfortunate that we dont [sic] get anyone killed in these stunts, so of course there could not be much danger.75

In Winterbourne’s sarcastic closing, he alluded to both the growing social capital of death in the First World War and the alleged correlation between death and war service. Where men were not dying, according to this logic, the dangers of war were wanting. Few were better positioned to comment upon the extent of disease than Corporal John Gibbs. Gibbs, like other British and Dominion soldiers, pointed to the pervasiveness of disease in the hope of evening out the relative dangers of the other wars and the Western Front. Writing to a friend, he argued to her that ‘I don’t agree with you that it is all fighting in France as it may surprise you that the boys out here have gone through terribly more hardships than their comrades in France + further in comparison with the number there is more fighting out here’. But it was disease that Gibbs held up as the most serious hardship facing men outside the Western Front, and one that the men in France and Flanders had been lucky to avoid. ‘Besides fighting with Cannon + Rifles etc.’, he wrote, British and Dominion soldiers had ‘to fight diseases’: Think of us here an Infectious Hospital with all kinds of Infectious diseases etc. from Cholera Smallpox Diphtheria Enteric + Typhoid etc. and the fight that is going on night + day when we come home it will be too risky for one of us for months + months to ever kiss a friend as we are certain Diphtheria carriers we have hundreds of these cases going through our hands and again there are lads in the trenches that were at Gallipoli + have been out for years + had no home leave, while their comrades in France get it often.

Gibbs had to toe a fine line in his impassioned plea. ‘I dont [sic] say they dont [sic] deserve it, oh God yes’, he clarified, ‘+ I know it is rather a hard 73 75

Manchester Guardian, 20 January 1916, 7. 74 The Times, 29 January 1916, 9. Original emphasis. Winterbourne to Alice and Edgar, 21 July 1918, LC LIDDLE/WWI/ EP/094.

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job to give us fellows leave. I only want to show that taking all through it is better to be in France after all.’76 Interestingly, a hierarchy of death, one that preferred death in battle on the Western Front to disease elsewhere, bears some similarities to how Japanese society commemorated the war dead of the Russo-Japanese War, fought from 1904 to 1905. As Naoko Shimazu has written, Japanese war monuments often differentiated between those who had died in action and those who had perished due to illness and disease.77 Indeed, the Western Front was preferred by some soldiers to the campaigns in the Middle East or Macedonia because of its lack of disease and sickness. ‘Bombardier X’, whose letters to his mother were published after the war in So This Was War! The Truth About the Western and Eastern Fronts Revealed, warned her that in Macedonia ‘Disease must get everybody sooner or later in this blasted climate. The country is rotten to the core. Death in France is often instantaneous, and painless. Here, men linger in agony, until they pray for death to release them.’ If those at home asked whether it was better on the Western Front or in Macedonia, he told her, ‘I write that others might be saved from this torture. This East devours the body and warps the brain. Tell my pals to choose France a thousand times first. Anything rather than waiting up on that line – waiting for the germs of disease to get up into your blood.’78 ‘Koolawarra’, a frequent contributor to the Kia Ora Coo-ee, was sure that to die on the Western Front, either by bullet or even shell, was the best way to go: ‘Better the true and unerring shot! Better the Death when their blood runs hot – Than this, Malaria! Malaria! Better the blast of the rending shell! Better the toll of the War God’s knell, Than this, Malaria! Malaria!’79 ‘Where I came from’, wrote one soldier in the 7th (Service) Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, to his aunt and uncle, referring to his time in Macedonia, ‘it’s nothing but disease that in most cases is worse than a wound’.80 With an eye to the post-war world and a return to civilian life, other soldiers wondered whether their disease-riddled bodies would be capable of reintegration. ‘Remember’, Robert Wingham, whose body had been 76 77 78 79 80

Papers of John (Jack) T. Gibbs, Gibbs to Violet, 16 January 1918, LC LIDDLE/WWI/ EP/022. Naoko Shimazu, Japanese Society at War: Death, Memory and the Russo-Japanese War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 143. Bombardier X, So This Was War! The Truth about the Western and Eastern Fronts Revealed (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1930), 86–7, 91. ‘Malaria’, in H. S. Gullett and Charles Barrett (eds.), Australia in Palestine (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1919), 144. Papers of L. E. and H. Dudley, Dudley to Aunt and Uncle, 10 March 1917, IWM Documents.24253.

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damaged relentlessly with disease and skin abrasions, urged his fiancée, ‘that the M.O. says it will take at least 5 years of quiet and rest in England to set me right again, though perhaps you didn’t know that’.81 General Milne, the commander in chief of the BSF in Macedonia, hoped the public would not forget the unique strains put on his men in one of his final dispatches in December 1918. In it, Milne pointed out that most soldiers who had fought in Macedonia would ‘return to their homes with constitutions shattered by a prolonged stay in this malarial and inhospitable country’.82 Allenby, the commander in chief of the EEF, expressed a similar sentiment in one of his final dispatches in August 1919. ‘Though the percentage of casualties’ in Sinai and Palestine was ‘lower than in the Western theatre’, he explained, the ‘climate was trying and sometimes extremely unhealthy’.83 Lieutenant R. G. Turrall of the South Wales Borderers in Macedonia was more anxious about how malaria would affect his and his comrades’ post-war employability. He voiced his concerns in an unpublished editorial intended for The Times in August 1918, with the Bulgarian Army weeks away from collapse. Turrall questioned whether the government was prepared to step in and financially support future ex-servicemen who would be prone to episodes of recurrent malaria. Malarial ex-servicemen, he argued, through no fault of their own, would otherwise lose out on employment opportunities, wages when sick, and their sense of self-confidence. He hoped, in conclusion, that ‘malarial subjects will not be overlooked + forgotten merely because their disability, although hardly won, is not theatrical enough for the average imagination’. In other words, although malarial ex-servicemen had not been wounded in battle, they were no less deserving of the post-war state’s full attention and financial backing.84 Missing Home Links After nearly half a year without mail, W. H. Bowyer of the 1/1st Battalion, Berkshire Yeomanry in Palestine, wrote impatiently to his girlfriend, Dorothy, in England: I hope you will not be offended with this letter but I have not heard from you for so long it makes me think that my letters are not appreciated. Of course I know that a lot of letters etc. go astray either lost at Sea or in the Post so perhaps some or both 81 82 84

Original emphasis. Papers of E. G. R. Wingham, Wingham to Nell, 1 November 1917, LC LIDDLE/WWI/GS/1772. Owen, Salonica and After, 188. 83 London Gazette, 8 August 1919, 10189–96. Papers of R. G. Turrall, unpublished editorial, 31 August 1918, IWM Documents.15329.

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our letters have been on the missing list. I have had no letters from anyone accept [sic] from Mother Elsie for about six months. I have applied for leave to England again but I do not think there is much hope of getting it. It seems such a long time since I saw Mother nearly two + a half years now when I was last at Woking + really I cannot say how long it is since I saw you. It will be quite the treat to see the dear old faces once again if ever I get the chance.85

Not only were Bowyer’s letters from home long overdue, even by Palestine’s standards, he had also been away from England for so long that the last moment he and Dorothy shared together escaped his memory. Nor was there much hope of a reunion. Leave home, he remarked cynically, was unlikely. As Helen B. McCartney reminds us in her study of two battalions of the King’s Liverpool Regiment – the Liverpool Rifles and Liverpool Scottish – British soldiers in the First World War were ‘first and foremost civilians’.86 So, too, were soldiers from Australia and New Zealand.87 These citizen soldiers from all corners of the British Empire, whether volunteer or conscript, craved contact with home.88 Private citizens with the financial wherewithal and time to spare could travel to the rear areas of the Western Front. Family members comforted dying husbands and sons and men heading into operations. Well-to-do families with telephones could, on occasion, call their loved ones.89 Leave, as David Englander has argued, was ‘the priority’ for front-line troops.90 News about friends, family, and community kept spirits high. Letters filled in the blanks about life at home and were proof that family and friends were alive and well.91 Parcels, both the contents and the care that went into packaging them, were further evidence that loved ones had not forgotten their men overseas.92 Yet in the British Empire’s other wars, in the Middle East and Macedonia, the link between home and the empire’s citizen soldiers was bent to the point of breaking.

85 86 87

88 89 90

91 92

Bowyer to Dorothy, 11 July 1917, IWM Documents.1640. McCartney, Citizen Soldiers, 1. Bill Gammage, The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1974); Glyn Harper, Johnny Enzed: The New Zealand Soldier in the First World War 1914–1918 (Auckland: Exisle Publishing, 2015). McCartney, Citizen Soldiers, 95. Australia was the only British Dominion not to enact conscription during the war. McCartney, Citizen Soldiers, 100. Original emphasis. David Englander, ‘Discipline and Morale in the British Army, 1917–1918’, in John Horne (ed.), State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 138. Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 49–51. McCartney, Citizen Soldiers, 96.

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Leave home was rarely granted. The sea passage to Britain and the Dominions was a treacherous journey. Concerns over the safety of Allied shipping and a post-Dardanelles fear of amphibious operations had already shelved plans for a joint naval-military landing at Alexandretta in 1916 and 1917.93 To transport soldiers from Sinai or Palestine, or from Mesopotamia via India, across the Mediterranean, only to return them following a short period of leave, was thought to be a waste of Allied resources. The situation was so perilous that soldiers bound for Mesopotamia did not travel through the Mediterranean but instead were diverted along the African coastline, navigating the Cape Peninsula on course to Basra.94 By August 1917, soldiers in the 60th (London) Division, sent to Macedonia in December 1916 and afterwards to Egypt in June 1917, had not been home since they were entrenched near Arras around the time of the Battle of the Somme. One Londoner, concerned about German Zeppelin raids on mainland England, put it plainly to his fiancée, whom he had not seen since 1915. ‘There is no leave from Egypt’, he regretfully told her, ‘as I dare say you know’.95 Bowyer submitted three applications for leave home in 1917. All three were rejected. On his third and final attempt in July, he conceded to his girlfriend, Dorothy, ‘I do not think there is much hope of getting it.’96 Other soldiers with bacillary dysentery, like Bowyer, had as many as three applications for leave home rejected.97 Some men took their misfortune in stride. With characteristic wit, the Kia Ora Coo-ee, written by and for Australians and New Zealanders stationed in Egypt, Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Macedonia, and published in Cairo, joked that leave would not be scheduled until 1937. Even then, the newspaper teased, leave would be cancelled: bill (of the First Contingent): ‘O’oray Nugget, we’re gettin’ three months leave to Australia next year.’ nugget: ‘Ferget it. This ‘ere paper sez its cancelled again.’ (That Leave, 1937)98

Similarly, C. E. W. Brayley, pessimistic about leave from Baghdad in October 1917, wished his family a ‘Merry Xmas and Peace in 1918 – or 1928’.99 And in Barrak, the soldier newspaper of the Imperial Camel 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

Hughes, Allenby and British Strategy, 32–3. Ulrichsen, Logistics and Politics, 64–5; Kaushik Roy, ‘From Defeat to Victory: Logistics of the Campaign in Mesopotamia, 1914–1918’, First World War Studies 1, 1 (2010), 35–55. Papers of C. Fautley, Fautley to Em, 10 August 1917, IWM Documents.11896. Bowyer to Dorothy, 11 July 1917, IWM Documents.1640. Fautley to Em, 10 August 1917, IWM Documents.11986. Kia Ora Coo-ee, 15 March 1918, 2. Brayley to Family, 10 October 1917, IWM Documents.7599

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Corps, the column ‘Military Terms Explained’ defined ‘LEAVE’ as ‘See Dodo’, or ‘An obsolete bird’.100 More tragic cases existed. In early October 1917, Trooper Edward Randolph Cleaver of the 4th Light Horse Regiment applied for compassionate furlough to be with his ailing father in Sale, Victoria. Three weeks later, after his parents appealed in person to the Australian minister for defence, his request was denied. Cleaver never made it home and was killed at Beersheba on 31 October.101 Lance Corporal William Millett of the 2/5th Battalion, Hampshire Regiment, understood well the logistical problems preventing British soldiers from returning home. Yet even his level-headed appreciation of the transport problems facing the Royal Navy crumbled when thoughts of home were too much to suppress. Trying to uphold a sense of optimism, he wrote to his wife, Nellie, There will be such a lot to talk about, more than you could ever write or I could think of, and many things have happened no doubt at home since leaving, now nearly 15 months ago; there will be a good many faces missing, but we must not look at things in this way, or it will only add to the sadness of it all.102

Like Cleaver, Millett never made it home. He was killed-in-action in the Jordan Valley in April 1918. The dangers of the Mediterranean Sea weren’t all imagined. A troopship sailing to England from Palestine in January 1918 had been torpedoed.103 Nor did restrictions owing to the unsafe waters of the Mediterranean Sea affect the rank and file exclusively. Following the death of his only son, Michael, near Nieuport in July 1917, Allenby decided to have his wife relocated to Egypt, petitioning the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) Sir William Robertson to overturn the ban on officers’ wives in Cairo. Owing to the submarine situation, Mabel’s relocation was rejected. This was a ‘great disappointment’ to Allenby, who had already made provisional arrangements for her arrival.104 When soldiers looked to lay blame on something or someone, it was not the Allied shipping situation, the dangerous Mediterranean Sea, or supposedly privileged officers they pointed to. Had they had been on the Western Front, soldiers argued, they would have had their leave. ‘If we had been in France’, wrote one soldier of the 2/14th Battalion, London Scottish, in the London Scottish Regimental Gazette in October 1917, ‘no 100 101 102 103 104

Barrak, 1 July 1917, 4. Papers of Edward Randolph Cleaver, Cleaver to Family, 9 October 1917, 26 October 1917, AWM 3DRL/4114. Papers of William Millett, Millett to Nellie, 6 October 1917, Millett Family Private Collection. Papers of Major Wilfred Evans, Evans to Mother, 24 January 1918, AWM 2DRL/0014. Allenby to Mabel, 13 August 1917, 29 August 1917, LHCMA Allenby 1/8/9 and 1/8/13.

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doubt we should have got Blighty leave’.105 On the one-year anniversary of his time in Palestine in February 1917, Lieutenant Colonel Randolf Baker of the Yeomanry Mounted Division, who had not been home since October 1914, ‘[envied] people in France getting this regular leave home’.106 ‘If hit on the front near Home then the wounded do get a chance for Blighty’, moaned one soldier in the 2/17th Battalion, London Regiment, in his diary. But in Palestine, he wrote, ‘the risks are none the worse, we fight with the same tools against the same enemy & at the same time never have a chance of a spell in “Blighty”’.107 Private Henry Dudley of the 7th (Service) Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, convalescing at Tigné on Malta after suffering from trench foot near Lake Doiran, groaned that ‘had [I] been in France I should have been home with my feet and had leave’.108 Captain Eric V. R. Bellers of the 1st Battalion, Gurkha Rifles, writing to his mother in April 1917, near the end of the Samarrah Offensive, thought it ‘a thousand pities this place isn’t a bit nearer home + one can’t get occasional leave to Blighty. France is obviously the place to be in, from every point of view.’109 In truth, soldiers on the Western Front rarely made it home. Before 1917, British soldiers in France and Flanders received ten days of leave for every fifteen months of service. After November 1917, leave was extended to two weeks.110 Crossing the English Channel often presented the same security concerns that restricted leave from Egypt, Sinai, Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Macedonia.111 The estaminets and behind-the-lines life of French and Flemish villages that replaced home for soldiers on the Western Front were nowhere to be found. At the heart of most soldiers’ dislike for the scenery of the east was a homesickness that craved signs of cultivation. El-Arish was ‘only groves of palms + sand nearly everywhere no gardens’, complained Corporal H. O. Biggs of the 54th (East Anglian) Division.112 Every move that brought the 8th Light Horse Regiment further into the barren, cascading sands of Sinai ‘seemed to take’ them ‘further out of the 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112

The London Scottish Regimental Gazette, 1 October 1917, 159. Baker to Son, 15 February 1917, IWM Documents.3723 Papers of A. V. Young, diary, 7 May 1918, IWM Documents.7292. Dudley to Uncle, Aunt, and Cousin, 11 February 1917, IWM Documents.24253. Original emphasis. Papers of E. V. R. Bellers, Bellers to Mother, 23 April 1917, LC LIDDLE/WWI/MES/007. Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 101. J. G. Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies 1914–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991 [1990]), 72. Papers of H. O. Biggs, diary, 23 February 1917, LC LIDDLE/WWI/EP/005.

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world’.113 North of Basra was like ‘Chingford plain’, wrote Private Reginald Barrington of the 2nd Battalion, Norfolk Regiment, had Chingford been ‘cleared of all its verdant green with not a tree in sight or a house. In place of the green’, he wrote home, ‘substitute sand and dirt’.114 Camped near Amarah made ‘one feel quite outside the world and only a distant spectator’.115 The Struma Valley was ‘like the peak district in Derbyshire’, wrote a soldier in the 2/4th Battalion, London Field Ambulance, ‘only there are very few trees and no streams or rivers’.116 Major Desmond Allhusen of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps was pleased to see Macedonia blooming in March 1918, but ‘the general effect’, he confessed to his brother, ‘is rather depressing, as the hills never change colour + the place is rather like a dirty brown + dark green Scotland’ (Figure 1.2).117 Campaigning in Sinai, according to one cavalryman in the East Riding Imperial Yeomanry, was like ‘being in the Wilds’. Three nearby villages were all that broke a countryside of ‘wide open spaces consisting mainly of sand. There are no music halls or places of amusement’, he wrote in his diary, ‘and we have to make our own entertainment’.118 Soldiers in the 1/2nd Essex Battery, Royal Field Artillery (RFA), found neither ‘local inhabitants in the rear tending estaminets’ in Sinai or Palestine nor any ‘linkage of inhabited, cultivated, and, in the past, industrious country extending back to the area sufficiently removed from the scene of actual hostilities as to be comparatively normal’. All that stood between them and the Ottoman Army were ‘miles of lonely and hillocky expanse’.119 Near Basra, one soldier in the 2nd Battalion, Norfolk Regiment, complained that ‘never any amusements or artists visit us like they do on the European battle front’.120 ‘There are no end of men who are here and have spent many months in France are anxious to get back there rather than have Salonica’, wrote a private in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, ‘there’s no comforts when we come out of the trenches like there is in France’.121 ‘The difference between the front in France and Macedonia’, explained 113 114 115 116 117 118 119

120 121

Knuckey, diary, 26 May 1916, AWM PR03193. Papers of R. Barrington, diary, 15 November 1916, IWM Documents.20333. Papers of W. E. Merrill, diary, 9 August 1916, IWM Documents.13385. Papers of T. C. Nobbs, Nobbs to Kitty, 20 December 1916, IWM Documents.17521. Papers of Major D. Allhusen, Allhusen to Rupert, 28 March 1918, IWM Documents.16970. Papers of J. B. Seddon, diary, 16 December 1915, 3 January 1916, LC LIDDLE/WWI/ EP/075. Edwin Blackwell and Edwin C. Axe, Romford to Beirut: Via France, Egypt, and Jericho. An Outline of the War Record of ‘B’ Battery, 271st Brigade, R.F.A. (1/2nd Essex Battery, R.F. A.) with Many Digressions (Clacton-on-Sea: R.W. Humphries, 1926), 87–8. Barrington, diary, 15 November 1916, IWM Documents.20333. Dudley to Uncle, Aunt, and Cousin, 11 February 1917, IWM Documents.24253.

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Figure 1.2 Camp of the Transport Section, 2/20th Battalion, London Regiment, Vardar, Macedonia, spring 1917. IWM Q 111895

E. V. J. Jones of the 8th Battalion, King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, ‘was that in France troops would be paid more often and when on rest would retire to a village and spend money on what they liked, such as wine or beer, also better rations and see other people’. Near Lake Doiran, Jones wrote, ‘we could only buy what was brought to us and never saw anyone only the troops we relieved or relieved us’.122 In The Lead-Swinger, the newspaper of the 1/3rd Battalion, West Riding Field Ambulance, ‘BOKO’ explained what ‘Top’ left behind in France when he moved to Macedonia: 122

Papers of E. V. J. Jones, typescript account, ND, IWM Documents.987.

40

Soldiering Top, when on the Western Front, Declared that life was fine; Always in for ev’ry stunt And drinking boko wine, Many a gay and mad carouse Enjoyed in some back garden, And in the house a future spouse, Perhaps, to kiss and pardon. Top, now in Salonika, Dreams of his Marguerite. Oh, how he used to like her And vow that she was sweet. What fateful and unhappy day When shell-shock made him dance. ‘Oh, curse the day I came away And left my soul in France’. Top’s in Macedonia, Repenting of his sins, Dreaming of his own dear, And nursing of his shins; Beetles tickled him o’ nights, And other crawly things; Mosquito bites and other mites Lend his repentance wings.123

In Macedonia, the lack of leave and the isolation felt by soldiers also manifested in a curious medical condition known as ‘Macedonian madness’ or ‘the Balkan tap’. According to Henry Collinson Owen, the editor of the Balkan News and an official war correspondent, the condition meant ‘that you suffer from a sort of mental obfuscation, due to long residence in the Balkans without leave – and many of the medical officers think there may be something in it’. The condition, Owen wrote, ‘is supposed to make you do all sorts of strange things’.124 In a post-war compendium of articles that appeared in The Mosquito, the post-war journal of the Salonika Reunion Association, one article noted that the ‘Balkan Tap’ was ‘caused by depression and general fedupness’. ‘If there was a psychiatrist in the B.S.F.’, the author wrote, ‘he would have advised the patient to occupy and interest himself, mentally and physically, in some form of amusement or recreation’.125 One ex-serviceman recalled 123 124 125

The Lead-Swinger: The Bivouac Journal of the 1/3 W. Riding Field Ambulance, 3 February 1918, 432. Owen, Salonica and After, 57. G. E. Willis (ed.), Salonika Memories 1915–1919 (Newbury: Newbury Weekly News, 1969), 30.

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that the condition was caused by ‘solitary confinement for an indefinite period in the wilderness of Macedonia’ and ‘the appalling monotony of the life’. ‘In France’, he explained, ‘a soldier’s existence may be more precarious; but at least he is certain of leave fairly frequently; and when he is out of the line, he sees a little “life”. But here leave does not come till after three years’ active service; and the only “life” – in the town of Salonica itself – is of the kind that makes one pray for death, as a happy release.’126 The condition had four stages, he wrote. The first was a ‘loss of memory’ which ‘generally comes after six months in the B.S.F., though the finer intellects’, he admitted, ‘sometimes hold out for a year’. The second stage was a ‘vacuity of gaze, conversation and intellect, due to mental atrophy’. Conversing with a soldier afflicted by the ‘Balkan Tap’ was ‘unusually futile’, he explained, and when you speak to him, he looks at you in an inane way. In addition, his mind is so weak that it is impossible to inoculate him against “rumouritis.” Within five minutes he will tell you that his Division is bound for Egypt, India, France and Mesopotamia, and that it is remaining in Macedonia for the term of its unnatural life. Not only will he tell you all this, but he will honestly believe it: for his mind is so empty that it becomes the shadow of the last rumour that it hears.

The third stage involved ‘strange talk and unnatural behaviour’. Somewhat sarcastically, the author explained, ‘You hear men say that the politicians are winning the War for us, that they (the sufferers) wouldn’t take leave if they were offered it, and that they intend to settle in Macedonia after the War’. Last, the fourth and final stage, was a ‘mild form of delusion’ that developed ‘after two and a half years’ of service in Macedonia.127 While one link to home, leave, was completely broken, the other link, correspondence, was bent to the point of breaking. Of course, much mail eventually made it through, as evidenced by the voluminous collections of letters held in archives across Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. But mail sent to British soldiers on the Western Front could arrive in three or four days. Letters sent by soldiers placed in specially marked green envelopes, in which soldiers signed a certificate confirming that the contents concerned only private matters, arrived in Britain in two or three days, as green envelopes were not subject to regimental censorship.128 The speed of mail delivery both to and from British soldiers on the Western Front resulted in over eight million letters being sent every 126 127 128

V. J. Seligman, The Salonica Side-Show (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1919), 61. Seligman, Salonica Side-Show, 61–5. Englander, ‘Discipline and Morale in the British Army’, 138.

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week in 1917.129 On average, mail sent from Britain or Ireland to a soldier in the Middle East took fourteen to twenty-one days, if not longer. The cause of the delay was twofold: German submarines prowling the Mediterranean Sea and, in Palestine, difficulty keeping the railhead at pace with the advancing army. Narrow sea passages at Gibraltar, Malta, Crete, and the Suez Canal clustered British and Allied shipping into dense convoys, making easy targets for German and Austro-Hungarian submarines. The lack of neutral shipping in the Mediterranean, particularly American and South American merchant vessels, reduced the risk of sinking non-Allied transport.130 From the beginning of 1916 until the war’s end, over 25 per cent of Germany’s ocean-going submarine fleet sailed the Mediterranean Sea. Throughout the course of the war, German submarines in the Mediterranean sank over three million tons of British and Dominion shipping.131 Over half the letters posted from London in June and July 1917 to the men of the 10th (Irish) Division in Macedonia were lost at sea, sunk by German submarines.132 ‘Everyone says the same thing’, wrote an officer in the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders near Lake Doiran to his mother, ‘their people don’t seem to be getting their letters’.133 The Balkan News in July 1917 reported that two shiploads of parcels destined for the BSF had been torpedoed on 15 and 18 May.134 Letters sent to home from men of the 1/4th Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, in Palestine were sunk with the RMS Arabia off the coast of Malta in November 1916.135 All letters sent to the Royal Engineers in Palestine in December 1916 were sunk in the Mediterranean Sea.136 Near el-Arish, Brigadier General Sir Hugh Archie Dundas Simpson-Baikie of the 60th (London) Division bemoaned to his wife that Palestine was ‘an awful place for mails’. ‘A great many’, he wrote to her, ‘are submarined than we ever know about’.137 ANZACs, on average, waited well over a month to 129 130 131

132 133 134 135 136 137

Peter B. Boyden, Tommy Atkins’ Letters: The History of the British Army Postal Service from 1795 (London: National Army Museum, 1990), 28. Paul G. Halpern, A Naval History of World War I (Annapolis: United States Naval Institute, 1994), 381–2. Hans Joachim Koerver (ed.), German Submarine Warfare 1914–1918 in the Eyes of British Intelligence: Selected Sources from the British National Archives, Kew (Steinbach: LIS Reinisch, 2010), XXII–IV. Papers of Captain D. H. B. Harfield, Harfield to Wife, 10 August 1917, IWM Documents.16068. Papers of G. S. MacKay, MacKay to Mother, 3 May 1917, IWM Documents.12688. Balkan News, 4 July 1917, 4. Papers of R. H. Sims, Sims to Mother, 12 November 1916, IWM Documents.7118. Original emphasis. Papers of F. D. Day, Day to Parents, 17 January 1917, LC LIDDLE/ WWI/EP/015. Papers of Brigadier General Sir Hugh Archie Dundas Simpson-Baikie, Simpson-Baikie to Marion, 2 July 1917, LHCMA GB 0099.

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receive mail from home, as letters and parcels sent from and to Australians and New Zealanders were routinely diverted to England. Near Gaza in October 1917, Private Culbert Cecil Fisher of the Camel Field Ambulance received eighteen letters in two lots that had gone to England before being rerouted to Egypt.138 Letters written to Edward Cleaver of the 4th Light Horse Regiment from his father took nearly four months to arrive. They had, according to Cleaver, ‘been to England and goodness knows what round about route it took to get there trying to dodge the Submarines’.139 Especially between August 1917 and January 1918, the delivery of mail in Palestine broke down under the stress of mobile warfare. One soldier in the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment ‘had no chance of posting for a week’ and had ‘not had any letters for a fortnight’.140 The advance towards Jerusalem, from October 1917 onwards, was so rapid that soldiers could barely find time to write and had trouble supplying a stable mailing address. Men in the Imperial Camel Corps moved in and out of the front line at a moment’s notice, leaving no time to write.141 Mail took the circuitous route of going to headquarters first and then back out to soldiers.142 When the winter rains came, turning the fine, grainy sand and wispy dirt into mud, the double-tracked railway was flooded over with water and concrete-like earth. The repair work of Egyptian labourers, praised near unanimously by soldiers, took time, leaving the track unusable for long stretches. Major General P. A. Bainbridge of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC) detailed the chaos caused by flooding in a letter home on the eve of his son’s departure for university: There has been a bit of rain here during the last 5 days + the railway has given out in places owing to the earthwork sliding, so that mails have been unable to get here or to get away. Further off too our letters have been much delayed and the last letter I have is dated 3rd January 30 days. However I write sometimes + put the letters in The Messenger Bag + hope they get through sooner or later. I believe these bags go to Egypt on one or other of our warships so as to ensure certain + quick transit across the Mediterranean but such a ship is not always immediately going so even this way is not as quick as it might be.143 138 139 140 141 142 143

Papers of Culbert Cecil Fisher, diary, 28 October 1917, SLNSW MLMSS 1843/Item 1. Cleaver to Family, 9 October 1917, AWM 3DRL/4114. Papers of T. Jobling, diary, 20 July 1917, 2 August 1917, LC LIDDLE/WWI/ADD/057. Papers of Donald Law Patrick Cameron, Cameron to Family, 23 November 1917, AWM PR88/094. Papers of C. S. Wink, Wink to Mrs. Whiffen, 28 December 1917, IWM Documents.3496. Papers of P. A. Bainbridge, Bainbridge to Robert, 10 February 1918, IWM Documents.10771.

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In 1918, the EEF’s advance again left soldiers with little to no time to write. Australian Sapper William Charles Allen of the Signallers General Reinforcements made one of France’s advantages clear to his mother and sister in Sydney: ‘I am very tired you cannot imagine the amount of moving about we do + sleep is allways [sic] acceptable so in future you will receive less letters in the field you get no time for letter writing the chaps in France are lucky they come down the line at frequently intervals but here it is different – so I hope you will understand.’144 Mail took even longer to get to Mesopotamia. Parcels sent from family in Edinburgh to Lieutenant Frank Cathcart of the Royal Flying Corps in Mesopotamia stopped arriving after April 1916. ‘I’ve no news’, he told his family in May, pointing out that no packages had reached him since March. ‘Have you stopped sending me parcels?’, he asked.145 For C. W. Dawson of the 1/5th Battalion, East Surrey Regiment, the five weeks he went without mail in January 1918 was the longest he had ever gone without hearing from his mother.146 Soldiers captured after the siege and surrender of Kut al-Amara and marched to prisoner camps in Yozgrad and Changli experienced the worst delays. The Kronical, a soldier newspaper produced by British and Indian prisoners of war (POWs) from Mesopotamia, complained in February 1918 that correspondence had been delayed by up to eight months.147 Delayed mail also meant that the contents of parcels and care packages sent from home often arrived spoiled. Writing for the R.A.M.C. Depot Magazine, produced for soldiers at Aldershot, one soldier in the Struma Valley described the problem in a fictionalised letter to his aunt: MY DEAR AUNT, – Many thanks for the jolly (rotten) parcel received yesterday. How is it you always think of the things I (don’t) want? And you tied it up yourself! How jolly! You did it splendidly, and it reached me nicely (squashed). Unfortunately, either by mistake or design, the tomato sauce was packed with the cork out. As a result I am eating the sponge cake with my meat. The Vaseline and chocolate have evidently formed an attachment that has detracted a little from their respective values, but the socks will undoubtedly be extremely smart when I have squeezed out the butter you thoughtfully packed in the toes. The cheese made me feel quite homesick; at least, I came over very funny when I untied the wrapper. I gave it to another chap, and it made him feel home-sick, too. We put it outside our tent, and the sergeant-major next door sent for the sanitary squad and 144 145 146 147

Papers of William Charles Allen, Allen to Mother and Sister, 16 July 1918, SLNSW MLMSS 4500. Letters from Mesopotamia, 1916, Cathcart to Family, 20 May 1916, IWM Documents.10502. Papers of C. W. Dawson, Dawson to Mother, 20 January 1918, IWM Documents.10921. The Kronical, 1 February 1918, 15.

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asked them what they thought they were for. After a while they found it, and took it away and buried it or drowned it or something. They look rather pale at work today . . . With best respects from your nephew GEORGE.148

Parcels and care packages were one of the most direct and accessible ways that families could provide support for soldiers abroad. On the Western Front, where the links between the home front and the battlefield were made easier by the geographic closeness of Britain to France and Belgium, parcels were sent in droves. An average of nearly 60,000 parcels were processed on a daily basis during the war, totalling over 320,000 tons.149 The speed with which parcels could reach soldiers in France or Flanders allowed families to include fresh produce, meats, and cheeses and, as Michael Roper has argued, were manifestations of familial care and a tangible, physical link to home.150 When letters failed to reach soldiers or parcels arrived mangled and spoiled, men sunk into despair. ‘TRALAS’, writing from Moascar for the Kia Ora Coo-ee, described the excitement of opening a parcel: It’s only an ordinary battered package – a tin (same as Mum used to get the tea in from old Withers, the grocer), sewn neatly into a canvas cover, and looking much the worse for its journey. My address embellishes the outside cover, Sister Millie’s best round hand having been employed in the task. Poor old Mill, I bet she spent some time over it. She’s a dear old kid, anyhow, and when I go home – but steady. I said it was only an ordinary, battered old parcel, and here I am getting sentimental over it already. I’ll tear the cover off it, anyhow, and see what’s doing inside.

After describing the parcel’s contents, including tea, socks, tobacco, and a letter from home, the author tried to hold back his emotion: I must be getting a cold; I feel as if there’s a huge lump in my throat, and I’m going to choke. But there’s a glorious sunset and the desert doesn’t seem so dreary as usual. Did I say it was only an ordinary battered package? Well, I was wrong; it was a great big bit of “Home” packed into a small space, and it would take all the battering in the world to knock it out of shape.151

One soldier in the 1/1st Battalion, County of London Yeomanry in Egypt, had to console comrades who had received crushed packages on mail day: The parcel’s had a cruel knock-out blow This wrapper’s all that I’ve received, I vow. Me lovin’ wife don’t write like this, ye know – 148 149

150

The R.A.M.C. Depot Magazine, 23 June 1916, 7. Rachel Duffet, ‘A War Unimagined: Food and the Rank and File Soldier of the First World War’, in Jessica Meyer (ed.), British Popular Culture and the First World War (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 60. Roper, Secret Battle, 94–8. 151 Kia Ora Coo-ee, 15 July 1918, 8.

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Soldiering ‘Buy National War Bonds NOW.’ I tried in vain to soothe him – on the verge Of tears he left me; and my fevered brow Still throbs to that most melancholy dirge: Buy National War Bonds NOW.152

When no parcels arrived for soldiers of the East Riding Imperial Yeomanry in Egypt on Christmas Eve 1915, one soldier, feeling ‘so far away from home’ and ‘in such peculiar surroundings’, ‘ached’ for Hull.153 Staff Sergeant Henry Langtip of the 4th Light Horse Regiment, near Tel el-Kebir, was left ‘disappointed at not getting any mail. Surely they haven’t forgotten us at home’, he asked rhetorically in his diary.154 ‘Our thoughts’, wrote one soldier in the 54th (East Anglian) Division in the Struma Valley, trying to capture the mood of his men, ‘are “What about the mail! Shall we ever get our parcels”’. Without mail from home, rumours ran rampant in the division. ‘Townshend has surrendered several times and Baghdad has often been captured even by the Russians’, he told his parents, ‘We get no reliable news. Shall I ever see an English newspaper?’155 Private B. R. Dunning of the 10th Battalion, Devonshire Regiment in Macedonia, who had received marmalades, tinned butter, and pocket notebooks in December 1915, was ‘really very distressed’ when, three months later, he had gone ‘ages’ without a letter or a parcel.156 Some sunk lower than others. ‘I know very well what disappointment is’, wrote Corporal John Gibbs of the RAMC from the Suez Canal to the fiancée of a deceased patient. ‘My dear friend you should have seen us on mail day on the Desert, such a rush round the post man’, he explained, ‘+ such smiles when one’s name is called, but also the poor chap that expected + did not get any, there are no smiles on his face but a very depressing mournful look’. For Gibbs, the long break in their mails was ‘the worst of being in Egypt’ and made him ‘seem out of the world altogether’.157 Near Es Salt in the Jordan Valley, Bernard Blaser of the London Scottish Regiment described something like clinical depression for those whose letters had gone missing: To those of us who received these links with home, the letters acted as a stimulant, and provided food for thought and sweet recollections; but for the unfortunates

152 153 154 155 156 157

Middlesex Yeomanry Magazine, 1 March 1918, 13. Seddon, diary, 23, 24 December 1915, LC LIDDLE/WWI/EP/075. Papers of Henry Langtip, diary, 13 June 1916, AWM PR00053. Brayley to Family, 29 February 1916, IWM Documents.7599. Papers of B. R. Dunning, Dunning to Mother, 27 February 1916, IWM Documents.10952. Gibbs to Violent, 7 November 1916, LC LIDDLE/WWI/EP/022.

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who did not, disappointment and despondency was all they got from the mail. I have known men not to receive letters for months on end, owing to the continual loss of mails at sea or other causes, and they have become so depressed and miserable that they were entirely indifferent as to whether they survived the war or not. They felt absolutely forgotten, and the total absence of any possibility of leave home, coupled with the uncertainty as to how long they were to be ‘buried alive’, often caused them to sink into such a deplorable state of apathy and neglect of their personal cleanliness that in time they fell sick and had to go to hospital.158

The emotional effects of missing letters and parcels drove many men to desire a transfer to the Western Front or, at the least, to consider those fighting in France and Flanders luckier than the men on the peripheral fronts. Colonel Gustavus Arthur Perreau of the 2/4th Battalion, Gurkha Rifles, near Basra, was subjected to the grumbles of his men. ‘This place is far worse than France’, he wrote. One of his soldiers explained to him that ‘he had lots of people to supply him in France but they forget him out here. No bundles of old Magazines’, he closed his letter home, even though he swore ‘they are more wanted out here’.159 Royal Engineer John Stanhope Baines, who had served on the Western Front from the start of the war until his transfer to Macedonia in 1916, was ‘afraid it must be that the submarines have robbed me’ of letters from his mother in Leeds. Mail delays, he told her, were ‘the only real grouse we have here as compared with France’. While Baines was happy not to be ‘shelled day and night’, like he had been on the Western Front, at least a steady flow of letters from Britain kept his spirit there high. In Macedonia, he explained, ‘The mails come at any time – in any order, and some of them don’t come at all. And it all makes one seem so far away and so cut off from everything and everybody.’160 Conclusion Not long after the capture of Jerusalem, Punch rather accurately captured the mood of many British and Dominion soldiers fighting in Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine (Figure 1.3). The caricature pictures an aged woman, crocheting earnestly, in conversation with an elderly clergyman around the hearth of a countryside home:

158 159 160

Bernard Blaser, Kilts Across the Jordan: Being Experiences and Impressions with the Second Battalion ‘London Scottish’ in Palestine (London: H. F. G. Witherby, 1926), 219. Perreau to Mother, 8 July 1916, IWM Documents.20221. Andrew Baines and Joanna Palmer, Dearest Mother: First World War Letters Home from a Young Sapper Officer in France and Salonika (Solihull: Helion and Company, 2015), 151.

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Figure 1.3 Punch, 19 December 1917. Source: Punch Cartoon Library/ TopFoto

the visitor:‘I hear your boy is in Palestine. How interesting it must be for him to move among those scenes where every spot brings up some recollection of the wonderful events of Biblical history!’ the mother:‘Ted don’t say much about that in ‘is letters. ‘E seems to think the country is sufferin’ from a fly-paper shortage.’161

The British Empire’s other wars were not, as Punch’s fictional clergyman thought, a picnic or a break from active service conditions. By almost all accounts, the Ottoman Army in the Middle East fought as well as it had done at the Dardanelles.162 The Bulgarian Army was also routinely praised by British and Dominion soldiers. While combat in the Middle East and Macedonia had fluctuated between long, dull periods of infrastructural work, digging, marching, and drilling, and periods of fierce fighting like the battles for Gaza, Sheikh Sa’ad, and Monastir, British and 161 162

Punch, 152 (19 December 1917), 422. Edward J. Erickson, Ottoman Army Effectiveness in World War I: A Comparative Study (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 124–5.

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Dominion soldiers endured many other hardships while soldiering. From extreme heat and sand in the Middle East to plunging winter temperatures in the valleys of Greek Macedonia, the climate was a continual problem. On all three fronts, soldiers felt isolated, left to occupy remote desert outposts in Sinai or makeshift camps in the Struma Valley. Insects like mosquitoes and flies were both a nuisance and cause for more serious concern. Diseases and sicknesses were rampant, especially malaria, dysentery, and septic sores. Yet to suffer in a field hospital in the Struma Valley, stricken with malaria, or to be sent to Basra after a cholera infection or Port Said with sandfly fever, did not match the social worth of death or disfigurement in battle. Furthermore, disease and sickness carried with them negative connotations of physical inferiority and even suspicion of mental illness.163 Links to home were often missing. Leave home to Britain, Australia, or New Zealand was nearly impossible. Letters and parcels took an agonisingly long time to arrive or ended up at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. It was during the war, after experiencing the hardships of fighting in Sinai, Palestine, Macedonia, and Mesopotamia, that soldiers were first concerned that what they were doing wasn’t fully understood by those at home, and that the Western Front was the measuring stick with which ‘true’ soldiering would be assessed. Moreover, the fact that the public seemed so ignorant of the non-combat hardships of the other wars formed an early basis for accusations made both throughout the war and afterwards, as will be explored in Chapters 4 and 5, that British and Dominion soldiers in the Middle East and Macedonia had been forgotten. Despite all the hardships they faced, though, soldiering outside the Western Front seemed to offer a unique wartime pleasure for the mostly working-class British and Dominion men who filled the ranks: tourism.

163

Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 59–60.

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In Port Said, nestled along the Mediterranean Sea near the Suez Canal, C. E. W. Brayley of the Labour Corps surveyed the street scene before him. ‘Here I am grilling under a Mediterranean Sun at this wonderful post of Empire’, he wrote home in February 1916. Port Said! Here East meets West. Italians, English and French fraternize. Respectable Egyptians scorn scum Arabs. Women are veiled or clothed in rags, money changers ply their trade in every street. Little street Arabs – how well we know the term in England – crave to clean your boots or beg for ‘backsheesh’. Mohammedan funerals with their wailing women pass, and minarets gracefully point to Allah. And the colours! They blend in one harmonious whole as only they can in the East.

Brayley was sure that his account of Port Said as a multicultural halfway point between Europe and the Middle East, a picturesque city where the sun shone bright and the people were worth watching, would provoke an inevitable and serious question: was he a soldier fighting a war on behalf of the British Empire or a tourist taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of Egypt? ‘You will begin to ask me’, he wrote to his family, anticipating the question to come, ‘whether I am a tourist or a soldier, a dilettante or a “First Aidist”. Believe me’, he reassured them, ‘the iron of soldiering is entering into my soul. I did not mind the shrapnel of Cape Helles, the snipers of Anzac or the terrible storms of Suvla for I was doing the real thing’.1 For Brayley, who had experienced the war in one of its harsher forms at Cape Helles, Anzac Cove, and Suvla Bay, and later took part in the fighting in Palestine and Mesopotamia, Port Said provided an alluring and much-needed break from the deadliness of combat at the Dardanelles; a break, he was adamant, that had not compromised his soldiering identity. As much as the British Empire’s wars outside the Western Front presented their own hardships of soldiering, some akin to those in France and 1

Brayley to Family, 1 February 1916, IWM Documents.7599.

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Flanders and Gallipoli, and some exclusive to soldiering in the Middle East and Macedonia, they also afforded British and Dominion soldiers unique pleasures. Tourism or sightseeing, like Brayley’s experience in Port Said, was one of those pleasures. While much of northeastern France and Belgium lay in ruins, pummelled by German shelling in the war’s early days, then torn apart by attritional battles and military occupation, the major cities of Egypt, Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Macedonia were left materially undamaged by the war. Cosmopolitan cities such as Alexandria, Cairo, and Port Said in Egypt, Jerusalem in Palestine, Baghdad and Basra in Mesopotamia, and Salonika in Greek Macedonia were open to exploration.2 For soldiers drawn overwhelmingly from the working class, the war was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel and to have the army and the government pick up the bill. As Joseph Clarke and John Horne have written of what they call ‘militarized cultural encounters’ in the long nineteenth century, the ‘mass mobilization that began with the Revolutionary wars and climaxed in the twentieth century’ gave rise ‘to the largest armies ever seen’ and ‘carried them in unprecedented numbers’ to places ‘that few of their contemporaries could ever hope to see’.3 Thus, the experience of soldiers, reflected so well above by Brayley – even though he rejected any suggestion that he was a tourist – was made up of two halves: one half of the experience comprised the hardships and toil of war; the other half of the experience, especially prominent for those who fought outside the Western Front, was tourism, in that everywhere they went was likely the first time they had been there and probably would be the last. Making these regions and cities even more appealing were the rich biblical, Islamic, and ancient histories tied to the lands and their peoples. In Palestine and parts of Mesopotamia, British and Dominion soldiers walked the lands made famous to them by Judaism and Christianity. These were lands they knew well, at least in their imaginations, from their religious upbringings and the influence of Christianity on early childhood education. Even Salonika had a connection to New Testament Christianity by way of the proselytising of Saul of Tarsus. Yet soldiers were also fascinated by travelling in what were equally 2

3

Gaza was the exception. The city was shelled by the EEF in November 1917, causing damage to the fourteenth-century Great Mosque. British Intelligence had determined that the Ottoman Fourth Army was using the mosque as a munitions store. While as much as two-thirds of Salonika’s old city was destroyed in a fire in August 1917, no fighting took place in or near the city and it was never bombarded by sea. Joseph Clarke and John Horne, ‘Introduction: Peripheral Visions – Militarized Cultural Encounters in the Long Nineteenth Century’, in Joseph Clarke and John Horne (eds.), Militarized Cultural Encounters in the Long Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 5.

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Arab-Islamic and, to them, exotic eastern lands. While cities like Cairo and Baghdad were unquestionably Arab and Islamic in character, Salonika held a dual appeal in that it was a part of Greece but had, until 1913, been an Ottoman and predominantly Muslim and Sephardic Jewish city. In addition to the appeal of touring the sites of both Old and New Testament Christianity as well as Islam, soldiers also had the pleasure of touring much of the ancient world. The pyramids and sphinx at Giza were must-dos on the itinerary of every soldier in Egypt. The more well-to-do men of the EEF journeyed further down the Nile to Karnak and Luxor. Simply being in Greece, although there was debate about whether Salonika and Greek Macedonia were Hellenic enough, was of greater interest to soldiers. But apart from unmistakably ArabIslamic cities like Cairo, British and Dominion soldiers were mostly disappointed by what they saw. Twentieth-century Palestine was not a land ‘overflowing with milk and honey’, Mesopotamia was not the ‘land of Arabian Nights’, and Greece was not the Greece of Homer. These appreciations of the places that soldiers toured are crucial for understanding how they lent meaning to their wars; this will be discussed in the next chapter. Moreover, this chapter will also make use of Gabriel Liulevicius’s concept of the ‘mindscape’, which he applied to German soldiers on the Eastern Front. As Liulevicius put it, the mindscape was a way not only of looking at and interacting with new lands and peoples, but also ‘of organizing the perception of a territory, its characteristic features and landmarks’. Crucially, he explains, the mindscape involves more than a ‘neutral’ description, since it ‘signifies an approach, the posture of advancing into the landscape. A mindscape proposes ways of dealing with land: how to move within it, how to change, appropriate, and order it. Far beyond the merely descriptive, the mindscape is a prescription as well, a vision of the future and what will be expected of the territory’. For Liulevicius, the ‘mindscape’ of German soldiers in Eastern Europe was a land that was empty, backwards, prone to chaos and war, and in need of German government, industry, and order.4 I argue that we can extend Liulevicius’s concept of a ‘German imperialist “mindscape” of the East’ to British and Dominion soldiers, who, like 4

Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 151–75. Others have suggested that the mindscape did not begin with German soldiers on the Eastern Front but was a product of German popular culture and educational texts produced in the decades before the war. See Tony Paddock, Creating the Russian Peril: Education, the Public Sphere, and National Identity in Imperial Germany, 1890–1914 (Rochester: Camden House, 2010).

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their German counterparts, were also advancing into unknown ‘eastern’ lands, whether in Macedonia or the Middle East. In some ways, as Gavin Daly has shown, British soldiers had been ‘mindscaping’ for a hundred years, dating back to the Peninsular War.5 To be clear, I am not suggesting that the German mindscape of Eastern Europe and the British imperial mindscape of the Middle East and Macedonia were identical. The British imperial mindscape, while it often tied together race and civilisation, did not devolve into a ‘race and space conception of the East’ that sought to clear the land of ‘backward elements’.6 But the same process in the German mindscape, of categorising the land and its people, of seeing backwardness and signs of decline, were also present in the British imperial mindscape. The British imperial mindscape as applied here is important because, as will be shown in Chapters 3 and 5, one of the ways that soldiers understood the campaigns outside the Western Front was as wars of liberation and as civilising missions meant to bring these pseudo–colonial spaces up to speed. The idea of a frontier where civilisation and modernity stopped, whether in Eastern Europe or in the Middle East and Macedonia, was an inherent part of the imperial gaze. Thus, this chapter says something broader about the experience of imperial armies fighting outside Western Europe: which is that many of them engaged with the colonial world in remarkably similar ways, suggesting that imperialism was a major way that soldiers understood what they were doing and how they were experiencing the First World War. Understanding how soldiers encountered ‘other’ cultures and ‘other’ peoples, both literally and figuratively, does much for our understanding of how Europeans defined civilisation, culture, and their own sense of Europeanness. While imaginings of the ‘other’ in intellectual and highbrow European culture have been well documented, most notably in Edward Said’s pioneering but problematic Orientalism and the schools of thought that have been influenced by his work, such as postcolonial studies, comparatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which essential ideas of non-European or ‘non-western’ civilisations filtered down to the less-educated and working classes.7 Indeed, Liulevicius’s 5 6

7

See Gavin Daly, The British Soldier in the Peninsular War: Encounters with Spain and Portugal, 1808–1814 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Robert L. Nelson, ‘Utopias of Open Space: Forced Population Transfer Fantasies during the First World War’ in Jochen Böhler, Włodzimierz Borodziej, and Joachim von Puttkamer (eds.), Legacies of Violence: Eastern Europe’s First World War (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2014), 122. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994); Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).

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work on the German imperialist mindscape has shown that ideas about the non-European world, and ideas about imperialism, too, filtered down to the mostly working- and middle-class men in uniform during the war. While soldiers, to quote Clarke and Horne again, ‘were not the savants that scholars normally turn to’, they do ‘allow us a glimpse of how the unexceptional, relatively uneducated majority of Europeans arrived at their own conclusions about the relationship between “civilization” and its “savage” other’.8 Soldiers as Tourists More and more historians of the First World War have recently engaged with the idea of the soldier as a tourist. With few exceptions, such as French soldiers on the Western Front or Russian soldiers on the Eastern Front, most soldiers found themselves away from home in foreign lands and often with leave to nearby cities. To be sure, soldiering as a form of tourism was not unique to the experience of twentieth-century warfare, although it might be fair to say that the global nature of the two world wars broadened the scope of wartime tourism. Nonetheless, historians have increasingly argued for a dual soldier-tourist identity in both the First World War and the Second World War. Yet historians have not been able to agree on whether tourism was a central feature of a soldier’s wartime experience or simply a secondary, supplemental part of it. Krista Cowman, for instance, in her study of British soldier life behind the lines on the Western Front, has described soldier-tourism as a ‘subsidiary activity to war’.9 Historians of the First World War have been particularly focused on whether soldiers from Australia and New Zealand considered the war as a tourist excursion, since it was the first time that many of them had been overseas, and whether or not tourism was a motivating factor in voluntary enlistment.10 As will be shown below, I argue, instead, that British and Irish soldiers also understood the war as a ‘tourist analogy’ and that perhaps no other soldiers during the war 8

9 10

Clarke and Horne, ‘Introduction’, 8. Previously, Bernard Porter also called on imperial historians to consider how empire was experienced at a lower level. See Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Krista Cowman, ‘Touring Behind the Lines: British Soldiers in French Towns and Cities during the Great War’, Urban History 41, 1 (2014), 106. Australia was the only dominion within the British Empire not to enact conscription during the war. See Bart Ziino, ‘A Kind of Round Trip: Australian Soldiers and the Tourist Analogy, 1914–1918’, War & Society 25, 2 (2006), 39–52; Richard White, ‘The Soldier as Tourist: The Australian Experience of the Great War’, War & Society 5, 1 (1987), 63–78; Harper, Johnny Enzed, 133.

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embodied the dual identity of soldier-tourist more than the men who fought outside the Western Front. This was especially true of soldiers in Egypt, Palestine, and Macedonia, who dealt with long stretches of inactivity and whose soldiering involved more work on infrastructural improvements and other general labour than their counterparts on the Western Front. In this way, some soldiers during the First World War might have had more in common with, for example, American soldiers in Italy during the Second World War, who felt overwhelmingly that they were both soldiers and tourists.11 To find clear evidence that soldiers outside the Western Front often considered themselves akin to tourists, we need only look at their own writings. As much as soldiers went to great pains to point out the hardships of soldiering, as we saw in Chapter 1, they also openly referred to themselves as tourists. In ‘The Traveller’, published in the Cornhill Magazine, a popular English literature journal, Private David Smith of the Motor Transport Company mused that his wartime soldiering was the trade-off for getting to see the world. I freely own I’ve got no moan – why, though I paid no fare, I’ve ‘ad me Meditraynean cruise like any millionaire! I’ve ‘ad a squint at furrin parts, and ‘eard ‘em talking Greek, Yes, me, wot makes when I’m in work a bare two quid a week! I’ve seen the sheep graze with the goats like what the Bible tells; I’ve seen the stones that look like bread, and sniffed some hefty smells.12

Colonel C. E. Temperley of the 4th Battalion, Rifle Brigade, 27th Division, was ‘not at all sorry’ about leaving Salonika in December 1916 for ‘fresh pastures’. The move, he wrote home, meant ‘seeing more of the World and it is very much better than sitting in one place moping and waiting for demobilisation’.13 ‘Though most of us may have grumbled a good deal during the past few years’, wrote W. J. Titmas of the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC), after sightseeing in Damascus in July 1919, ‘there is a certain amount of consolation in the fact that the war has afforded rare opportunities for “globe trotting” at the government’s expense’.14 Another soldier in the 2/14th Battalion, London Scottish, stationed in Egypt, found that one ‘of the greatest pleasures when on active service, and billeted near a town, is to get leave to visit the 11 12 13 14

Andrew Buchanan, ‘“I Felt like a Tourist instead of a Soldier”: The Occupying Gaze – War and Tourism in Italy, 1943–1945’, American Quarterly 68, 3 (2016), 593–615. ‘The Traveller’, Cornhill Magazine, 119 (London: John Murray, 1919), 318–19. Papers of Colonel C. E. Temperley, Temperley to Family, 21 December 1916, IWM Documents.13596. Journal of the Royal Army Service Corps, 1 July 1919, 157.

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place’.15 Reginald Barrington of the 2nd Battalion, Norfolk Regiment, felt a ‘grievous disappointment’ after learning that his troopship, bound for Mesopotamia from Plymouth, was not going to stop in India. ‘I should have loved to see something of India’, he wrote in his diary.16 ‘One can’t help wondering what the immediate future is going to be’, wrote George Herbert Whyte, after hearing comrades on the Western Front gossip about a move abroad. ‘We have troops in Egypt, Salonika and Mesopotamia’, he explained to his wife, ‘In some ways I should not be sorry to be moved from France. It would be hateful to be further away from England and from touch with you; but I should love to see new countries, and to be away from this dirty trench fighting. We have old links with Egypt and with Greece, have we not?’17 Malcolm Murray Thorburn of the 2nd Battalion, Black Watch, was moved by the ‘excitement of going to the East to Mesopotamia’. ‘I’ll send you a crocodile skin from the Tigris!!!!’, he promised his parents.18 Wartime travel was one benefit shared by all soldiers in the peripheral campaigns, according to a December 1918 article, ‘The Adventurous East’, published in the Kia Ora Coo-ee. Recounting a conversation on the verandah of Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo between five soldiers – two from Mesopotamia, one from East Africa, one from Macedonia, and one from Palestine – the article made it clear that all of these men, in one way or another, felt like the war had afforded them the chance to travel. The soldier from East Africa, ‘of the comfortable farmer type, half yeoman, half squire’, was an amateur hunter in peacetime. ‘His dream had always been big game, but until East Africa claimed him’, the article explained, ‘he had never shot anything bigger than a pheasant’. The soldier proudly boasted to the other men that he had already downed five lions. Impressed, the other soldiers thought the tale ‘the kind of yarn with which Fenimore Cooper beguiles’, referencing the nineteenth-century American author of The Last of the Mohicans. Soon, the ‘Salonika man’ entered the conversation, waxing on portrayals of lions in Greco-Roman friezes. ‘He was an Oxford don, and well over 50, but his lean purse had never taken him as far as his beloved Aegean until in 1915 a knowledge of modern Greek had translated him in khaki to the haunts of Aphrodite.’ Next, the soldier from Mesopotamia entered the fray. A pre-war regular, he was an acting captain in the Indian Cavalry. He spoke of shooting 15 16 17 18

The London Scottish Regimental Gazette, October 1917, 157. Barrington, diary, 23 September 1916, IWM Documents.20333. George Herbert Whyte, Glimpses of the Great War [Letters of a Subaltern from Three Fronts] (London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1919), 59. Papers of Lieutenant M. M. Thorburn, Thorburn to Parents, 1 November 1915, IWM Documents.511.

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partridges near Daniel’s tomb, of visiting the shrine of Hussein in Karbala, and of spending time on the beach in Kuwait. Turning to the soldier from East Africa, the two exchanged words on the best place to hunt ibexes in Persia. The Palestine man, who had until that point remained silent, finally chimed in. He told the other soldiers about a ‘forced landing near Jericho or Sinai or somewhere, and this carried him away to Dafur [sic]’, where the soldier recounted his meeting with local tribesmen who had ‘never seen wheels on earth before, much less wings and wheels in the sky’. The Mesopotamia soldier returned to the conversation. At first, he ‘wanted to chuck his job and join the Flying Corps’ but changed his mind and decided ‘that his show was too good to miss: it ought to take him to the Caspian. He meditated a moment, and then burst out. “By Jove! it seems a rotten thing to say, but I believe I am enjoying this war.” “Of course,” he added, “I’d stop a bullet to-morrow if it would do any good.”’ Ending the article, the anonymous author concluded ‘There are compensations even in the much-maligned East’.19 The dual identity of these men as soldier-tourists was further reinforced by the fact that soldier-tourism was actively promoted by military authorities who were eager to keep morale high and men out of the red-light districts. Garpatch’s Complete Pocket Handbook to Palestine and Syria was often advertised in the Kia Ora Coo-ee. It contained sections including ‘A Complete Historical Sketch of Palestine for the Last 5000 Years’, ‘The Gaza & Jerusalem Campaigns: General Sir E. H. H. Allenby’s Complete Report’, ‘Modern Palestine: What to See and How to See It’, ‘Ancient Judaea, Samaria, Galilee and Jerusalem’ by Josephus, and a complete map of Palestine with a smaller one of Jerusalem. The Anglo-Egyptian Supply Association published Arabic Without a Teacher in 1916, which England’s trade journal, The Bookseller, described as having been ‘specially prepared for the soldiers now in Egypt, and has been received by them with much favour’.20 A second edition followed later that year and was approved by General Sir John Maxwell, the British commander in Egypt.21 Alexander R. Khoori published Alexandria: How to See It, in 1917. Gale & Polden published Pathfinder’s Soldier’s Night Guide for Egypt, Arabia, and India, in 1916. Macmillan & Co published a new edition of Guide to Egypt and the Sudan in 1916, which included ‘new maps’ and gave ‘full consideration’ to ‘travelling arrangements’.22 Guidebooks were also available for soldiers to purchase. In Macedonia, soldiers could buy the ‘Guide to Salonika’, published by a local Greek 19 20 21

Kia Ora Coo-ee, 4 December 1918, 3. The Bookseller: A Weekly Newspaper of British and Foreign Literature (London: Office of The Bookseller, 1916), 100. Bookseller, 361. 22 Bookseller, 356.

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company, which went through eight editions during the war. The guidebook was meant ‘to facilitate the knowledge of the ancient Aegean city amongst the numerous strangers that the hazards of the world-war have brought to these regions’.23 Over its seventy pages, soldiers could find information on the city’s ancient history, Salonika under the Romans, the arrival of Christianity, the city’s role in the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, the Balkan Wars, how and why the war had come to Greece, the great fire, the city’s demographics, lists of monuments, churches, mosques, major streets, and local newspapers, and tram schedules and fares. The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Mesopotamia issued tourist guidebooks about Baghdad. The guidebook proposed a series of walking tours that pointed out the city’s landmarks.24 Soldier newspapers regularly featured articles that recounted soldier travels and suggested efficient travel itineraries. In the London Scottish Regimental Gazette, a series of articles, titled ‘Palestine’, detailed the journey of a group of soldiers throughout the region, where they saw the Tomb of Moses and gave details on how best to travel the countryside.25 General tourist articles like ‘Going to Jericho’ appeared in the Kia Ora Coo-ee, while articles such as ‘The Sights of Salonica’ were featured on the front page of the Balkan News in Macedonia.26 If soldier newspapers were, in fact, a reflection of what soldiers were interested in and wanted to read about, as Robert L. Nelson has argued, these articles are further proof of how seriously the soldier-tourist dual identity had taken root.27 Some soldier newspaper guides were less serious, such as The Mosquito’s ‘An Impression of a Cockney Showing His Pal Around Alexandria’, which followed the jaunts of a stereotypically Cockney soldier and his comrade as they toured the city.28 N.Y.D. at 43, the soldier newspaper for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Canadian Field Ambulances, attached to the 43rd General Hospital in Salonika, produced a light-hearted column, titled ‘On Saloniquing’, featuring tips and tricks for touring the city, from getting a leave pass to navigating the city’s public transport.29 Soldiers had to toe a fine line. Too much talk of tourism would have reinforced the view held by many on the home front that touring, not fighting, was all they were doing (a subject we will explore in Chapters 4 and 5). Writing to his sister, H. C. Peerman of the Welsh Howitzer 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

NA, Guide to Salonica 1918 (N. Christomanos: Thessaloniki, 1918), 1. Found in the Papers of T. Sampson, LC LIDDLE/WWI/MES/04. The London Scottish Regimental Gazette, May 1918, 79. Kia Ora Coo-ee, 15 May 1918, 3; Balkan News, 14 December 1918, 1. Robert L. Nelson, German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 16–54. The Mosquito: Organ of the Army Ordnance Corps, 1 June 1916, 6–7. N.Y.D. at 43, 1 January 1917, 4.

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Battery thought it ‘would be a pity’ having been so close to Jerusalem ‘not to take the opportunity when offered’. That his trip to Jerusalem as an officer would not count as leave surely factored into his decision.30 Sapper Frank Day wrote cautiously about his travels to his parents: ‘I do think myself very lucky to see the world like this . . . we are quite out of touch with France news but very much in touch here, absolutely on the spot + not many miles from a possible fighting line.’31 By pointing out that he was near the front line, Day consciously constructed an image of a soldier who was both seeing the world and fighting the war. In his post-war unpublished memoir based on his wartime diary, C. R. Hennessey perhaps best encapsulates the complicated identity that soldiers were attempting to manage. Writing of the advance towards Jerusalem, Hennessey recalled: ‘We were not here in the capacity of tourists, nor yet pilgrims, but I had the distinct feeling that we were a little of each. It was a solemn thought that we, natives of London, had been chosen to launch an attack on this famous place.’32 Balancing tourism and pilgrimage was the unavoidable fact that Hennessey was in Palestine to make war. Touring the Biblical World First and foremost, British and Dominion soldiers outside the Western Front were fascinated to be touring lands known to them from the Old and New Testaments. Although organised religion was in decline, as church attendance dropped markedly in the early twentieth century, Britons still clung to some kind of personal, vernacular Christianity, based on superstition, tradition, custom, and history.33 Moreover, biblical tourism was likely enhanced by the presence of articles in soldier newspapers that connected the past to the present. In the Bairns Gazette, the article ‘Samson at Gaza’ reprinted an excerpt from the Book of Judges.34 The Palestine News often published articles on Palestine’s historical and religious past, such as ‘The Cities of the Philistines’ and ‘Ramleh in History’.35 After Jerusalem was captured in December 1917, soldiers of all ranks visited the city. Troops in the 60th (London) Division, billeted outside 30 31 32 33 34 35

Papers of H. C. Peerman, Peerman to Caroline, 8 May 1918, LC LIDDLE/WWI/ EP/056. Day to Parents, 28 January 1916, LC LIDDLE/WWI/EP/015. Papers of C. R. Hennessey, unpublished memoir, IWM Documents.12705. Callum Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Harlow: Pearson, 2006), 88–115; Bar-Yosef, Holy Land in English Culture, 250. Bairns Gazette, 1 May 1917, 5. Palestine News, 13 June 1918, 6; Palestine News, 7 March 1918, 6.

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the old city’s walls at Kerem Avraham, flooded into the city.36 W. H. Martin of the Royal Engineers spent the morning of Allenby’s entry on 11 December inspecting the Cathedral of St George, lounging in the Garden of Gethsemane and hiking up the Mount of Olives before returning to Jerusalem to watch Allenby walk through the Jaffa Gate. He and his comrade, he wrote in his diary, ‘were extremely lucky to have seen the interior of Jerusalem as several officers have applied for permission to go in and for the present have been refused’.37 Australian Sapper William Charles Allen of the Field Squadron Engineers had ‘been to all the Holy Places etc.’, including Bethlehem, where ‘Christ was born’, he told his mother, and where Allen had bought her an olivewood commemorative book.38 Captain D. M. M. Fraser of the RAMC spent a number of ‘wonderful days wandering in the old city’ in January 1918. He and others toured all the major holy sites of the three Abrahamic faiths, including the Holy Sepulchre, the Temple Mount and Dome of the Rock, and the Wailing Wall, which they visited multiple times.39 In December 1918, he was even responsible for guiding convalescent Indian Muslim soldiers around the city, making sure to bring them to the Al Aqsa Mosque.40 Allenby himself was fascinated by the region’s biblical history. As Major W. F. Stirling, an officer in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and chief of staff to T. E. Lawrence, put it, Allenby ‘consistently turned to the Bible as his forces advanced across Palestine.’ ‘The historical lore contained in the books of Judges and Kings were at his finger-tips’, he continued, ‘and often, as we drove along, he would say: “You see that hill over there? That is where such and such a thing happened – it’s in the second book of Chronicles.”’41 Firm restrictions followed soon after Jerusalem’s capture and soldiers interested in touring the city required the company of an officer. Oneday passes to enter the old city were issued to officers in mid-December 1917, permitting entry until 4 P.M. Churches and mosques were not to be entered ‘on any account’, a restriction that few officers, if any, obeyed. Groups ranged in size from as small as one officer and two soldiers to as large as four officers and fifty soldiers.42 Soldiers without an official pass or an available and willing officer were undeterred. Men in the 2/15th Battalion, London Regiment, slipped through the Jaffa 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Empson, diary, 13 December 1917, IWM Documents.11943. Papers of W. H. Martin, diary, 11 December 1917, IWM Documents.12813. Allen to Mother and Sister, 25 July 1918, SLNSW, MLMSS 4500 (MLK 3506/Item 3). Papers of D. M. M. Fraser, diary, 12 January 1918, IWM Documents.14662. Fraser, diary, 25 December 1918, IWM Documents.14662. W. F. Stirling, Safety Last (London: Hollis and Carter, 1953), 78. Papers of Major E. B. Hinde, diary, 2 February 1918, IWM Documents.11178.

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Gate without a pass in December 1917 and went on a ‘leisurely inspection’ along the Via Dolorosa before ending at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.43 Other soldiers bribed guards, snuck past them, or called in favours.44 If a soldier failed to dupe the military police or slip past them, entering the old city with an army chaplain was another way of gaining entry. ‘One sees groups of soldiers following their “padre” about the City within the walls’, wrote the Palestine News, pointing out how most soldiers were touring the city.45 Chaplains created travel programs for soldiers, ensuring that they went off the beaten path to visit Christianity’s less popular sites such as the House of Caiaphas and the Chamber of the Last Supper.46 The YMCA was eager to capitalise on this bull market. The arrival of so many soldiers in the holy land was a rare chance to encourage interest in Jerusalem’s Christian heritage and to promote the values of Protestant Christianity to thousands of men. YMCA chaplains became registered tour guides with the EEF soon after Jerusalem’s capture.47 From the Red Triangle Hostel in Jerusalem, opened by Military Governor Sir Ronald Storrs on 10 December 1917, tours ran twice daily and were free of charge.48 Camped outside Jerusalem at Latrun, the Worcestershire Yeomanry organised tours through the YMCA in May and June 1918.49 Cecil Downs of the 4th Battalion, Gordon Highlanders, toured Jerusalem in February 1918 at the side of an American YMCA chaplain who had fled Beirut.50 Between December 1917 and May 1918, according to the YMCA’s own records, YMCA chaplains led over 4,295 officers and men through Jerusalem.51 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Hennessey, typescript memoir, IWM Documents.12705. A. Douglas Thorburn, Amateur Gunners: The Adventures of an Amateur Soldier in France, Salonica and Palestine in the Royal Field Artillery recording Some of the Exploits of the 2/22nd County of London Howitzer Battery R.F.A. on Active Service (Liverpool: William Potter, 1934), 87. Palestine News, 28 March 1918, 15. Papers of G. Good, Good to Unknown, 30 March 1918, IWM Documents.16109. ‘Fourth Annual Report on Y.M.C.A. Work With the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. September 1917–1918’, AWM 25 1039/1. Palestine News, 14 March 1918, 15. C. [Lord Cobham], The Yeomanry Cavalry of Worcestershire, 1914–1922 (Stourbridge: Mark and Moody, 1926), 175. Cecil Sommers [Cecil Downs], Temporary Crusaders (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1919), 68. ‘Fourth Annual Report’, AWM 25 1039/1. For more on the YMCA’s evangelism, see Edward C. Woodfin, ‘Huts in the Holy Land: The YMCA and British Empire Soldiers in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign, 1916–18’, in Jeffrey C. Copeland and Yan Xu (eds.), The YMCA at War: Collaboration and Conflict during the World War (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018), 43–5.

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The chance to photograph the holy land up-close and in-person resonated deeply with soldiers raised on Christianity. For R. H. Sims of the Royal Sussex Regiment, a devout Christian, his photographs of the Garden of Gethsemane, Joseph’s Well, and the Mount of Temptation were evidence for his mother that ‘we are treading on exactly the same ground as our Lord trod on, the great Saviour & Son of God’.52 After Jerusalem’s capture, W. H. Martin of the Signal Corps toured the city with an army chaplain and took photographs of tens of holy sites to mail home, including St Stephen’s Gate, the Via Dolorosa, the House of Simon, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.53 Overwhelmed by the emotion and awe at being in Jerusalem, Lieutenant Frederick Spencer of the Machine Gun Corps had his ‘likeness’ taken in Jerusalem to prove to his sister in Surrey that he had been within the old city’s walls.54 After leaving Basra by boat, Captain Eric V. R. Bellers of the 1st Gurkha Rifles found it was very interesting going up the river + the captain kindly let us sit on the searchlight platform above the bridge, so we had a good view. The new channel of the Euphrates comes in at Kurna + it is here the Garden of Eden was supposed to be, though I am inclined to agree with the Tommy of Punch, who said ‘it would not take no bloomin flaming sword to keep him out of it’.

Day two of his leave in Mesopotamia provided more biblical sites. ‘The second day there was another object of biblical interest in the form of Ezra’s Tomb on the bank of the river, with a blue tiled dome in a clump of palm trees + rather picturesque. I took a photo of this + of various other things en route + am sending them down to get developed by the official photographer at the Base, when I get to the end of my journey.’55 Outside of Palestine, soldiers also used the bible as their reference point. In Egypt, Corporal Walter E. J. Francis of the Queen’s Westminster Rifles, writing to his mother, detailed his trips to the ‘Coptic Church where Joseph + Mary stayed on their flight to Egypt’. Later that afternoon, he told her, he was travelling to the ‘spot where Abraham is supposed to have sacrificed the goat in place of Isaac’.56 After touring the site of Ezra’s Tomb and finding time to stop at the Garden of Eden, one soldier in the 5th Battalion, East Surrey Regiment, thought it ‘wonderful finding oneself in such an old country. Fancy, 52 53 54 55 56

Sims to Mother, 6 February 1918, IWM Documents.7118. Martin, diary, 26 February 1918, IWM Documents.12813. Spencer to Ruth, 29 May 1918, LC LIDDLE/WWI/EP/078. Original emphasis Bellers to Mother, 24 February 1917, LC LIDDLE/WWI/MES/007. Papers of W. E. J. Francis, Francis to Mother, 10 October 1917, IWM Documents.16018.

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there are Christians here (Armenians + Chaldeans) who were Christians before England was “discovered”!’, he wrote to his mother, and ‘Jews who came here captive from Israel’.57 Robert Stewart Campbell of the Royal Engineers found that in Mesopotamia he was ‘marching over the ground that must have been familiar to Abraham’. ‘A short way up the Tigris’, he wrote to a loved one, ‘I stood (barefooted, by request) on the spot where Ezra is buried. Then near Vinma, if we are very credulous, we may gaze upon the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil which lie at the junction of the Tigris with the Euphrates.’58 In Salonika, men of the Hampshire Regiment ‘saw the spot which St Paul addressed the Macidonians [sic]’, as did C. D. Halliday of the Army Pay Corps who, on weekend leave in the city in April 1919, found himself at ‘St. Paul’s Seat where he was supposed to have made his ovation to the Thessalonicans [sic]’.59 Touring the Ancient and Islamic Worlds Touring the sites of ancient Egypt and Islam also was common. Fraser thought that touring the sphinx and pyramids at Giza, as well as Bethlehem and Jerusalem, was an ‘unforgettable experience’. In a diary entry in February 1918, Fraser also alluded to the fact that he, like so many other soldiers, was previously aware of ancient Egypt only through books, photographs, and stories. ‘The Old Sphinx looked so familiar’, he jotted down in his diary, ‘that it was difficult to believe that we were seeing it for the first time’.60 Western, and particularly Victorian, fascination with all things Egyptian was widespread in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In furniture design, architecture, jewellery, knick-knacks, and art, British culture absorbed, modified, and integrated Egyptian motifs as part of an over century-long cultural rebirth which began with the French expedition under Napoleon. Egyptology emerged as a serious academic discipline in the latter half of the nineteenth century, buoyed by the British occupation of Egypt after the failed Urabi Revolt and the establishment of the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1882. For amateur Egyptologists and the

57 58 59 60

Papers of Captain C. W. Dawson, Dawson to Mother, 14 January 1918, IWM Documents.10921. Papers of R. S. Campbell, Campbell to Unknown, 17 September 1917, IWM Documents.11870. Spaull to Parents, 29 May 1917, IWM Documents 15453; Papers of C. D. Halliday, diary, 27 April 1919, IWM Documents.17059. Fraser, diary, 24 February 1918, IWM Documents.14662.

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globetrotting elite, Egypt was also a popular destination for the British travel company, Thomas Cook.61 But for those who did not have the financial wherewithal to take months of time off work and spend hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds to journey to the Middle East, the British Museum was instrumental in presenting ancient Egypt to the wider public. Even more available were visual representations. Guidebooks to Egypt appeared from the 1830s onwards, including John Gardner Wilkinson’s Topography of Thebes, and General View of Egypt and those published by the German travel company, Baedekers. Cook had, by 1876, published its own Cook’s Tourist Handbook for Egypt, the Nile and the Desert after enlisting the help of a British Museum Egyptologist. By 1912, Cook’s Tourist Handbook had been published in twelve editions.62 Photograph collections of Egypt and Palestine were also popular, such as the lithographs of David Roberts, published between 1842 and 1849 in the popular The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia, and the photographs of Francis Firth, published between 1858 and 1860 as Egypt and Palestine Photographed and Described.63 Since the industrial revolution and the spread of urbanisation, leisure activities in Britain had evolved from community-centred events to cross-country and transnational activities such as travel and tourism. Recreational travel was, at first, mostly confined to Britain. The expansion of a national rail network allowed Britons of the working and lower-middle classes to travel through the country. This newfound logistical freedom popularised seaside holidays and country house escapes. As a result, attitudes towards travelling also changed in the late nineteenth century, becoming more about experience and interaction rather than moving from one location to another.64 Yet throughout the nineteenth century, Britain’s industrial middle class, enriched by the rising living standards and wages brought on by the industrial revolution, increasingly joined the upper class in travelling overseas for leisure and, as David Malcolm Reid has put it, for ‘cultural improvement’. But Cook’s tours as far afield as Egypt and Palestine, or 61 62

63 64

James Stevens Curl, Egyptomania, The Egyptian Revival: a Recurring Theme in the History of Taste (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), xviii, 136–7, 163–7. Donald Malcolm Reid, Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 69–72. Stephanie Moser, Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 7–8, 200. Judith Flanders, Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (London: HarperPress, 2006), 206–19.

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Greece, for that matter, were still financially prohibitive. While steam by the mid-nineteenth century and rail travel by the start of the twentieth had made traversing both Upper and Lower Egypt easier, cheaper, and faster than ever before – the railroad had reduced the time it took to travel from Lower to Upper Egypt by half to two-thirds – the working and lowermiddle classes had little hope of travelling on their own to Egypt, unless as servants for the elite or as soldiers and sailors in the British Army and Navy.65 By 1914, then, British and Dominion men had been fed a steady diet of Egypt and Palestine, in one form or another, for the better part of a century. Yet few would have had the financial means or the time that a costly, months-long trip to the region required. The war changed that. As James E. Kitchen has observed, the war, for the first time since the medieval crusades, had sent hundreds of thousands of men from the ‘occident’ into the lands of the ‘orient’.66 Most of these men were from the working or lower-middle classes. For many, the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo was the place to go. Private Bayley of the London (60th) Division spent an entire day perusing the museum’s collection, where he saw the ‘Mummies of Ramses and Amenephos and others’.67 Lieutenant Dr W. S. Scott of the Shropshire Yeomanry spent his morning on leave in Cairo at the Museum, where he found the mummies of Rameses II and III ‘most interesting’.68 As fascinated as soldiers were by the museum’s collection, it was no substitute for seeing first-hand the pyramids and sphinx at Giza. One soldier and his comrades in October 1917 had Thomas Cook’s office in Cairo design a programme for their six days of leave. Day one included the pyramids and sphinx, which the soldier and his comrades climbed inside of (Figure 2.1).69 After touring the mosques of Cairo and finding them all ‘more or less alike’, O. W. Burnett of the 6th Battalion, Leinster Regiment, was confident that ‘the great trip of all of course is the Pyramids + Sphinx’.70 Similarly, Bombardier J. W. Gough wrote in his wartime diary of the prospect of a weekend pass to Cairo: ‘I hope so, it would be a pity to miss the 65

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67 68 69 70

Donald Malcolm Reid, Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 69. James E. Kitchen, ‘“Khaki Crusaders”: Crusading Rhetoric and the British Imperial Soldier during the Egypt and Palestine Campaigns, 1916–18’, First World War Studies 1, 2 (2010), 156. Papers of H. Bayley, diary, 11 June 1917, IWM Documents.10784. Scott, diary, 16 April 1916, IWM Documents.8203. The London Scottish Regimental Gazette, October 1917, 158. Papers of O. W. Burnett, diary, ND, IWM Documents.16334.

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Figure 2.1 Group of British soldiers on horseback and camels in front of the Sphinx, Giza, Egypt, 1915. IWM Q 70412

Pyramids etc being so near.’71 After Second Lieutenant Wingham’s application for leave to Cairo was granted, he wrote to a loved one in England that ‘I shall make a point of seeing the old Sphinx + the pyramids. These places are very wonderful and very beautiful’.72 One soldier in the London Scottish wrote of his leave to Cairo, where he and other comrades had been ‘buying a few souvenirs in the city, and we have booked a dragoman or guide for tomorrow to take us to the Pyramids. I will have my photo taken sitting on a camel whilst I am there, if the camel does not take hump-rage at the idea (!).’73 Indeed, judging by the loose photographs and those pasted into post-war scrapbooks, a subject we’ll return to in Chapter 6, almost every soldier went to the pyramids and sphinx and had their photos 71 72 73

Papers of J. W. Gough, diary, 28 September 1917, IWM Documents.13595. Wingham to Nell, 4 March 1917, LC WWI/GS/1772. The London Scottish Regimental Gazette, October 1917, 159.

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taken on camelback. The typical itinerary of soldiers in the 2/15th Battalion, London Regiment, on leave in Cairo, included ‘being photographed sitting on camels at the foot of the Sphinx’.74 Welsh Sergeant Charles Jones of the Prince of Wales’s Own Civil Service Rifles also had his photograph taken at the sphinx, as did English Sergeant William Bailey of the 60th (London) Division, Captain Alexander McColl of the Wellington Regiment, and Irish Private O. W. Burnett of the Leinster Regiment. Indeed, rank and class seemed to make no difference at all. Of all the soldier diaries, letter collections, and postwar recollections examined in this study, roughly half visited the pyramids and sphinx, and roughly half of those soldier visits came from the lower ranks. Rank, status, and finance did make a difference when it involved travelling to Upper Egypt and the pharaonic sites of Karnak, Luxor, and Aswan. Most organised tours targeted officers, and with prices to match. Shrewdly situated across the street from Shepheard’s Hotel, the one-time headquarters of the EEF and where only officers lodged, the British-run Cairo Express Agency offered prearranged trips at inclusive rates.75 Captain E. B. Hinde’s ten-day trip to Luxor with a fellow medical officer from the Norfolk Regiment was organised by an Egyptian dragoman and included two days of sightseeing, train tickets, meals, and water transportation via a felucca down the Nile.76 Alongside five other officers, Fred Yates, an officer in the Manchester Regiment, made the trip to Upper Egypt in January 1919 in an effort to ‘finish our time overseas’ with an ‘interesting trip’. ‘We shall see temples, tombs, etc.’, he wrote home, ‘going back 1500 years and more’.77 Even Leo Amery, on a strategic reconnaissance mission to Luxor with Allenby and Jan Smuts in 1917, was captivated by the archaeology of ancient Egypt. His diary was ‘so full of the sights’, he wrote to Archibald Wavell after the war, ‘that the strategical part seems to have been rather compressed’.78 Some soldiers thought that modernisation and westernisation were changing the Middle East and that what they were seeing might not last for much longer. ‘I wonder how long it will be before many of the most interesting sights of Cairo are forgotten in the wave of 74 75 76 77 78

Hennessey, typescript memoir, IWM Documents.12705. Palestine News, 4 April 1918, 12. Hinde, diary, 11–21 December 1916, IWM Documents.11178. A Family’s Wartime Letters, 1914–45, Yates to Bess, 1 January 1919, IWM Documents.14035. Sir Edmund Allenby Collection, Wavell to L. S. Amery, ND, MECA, GB165-0005, File 2.

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progress that seems to be turning Cairo into a parody of a European city?’ asked one soldier in October 1918 in the Palestine News. A decade ago, he argued, tourists could see ‘interesting Oriental sights every hour of the day’, but much had changed. By the time of the war, one had ‘to delve deep into the back streets if one wishes to see anything truly Oriental’. One of the only outward displays of authentic, unadulterated Cairo life were weddings, he wrote, urging all soldiers to witness them if they could.79 Other soldiers toured the remains of the ancient Greco-Roman world. Private Culbert Cecil Fisher of the Australian (Camel) Field Ambulance relied on Pliny and Josephus to understand the history of Jaffa, Hebron, Gaza, and Beersheba when he toured those cities in 1917.80 Soldiers of the 9th Mountain Artillery Brigade, in June 1918, received permission to visit Baalbeck, where they toured the Temple of Bacchus.81 Soldiers with classical educations, such as Conor Francis O’Brien, an NCO with the Leinster Regiment, saw their time in Macedonia as a tour of Greco-Roman history. After O’Brien’s diary ends in May 1918, he only jotted down two Greek quotations, one of which was the opening line of Homer’s Odyssey: ‘Tell me, Muse, of a resourceful man who wandered far and wide after he had sacked Troy’s sacred city, and saw the towns of many men and knew their minds experience.’82 In addition to seeing the sites of ancient Egypt, soldiers were also keen to explore Islamic architecture, art, and religious worship. As much as Fraser was impressed by Cairo’s wide streets, packed tightly with shops, cafés, and restaurants, and the city’s gardens and public squares, he wanted to find the ‘glamour of the East beneath this layer of modern civilisation’. In the small, community mosques, Fraser had found the east he was looking for. ‘Look into a mosque’, he wrote in his diary, ‘or a corner of the Moussky, and centuries roll back’.83 According to Harry J. Edwards in Mesopotamia, writing in the soldier newspaper, the Royal Sussex Herald: Everyone’s admiration is aroused at the magnificent mosaics that cover the mosques and minarettes [sic], intricate designs, worked with the brightest of blending colours, and then, perhaps, the figure of a stork, clacking his long bills together, perched upon the top balcony, completes a perfect picture – but stay, there is one item that mars the perfection, and that is a little ugly wooden door let 79 80 81 82 83

Palestine News, 31 October 1918, 6. Fisher, diary, 13 July 1917, SLNSW, MLMSS 1843/Item 1. Papers of J. W. Smith, unpublished memoir, IWM Documents.3444. Papers of C. F. O’Brien, diary, May 1918, IWM Documents.22822. Fraser, diary, 19 February 1918, IWM Documents.14662.

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into the mosaic; how crude yet how Eastern. These minarettes that rise above the square flat-roofed buildings that comprise the dwelling portions of the city are like slender ever-watchful sentinels, and when, at certain periods, these are illuminated at night, the picture is complete.84

Lieutenant H. S. Parker of the Machine Gun Corps also wrote at length about his visit to the mosque at Kazamain, near Zobeida’s Tomb, which he called a ‘glorious affair’. He was particularly impressed by the upper part of the minarets and dome, covered in gilded plates, ‘which flash very beautifully in the sun’.85 Another soldier in the RASC found that the Mosque of Omar was a ‘gem of architecture’. He had ‘seen nothing which could compared with it. One marvels at the marvellously [sic] executed inscriptions in tile work which run entirely around the building.’ ‘There is a devoutness about it all’, he wrote of watching a Muslim at worship, prostrating on the ground, ‘that is to be commended, and the silence is in striking contrast to the pomp and display which is enacted in most of the Christian Churches’.86 In the Kia Ora Coo-ee, historical articles appeared equally on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Dome of the Rock, and were equal in tone; both were simply chronological histories of the holy sites.87 The only structures that impressed one Australian soldier and broke up the ‘regular squat appearance of Salonique’ were twenty minarets rising from mosques at different points in the city.88 Again, wartime photographs tell us much about what interested soldiers. Even though Private Benjamin Eppel, a Scottish Jew serving with the Royal Scots Regiment, regularly attended Sabbath services at the fourteenth-century Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue in Alexandria, it was photographs of Cairo’s mosques that he mailed to his parents in Edinburgh.89 Sergeant G. Good of the RFA was spellbound by the ‘beautiful inlaid ivory work in the walls and the pulpit’ of Cairo’s fifteenth-century Mameluke al-Bordeini Mosque, excitedly snapping photographs of its interior to send home. Photographing Islamic holy places could present unexpected challenges. While photographing a mosque’s exterior was allowed, it was taboo to photograph the interior during ablution or prayers. That wasn’t enough to stop S. J. G. Chipperfield of the Machine Gun Corps from sneaking his camera into the Mosque of Omar atop the Temple Mount (Figure 2.2). 84 85 86 87 89

Royal Sussex Herald, 1 October 1917, 17. Papers of Lieutenant H. S. Parker, Parker to Mother, 2 August 1917, IWM Documents.16064. Journal of the Royal Army Service Corps, March 1918, 186–7. Kia Ora Coo-ee, 15 August 1918, 11. 88 Ora Coo-ee, 15 June 1918, 7. Papers of B. Eppel, Eppel to Mother, 30 May 1916, IWM Documents.17618.

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Figure 2.2 British soldiers touring the Temple Mount, Al Aqsa mosque, Jerusalem, Palestine, 1918. Source: Lowell Thomas Papers, Marist College Archives and Special Collections, 1494.12.1

Chipperfield knew the danger of breaking Islamic custom but snapped tens of photographs anyway.90 Touring the Cosmopolitan East While French docks and ports reminded many soldiers of Britain’s own commercial port cities, such as London, Liverpool, and Glasgow, the Middle East and Salonika appeared both foreign and cosmopolitan.91 Alexandria was the closest thing to a cosmopolitan, Mediterranean, and westernised city in Egypt. While the city was relatively small at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with just over 10,000 inhabitants, by 1907 the city was home to over 400,000 people. By 1882, the year of the British occupation of Egypt, Alexandria had become more cosmopolitan and multicultural; as much as 25 per cent of the city’s population was European, with Greeks making up the majority of the European community.92 90 91

Papers of S. J. G. Chipperfield, diary, 9 December 1917, IWM Documents.7488. Bet-El, Conscripts, 69. 92 Reid, Whose Pharaohs?, 149.

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That said, London, too, was a city that evinced all the hallmarks of industrial modernity, of the British Empire’s economic, cultural, and political dominance.93 Domestic tourism to London spiked in the latter half of the nineteenth century, especially after the end of the FrancoPrussian War and the Commune between 1870 and 1871, when both domestic and transatlantic tourism to Paris declined. In London, domestic tourists imagined the city as the capital of a ‘vast commercial empire’ through which flowed ‘information, goods, and people’, as Joseph de Sapio has written, and a city that was ‘at the cutting edge of modern technology’ and responsible for the success of the empire as a whole.94 Interestingly, as London became more and more a city filled with foreign tourists, some Britons decried the city’s worsening, as they saw it, cosmopolitanism, foreshadowing the views of many soldiers in the Middle East and Macedonia.95 Whether in Alexandria, Salonika, or Baghdad, soldiers remarked on the multicultural, multi-ethnic crowds roaming the city streets. ‘The people were striking’, H. T. Pope wrote from Salonika in his wartime diary, ‘all sorts, Turks, Serbians, Greeks, French, Italians, and women in a gaudily coloured kind of harem dress’.96 The people lining Salonika’s streets provided D. D. M. Fraser with a ‘wonderful kaleidoscope’ of colours and people.97 In Jerusalem, ‘the same cosmopolitan crowd’ reminded Major F. St J Steadman of the RAMC of Salonika. ‘Turks, Arabs, Egyptians, Jews, French, English, Russians’, he wrote home to his wife.98 In the Longleat Lyre, a newspaper published for soldiers convalescing at the Military Relief Hospital at Longleat House in Wiltshire, an anonymously written article described the city: There are many different nationalities and many different languages spoken, which entirely bewilders one. Firstly, we have French, Italian, Russian, Serbian, Greek and English troops out here. Secondly, the natives are made up of Greeks, Jews, Turks, etc. A big percentage of the civil population consists of Spanish Jews. Lastly, the peasantry, of course, is made up of the Macedonian type. Their dress looks picturesque, but too many belts and sashes, etc, for them to be quite clean. A very much larger percentage of the foreigners can speak English than Englishmen can speak French or any other foreign language. Many of the Greek population can speak English quite fluently, and to show how quickly even the vagabond section of the population can pick up languages, we find the street Arab who hawks matches, 93 94 95 96 97 98

Joseph De Sapio, Modernity and Meaning in Victorian London: Tourist Views of the Imperial Capital (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 3. De Sapio, Modernity and Meaning in Victorian London, 88–9. De Sapio, Modernity and Meaning in Victorian London, 130. Pope, diary, 30 November 1916, IWM Documents.6877. Fraser, diary, 23 August 1916, IWM Documents.14662. Steadman to Wife, 21 December 1917, IWM PP/MCR/407.

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etc., speaking all the languages of the allies, picked up since the troops came here. Sometimes it is quite amusing to hear them, as they have picked up many phrases which we should hardly like to hear used in the drawing room.99

Disappointment Yet disappointment with the Middle East and Macedonia was widespread. To be fair, British and Dominion soldiers, for the most part, seemed to be disappointed with everywhere they visited during the war, including France.100 Jerusalem, especially, elicited a range of responses from soldiers.101 Most left the city disappointed, if not disillusioned, with Jerusalem and Christianity, at least as it was practised in Palestine. G. W. Gotto of the 1st Mounted Divisional Train toured Jerusalem in May 1918. He reserved his harshest criticism for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. ‘I cannot even begin to describe to you’, he wrote home, ‘the ghastly tawdriness of the place, but it looks more like a shop with a display of Xmas tree decorations’. Further de-sanctifying the site, Gotto was certain that the Holy Sepulchre was, in fact, ‘faked’. ‘It is far too short to take an average size man’, he elaborated. ‘Then again I believe that the Jews always buried in a hollowed out cave or hole, whereas this is palpably built up.’102 In addition to the confusion caused by competing denominations in the sepulchre, where ‘bits of it belong to the Greeks, bits to the Roman Catholics, and bits to the Armenians, Copts, Syrians, and Abyssinians’, Sergeant G. Good of the RFA felt that the Stone of Unction was a ‘story calculated to turn the whole thing to ridicule’.103 British Protestants, in particular, took exception to Jerusalem’s holy sites. Dr W. S. Scott of the Shropshire Yeomanry, who was eager to retrace the stories of the New Testament, found that the ‘lack of authenticity is the only crab to the sites of various events in the life of Christ’.104 In ‘Dug-out Digressions’ in the Chronicles of the White Horse, the anonymous soldier-author asked, ‘Who are the authors of the following: – “Jerusalem the Golden” and “Jerusalem my Happy Home”? Is there 99 100 101

102 103 104

The Longleat Lyre, 1 April 1917, 14. Cowman, ‘Touring behind the lines’, 109–11. The topic of disillusionment with Jerusalem has also been dealt with by Bar-Yosef, Holy Land in English Culture, 276–81; Kitchen, British Imperial Army, 92–8; and Mahon Murphy, ‘The “Hole-y” City: British Soldiers’ Perceptions of Jerusalem During Its Occupation, 1917–1920’, in Joseph Clarke and John Horne (eds.), Militarized Cultural Encounters in the Long Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 351. First World War Letters from the Middle East, 29 May 1918, IWM Documents.4947 Good to Unknown, 6 April 1918, IWM Documents.16109. Scott, diary, 9 December 1918, IWM Documents.8203.

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another Jerusalem on this peaceful earth?’, he asked sarcastically.105 And in ‘A Sand Grouse’, ‘C.G.B.M.’ felt that both Palestine and Jerusalem had disappointed: Oh! Sunny Land of Promise Oh! flowery Palestine! Oh! Land of corn and olive The Fig-tree and the Vine. Seems always out of reach, The flowers we heard so much of Are only flowers of speech! Jerusalem the Golden, With milk and honey blest; Where is that milk and honey? It seems to have ‘gone West’. The honey that I’ve met here Is Cross and Blackwell’s brand, The only milk I’ve tasted Has come from Switzerland. I sometimes sit and wonder If all we read is true, And why these ancient Sheenies Thought such a lot of you! Would I were back in London In a cosy ‘Private Bar’, With a pint of foaming bitter And a Sixpenny Cigar.106

W. J. Titmas of the RASC, after touring the Church of St Anne, the Via Dolorosa, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, noted that a ‘feeling of deep reverence comes over one on entering this “Sanctum Sanctorum.” We stayed just for a few moments in silence and then took our departure.’ Indeed, Titmas found most of Jerusalem’s sites ‘amazing’. What he did not enjoy was the bickering between rival Christian sects. ‘The worst exhibitions of intolerance are shown between the various Christian Sects occupying the Church. One sect claims the right to clean a certain window; another a certain flagstone and so it goes on. This Church gave me the very worst impression of the religion of Him in whose name it stands.’ ‘The Christianity of Christ’, he concluded, ‘is outraged by such pretensions and these Holy places are a scandal to intelligent Christians, and the objects of derision to unbelievers’.107 After touring Ascension Hill 105 106 107

Chronicles of the White Horse, 1 July 1917, 12. Chronicles of the White Horse, 1 July 1917, 11. Journal of the Royal Army Service Corps, March 1918, 186–7.

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on the Mount of Olives, where ‘On the floor there is a square of ribbed stone to protect the spot from which Jesus ascended into Heaven. Tradition says his footprint is still there (the ball of the foot and the toes), also the point of his staff!’, Titmas was unconvinced: ‘It is really extraordinary how such impossible stories find credence in this enlightened age. But I am afraid superstition is deeply rooted in this strange City, and perhaps fostered by those who make Christianity a trade for tourists, rather than a profession of good deeds.’108 Unrealistic expectations, wrote one soldier in the Palestine News, was the reason for such widespread disappointment with Jerusalem. ‘Many of the best men are disillusioned’, he wrote, ‘What fly had bitten them? What did they expect? They expected to be disappointed. They came prepared by talking in Egypt for disillusionment. “It is nothing like what I thought it would be. But then I never thought it would be.”’109 Nonetheless, the author was one who counted himself ‘outside the ranks of the disillusioned, the disappointed, at the view of Jerusalem’, and, instead, suggested an itinerary consisting of a mixture of modern and medieval architecture, bypassing most of the city’s religious sites. One passage neatly summarises this attitude: We are not out for history or shrines. For the eye alone and the eye-mind, the walk to the Haram Esh Sherif, past carved balconies, and a great gothic doorway with all the special English features, and the Grand Mufti’s beautiful court, is a delight that grows ever day. And the Haram itself, the Temple area! Is there a nobler town-space in the world, a space so quiet, harmonious and beautifully lonely; under such a sky; with carved cypresses like these?110

Australian Lieutenant-Colonel W. Maitland Woods also tried to hit the men of the EEF with a harsh dose of reality. ‘All of us’, he wrote, ‘on entering the Holy Land, try to reconstruct the scene as it was in the time of our Lord’. But the problem, he argued, was that so much had changed over two thousand years that soldiers were bound to be disoriented and disenchanted with modern Palestine. ‘First of all, we must dismiss from our minds that the Bedouins represent in any way the inhabitants of Palestine in the time of Christ’, he cautioned. ‘They have drifted in here from the Desert, and for many centuries have been a source of great danger to pilgrims.’ After writing about Palestine’s ancient beauty, Woods felt it easy to understand ‘how so wealthy and beautiful a country excited the covetous desires of neighbouring Great Powers,

108 109 110

Journal of the Royal Army Service Corps, March 1918, 189. Original emphasis. Palestine News, 19 September 1918, 6. Palestine News, 19 September 1918, 6.

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Figure 2.3 British and French soldiers at the Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem, Palestine, 1918. Source: Lowell Thomas Papers, Marist College Archives and Special Collections, 1494.45.1

lying as it did on the open road between Syria, Mesopotamia and Asia Minor on the one side, and Egypt on the other’.111 The differences between Eastern Orthodox Christianity and its more austere Anglican counterpart were easily noticeable and sources of considerable apprehension for some soldiers. Major Wilfred Evans of the Australian Army Medical Corps spent much of June and July 1918 sightseeing in Bethlehem and Jerusalem. In Bethlehem, Evans visited the Church of the Nativity, which, to his mind, had ‘the same superstructure of tawdriness’ that plagued the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (Figure 2.3). The Church was also beset by another similar problem: rivalries between Christian denominations. Writing to his mother, Evans gave the Roman Catholic portion of the Nativity a pass, but the Greek Orthodox part of the Church was ‘positively revolting’. ‘It’s [sic] walls’, he wrote, ‘are covered with paintings of all kinds + most of them atrocious. The figures representing Christ are too awful for words + the whole place disgusts me.’ The fact that the Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian 111

Kia Ora Coo-ee, 15 July 1918, 3.

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Christians had quarrelled over ownership of the church exemplified, to Evans, ‘the spirit of these people guarding the holy place more than anything I know’.112 What did impress Evans was the German hostel atop the Mount of Olives and the Mosque of Omar. Of the German hostel, Evans was awestruck by its architecture, organ, and iconography, although even there he found evidence of Germany’s misguided ways. Inside the hostel, he commented on the painting of Christ and the apostles on the hostel’s ceiling. Incorporated into the painting, he lamented, was the Kaiser and his wife. ‘To my mind nothing nearer blasphemy can be imagined’, he wrote home, ‘+ I think it well illustrates the mind of the present ruler of Germany to thus place himself practically on an equal with Christ’. The YMCA was also concerned about the authenticity of Jerusalem’s holy sites and feared that soldiers touring Palestine were being put off by, and not turned on to, Christianity. YMCA Secretary William Jessop expressed serious concern over the number of apocryphal sites in Jerusalem in the YMCA’s annual report for September 1917–1918: ‘So much of fraud is practiced and so many superstitions have gathered around the holy places that often a violent disgust is aroused that threatens to shake the faith of some. Our endeavour was to help all to catch something of the inspiration which can be felt if rightly understood.’113 Some of the places that soldiers saw seemed to be on the verge of extinction. Lieutenant W. Sorley Brown of the 4th Battalion, King’s Own Scottish Borderers, and his comrades ‘“doing” Cairo’ and seeing ‘all that ought to be seen’ feared that the city was losing its oriental feel; in other words, the ‘orient’ was not oriental enough. ‘The present is an opportunity not to be missed’, he wrote, ‘as, but for this war, I would probably never have seen this extraordinary city, still Oriental, but becoming more and more European with the passage of years’.114 Lieutenant R. G. Turrall of the South Wales Borderers was willing to put up with the ‘mud + mire that swamps cobbled roads + pavements alike in dark slime’ if Salonika was ‘as eastern as from the bay, as the minarets + blue washed houses by the old wall seemed to indicate’. But ‘to find such a state prevalent among houses that ape the style of western Europe’, he wrote to his father, ‘well, no wonder ones [sic] thoughts are returning again + again to the good ship’.115 Sydney-born Sergeant Frederick Leonard Edmonds of the 7th Field Company Engineers, after touring Jerusalem in January 1918, was disappointed by the city’s westernisation. ‘The Jerusalem of today cannot be termed a typical oriental city’, 112 113 115

Evans to Mother, 24 June 1918, AWM 2DRL/0014. ‘Fourth Annual Report’, AWM 25 1039/1. 114 Brown, My War Diary, 94. Turrall to Father, April 1916, IWM Documents.15329.

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he wrote in his diary. Inside the old city’s walls, he clarified, ‘its eastern character has been generally preserved, but in recent years European influence has been great’. Urban sprawl had led to the building of modern, European-style suburbs outside the old city, and the same was true of Jewish settlements dotting the surrounding hillsides. Not only was Jerusalem disappointingly European – a subtle, if unintentional, nod to Istanbul’s efforts to modernise the city – but the dress of the locals, Edmonds thought, had also suffered. ‘One of the most lamentable influences of the west is the gradual extinction of national dress.’ ‘Some of the native women are still to be seen dressed in there [sic] national dress’, he explained, ‘but the pity is that so few are to be seen in there [sic] national dress now, most of them being dressed in hideous colors and designs of cheap European clothing’.116 The British Imperial Mindscape But beyond the big, cosmopolitan cities of Egypt, Palestine, and Mesopotamia, what British and Dominion soldiers in the Middle East thought they were seeing were societies that had progressed little since biblical times. Even larger cities, such as Cairo, Alexandria, Jerusalem, or Baghdad, as impressive as they were, were thought to be technologically backwards, lacking proper civil infrastructure, town planning, and modern agricultural methods. Macedonia, too, was described as a backwards region and, like the rest of the Balkans, as one that had been ravaged by endless conflict and savagery. As Samuel Hynes has written, one of the features that distinguishes soldier writings of travel from more conventional travel literature is that the latter ‘makes the reader feel that he knows the place he is reading about’, while the former ‘[makes] the war vivid, they don’t make it familiar’.117 Soldiers moved from simply describing what they had seen, as noted above, to prescribing a fix for the problems of these regions and an antidote to the chaos that seemed to reign outside of Europe. In the British imperial mindscape, that fix was British liberal imperialism. In this way, British and Dominion soldiers, as we will see, acted similarly but not identically to their German counterparts on the Eastern Front, who also saw ‘eastern’ lands in need of fixing and imperial ordering. I suggest that this says much about the way that western armies during the First World War experienced non-Western European places, and that an ethos of imperialism, or an imperial 116 117

Papers of Sergeant Frederick Leonard Edmonds, diary, 22 January 1918. SLNSW MLMSS 2760 Item 3. Samuel Hynes, The Soldier’s Tale: Bearing Witness to a Modern War (New York: Penguin, 1997), 6.

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mindscape, was pervasive throughout the war. The pervasiveness of an imperial language or British imperial mindscape calls into question, at least when discussing soldiers fighting in the war’s non-western, nonEuropean spaces, any argument about ‘absent-minded imperialists’, the notion that for most Britons the empire did not factor into how they understood the world and Britain’s place in it. This is not, of course, to say that Bernard Porter’s overall argument about ‘absent-minded imperialists’ is wrong, only that, as he himself argues, an understanding or recognition of imperialism could be expressed at different times, in different places, and in different ways. The First World War outside the Western Front, I suggest, as he does, was one of those times and places.118 In much the same way that soldiers in the trenches of the Western Front relied upon their senses to navigate and understand their experience, as Santanu Das has argued, so, too, did soldiers ‘touring’ the Middle East and Macedonia.119 Soldiers often looked to the streets, store fronts, and buildings around them, finding in the crisscrossed streets and haggard buildings of Egypt, Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Macedonia proof of a social and civilisational backwardness. ‘From the Salonica Front’, a four-part series written by ‘J.C.L.B.’ for Lines of Fire, the soldier newspaper of the 1st Officer Cadet School, Royal Garrison Artillery (RGA), at Trowbridge, described the city’s streets as ‘narrow and atrociously cobbled’.120 Another soldier who had served in Sudan considered Salonika’s roads ‘the worst I have ever seen anywhere, great cobble stones of a huge size and very uneven’.121 ‘The city itself is hopeless’, wrote ‘A.A.N.S.’ in the Kia Ora Coo-ee. ‘The streets are narrow, dirty and cobbled’ and ‘the shops poky and expensive’. The tram service, which only ran through part of the city, was ‘erratic even in it’s [sic] limitation, and the cars are always overcrowded’, forcing soldiers off and into ‘three-ton lorries’.122 Another soldier described Salonika’s streets as ‘narrow’ and ‘mean’.123 A soldier in the 2nd Battalion, New Zealand Rifle Brigade, labelled Cairo’s and Alexandria’s streets as ‘filthy’ and ‘narrow’.124 Ludd’s streets, wrote Sergeant Frederick Leonard Edmonds of the 7th Battalion, Field Company Engineers, were ‘more alleyways dirty, dingy and smelly’.125 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125

Porter, Absent-Minded Imperialists, ix, xiii, 257. Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 35–72, 84–5. Lines of Fire, 1 February 1919, 20. Papers of Captain G. Hall, Hall to Wife, 4 October 1916, IWM Documents.12218. Kia Ora Coo-ee, 15 June 1918, 7. Papers of H. Bartlett, unpublished memoir, c.1930, IWM Documents.4584. The Desert Rag, 25 December 1915, 6. Edmonds, diary, 26 January 1918. SLNSW MLMSS 2760 Item 3.

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Baghdad’s streets were ‘very narrow and very crowded’.126 They were also ‘very hot and dusty, also narrow and irregular; the only straight road in the place’, wrote one soldier in Diana’s Ditty Box, the sailor newspaper of the HMS Diana on the Tigris, ‘is the main road built for military purposes by the Germans during their superintendence of the Turks’ war affairs’. It was ‘agonizing to get about’ and in ‘traversing the tortuous narrow lanes one was continually jostled and pushed from side to side’. The average lane, the soldier guessed, was no more than ten feet wide and often packed tightly with people and pack animals.127 Properly built civil infrastructure and city planning were missing everywhere. Alexandria left Australian Sapper Allen of the Field Squadron Engineers unimpressed by both the size of the city’s buildings and their positioning on the street. The harbour, in particular, was overcrowded, he wrote home, and from ‘every point one sees nothing but dirty Gyppos running here and there’.128 Salonika’s lack of central planning also bothered W. J. Mussett of the 27th Lines of Communication Company, Army Service Corps (ASC). After driving through the city in October 1915, he found that the ‘shops are improvised being little more than sheds, with a good one splashed here and there’. Afterwards, he ‘learned there is no Town Council to supervise the Buildings which explains the irregularity of the shop fronts and the shocking condition of the state of the roads and streets’. Even Rue Venizelos, Salonika’s finest thoroughfare, ‘their only West End Street’, he wrote in his diary, ‘is a poor effort and little better with its cobbles than the other streets’.129 Architectural standards were also lacking in Jerusalem. ‘The houses are very closely built’, wrote one soldier in the Journal of the Royal Army Service Corps. ‘Many of the exterior walls are supported by props stretching overhead across the narrow streets and braced up against some stronger wall. They have an ominous “bulge”’, he continued, ‘and I expect one of these days they will topple over in spite of their supports’. The city’s shops were ‘very small, ill ventilated and poorly lighted’, while its streets were ‘in no way attractive’. ‘They are narrow, tortuous and bewildering’, the soldier wrote, ‘running here and there without any order or regularity’. Only two streets, David Street and Christian Street, impressed him, while the others were ‘something less than alleys and something more than paths’.130 ‘What attractiveness Baghdad has is seen best from the Tigris’, wrote Private 126 127 128 129 130

Campbell to Unknown, 17 September 1917, IWM Documents.11870. Diana’s Ditty Box, 1 April 1918, 6–9. Allen to Mother and Sister, 25 March 1918, 20 April 1918, SLNSW, MLMSS 4500 (MLK 3506/Item 3). Papers of W. J. Mussett, diary, 17–21 October 2015, IWM Documents.12945. Journal of the Royal Army Service Corps March 1918, 188.

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Harold Hill of the Machine Gun Corps to his parents in England. ‘Seen on foot’, he elaborated, ‘Old Baghdad is not a dream city. When I first walked through the streets I looked in vain for marble walls and golden domes: I found only mud bricks and red or blue tiles. I was disillusioned so started to look for other interests.’131 Basic sanitation also seemed to be absent. Salonika was a ‘horrible place filthy and half civilized’.132 The city was ‘dirty’, ‘untidy’, and ‘composed of sun, dust, and smells in equal proportions’.133 ‘The odour that assails your nostrils’, wrote another soldier in Salonika, ‘does not remind you of the lavender fields of Mitcham’. After returning to the Struma Valley, he was ‘glad to get out of it and get a mouthful of something resembling fresh air’.134 Damascus, ‘which sounds rather romantic’, Major Evans of the Australian Army Medical Corps explained to his mother, left him ‘disappointed with the famous city as I find it a beastly dirty, not to say verminous city’.135 While a soldier with the 2/21st Battalion, London Regiment in Palestine, admitted that some of the local men ‘are very finely built and many of the girls are wonderfully graceful’, their ‘appearance belies them and among other drawbacks they badly want washing and sterilizing’.136 Al-Eizariya, better known to soldiers as Bethany, was a ‘filthy collection of hovels swarming with diseased Arabs’.137 Jerusalem was a ‘filthy + poverty stricken city no doubt’, one soldier granted, ‘due to the horrible treatment the inhabitants received at the hands of the Turks’.138 The city’s inhabitants were in need ‘of a good scrubbing’ and threw ‘all their living refuse’ into the streets.139 The ‘odours arising from some of these heaps are vile’, one soldier wrote in a soldier newspaper, ‘more than once I was compelled to hold my nose!’140 Ismailia’s ‘native quarter’ was ‘a collection of mud huts in a filthy condition. Fowls, ducks, turkeys, pigs all in the hut with the people’, wrote one soldier.141 Port Said was ‘a very dirty place, like 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141

Papers of Harold H. Hill, typescript account, ND, LC LIDDLE/WWI/MES/046. Mussett, diary, 11–12 November 1915, IWM Documents.12945. Papers of A. E. Bundy, diary, 15 November 1917, IWM Documents.10828; Lines of Fire, 1 February 1919, 20. Papers of T. G. Craddock, diary, 6 April 1918, IWM Documents.16826. Evans to Mother, 10 October 1918, 11 November 1918, AWM 2DRL/0014. Papers of C. R. Verner, typescript journal, 1918, IWM Documents.12581. Galloway, diary, 10 January 1918, IWM Documents.1630. Papers of Trooper Gordon Tunstall Birbeck, Birbeck to Mother, ND, SLNSW MLMSS 810/Item 2. Hennessey, typescript memoir, IWM Documents.12705. Journal of the Royal Army Service Corps, March 1918, 188. Alan Pryor and Jennifer K. Woods (eds.), Great Uncle Fred’s War: An Illustrated Diary 1917–1920 (Whitstable: Pryor Publications, 1985), 25–6.

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nearly all these places are’, wrote Trooper William Weaber of the 10th Light Horse Regiment.142 Baghdad was not the Baghdad ‘based on “Arabian Nights”’, but one of ‘filth and smell’ that rivalled ‘anything Egyptian’.143 Second Lieutenant D. A. Simmons of the Dorsetshire Regiment was unimpressed with every city he saw in Mesopotamia. Basra was ‘a large place full of little, narrow, dark alleys’, and its people ‘villainous + rather dirty’, he wrote in April 1919, ‘very dirty and very evil-smelling. I don’t think there were 10 consecutive yards of even roadway anywhere; everything allowed to gradually fall to pieces and decay. All refuse was just thrown into the streets, pariah dogs were as the sands of the sea in multitude.’144 Although Kut alAmara was ‘a fair sized town’, it was, he wrote, ‘incredibly dirty’. Behind the pleasant exterior of the river front, he found ‘the usual unutterable squalor and dirt of any Arab or Turkish town’.145 Of course, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Macedonia were not exactly the backwaters that soldiers made them out to be. Since the Ottoman Municipal Ordinance of October 1877, which tasked municipalities with improving streets, walkways, sanitation, traffic, and construction, regional urban development in Ottoman Palestine constituted what Salim Tamari has called a ‘grid of triadic urban modernity’, centred on three cities: Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Beersheba. Road, rail, and telegraphic communications linked Jerusalem, the administrative capital of the region, to Jaffa, its main port city; Jaffa became the hub of external trade; and Beersheba was to be a garrison town on the frontier of the Palestinian-Sinai border. The goal, as Tamari writes, was to create a microcosm of ‘Istanbul modernity’ in each city.146 Across all of Ottoman Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Mesopotamia, from Haifa to Aleppo to Beirut to Baghdad, infrastructural developments had reshaped the region’s towns, cities, and ports, and commerce, thanks to Mediterranean trade, thrived.147 Macedonia, too, under Ottoman rule, had been the subject of serious modernisation efforts.148 142 143 144 145 146 147

148

Papers of Trooper William Victor Weaber, Weaber to Aunt, 28 March 1918, SLNSW MLMSS 9107. Kia Ora Coo-ee, 15 June 1918, 3. Dawson to Mother, 31 December 1917, IWM Documents.10921. Papers of D. A. Simmons, typescript account, April 1919, IWM Documents.21098. Salim Tamari, The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 45, 65. Jacob Norris, Land of Progress: Palestine in the Age of Colonial Development, 1905–1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 26–62; André Raymond, Arab Cities in the Ottoman Period: Cairo, Syria and the Maghreb (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950 (London: Harper Collins, 2004), 209–37.

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Nonetheless, soldiers pointed to Arab and Greek peoples as the problem. Soldiers referred to local peoples as ‘biblical’ and as though they had not changed at all over two millennia. Villages near Basra were ‘So quaint you can’t imagine’, wrote Private M. M. Thorburn of the 2nd Battalion, Black Watch. The city’s bazaar was peopled by ‘old Isaacs and Jacobs’ and the ‘same old Biblical Arabs’. Those at Qurna, he wrote in the same letter home, ‘can’t have changed an atom’ from biblical times.149 ‘I wish you could be here for a day, by some magic carpet or something (we are in the land of the Arabian Nights)’, wrote Captain C. W. Dawson of the 5th Battalion, East Surrey Regiment from Basra, ‘for you can never picture the place + its wonderful extremes + varieties without seeing it. The Arabs are just like their pictures, very “biblical” in appearance if you understand what I mean.’150 Women carrying water in metal jugs from the river to their homes in Basra reminded Captain P. Carrington-Peirce of the 55th Brigade, RFA, of ‘“Rebecca at the well”’. ‘This old method of water carrying’, he jotted down in his diary, ‘is but a survival or continuance of what was in vogue centuries ago’.151 The ‘male dress’ in Assur, the capital of ancient Assyria, made the men look more like ‘Abraham and Moses with their flowing robes’.152 Arabs near Ludd were ‘clad in patchwork quilts, like Jacobs [sic] coat of many colours’.153 Other Palestinian villagers were ‘of the Shylock type – long beards and gowns of every colour – the whole thing very biblical’.154 Bethlehem was ‘still the same Bethlehem of Judaea’, wrote another soldier. The town was run by village patriarchs, the Well of Bethlehem and Solomon’s Pools still stood, and marriage customs relied on the bartering of women and goods amongst local families.155 Soldiers watched Greek and Bulgarian refugees pushing their belongings in wooden carts down the road to Salonika, ‘like they did in the olden times as we have read in the bible’.156 Scenes of Greek and Bulgarian ploughman working with oxen and metal ploughs made ‘the Bible very real’, according to C. E. W. Brayley, who opened this chapter, while Greek women fetching water from nearby wells looked like ‘Rachels and Rebeccas’.157 Macedonia reminded L. G. Pinnell of the 67th Battalion, Machine Gun Corps, of ‘nothing on earth unless it be the pictures in the old family Bible’. Pinnell had watched villages in Ak 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157

Thorburn to Alison, 3 January 1916, IWM Documents.511. Dawson to Mother, 31 December 1917, IWM Documents.10921. Carrington-Peirce, diary, 25 October 1916, IWM Documents.10844. Papers of O. A. Summers, diary, 5 September 1917, IWM Documents.11564. Good to Unknown, 10 March 1918, IWM Documents.16109. Catford to Parents, 10 November 1917, LC LIDDLE/WWI/EP/008. Kia Ora Coo-ee, 15 July 1918, 6. Dudley to Uncle, Aunt, and Cousin, 8 November 1916, IWM Documents.24253. Brayley to Family, 6 November 1915, IWM Documents.7599.

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Bunar ‘constructing a threshing floor there – in exactly the same way that Vergil [sic] described 19 centuries ago, and Hesiod five centuries before him’.158 Pre-war officers and men who had experience in the empire’s colonial possessions were stunned by how similar the Greeks, who were, as they often put it, supposedly Europeans, seemed to Africans and Indians. ‘The curious part about these people’, a puzzled Brigade Major Vivian Fergusson of the RFA wrote of the Greeks to his fiancée, ‘who are by way of being civilized Europeans – is their likeness in many ways to the natives of India’.159 Brigadier General Sir Hugh Simpson-Baikie, who had been previously stationed in India, Egypt, Sudan, and South Africa, was astonished by the small city limits of Salonika and the comparatively large population. ‘They must have lived entirely like the Natives in India’, he concluded.160 Another officer described Kalamariá, a suburb of Salonika, as a ‘Kaffir village in darkest Africa’. The skin colour of the villagers stood out most to him; they were black enough to ‘pass for Arabs’.161 The concept of ‘backsheesh’ – something for nothing – was everywhere, soldiers complained. Soldiers on tours of the pyramids and sphinx at Giza were ‘continually bothered by the guides, donkeys, boys + little kids all crying for “backsheesh”’. Some guides demanded payment before helping soldiers into the passages of the pyramids.162 Other guides were accused of luring British and Dominion soldiers into bazaars and marketplaces, where tradesmen had conspired to inflate prices and increase profits. The bazaar in Minya in Egypt was ‘surrounded by beggars of all descriptions, blind lame etc., whining the eternal “Bac sheesh”’.163 ‘It is asked for here more than anywhere else in the world’, wrote another soldier, ‘not even excepting Naples’.164 Selecting an Arab guide was a cautious affair for soldiers. Weary of ‘glowing tales’ and fanciful stories, they made a conscious effort to hire a guide who appeared honest and genuine. Advice columns in the Palestine News sought to help by disclosing strategies for fending off overzealous escorts. ‘You may be painfully aware that a Guide is weaving a web of fabrications for your edification’, wrote an anonymous soldier in the newspaper. He recommended that 158 159 160 161 162 163 164

Papers of L. G. Pinnell, Pinnell to Mother, 16 July 1916, ND, LC LIDDLE/WWI/ SAL/052. Papers of V. M. Fergusson, Fergusson to D’Ewes, 30 March 1917, IWM Documents.10940. Simpson-Baikie to Wife, 14 December 1916, KCLMA. Papers of Commander Edgar Allison Burrows, Burrows to Family, N.D., LHCMA Burrows 3/7. Papers of W. C. Culliford, typescript account, ND, IWM Documents.17089. Papers of F. S. Hook, diary, 15 March 1916, IWM Documents.4684. Diana’s Ditty Box, 1 April 1918, 7.

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soldiers wrap their faces in mosquito poultice, hang bells from their belt buckles, and ‘Walk straight up to the first Guide you see and say to him “I am a leper. Give it backsheesh.” He will vanish’, the soldier predicted, ‘and before the day is out the whole community of Guides will have a detailed description of you’.165 ‘Except in his demands for “baksheesh”’, explained the history of a South African artillery battery in Palestine, ‘the lower-class Egyptian is a rather undemonstrative soul. And why one should be expected to shower largesse upon a man who has not even carried one’s bag or washed one’s shirt seems somewhat incomprehensible. But the hope – and expectation also – of this unearned increment’, he concluded, ‘springs eternal in the Gyppo’s breast, and is as ancient and inexorable, I suppose, as the laws of his old friends the Medes and Persians’.166 The villagers of Amarah had ‘learnt that ever present word “buckshee”’. Every Iraqi ‘yells it and holds out his dusky paw’.167 To Simmons of the Dorsetshire Regiment, there ‘seemed to be not one atom of personal pride or endeavour or competition’ in Basra’s bazaar, he wrote in April 1919. Fatalistic Arabs, with no sense of free market economy, manned stands indifferently. ‘If you liked to buy anything, well and good; if you considered the price too high, well it was the will of Allah’, he explained, ‘but the shopkeeper would not reduce it one farthing; you could take it or leave it, he didn’t care a rap if he sold it or not’.168 While Egyptians, Palestinians, and Iraqis wanted something for nothing, Greek merchants – referred to as ‘rednosed robbers’ by one soldier – wanted too much for everything.169 Greek labourers pestered soldiers on Salonika’s tram to buy pants and raincoats for ‘fabulous sums’.170 One soldier in the Kia Ora Coo-ee chastised Greek traders as a ‘dishonest band of brigands’ who didn’t ‘care a fig whether we buy today or not; they know full well we must have the commodities, and must pay their price’.171 Years of commerce between Greeks and Salonika’s Jews, wrote F. W. Twort of the RAMC, after vising Egnatia Street, had ‘bred a band of super-swindlers’.172 O .C. M. Haines of the 25th Casualty Clearing Station, on leave in Salonika to buy souvenirs for his wife, felt that Greek merchants had ‘risen to the occasion’ and ‘as a rule their goods are gaudy, + altogether too dear for the article itself’. Like Twort, Haines found the comparison between Salonika’s Greeks and Jews too easy to 165 166 167 168 169 170 172

Palestine News, 2 May 1918, 11. F. H. Cooper, Khaki Crusaders: With the South African Artillery in Egypt and Palestine (Cape Town: Central News Agency Ltd., 1919), 14. Papers of J. C. Lindley, Lindley to Unknown, 7 March 1916, IWM Documents.16701. Simmons, unpublished account, April 1919, IWM Documents.21098. Moore to Mother, 28 August 1917, IWM Documents.12814. The White Band, September 1917, 82. 171 Kia Ora Coo-ee, 15 June 1918, 7. Papers of Captain F. W. Twort, typescript account, c.1916, IWM Documents.17131.

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make. ‘They are just like Jews’, he wrote of the Greeks.173 Soldiers had to ‘beat down the price’ of goods and other items with ‘Greek pavement merchants’ so frequently, wrote one soldier in the Hampshire Regiment, who had tried in frustration to buy photographs of the Great Fire, that it was best to pay the merchant a quarter of the asking price ‘and you are about right’, he told his parents.174 Others used more forceful tactics. ‘Did a deal in eggs with a Greek’, wrote Captain D. H. B. Harfield of the Hampshire Regiment. ‘105 for 15fr. He was furious but they do us in always and a revolver works wonders out here’, he explained.175 Soldiers also looked at the state of women in Arab and Greek society as evidence that both cultures were backwards. Greek women, especially, were nothing like what soldiers had imagined. In the White Band, the soldier newspaper of the 20th and 21st Officer Cadet Battalions at Crookham Camp, Hampshire, the anonymous author of ‘On A Day’s Saloniquing’, published in September 1917, recalled travelling in the city on the tram. Inside the carriage, the soldier gazed around ‘not with open mouth’ but ‘with eyes wide open’. He ‘cast around for a damsel of the classical type familiar to artists and sculptors, – a goddess with perfectly symmetrical figure, clad in the minimum of a clinging drapery, holding in arm outstretched a pair of papier maché balances, and gracefully advancing at about the regulation pace for a native sanitary section. Alas!’, the soldier wrote dejectedly, ‘the gladsome vision does not materialise, and you see only the commonplace peasant class, dark and hardly fitted to be advertisements for somebody’s soap, with not and again an amply-proportioned, matronly figure, ponderous in her black velvet and furs’.176 Greek women, wrote another soldier in the RAMC, were ‘awful’ and ‘expressionless’, and with ‘skin of unhealthy whiteness’.177 Captain F. W. Twort, also of the RAMC, suggested that the racial stock of Greek women had clearly declined over the centuries. ‘From childhood’, he wrote, ‘one reads and hears beauty of the Greeks, but from what I have witnessed of the present day representatives of that race they cannot be said to be endowed with a great amount of it!’ Twort pointed to the dark hair and eyes of Greek women and their ‘clear white skins’ as evidence that their racial health was questionable.178 173 174 175 176 177 178

Papers of O. C. M. Haines, Haines to Parents, 29 October 1916, IWM Documents.3245. Spaull to Parents, 31 October 1917, IWM Documents.15453. Harfield to Wife, 27 June 1916, IWM Documents.16068. White Band, September 1917, 82. Papers of J. E. Sleigh, diary, IWM Documents.11789. Twort, typescript account, ND, IWM Documents.17131.

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Women were also treated like second-class citizens, a clear sign, soldiers thought, of social backwardness. ‘Decrepit-looking native men’ in Macedonia forced their women to ‘trudge the road alongside their easy-going “lords”’, Lieutenant Muggeridge recorded in his diary.179 Captain G. S. MacKay of the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders felt out of place when, catching a ride into Salonika, he gave up his seat on a transport bus to a female passenger, ‘quite contrary’, he wrote to his mother, ‘to the rules of Greek ettiquette [sic]’.180 ‘Macedonian manners’, as one soldier in the London Regiment put it, remembering the scene of a Greek patriarch leading his family on donkey-back while his wife and children walked behind him, made him ‘feel like throwing bricks at the man’.181 For Private George Wilson of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry Regiment, the way that women were treated in Salonika was confirmation that Greece and the Balkans were stuck in an earlier stage of civilisation. Wilson remembered watching caravans of Greek refugees and donkeys from the frontline streaming into the city as his regiment marched out of it. ‘On the leading donkey rode the owner of the line of donkeys. At the end of the line of donkeys’, he wrote in amazement, walked a woman, presumably, the wife of the owner of the donkeys. It struck me most forcibly at the time that how primative [sic] it seemed. This sight of a woman, a long staff in her hand, clad in some black rode for a garment, plodding along behind that string of donkeys while her husband rode in comparative ease. It seemed to set back the time two thousand years or more to the story of the Holy Land and the Bible.

Wilson and other Englishmen ‘were used to treating our Womenfolk with respect’, he wrote, ‘yet here in a so called civilised country, women were treated with scant courtesy and treated as so much as slaves or cattle’.182 For William Knott, on the religious fringe of the EEF, Islam was the problem and Christian British rule the solution. Knott was by no means alone. As John Darwin has written, British opinion, ‘whether sympathetic or not, tended to regard Islam as a culture in decline’.183 On the spot, Knott’s understanding of Islam was similar. His frequent meetings with a Christian missionary in Egypt convinced him that a ‘nation can never rise above the standard of it’s [sic] womanhood’. The social position of 179 180 181 182 183

Papers of Lieutenant A. H. Muggeridge, diary, 5 December 1916, IWM Documents.8493. MacKay to Mother, 2 Feb 1917, IWM Documents.12688. Papers of J. Hartsilver, typescript account, ND, IWM Documents.12221. Original emphasis. Papers of G. H. Wilson, unpublished memoir, IWM Documents.14191. John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 296.

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Arab women was an indicator of the ‘low moral state’ of Egypt. The conditions of Arab women were ‘pitiful more especially the Moslems’, he argued, who forced their wives to ‘trudge along with tremendous loads on their heads’ while ‘the men ride the donkeys’. Only ‘three out of every 1000 women were able to read or write’, he was told at a missionary lecture in Cairo. All of this led Knott to reaffirm his belief in the beneficence of evangelical Christianity and the civilising march of the British Empire (a subject we’ll return to in the next chapter). He addressed the critics of Christian evangelism in his wartime diary: ‘if they take a walk into some of the filthy native villages and saw those who have benefitted . . . then the value of these wonderful benefactors would be better realized’.184 Others pointed to widespread prostitution as representative of Arab society’s failings. Brothels in Cairo’s red-light district, the Haret al-Wasa quarter, numbered in the hundreds and prostitutes conceivably into the thousands, a cause of concern to both military and municipal authorities for different reasons.185 F. V. Blunt of the 2/15th Battalion, London Regiment, was appalled by the open solicitation of prostitutes on Cleopatra Street. ‘I never dreamt such places existed’, he wrote in his diary, ‘I had never seen anything like it in England.’ Blunt sympathised with the prostitutes, recognising that each one was ‘some mother’s daughter and someone’s sister’. The problem was endemic, he thought, and an accepted practice: ‘What an occupation to have – and in the East it is an occupation.’186 Away from the region’s cosmopolitan city centres, soldiers found wide open expanses, desolation, and few signs of cultivation. ‘Curiosity, pity, wonder, were all aroused’, recounted one soldier after touring a Greek Macedonian village. ‘Picture a field littered over with mounds, shallow holes, small boxes like hen-coops, rusty petrol tins by the score, broken and battered slender railings, old bottles, shoes, bits of clothing, etc, etc. – it reminded me’, he continued, ‘of nothing so much as a badly-kept allotment ground or municipal rubbish tip’.187 The country outside Salonika was ‘wild, barren + mountainous’, wrote one Irish soldier to his mother, ‘something like Kerry but not as green + one never sees a tree’.188 Fields had been left unplowed and without proper irrigation. ‘The country here would be intensely fertile if irrigated as it is nothing but 184 185 186 187 188

Knott, diary, 24 September 1917, IWM Documents.7987. Mark Harrison, ‘The British Army and the Problem of Venereal Disease in France and Egypt during the First World War’, Medical History 39 (1995), 133–58. Blunt, diary, 7 September 1917, IWM Documents.2512. Kia Ora Coo-ee, 15 November 1918, 20. Papers of Captain M. R. Mahoney, Mahoney to Mother, 4 January 1916, IWM Documents.16151.

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alluvial mud brought down by the river during countless ages’, Second Lieutenant J. C. Lindley of the South Lancashire Regiment wrote home from Amarah. ‘No stones. Just rich black soil but all dried up and blistered in the sun’s heat. The curse of Adam and Eve’, he continued, ‘must have fallen on the garden of Eden also for I have never seen such a desolate land as hereabouts’.189 The Palestinian countryside, in Major Evans’ eyes, was full of untapped potential. ‘Glorious country it is + should be rich + prosperous instead of being poor + full of starving population’, he wrote home.190 For one soldier in the Chronicles of the White Horse, one of Palestine’s ‘Shattered Illusion’s was that it was a ‘land flowing with milk and honey’.191 ‘The troops looked in vain for the Promised Land of milk and honey’, explained an article in the Anzac Bulletin, but except for ‘the few Jewish and German colonies and the orange groves about Jaffa, it was, with all its natural possibilities, a land bare and neglected, a reproachful ghost of a great life that is gone’.192 In sum, every marker of modern, twentieth-century civilisation, as it was understood by British and Dominion men, in Egypt, Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Greek Macedonia, was missing: the streets were too narrow and confusingly laid out; buildings were constructed improperly and without any order or planning by a town council; the people were a curious and potentially problematic mixture of the unclean, biblical-age beggars, and modern-day swindlers; and fields upon fields had been left to dry out and go to waste. When soldiers tried to find meaning in fighting away from the Western Front, as we will see in the next chapter, they often thought of the backward state of the Middle East and Macedonia and the benefits that either direct or indirect imperial rule would have on the region’s peoples. No Substitute for Home After enduring a German chemical gas attack, most likely that which saw 15,000 asphyxiating shells fired at the British trenches between the Doiran and Vardar over a three-day period in March 1917 at the Battle of Doiran, Sapper John Steeksma wrote about Salonika from his hospital bed for the Royal Engineer’s Post Section.193 After writing about Salonika’s poor roads, its smells, its curious mixture of peoples, foremost among them the ‘wretched nondescript’ that defied categorisation, crowds of 189 190 191 193

Lindley to Parents, 7 March 1916, IWM Documents.16701. Evans to Mother, 11 November 1918, AWM 2DRL/0014. Chronicles of the White Horse, 1 April 1917, 7. 192 Anzac Bulletin, 3 January 1919, 4. Yigal Sheffy, ‘The Chemical Dimension of the Gallipoli Campaign: Introducing Chemical Warfare to the Middle East’, War in History 12, 3 (2005), 316–17.

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‘hucksters’ all looking to pull one over on soldiers, and the Greeks’ poor treatment of animals, Steeksma made clear that the city, which he described as a ‘wretched hole’, was not only backwards and disillusioning but also that soldiers’ thoughts consistently turned westwards: Is the city disenchanting? Are the hills too wild and bleak? Do the big guns sound too deadly On the air of Salonique? Even so; but every soldier Takes a sudden westward leap When his blankets are around him And he settles down to sleep.194

Salonika, with its ‘wild’ and ‘bleak’ hills, was no substitute for home leave, which, as we saw in Chapter 1, was largely missing from the experience of soldiering outside the Western Front and the lack of which was claimed by soldiers as a special hardship. Steeksma was not the only soldier who felt homesick and argued that wartime tourism was no substitute for home leave. In ‘The Exile’s Lament’ in The Mosquito, the newspaper of the Army Ordnance Corps at Alexandria, one soldier would have happily exchanged the cosmopolitan crowds walking the city and its women for a sight of home: The city is full of a grasping race Painted women, and tempting snares Oh! for the sight of a homely face And the sound of our mothers murmured prayers.195

At Mersa Matruh, ‘J.C.M.H.’, writing for the Chronicles of the White Horse, reminded his comrades that the ‘happiest memories of each day are spent in dreams of Home’.196 ‘Not many of us, I think, would take up our abode in Egypt’, one soldier suggested in the Desert Rag, produced by the 2nd New Zealand Rifle Brigade, ‘when the thought of old New Zealand with her hills and valleys, clad in bush or grass, with her streams and cultivated fields, with browsing flocks of sheep or herds of cattle, unequalled climate and all else that she provides us with’.197 A British soldier, excited to see Alexandria, told his parents that he would ‘willingly give it all up only if only I could get home again, to peace + quietness’.198 Similarly, a private in the 2/23rd London Regiment 194 195 196 197 198

The Royal Engineer’s Post Section, 1 December 1917. The Mosquito: Organ of the Army Ordnance Corps in Alexandria, 1 June 1916, 5. Chronicles of the White Horse, 1 April 1917, 8. The Desert Rag, 25 December 1915, 6. Day to Parents, 2 January 1916, LC LIDDLE/WWI/EP/015.

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welcomed leave to Egypt and the chance it afforded him to go to Giza, ‘but its [sic] not like getting leave to England, nothing at all’, he confided in his diary.199 J. Wilson of 279th Machine Gun Corps was willing to ‘forego all the cities and rich valleys of the East’, including two cities, Beirut and Damascus, he had wanted to visit since childhood, for home.200 In the anonymously written ‘A Soldier’s Farewell to Mesopotamia’, both the modern and biblical sites of Mesopotamia were no match for home. We’ve seen ‘Baghdad’ + ‘Basrah’ Viewed ‘minaret’ + ‘Dome’/But we’d swap the whole dam Country For a foot of land at Home We’ve passed through ‘Kut’ + ‘Qurnai’ Where Even + Adam fell But this ain [sic] no figs nor apples But its [sic] Blinking hot as –‘L’ – In olden days when vexed or wroth We’ve spoke of regions hot And muttered ‘Hades’ – now we’ll say Oh go to Mes-o-pot We’re fed up with your Cafes And Bazaars where ‘Arabs’ sprawl We’re longing for the parting From ‘Arabs’ one + all Oh ‘Eden’ you’re the limit Farewell thou barren spot and Heaven grant that we never more Set foot in Mes-o-pot.201

Touring Greece and Salonika, as Steeksma pointed out, was no better. Although he was impressed by the sight of mosques and minarets rising from Salonika’s skyline, John Macleod, a student at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, longed for the ancient and more familiar university town of Cambridge: THE minarets of Salonique Rise slender-white against the sky From cypress-shady court the Greek Craftily scans the passers-by I see; and in me leaps desire For Cambridge court and Cambridge spire.202 199 200 201 202

Papers of E. H. Bryant, diary, 21 September 1917, IWM Documents.16667. Papers of J. Wilson, diary, 18 October 1918, IWM Documents.4070. Poem Entitled ‘Farewell to Mesopotamia’, IWM Documents.12418. John Macleod, Macedonian Measures and Others (London: Cambridge University Press, 1919), 9.

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Whether they had toured Salonika, Alexandria, Cairo, Jerusalem, or Baghdad, home was the trip most soldiers would have preferred.203 Conclusion Not long after the war’s end, the extent of soldier tourism during the conflict was well known. Reviewing the watercolours of aerial combat and other scenes from the war in Palestine and Mesopotamia on exhibition at the Manchester City Art Gallery in May 1921, painted by Royal Flying Corps (RFC) pilots and brothers Richard and Sydney Carline, the Manchester Guardian anticipated keen interest from all members of the public. ‘More John Smiths have travelled in the East during the last few years’, the Guardian explained, ‘than ever before’.204 As much as British and Dominion soldiers in the Middle East and Macedonia were soldiers – a point they went to great lengths to emphasise, as we saw in the previous chapter – they were also tourists. While tourism was part of the experience of fighting on the Western Front, it was even more so for those away from it. Perhaps more than any other soldiers during the First World War, at least those who fought on behalf of the British Empire, they considered themselves as soldier-tourists and experienced much of the war as travel and intercultural interaction, a dual experience that, after the war, impacted how they remembered their time in the army (the subject of Chapter 6). Both the explicit references to themselves as tourists and the extent of soldier photography outside the Western Front make that point clear. British and Dominion soldiers toured the sites of Christianity, of ancient Egypt and the Greco-Roman world, of Islam, and also marvelled – and occasionally disdained – the multicultural cosmopolitanism of the non-western world. Yet almost everywhere they went, disappointment was the overriding emotion, leaving them to feel like the world they had explored paled in comparison to home. The one exception might have been the more ‘authentic’ experience of Islam in the Middle East and, to some extent, the Jewish part of Salonika. The Middle East and Macedonia’s urban city centres, including Cairo, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Salonika, were filled with narrow streets and alleyways, poorly constructed buildings, filth and squalor, and peoples of questionable morals and commercial practices. To be sure, the Greek government under Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos was also concerned about Salonika’s cosmopolitanism and infrastructural 203 204

Bar-Yosef has taken to calling British soldiers in Palestine ‘homesick crusaders’. See Bar-Yosef, Holy Land in English Culture, 276–81. ‘The City Art Gallery: “Lands of the Bible”’, Manchester Guardian, 2 May 1921, 3.

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problems.205 Yet they did not see the city as proof that modern Greece was in ruins; British and Dominion soldiers did. This view was, as I have argued, part of a British imperial mindscape that in some ways mirrored how German soldiers on the Eastern Front tried to make sense of Eastern Europe. And like German soldiers, British and Dominion soldiers offered a ‘fix’ for the problems they saw all around them. That fix was the modernisation of the Middle East and Macedonia under the watchful eye of the British Empire, a topic we will explore in the next chapter. Some, as noted above, even dreamt of settling in Mesopotamia or Palestine after the war, turning in their rifles for ploughs, pickaxes, and an agrarian lifestyle. It was British and Dominion soldiers who would fulfil the untapped potential of Palestine and Mesopotamia. It is important to point out, though, that the luxury of soldier-tourism was never a substitute for home. Soldiers unquestionably took advantage of their geographic location in the war, but home was always the sight they most wanted to see. But finding meaning in spending the war touring the Middle East or Macedonia was hard to do. Germany, after all, was the main enemy, and the liberation of Belgium and partially occupied France the war’s ultimate goals. In the next chapter, we will explore what it meant to be fighting outside the Western Front.

205

Mazower, Salonica, 277.

3

Meaning

Crouched in a makeshift dugout near Gaza in April 1917, ‘ALA’, a British soldier in the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment, mused on life after the war. Drifting off from the sweltering heat, his eyes slowly closed. Soon, he was transported to a dream world in post-war ‘Blighty’. He recounted his make-believe return to domestic life in the Regiment’s soldier-produced newspaper, Chronicles of the White Horse. No longer starved by paltry army rations, his full belly bulged at the waist. His hair was cropped and ‘beautifully arranged’. His clean shirt and trousers were unsullied by sand and sweat. The comforting sight of brick, mortar, and glass windows surrounded him, replacing leaky sandbags and the endless flatness of the desert of southern Palestine. The mood of the scene, an illusory manifestation of Saville Lumley’s Parliamentary Recruiting Committee poster, ‘Daddy, what did You do in the Great War?’, quickly darkened as his imaginary family gathered around him. Presently I heard my little wife asking me to look after the boys for a few minutes in the drawing room. There they were, the little beggars, six of them, romping about just like I used to do. A yell went up ‘Here’s Dad! come on Daddy and play soldiers’. ‘No, boys, I’m tired’. ‘Well then, Daddy, tell us what you did in the Great War’, and they all crowded round me on the floor. ‘Well, I marched long distances, dug trenches, built dug-outs and –’. ‘Yes, we know, but didn’t you kill any Germans? and what did you do at night in Alexandria’ ‘Son – don’t be silly – here comes your mother.’ My wife: ‘Oh George, it’s Sunday, and the boys must behave themselves; here’s a Bible, just tell them something about the Holy Land!!!’1

Before ALA could open the bible, the deafening sound of a shell exploding near his trench woke him from his dream. Although written about the war in Sinai and Palestine, ALA’s fantasy scene about a post-war world in which he and other soldiers who had not fought on the Western Front would be questioned, if not embarrassed, about what they had done in the war, would have resonated with soldiers 1

Chronicles of the White Horse, 1 July 1917, 8.

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in Macedonia and Mesopotamia. The hardships of their wars (as we saw in Chapter 1), including long route marches, the digging of trenches, fortifying dugouts and redoubts under trying climatic and environmental conditions, combating Turks, Arabs, and Bulgarians, and the fleeting pleasures of wartime tourism were no substitute for fighting the German Army on the Western Front. Their distance from the Western Front led soldiers to ask an inevitable question: what were they doing to win the war by fighting the Ottoman Army in Sinai, Palestine, and Mesopotamia or the Bulgarian Army in Macedonia? If the most courageous, dutiful, and selfless men were found across the English Channel in the trenches of France and Flanders, what, then, did it mean to be fighting the British Empire’s other wars?2 This chapter will show that the First World War in the Middle East and Macedonia had multiple meanings that can be broken down into three categories: personal, strategic, and moral. All three ways of understanding the British Empire’s other wars, however, were directly or indirectly tied to the war against Germany on the Western Front. First, soldiers constructed a personal meaning of the campaigns. In the war’s early years, when few predicted that the conflict would last as long as it did, many soldiers were embarrassed to be in the Middle East or Macedonia, far from the guns in France and Flanders and, as ALA wrote fearfully, not fighting the German Army. Professional soldiers considered the other wars an obstacle to career advancement. But as the war dragged on and battles like Ypres and the Somme were fought on the Western Front, survival was paramount to fathers, husbands, and sons who, as civiliansoldiers, were only temporarily in uniform and had a separate, domestic life to return to. Being away from the Western Front during times of crisis, like during the Somme Offensive or the German Spring Offensive, was troubling, and led many to have doubts about whether they were contributing to the war effort. But surviving the war meant far more, and fighting in the Middle East and Macedonia increased those odds. Whether embarrassed or safe, though, soldiers had to contend with the question of whether the other wars were leading the British Empire towards victory or further away from it. The second meaning of the campaigns in the Middle East and Macedonia was tied to the war’s grand strategy. While no soldier outside the Western Front expressed his belief that the war could be won in Palestine, Mesopotamia, or Macedonia alone, many argued that what they were doing was part of the wider war effort; they were, in short, ‘doing their bit’. Last, this chapter will examine what that ‘bit’ was and how soldiers identified 2

Bet-El, Conscripts, 181.

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a moral meaning in their campaigns. It will explore how soldiers wrote about and lent meaning to the war in the Middle East as a crusade against the Ottoman Empire, as a war of liberation from Ottoman misrule, as part of the ongoing legacy of British liberal imperialism, and how the war in Macedonia and Mesopotamia had brought civilisation to its supposedly backwards peoples. As historian Ronald Hyam has argued, the ‘entire British expansionist enterprise overseas was infused with and energized by a profound sense of moral and religious purpose’. British and Dominion soldiers outside the Western Front very much fit Hyam’s understanding of empire and how the imperial public saw its purpose.3 Moreover, as Hyam urges, the empire cannot be fully or properly understood without ‘moving beyond the metropolis and into the periphery’. By looking at British and Dominion soldiers in the Middle East and Macedonia, it’s clear that soldiers as far away from the metropolis as possible thought about empire remarkably often and connected both the war and the coming post-war to imperialism and empire.4 Moral meanings like the liberation of Palestine and the extension of liberal imperialism first arose during the war, but, linking this chapter with Chapter 5, emerged more strongly in the interwar period as ex-servicemen remembered the other wars in their memoirs and other retrospective writings. Importantly, this section will also engage with the debate on soldier morale and combat motivation in the First World War by suggesting that, for those fighting outside the Western Front, the primary group alone was not enough to sustain combat motivation before and after battle; a legitimate demand also was needed. Personal Meaning With such well-defined links between soldiering, manliness, and duty to empire, and with Germany seen as the war’s chief aggressor and the most serious threat to the British Empire, the prospect of spending 1915 and 1916 in Egypt held little appeal for most soldiers. For Australians and New Zealanders, disembarking at Alexandria in December 1914, instead of Marseilles, was a serious blow. Like the rest of the British Empire, in Australia and New Zealand it was Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality, real and fabricated tales of German atrocities, and a desire to come to the aid of the ‘old world’ that had motivated many men to enlist.5 3 4 5

Ronald Hyam, Understanding the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 24. Hyam, Understanding the British Empire, 2. Gammage, Broken Years, 5, 35; Harper, Johnny Enzed, 19–23.

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Private Cecil Malthus of the 12th (Nelson) Company, attached to the Canterbury Battalion, was one such case. Malthus enlisted in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force at Canterbury less than two weeks after Germany invaded and occupied Belgium. He was motivated, in his own words, by ‘the stories of German “Atrocities”’, although he later came to doubt Allied propaganda after his own meetings with French civilians revealed unexpected tales of German friendliness.6 Yet Malthus found himself in Egypt, not France, near the end of 1914. ‘I hardly need say’, he wrote to his wife, ‘that we were horribly disappointed when we found our destination was Egypt’. Until the moment he noticed his transport ship slowly pulling into dock at Suez, he was sure that his and his comrades’ destination was the Western Front.7 Malthus described his time in Egypt as something like an enforced and unwanted holiday. He tried to learn Arabic, refined his grasp of French in the cafés and restaurants of the European quarter, and took in as much of Egyptian-Levantine culture as he could. Despite the joys of being on a ‘pleasant holiday’, Malthus could not shake the feeling that he should have been fighting in France. This was, in truth, a complicated matter. Social pressures, such as the atrocity propaganda that pushed Malthus and hundreds of thousands of like-minded men to enlist in the first place, presented the fighting in France and Flanders as the only real war. That front also happened to be the bloodiest for British and Dominion soldiers. Domestic pressures forced an entirely different consideration. Malthus’ wife, Hazel, thought it was better for him to be in Egypt, as far from the sound of German guns as possible. Malthus sided with Hazel and agreed that the climatic and environmental hardships of Egypt – the terrible heat, long days of route marching, endless dust storms, and, most damnably, the inability to keep butter at room temperature – were much preferred over combat conditions in France. The Battle of Neuve Chapelle, which began three days before he wrote to her, had ended with nearly 12,000 British and Indian casualties. Still, he was ‘far from agreeing with [her] wish that we may remain in Egypt indefinitely’. But between the aftermath of Neuve Chappelle and the start of the Gallipoli campaign, Malthus’s attitude towards his place in the war fluctuated. His earlier bloodlust was gone. Although rumours overheard at Zeitoun spoke of a move to the Dardanelles, he confided to Hazel that deep down he had little appetite for what was expected to be a tough and 6 7

Papers of Cecil Malthus, Malthus to Hazel, 23 May 1916, Christchurch City Libraries, Nga Kete Wananga o-Otautahi. Malthus to Hazel, 12 December 1914.

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far more dangerous campaign than safeguarding the Suez Canal. ‘Whenever things get a little too slow we always get a rumour to bright [sic] up our hopes. I know we are supposed to pretend that we are, but now that our first enthusiasm is over, I think most of us are quite willing to keep our skins whole. But we would give anything to get out of this.’8 ‘Anything’ turned out to be a transfer to Anzac Cove at the end of April 1915. There, Malthus was exposed to the brutality of the war to force the Dardanelles Straits. He sent his only green envelope letter – a sealed letter that bypassed censorship, so long as its contents were about private and family matters only – of the war home to Hazel, in which he professed his love for her and wished he had never left New Zealand. He experienced the ‘toughest [fighting] we have ever had’ and came to the unsettling conclusion that despite all his posturing he was ‘not really meant for soldiering’.9 After contracting scarlet fever in August, Malthus was invalided back to Egypt in September. He spent several months in and out of hospitals at Ras-el-Tin, Moascar, and Gezirah, before finally, and regrettably it would seem, making his way to the Western Front, where he was wounded on the Somme in September and discharged the following April. Malthus’s varied experience of the war, of boredom in Egypt, terror at Gallipoli, and a wound that led to his discharge from France, is one of the best examples of how and why the Middle East likely got its reputation as an inactive front, if not a vacation, from the war altogether. For Malthus, Egypt was little more than roaming the streets of Cairo and Alexandria practising his Arabic and French, interspersed with occasional garrison work and training exercises. This inactive version of Egypt would have been reinforced by his evacuation from Gallipoli to the breezy seaside hospitals along Egypt’s Mediterranean coastline. Egypt was where Malthus escaped the war, not where he fought it. He did not take part in Murray’s advance into Sinai or in Allenby’s push into Palestine and eventual capture of Jerusalem. In short, Malthus saw few signs of the war, and he – as many others surely did – more than likely took that appreciation of the Middle East, short-sighted as it was, with him to the Dardanelles and then to France. But Malthus wasn’t alone. To be defending the Suez Canal or to be probing into Sinai in 1915 and 1916 meant something very different than the later war in Palestine. Australians, too, who arrived in Egypt in December 1914, soon grew tired of route marches, garrison work, and wandering the streets of Alexandria, Cairo, and Port Said. Sergeant 8 9

Malthus to Hazel, 3 April 1916. Malthus to Hazel, 26 August 1916; Malthus to Hazel, 11 September 1916.

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W. W. B. Allen of the 9th Battalion, Australian Imperial Force (AIF), was ‘fed up generally with our stay for such a long period here. We have been on the job for about six months and haven’t had so much as a shot fired’.10 ‘The sand and hot weather is killing us’, Corporal R. E. Antill of the 14th Battalion, AIF, wrote home, ‘the sooner out of this place and in the firing line the better I don’t want to die in the attempt I want to do some thing first what do you say if its [sic] only 1 German’. Soon, he ended, ‘we shall round the Dardenals [sic] or in the south of France and then the fun will start’.11 Major Oliver Hogue of the 14th Light Horse Regiment, famed for his writings under the pen name ‘Trooper Bluegum’, was deeply uncomfortable with being stuck in Egypt, on garrison duty along the Canal, while other Australians were fighting at Gallipoli. ‘Do you know I’m almost ashamed to write any more letters from Egypt?’, he wrote home. ‘Here we have been stuck here for months and months while our comrades have been doing all the fighting.’12 Fred Tomlins, a signaller in the 1st Light Horse Regiment, ‘cursed’ his misfortune ‘in being left behind’ in Egypt in April 1915 while his comrades made way to Gallipoli. He hoped ‘to Goodness’ that rumours of a move to Gallipoli in late April were true.13 Protesting their stay in Egypt in letters and diaries was one thing, but breaking military law was another. In August 1915, four artillerymen went to great lengths to escape Egypt. The foursome made their way on board a ship sailing from Egypt for the Dardanelles. Detained along with eight others who had hid on board, the four artillerymen walked from battalion to battalion at Anzac Cove, desperately trying to join the fighting. In time they were arrested, sent back to Egypt, and fined twenty-four days’ pay.14 Even after Australians and New Zealanders returned to Egypt from the Dardanelles, it was to France that they wanted to go. Captain H. E. S. Armitage of the 50th Battalion, writing in his diary in December 1915, felt that ‘there is a job for us and our fellow Anzacs near by – and by God . . . we’ll make our names stand out in Hunnish blood’.15 After the evacuation of the Dardanelles, Tomlins and the 1st Light Horse Regiment were back in Egypt, stationed to the east of the Canal in Sinai. With a move to Gallipoli no longer an option, and the monotony of desert life in Sinai a reality, Tomlins set his sights on the Western Front. ‘We do not expect to have any more fighting in this 10 11 12 13 14

Quoted in Gammage, Broken Years, 41. Papers of R. E. Antill, Antill to Mother, 1 April 1915, AWM 1DRL/0047. Papers of Major Oliver Hogue, Hogue to Family, 7 May 1915, AWM 1DRL/0355. Papers of Fred Harold Tomlins, Tomlins to Jessie, 15 April 1915, SLNSW MLMSS 5975. Gammage, Broken Years, 42. 15 Quoted in Gammage, Broken Years, 116.

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part of the world’, he told his mother, ‘+ living in hopes of being sent to France next spring + getting there for the final dust up’.16 Not only were men as far from the Western Front as possible, or so it seemed, but also the conditions of desert warfare had pushed some of them beyond their mental and physical limits. The aforementioned Private Oliver Clarke of the 7th Light Horse Regiment, stationed in Sinai in August 1916, thought it lucky that his comrades had escaped the safety of Egypt for the killing fields of France. ‘What do you think of Eugene Waters luck?’, he wrote to his brother. ‘He had managed to get a commission in the Engineers, and is off to France in a few days. Lucky dog isn’t he?’ Clarke left no doubt as to why Waters was so fortunate. ‘I don’t mean because he has a commission’, he clarified.17 Just what had Waters left behind and why was Clarke so sure that his move to France was a blessing in disguise? In the same letter to his brother, Clarke vented about the drudgery of the war in Sinai: The daily routine in connection with the horses along with the ever present sand and terrible heat is enough to dishearten anyone. We had two or three days of 124 degrees in the shade, and there is no shade. Now what do you think of that? Is it any wonder that we are all anxious to get out of Egypt? Every day the temperature is 100 degrees or more and we have to go out and work in it.18

While soldiering, it might be said, was not Clarke’s cup of tea, he was well aware of the conditions prevailing in France. In January 1917, he was left shocked that the temperature in Egypt and Sinai could dip so low. It was a cold, he wrote home, that made him ‘realise what the poor lads in France must be suffering’.19 The prospect of withering away from the climate and disease, far from the fighting on the Western Front, was especially upsetting for men of the New Zealand (Maori) Pioneer Battalion. After departing New Zealand in February 1915, their hopes of battling the German Army on the Western Front were soon dashed. Instead, they found themselves in Egypt, relegated to garrison duty along the Canal. Shortly after setting up camp at Zeitoun, the battalion held a parade complete with traditional Maori hakas, songs, and dance. With the Higher Commissioner in Egypt Sir Henry McMahon and the Commander in Chief of the Force in Egypt Sir John Maxwell both present, the battalion’s medical officer, Captain H. M. Buchanan, gave voice to the men’s concern: Our ancestors were a war-like people, constantly sending our war parties on their inter-tribal campaigns. The members of this war party would be ashamed to face 16 17 18 19

Tomlins to Mother, 3 October 1916, SLNSW MLMSS 5975. Papers of Oliver Joseph Burke Clarke, Clarke to Nickie, 9 August 1916, AWM PR00054. Clarke to Nickie, 9 August 1916, AWM PR00054. Clarke to Nickie, 5 January 1917, AWM PR00054.

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their people on the conclusion of the war if we are to be confined entirely to garrison duty and not given an opportunity of proving their mettle at the front. I speak now not so much as a soldier but as a representative of the old Maori chief who would have spoken to you had they the opportunity to voice their views and the thoughts that are in them.

What, exactly, were the views that Buchanan alluded to? ‘We would sooner die from the bullets of the enemy’, he shouted, ‘than from sickness, disease . . . for what say the Maori proverb? – “Man should die fighting hard like the struggling uroroa shark! and not tamely submitting like the lazy tarakjii, which submits without a struggle”’. Buchanan’s passionate appeal to Maori tradition led to a thunderous applause from the pakeha New Zealanders and Maoris looking on and listening. ‘We, therefore, ask you’, he ended, ‘as the old chiefs of our people would ask you, to give us an opportunity for active service with our white kinsmen from New Zealand. Give us a chance!’ With no plans for an offensive into Sinai on the table, the chance for ‘active service’ that Buchanan and the Maoris so desperately wanted was with their ‘white kinsmen’ in France. By July 1915, the battalion was finally fighting at Anzac Cove as part of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles and later saw action on the Western Front.20 By 1918, after the captures of Gaza and Jerusalem, New Zealanders still felt as though they would have done more for the war effort had they been elsewhere. In Te Korero Aotea, the newspaper of the Aotea Convalescent Home in Heliopolis, Egypt, wounded men expressed their hope that in the next war they would play a more important part: I FEEL that if the next great war should happen in my day, I shall be more particular as to the part I play. I find the comforts of the line incalculably few; I do not like Palestine I loathe the squadron stew. Wherefore, when next some super-hun Involves me in the strife; I’ll bet against their longest gun To jeopardize my life.21 20

21

Original emphasis. Documents of biographical interest, Ramsden Papers, Sir Peter Buck, ms report, ‘With the Maori Contingent – Egypt’, 1915, Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, MS-0196-340A. Te Korero Aotea, 1 January 1918, 29.

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Nor did men from one of Britain’s smallest dominions, Newfoundland, see reason to stay in Egypt any longer than they already had. John Gallishaw of the First Newfoundland Regiment, attached to the British 29th Division, was thankful for the chance to see the pyramids at Giza and to meet men from the antipodes. But Newfoundlanders in Egypt, he claimed, had one constant grumble: ‘[Egypt’s] some place, but it isn’t the front. We came to fight, not for sightseeing.’22 Being in Macedonia or Mesopotamia instead of on the Western Front was just as frustrating. Men of the Cheshire Regiment expressed their desire for glory in France instead of inaction in Macedonia. ‘But we needs [sic] must get in action’, one soldier wrote in The Balkan News: Far from the plains of Greece And win a great victorious And everlasting peace.23

Lieutenant Ilay Ferrier of the 6th (Poona) Division found it ‘rather sickening’ when his battalion was told in September 1914 at Kirkee that they were headed to Mesopotamia.24 Nearly a year later, camped at Ali al-Gharbi, not far from Amarah, he complained to his mother that ‘France, Flanders + the Dardanelles overshadow this picnic’.25 ‘This is a rotten country’, he told her, ‘The latest cry when things are not quite nice is “Mesopotamia for the Mesopotamians, we don’t want it!”’26 Thomas W. Hutton of 13th Battalion, Black Watch, explained in the first stanza of a lengthy poem that it was on the Western Front or worse, dead and buried, that he and his comrades should have been instead of Macedonia: They couldn’t cure malaria, so they bunged us up the line They were frightened of the pensions bye and bye; Our proper place was Paradise or somewhere across the Rhine, So they sent us where the whizzing bullets fly.

While in an earlier poem, ‘Adoption’, Hutton, perhaps with a grain of salt, rationalised the deaths of Australian soldiers in Egypt as their sacrifice for empire, soldiers in Macedonia were better off dead, having made the 22

23 24 25 26

John Gallishaw, Trenching at Gallipoli: The Personal Narrative of a Newfoundlander with the Ill-fated Dardanelles Expedition (New York: The Century Company, 1916), 32. Balkan News, 17 December 1915, 3. Papers of Ilay Ferrier, Ferrier to Mother, 22 October 1914, LC LIDDLE/WWI/ MES/031. Ferrier to Mother, 24 August 1915, LC LIDDLE/WWI/MES/031. Ferrier to Mother, 22 September 1915, LC LIDDLE/WWI/MES/031.

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ultimate sacrifice, or being ‘across the Rhine’ and making their way towards German soil.27 While some British and Dominion soldiers were fed up with being stuck in Egypt or Macedonia in the early years of the war, where little fighting had taken place, boredom was widespread, and disease was rampant, and some felt embarrassed, owing to social pressures and propaganda that identified the only real war as the one being fought against the German Army, other soldiers recognised that being far away from the Western Front increased their chance of survival. The fact that soldiers put such a premium on safety and survival is not surprising. As Helen B. McCartney reminds us in her study of two battalions of the King’s Liverpool Regiment, British soldiers, especially those drawn from the Territorial Force, were ‘first and foremost civilians’.28 Soldiers from Australia and New Zealand felt similarly, Australians maybe even more so, as they were the only white dominion to reject mandatory military service and field an entirely voluntary army.29 But whether British, Australian, or a New Zealander, husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers placed their safety first and the needs of the war effort a very distant second. Preferring to stay in the Middle East or Macedonia instead of going to the Western Front or Gallipoli made obvious sense to men who wanted to survive. Especially after the battles at Ypres, Artois, and Loos on the Western Front in 1915, which produced more than 200,000 casualties combined, and the Gallipoli campaign, which also wounded and killed more than 200,000 men (mostly from disease and sickness), both fronts looked like a death sentence. Australian Major Bill McGrath’s letter to his brother, written before his departure from Heliopolis for Gallipoli, reads like a final will and testament: Tomorrow we embark for the Dardanelles. We go dismounted so you can bet its [sic] going to be pretty rough for a while. Horses may follow later. We are now clothed with putties + other infantry gear. Well old man I hope I come through lucky. It is a big thing to go for + for Lizzies [sic] sake I am very sorry. However it is too late to drawback so will do my bit cheerful. Should anything happen I ask you + all to keep a kindly eye on the poor little girlie + the boy. She is a wonderful good little girl + you know what I have been to her. I am very sorry Jack that I have caused you so much grief + worry through life. It was just my nature I suppose. I will try + repay you for your kindness to me by everything in my power. Give my love to Clare + the kiddies. Always keep them foremost in your thoughts.30

27 28 30

Thomas W. Hutton, Rhymes of Four Fronts (Kirkintilloch: D. MacLeod Ltd, 1936), 54–6, 114–15. McCartney, Citizen Soldiers, 1. 29 Gammage, Broken Years; Harper, Johnny Enzed. Papers of William McGrath, McGrath to Brother, 14 May 1915, SLNSW, MLMSS 9476/Folder 1/Item 1.

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McGrath, in fact, survived Gallipoli and was transferred to Sinai in June 1916. His experience of the Dardanelles had put him off from ever wanting to return there or be moved to the Western Front. ‘Of course everyone wants something to happen’, he wrote to his brother from Sinai, bored but ‘quite safe from any attacks’, ‘but that sort of shite comes from the new bloods. All the old beard recognize the good wicket they are on + say nix.’31 Sitting and talking with fellow soldiers of the 8th Battalion, Hampshire Regiment, on Christmas 1917, Private Donald McNair saw a bleak future if he was to be transferred to France. He compared the winter conditions in the Judean hillside, harsh as they were, to the dilemmas facing men on the Western Front: ‘A “Merry Christmas” was freely exchanged, while one observed that it was worse than France, and then added “I don’t know, though: out there if you lie down you are “drownded” [sic], if you stand up you are shot – what a horrible predicament!”’32 Captain P. Carrington-Peirce of the 13th (Western) Division, which was part of the relief force that had suffered over 20,000 casualties in its effort to lift the siege of Kut al-Amara, was ‘jolly glad’ he was in Mesopotamia ‘instead of France or Salonica’ because it was more ‘sporting (and safer)’.33 ‘From all accounts’ of the Western Front that Major Wilfred Evans of the Australian Army Medical Corps had heard, ‘we must consider ourselves fortunate [in Palestine]’, he wrote to his mother in January 1918.34 Men who had already fought at Ypres or the Somme did want to go back. Until January 1916, when he was transferred to Macedonia, Irish Captain Martin Mahoney of the 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Fusiliers, had spent all of his war in the trenches of the Ypres salient. Writing to his mother in Cork, Mahoney admitted that he was content to see out the war making roads in Macedonia even though the weather was ever-changing between freezing cold and oppressive heat and road-making was ‘not what one could call an intellectual occupation’. But Macedonia was ‘better than standing in wet trenches’ at Ypres, he explained, where trench foot and artillery shelling were more likely to injure or kill him.35 Similarly, Private P. F. F. Spaull of the 19th Battalion, Hampshire Regiment, found Macedonia ‘infinitely better than Flanders for comfort’. Whenever he thought of the Western Front or when his comrades, huddled around a campfire, traded war stories of Ypres and Loos, ‘my mind always goes 31 32 33 34 35

McGrath to Brother, 7 June 1916, SLNSW, MLMSS 9476/Folder 1/Item 1. Philip McNair (ed.), A Pacifist at War: Military Memoirs of a Conscientious Objector in Palestine 1917–1918 (Much Hadham: Anastasia Press, 2008), 69. Carrington-Peirce to Mother, 4 January 1917, IWM Documents.10844. Evans to Mother, 10 January 1918, AWM 2DRL/0014. Mahoney to Mother, 18 February 1916, IWM Documents.16151.

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back to 1915–16’, he wrote to his parents, ‘I really do not think I could stand those conditions again’.36 When rumour of a transfer to Macedonia made its way from man to man in the 11th (Cambridge) Battalion, Suffolk Regiment, finally reaching Signaller W. J. Senescall, he looked forward to escaping the wet, cold trenches of Ypres, where death lurked in the form of the sniper’s ‘whiz-bang’. In a poem, he wrote: Far away from Ypres I want to be Where German snipers can’t snipe at me. Wet is my dugout, cold are my feet. I’m waiting for a whiz-bang to sing me to sleep.

Once in Macedonia, stationed in the Struma Valley, Senescall found his ‘phony war’: Draw your gumboots from the Quarters and go down to Berakley-Zuma. Take a pick and shovel with you and go down towards the Struma. And the Bulgars, they won’t shell you, no its [sic] only a ruddy rumour. In the evening by the moonlight on the Struma.37

Yet exchanging the brutality of the Western Front for the safety of the Middle East or Macedonia was not always a straightforward proposition. For Siegfried Sassoon, the prolific English war poet, Palestine was unquestionably safer than the Western Front. But Sassoon had to reconcile that fact with another; Egypt, in his mind, was an unimportant sideshow and a place where he would not be contributing as much to the war effort. He weighed the benefits and drawbacks of being sent away from the Western Front in his wartime diary: ‘Points in favour of going: New Country – conditions not so trying (probably Palestine) – less chance of being killed. Points against going: I want to go back to one of the regular battalions. The other place is only a side-show, and I’d be with an inferior battalion.’ Sassoon lobbied unsuccessfully to high-ranking friends to quash his transfer. He arrived in Palestine in February 1918. Sassoon found the climate agreeable; Palestine’s ‘soft, warm air’ reminded him of an ‘English summer’. The rumble of artillery guns, however, was so far away when compared to France. ‘Nothing grim about this Front so far’, he wrote, ‘France was grim’.38

36 37 38

Spaull to Parents, 11 November 1917, IWM Documents.15453. Papers of W. J. Senescall, typescript account, IWM Documents.15087. Siegfried Sassoon, The Memoirs of George Sherston (New York: Literary Guild, 1937), 137.

Personal Meaning

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While Sassoon, a bachelor during the war, struggled to come to terms with his transfer away from the Western Front, most British and Dominion soldiers with families struggled to come to terms with being transferred to the Western Front. Husbands, like Robert Wilson of the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars, dreaded the thought of widowing their wives. ‘I am not afraid of France’, Wilson wrote to his wife from Jerusalem in August 1918, ‘as a matter of fact I should like to go there, but I won’t if I can help it for your sake – and I don’t think we ever shall’.39 Captain T. Sherwood of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, whose wife was pregnant with their first child at the time of his enlistment in September 1914, took solace in having exchanged the battlefields of the Western Front for Persia. ‘If in France’, he pleaded with her two days after the start of the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917, ‘I should be just as far away and you’d have fearful worries. What a great deal you and I have to be thankful for.’40 Three months later Sherwood felt the same. ‘All we want now is the War to finish, anyhow I’m absolutely safe’, he reassured his wife, ‘it would be awful for you if I was in France, think of the anxiety for you, we are lucky’.41 Sons also looked out for fathers. Captain D. F. Heath of the Machine Gun Corps had fought on the Western Front with the 20th Battalion, Manchester Regiment, in 1916 and in Mesopotamia in 1917 before arriving in Palestine in August 1918. One month into fighting in Palestine, Heath’s father, at home in England, contemplated enlisting in the army. Over a number of back-and-forth letters, Heath told his father that if his fitness was up to par and he had to join a fighting unit, then he should join a mounted arm and take all available instruction courses. ‘If you think the war is going to last a long time’, he made clear, ‘and you want to be alive at the end of it, apply for the East’.42 Fear of being sent to die on the Western Front was especially strong during two phases of the war: the Somme Offensive from July to September 1916 and the German Spring Offensive from March to July 1918. As bored and ‘fed up’ as Captain D. H. B. Harfield of the 10th Battalion, Hampshire Regiment, was with Macedonia, the Somme seemed much worse. ‘I hear rumours of a move and shall not be sorry as this Post is giving me the blues’, he wrote to his wife on 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Despite wanting a ‘thoro’ change’, like the rest of his men, Harfield admitted, ‘I ain’t keen on France all the 39 40 41 42

Robert Henry Wilson, Palestine 1917 (London: Costello, 1927), 119. Papers of Captain T. Sherwood, Sherwood to Blanche, 22 November 1917, IWM Documents.22179. Original emphasis Sherwood to Blanche, 3 February 1918, IWM Documents.22179. Papers of D. F. Heath, Heath to Father, 13 September 1918, IWM Documents.10521.

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same!’43 Missing the Somme Offensive was even worth celebrating. Eight months after the Somme Offensive ended, E. H. Bryant of the 60th (London) Division looked back on what could have been had he and his comrades been sent to France. He felt ‘a very great deal to be thankful for’, he wrote to his parents, ‘It is my firm opinion that at the time, we were for the Somme, but owing to the trouble in Greece, were diverted there’.44 The German Spring Offensive was another phase in the war in which death looked to be a near certainty. The German Army battered through the Allied lines in March and April 1918, advancing at a pace not seen since the war’s opening months. By April, a quarter of a million Allied troops were killed, wounded, or captured, and the Allies had lost over 300,000 square kilometres of ground. The German Army had also suffered crippling losses, many of which were its best-trained and battle-hardened soldiers.45 In an effort to stem British and Dominion losses, white battalions in the EEF were selected for transfer to France. In exchange, Indians were withdrawn from the Western Front and garrison operations to fill their place. By October 1918, only two divisions in Palestine, the 54th (East Anglian) and the Australian and New Zealand Mounted Division, had not been integrated with Indians.46 Men of the 2/16th (County of London) Battalion had already been on the Western Front in April 1916, at Vimy Ridge, before moving to Macedonia and taking part in the Battle of Doiran in April and May 1917. Knowing full well how serious the fighting was on the Western Front, rumour of a transfer back to it during the height of the German Spring Offensive caused much unease. Sergeant William Bailey was ‘anxiously watching the news from France’, he informed his mother in March, ‘shouldn’t be surprised if we are sent back there, but I hope not, there seems to be a terrible slaughter going on’.47 Whispers of a transfer continued to swirl, finally reaching one of Bailey’s comrades, D. H. Calcutt, in May. ‘Not all the Battalions in the Division are going’, he complained in his diary, four days before the start of the Third Battle of the Aisne, ‘but we are unlucky’. He became sullen and fatalistic as he closed his entry. ‘Cheer up’, he told himself, ‘you will soon be dead now’.48

43 44 45 46

47 48

Harfield to Wife, 1 July 1916, IWM Documents.16068. Bryant to Unknown, 27 May 1917, IWM Documents.16667. Alexander Watson has argued that German losses during the Spring Offensive contributed significantly to the army’s collapse. See Watson, Enduring the Great War, 184–231. For the Indianization of the EEF, see James Kitchen, ‘The Indianization of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force: Palestine 1918’, in Kaushik Roy (ed.), The Indian Army in the Two World Wars (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 165–190. Papers of William Bailey, Bailey to Mother, 30 March 1918, Box 1/File 2, William Ready Division of Archives & Research Collections, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada. Original emphasis. Papers of D. H. Calcutt, diary, 23 May 1918, IWM Documents.6903.

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The seriousness of the Spring Offensive, the belief that Britain’s, if not the British Empire’s, very existence was at stake and along with it the war’s outcome, was not enough to outweigh the fear of dying. In April 1918, Lieutenant Frederick Spencer of the Machine Gun Corps, bored of camp life in the Jordan Valley, admitted to his sister that ‘we should be there’, referring to the Western Front, ‘instead of playing about on a sideshow’. His feeling, however, was no conviction. ‘I must say I don’t pretend for a moment I want to go’, he continued writing, ‘Even the un-bearability of the Jordan Valley is very much preferable’.49 The same competing emotions, a sense of duty and the will to live, affected Captain Robert Wingham of the 10th Battalion, King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. ‘The only subject of discussion out here is the terrible battle waging in France’, he wrote to his future wife in March 1918, ‘Good Lord, Kid, it must be the most frightful thing that has ever happened in the history of the world’. Confident that British and Allied soldiers had the mental and physical fortitude to withstand the German Army’s onslaught, Wingham deemed the Western Front a battle for Britain’s existence. But faced with the prospect of a British loss and a German-controlled Europe, he considered himself ‘extra-ordinarily fortunate’ to be in Palestine. ‘Yet, kid’, he conceded, ‘it strikes me often that I ought to be sharing with the rest the appalingness [sic] of France’.50 With Britain and the Allies seemingly on the verge of defeat, C. E. Winterbourne of the 378th Siege Battery, RGA, in Palestine in May 1918, composed the poem ‘Stop Press Items’, which he sent to his siblings in Leeds: They sent us out here, instead of to France Where the Germans are leading a merry dance They’ve took Festubert as well as Loos And General Foch has gone on the booze They have also sent our Navy down And left out Tars, in the sea to drown The war we are losing, we can never win But I’m glad I’m away from the terrible din.51

Only in November 1918, one week away from the armistice, did Winterbourne desire to ‘go to France for the final’, motivated by the prospect of home leave and to avoid another hot summer in the Jordan Valley.52 49 50 51 52

Original emphasis. Spencer to Ruth, 27 April 1918, LC LIDDLE/WWI/EP/078. Wingham to Nell, 25 March 1918, LC LIDDLE/WWI/GS/1772. Winterbourne to Alice and Edgar, 13 May 1918, LC LIDDLE/WWI/EP/094. Winterbourne to Alice and Edgar, 4 November 1918, LC LIDDLE/WWI/EP/094.

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The inconvenient truth was that soldiers were spot on. If they wanted to survive the war and return home to their families and pre-war lives, staying away from Gallipoli or the Western Front gave them the best chance to do so. From April 1916 until December 1918, the Australian Light Horse in Sinai and Palestine, for example, suffered over 1,400 deaths as a result of battle and other causes, and over 3,300 wounded. At the Battle of Fromelles in July 1916, part of the Somme Offensive, over 5,500 Australians of the 5th Division were made casualties in twenty-four hours, of which nearly 2,000 died. While the Battle of Ctesiphon, the siege and surrender of Kut al-Amara, the First and Second Battles of Gaza, and the Battle of Doiran all killed and wounded men in numbers comparable to some battles on the Western Front, these were the exceptions, not the norm. By the end of the war, 6.53% of British and Dominion soldiers who had served in Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine had been killed, wounded, or officially listed as missing. In Mesopotamia, 15.79% of soldiers became casualties, while in Macedonia the casualty figure was 8.60%. In comparison, soldiers at Gallipoli suffered a casualty rate of 22.83% and soldiers on the Western Front of 55.99%.53 The few who truly wanted to move to the Western Front were exclusively pre-war, professional soldiers, for whom the war in France and Flanders was a pathway to promotion. Captain A. M. McGrigor of the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars Yeomanry felt as though he had been ‘condemned to Egypt’ following the evacuation of the Dardanelles.54 For fifteen months, until his move to the Western Front after the start of the Third Battle of Ypres in July 1917, McGrigor tried repeatedly, almost obsessively, to escape the Middle East. When the Australian 5th Division departed for France in June 1916, he ‘wished to goodness’ that he had been aboard the troopship.55 After coming close to securing a transfer in August 1916, his move was thwarted by an outbreak of cholera.56 By April 1917, McGrigor was willing to accept a transfer to any unit on the Western Front, including an infantry regiment, which would have had a negative effect on his seniority.57 Brigadier General Sir Hugh Archie Dundas Simpson-Baikie described his move to Macedonia from France, punctuated by a short stop in Mesopotamia, as an ‘awful nuisance’ that was sure to slow his career advancement.58 53 54 55 56 57 58

The War Office, Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War, 1914–1920 (HMSO: London, 1920), 248. McGrigor, diary, 8 April 1916, IWM Documents.9984. McGrigor, diary, 16 June 1916, IWM Documents.9984. McGrigor, diary, 5 June 1916, 20 August 1916, IWM Documents.9984. McGrigor, diary, 17 April 1917, IWM Documents.9984. Simpson-Baikie to Wife, 14 December 1916, LHCMA.

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Discontent with the career prospects of the war in Palestine also reached the highest levels. Jan Christian Smuts, the South African general who conquered German Southwest Africa and commanded in German East Africa, declined an offer from Lloyd George to take over the EEF in May 1917. Smuts surmised, wrongly it turned out, that the CIGS Sir William Robertson and the War Office had no intention of properly supplying and supporting an offensive in Palestine.59 Lloyd George’s second choice, Allenby, had concluded the same. While Smuts was able to reject Lloyd George’s offer, Allenby’s failure in command of the Third Army at the Battle of Arras in April 1917 had left him with little say in the matter. Sent to Palestine in June 1917, Allenby was ‘desolate’ over his unceremonious removal from the Western Front.60 Although the upper echelons of the British Army were concerned with their careers, most British and Dominion soldiers were at ease with being away from the Western Front. Even when it seemed like the war was at a critical juncture during the Somme Offensive and the German Spring Offensive, safety and survival were of paramount importance, and the chances of remaining safe and surviving the war were greater in Sinai, Palestine, Macedonia, and Mesopotamia. Those who had already fought at Ypres or Artois, at Loos or Gallipoli, had no desire to go back. Not only does this reinforce the argument that soldiers were first and foremost civilians in uniform, anxious to return home to their families and loved ones, but also that soldiers were not the bloodthirsty killers Joanna Bourke has suggested they were. Fighting on the Western Front was the best opportunity to kill, and to kill the main enemy, Germans, and few were inclined to seize that opportunity.61 Strategic Meaning Soldiers outside the Western Front were certain that they were safer and more likely to survive the war. Of that there was little doubt. But what did it mean on a strategic level to be fighting in the Middle East or Macedonia? Were they still helping the war effort, directly or indirectly? Especially in the aftermath of the siege and surrender of Kut al-Amara, British and Indian soldiers struggled to find meaning in the war in Mesopotamia, a war that had seemed strategically meaningless, as far as 59 60 61

F. S. Crafford, Jan Smuts: A Biography (New York: Kessinger Publishing, 2005 [1943]), 123–4. Hughes, Allenby and British Strategy, 24; Brian Gardner, Allenby (London: Cassell, 1965), 113. Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare (London: Granta Books, 1999), 1–31.

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its effect on the Western Front went, and administratively mismanaged by their own government. For H. Seville, on board the HMS Waterfly, a gunboat on the Tigris River, Christmas 1916 gave him time to reflect upon the previous year. ‘1st anniversary of our arrival in this cursed country’, he wrote in his wartime diary, ‘a whole year absolutely wasted, discomforts of all sorts put up with to absolutely no purpose’.62 British and Indian POWs who had been marched from Kut al-Amara to Anatolia felt much the same. In The Kronical, produced by British and Indian POWs at Yozgrad and Changli, the patriotic poetry of Beatrix Brice Miller, tailored to the anxieties of those who had fought in Mesopotamia, seemed to be a favourite and appeared in at least two issues. Born to British parents in Chile, Miller served during the war as a VAD in France. In 1916, her poem ‘To the Vanguard’, published in The Times, brought her some renown. While ‘To the Vanguard’ was written near the closing of the Somme Offensive and was an over-the-top paean to British manhood and its defence of empire, two poems she contributed to the Kronical focused on the men who had fought in Mesopotamia. The first, ‘Mesopotamia ‘15‘16’, published in March 1918, was written after Miller read the Report of the Mesopotamian Commission of 1917. In it, Miller attacked the British and Indian governments for callously wasting the lives of the empire’s best and bravest. ‘The World is waiting, Sirs. Men may absolve you’, she wrote, ‘Leaders of Armies, Ministers and Statesmen’. There’s still a Judge whom one day you must face, A God demanding at your hands His sons; These gladly offered all of life in fee For England. You received and spilled the gift And gave to England naught but shame instead.63

Moreover, as Miller pointed out in a second contribution, ‘England to Kut’, in April 1918, British and Indian soldiers had been asked to fight far from Europe and in a campaign that seemed to lack any significance. ‘You were not called to fight before our gates’, she wrote, as if speaking directly to the POWs at Yozgrad and Changli, ‘In battle raging where all Europe watched. The task we set you – just to stand and hold A desolate outpost half a world away. And yet no greater task was ever set; And yet no greater men obeyed a call! You held the flag of England with your lives When everything but life was reft away. 62 63

Papers of H. Seville, diary, 25 December 1916, IWM Documents.10187. The Kronical, 1 March 1918, 5.

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After comparing the defenders of Kut al-Amara to modern-day Spartans at Thermopylae, Miller comforted British and Indian soldiers by making clear that no matter the folly of the campaign, they had ‘given all else – you gave your freedom too’.64 Others appreciated the global scale of the war and imagined Mesopotamia as part of a worldwide front line against the Central Powers that stretched from the Western Front to the Middle East and down into the Balkans. In one regimental Christmas card titled ‘Xmas is dear to all: this sentiment is fully endorsed by the soldier in Mesopotamia’, the card’s most important stanza reads: A hotter place we know, but one In which we wish the Turk and Hun; We have our own ‘place in the sun’ – MESPOT! But still, we’re winning ‘every time’, So cheerio is the countersign From this part of the Allied Line – MESPOT!65

Mesopotamia was where ‘Portsmouth Boys’ in the 215th Brigade, RFA, writing to a local figure in Portsmouth, were ‘“doing their bit”’ in a Portsmouth Battery, ‘“somewhere in Mesopotamia”’.66 According to Arthur Tillotson Clark, an American volunteer with the YMCA in Mesopotamia, British soldiers after Baghdad’s capture felt like they had struck a blow against Germany. ‘To the Tommies in Bagdad the expulsion of the Germans was a great event’, Clark wrote. ‘What interested them’ was to be able to write their names in a German building. The troops in France could not do that. They never got on soil that had been German before the war. Here the Tommies felt superior to their brothers on the western front. They were in German territory, for all the territory of the railway was German. On the walls of the wireless station were the penciled names of thousands of Tommies who could say some day, ‘We were in Germany right enough.’ One bright Tommy wrote on the wall, ‘Berlin next’.67

Captain Eric Bellers of the 1st Gurkha Rifles thought about the capture of Baghdad as an invaluable bargaining chip, ‘with a few odd millions thrown in’, to offer the Ottomans to exit the war.68

64 65 66 67 68

The Kronical, 1 April 1918, 10. ‘Xmas is dear to all: this sentiment is fully endorsed by the soldier in Mesopotamia’, IWM EPH.C.GREETINGS (WWI) K83/4249–2. Letter Written to Miss Parsons by the Men of the 215th Brigade RFA in April 1918, IWM Documents.15252. Arthur Tillotson Clark, To Bagdad with the British (London: D. Appleton and Company, 1918), 221–2. Bellers to Mother 17 September 1917, LC LIDDLE/WWI/MES/007.

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Imperial concerns were obviously at stake, like in Palestine (which bordered Egypt) and Mesopotamia (which bordered India). The security of both Egypt and the British Raj was of paramount importance for Captain Albert Trapmann of the 25th (Cyclists) Battalion. In Straight Tips for ‘Mesopot’, a guide for soldiers new to Mesopotamia, published in Bombay sometime before Baghdad’s capture, Trapmann argued that the war in Mesopotamia was key to severing the Sofia-Constantinople Railway. By breaking the communication and supply line between Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire, the latter, he proposed, would be forced to the peace table. In the ensuing negotiations, Baghdad, and much or all of the rest of Mesopotamia, would be secured by treaty. For Trapmann, Mesopotamia was a win-win for the British Empire: its capture would roll back German influence around the globe and a British Mesopotamia would safeguard the empire’s two prized possessions in the region, Egypt and India. ‘It has taken the present world-wide war to fix our attention on the inward meaning of the German Baghdad railway scheme’, he reasoned. ‘If we do not wish to see India robbed of some of the more important sources of her wealth and of her strategical position then it surely behoves us’, he continued, ‘to at least control, even if we do not rule over, the valleys of the Tigris and of the Euphrates’. The alternative, a ‘Teutonised Mesopotamia’ providing ‘cotton, hemp and corn’ for ‘the wants of the fatherland’, was unthinkable. If left to Germany, Mesopotamia would be irrigated and commercialised to the point where ‘all the best elements of the population of Kurdistan, Armenia, Georgia and Persia’ would flock to the land.69 In shades of the French General Charles Mangin’s plans for a force noire, drawn from French sub-Saharan Africa, Trapmann envisioned a German Mesopotamia populated with migrants from throughout the region as a ‘ground for recruiting a hard bitten Teutonic army’. Not only would the capture and control of Mesopotamia throw a wrench in Germany’s Middle Eastern ambitions, it would also pay for itself through post-war irrigation and farming projects, provide land to settle soldiers on after the war, and better position the British Empire to fend off potential rivals in the region like Japan and China. Of small concern to readers in 1917, Trapmann warned, Mesopotamia was ‘bound to be of vital importance to the solidity of the British Empire fifty years hence’.70

69

70

For Germany’s Middle Eastern policy, see Sean McMeekin, The Berlin-Baghdad Express: the Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010). Albert Trapmann, Straight Tips for “Mesopot” (Bombay: Thacker and Company, 1917), 85–90.

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Mesopotamia seemed vital to the protection of Egypt and India and offered all sorts of possibilities in the post-war period, from massive farming projects to soldier settlement. How Macedonia fit into the Allies’ strategy, at least before Bulgaria’s collapse made the previous three years’ toil seem worthwhile, was harder to grasp. Officers, especially, questioned why they were occupying Greece and manning the Greek-Bulgarian border at all. ‘I don’t see anything can be gained by an offensive in Macedonia’, Second Lieutenant E. S. Forster confided in his diary in February 1916. Marching into Serbia was too difficult, the roads and railways too poor, he reasoned. Serbia’s freedom was best settled on the Western Front. ‘We should simply be playing the German’s game if we kept a large number of Divisions doing no good here and in Egypt. I feel sure that the war will be decided on the Western Front.’71 ‘The campaign here’, wrote Lieutenant A. H. Muggeridge of the Leicestershire Regiment in his diary in February 1917, ‘placed a greater strain on stamina and temperament than was experienced on more active fronts’. But what, exactly, soldiers were doing there was hard to pin down. His men felt hopelessly isolated from the war and ‘Out of complete touch with civilisation’. Salonika felt ‘as remote as London’, and week after week ‘the same routine took them from the same billets to the same front line’. The ‘Men found it very hard to see the purpose of their work here in the general plan of winning the war’.72 Irish soldiers in the 10th (Irish) Division were known to ask their English officers how they were winning the war – and by that, they meant how were they defeating Germany – in Macedonia against the Bulgarians. One officer recalled that he ‘had men, who afterwards came out in 1917, who hadn’t the foggiest idea in what part of the world they were campaigning, much less the reason why. They knew they were about twelve days from home and that they were making war against the Bulgars’, he explained, ‘But what connection there was between Bulgar and German presented a problem incapable of solution; on such points the platoon officer was frequently consulted’.73 One of the few who understood the strategic importance of Macedonia before Bulgaria’s collapse was C. B. Edwards of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry. Motivated by a soldier who, on leave in England, was confronted with questions like ‘Are you getting anywhere near Baghdad’ 71 72 73

Papers of E. S. Forster, diary, 21 February 1916, LC LIDDLE/WWI/SAL/025. Muggeridge, diary, 1–5 January 1917, IWM Documents.8493. R. Skilbeck Smith, A Subaltern in Macedonia and Judaea 1916–17 (London: The Mitre Press, 1930), 55. For more on the Irish (10th) Division in Macedonia, see Philip Orr, ‘The Road to Belgrade: The Experiences of the 10th (Irish) Division in the Balkans, 1915–17’ in Adrian Gregory and Senia Pašeta (eds.), Ireland and the Great War: ‘A War to Unite Us All’? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 171–89.

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and ‘Where have you come from, from The Front or Salonica’, Edwards defended the strategy of occupying Macedonia and keeping a short leash on Greece. ‘As they would in Euclid’, he reasoned, suppose there were no expeditionary force in Macedonia. Greece would they be against us openly; Salonica one of the most wonderful natural harbours in the world would now be an enormous submarine base, not more than about two days from Egypt in a fast ship. What about the Egyptian force then and Palestine, even Mesopotamia. The front here is as long as the Western front almost. How many realise that to begin with?74

For Edwards, Britain’s and the Allies’ occupation of Macedonia had prevented the Central Powers from gaining access to a major Mediterranean port, which would have endangered operations across the region, including in Sinai, Palestine, and Mesopotamia. Opinions changed as events on the Western Front called into question the war’s grand strategy. More than most soldiers, Brigade Major Vivian Fergusson of the 28th Division understood the geopolitics of the war. In February 1916, Fergusson predicted that if Greece and Romania were brought into the war on the side of the Allies, ‘it wouldn’t be very long before Austria made a separate peace’.75 The start of the Battle of Verdun one week later made him change his mind. To keep British and Dominion soldiers pinned down in Macedonia while the fate of the war was being decided on the Western Front was a grave miscalculation, he wrote to his fiancée. After speculating on the length of the front line at Verdun, the number of German soldiers in the advance, and the number of French defenders, Fergusson explained that he had always felt ‘that we were playing the Germans’ own game by allowing ourselves to be enticed out here where there is absolutely nothing doing’. ‘The essence of strategy is to have the maximum number of men at the right place at the right time. So in order to make sure of superiority in numbers’, he lectured her, ‘it has always been the custom to try and deceive your opponent into dissipating his force by means of threats at various outlying places’. Neither Germany nor Bulgaria, he concluded, had ‘ever intended to attack Salonika and I’ve always said so’. Not even Egypt, he concluded, was at risk. In the same way that Germany had used Bulgaria to tie up British and Allied soldiers in Macedonia, it had done the same with the Ottoman Empire in Egypt. ‘[The Germans] have certainly played their cards very well’, Fergusson admitted, impressed with Germany’s strategy. ‘The only thing that surprises me is that the military experts 74 75

Papers of C. B. Edwards, typescript account, IWM Documents.16818. Fergusson to D’Ewes, 17 February 1916, IWM Documents.10940.

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have allowed themselves to be deceived.’76 A month later, though, as the Battle of Verdun raged on, Fergusson was pessimistic about the chance of winning the war against the main German Army. Even after hearing a rumour that Germany had offered peace terms to the Allies, Fergusson was resolute: ‘If we are to get into Germany at all I don’t think it will be by the Western Front.’77 Higher up the chain of command, the Western Front was still considered the place where the war would be won. Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Barrett, commanding the 6th (Poona) Division in Mesopotamia, hoped for a revolution in Constantinople that would force a ‘cessation of hostilities’ with the Ottomans and let Britain focus on the Germans. He warned his cousin not to think too much of their success in Mesopotamia. It was only the defeat of Germany, he wrote, that could end the war.78 Moral Meaning On 11 March 1917, after nearly two and a half years of marching up the Tigris River, the British-Indian Army captured Baghdad. A little over one week later, Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maude delivered a proclamation to Baghdad’s residents. In it, Maude reassured Baghdadis that his army had not ‘come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators’. Since antiquity, Maude declared, reading from a carefully prepared speech written by Wellington House propagandist Sir Mark Sykes, Baghdad had been ‘subject to the tyranny of strangers, your palaces have fallen into ruins, your gardens have sunk in desolation, and your forefathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage. Your sons have been carried off to wars not of your seeking, your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered in distant places.’ Both the Turks and Germans were accused of pillaging Mesopotamia and holding back the advancement of Arabs. But Britain had not fought in Mesopotamia to replace one tyrannical government with another. As Maude made clear, the British-Indian Army had liberated, not conquered. Mesopotamia’s Arabs had been freed.79 Nine months later, Jerusalem was captured by the EEF. On 11 December, General Sir Edmund Allenby entered the city on foot in a cleverly orchestrated performance, meant to impress both Jerusalemites and the world with its modesty. Reading from another preapproved script 76 77 78 79

Fergusson to D’Ewes, 25 February 1916, IWM Documents.10940. Fergusson to D’Ewes, 24 March 1916, IWM Documents.10940. Letter from Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Barrett in Mesopotamia, 1915, Barrett to James Boyd, 2 February 1915, IWM Documents.8892. Rogan, Fall of the Ottomans, 326.

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of which Sykes was again the author, Allenby declared martial law. The language of Allenby’s proclamation, like Maude’s, was about liberation, not conquest. To win over Muslim opinion, the proclamation guaranteed the protection of the city’s holy places, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim alike. Muslims were free to continue worshipping, and Muslim holy sites, such as the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, were to be guarded exclusively by Indian Muslim soldiers. Even the Holy Sepulchre, Allenby noted, would remain in the hands of its traditional guardians, the Sunni Muslim al-Husseini and Nuseibeh families. By the end of 1917, then, the captures of Baghdad and Jerusalem, at least officially and publicly, had been sold to soldiers and civilians as liberations from Ottoman despotism and centuries of tyrannical misrule. But individual soldiers were removed from the need to be politically sensitive to the fact that the British Empire had captured and occupied two major Middle Eastern cities, both of which were important to Muslims, during an ongoing world war. Did soldiers internalise that official and public language? For soldiers fighting in Sinai and Palestine, the ‘freeing’ of Jerusalem and the ‘liberation’ of Palestine, as we will see, formed the keystone of retrospective accounts of the campaign. Yet during the war, Jerusalem’s return to Christendom appealed only to a select religious few.80 The publication of the Balfour Declaration in The Times on 9 November 1917 introduced a new dimension to the war in Palestine, and one that was quickly latched on to by the army’s devout Christians: Zionism.81 One of these men was conscientious objector William Knott. A pre-war clerk at the Salvation Army Headquarters in London, Knott had rejected military service on account of his religious faith (possibly Plymouth Brethren). Subsequently, he served with the 32nd Battalion, Field Ambulance, at Gallipoli and Salonika before transferring to Egypt with the 1/3rd Battalion, Welsh Field Ambulance, in September 1917. Knott’s wartime diary is littered with details of evangelical meetings, communal prayer sessions, his dislike of the vulgarity of the common ‘Tommy’, as well as disparaging remarks about the local Muslim population and its treatment of women.82 Although he never revealed his religious denomination, his presence at evangelical lectures and his eschatological view of world history led him to conclude that ‘There will 80

81 82

William D. Mather,“Muckydonia” 1917–1919: Being the Adventures of a One-Time “Pioneer” in Macedonia and Bulgaria during the First World War (Devon: Arthur H. Stockwell, 1979), 147. The Times, 9 November 1917, 7. Knott, diary, 22 September 1917, 24 September 1917, 19 October 1917, IWM Documents.7987.

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be great rejoicing in England over the news of the fall of Jerusalem’. Knott was certainly right, as the British, Irish, and Dominion presses capitalised on the capture of the religiously and historically important city, all the more important for the victory’s morale-boosting effect in a year of failures on the Western Front. Although he expected that his fellow Britons would revel in Jerusalem’s victory after such a long time under Turkish rule, Palestine was not to be Britain’s. ‘After so many years, over 1300, the Holy City has been wrestled from the hands of it’s [sic] oppressor, the Turks’, he wrote. ‘It is indeed a great privilege to participate in the freeing of the land for the return of God’s chosen people, Israel.’83 Others also correlated the campaign with the cause of Zionism and the deliverance of Palestine as the new/old Jewish homeland. After visiting the Jewish colony of Gederah, established in the nineteenth century by Russian Empire Jews who had fled pogroms in Ukraine, C. P. Carlson, a gunner in the Honourable Artillery, wrote to his mother full of pride that he and other British and Dominion soldiers were ‘helping to carry out a prophecy which states that the land will again be delivered to the Jews’.84 In a tongue-in-cheek article titled ‘Things we ought to know’, the 6th Mounted Brigade’s newspaper, Chlorine, asked, ‘Why the inhabitants of the Jewish Quarter in Timbuctoo have not yet sent their congratulations to General Allenby on the capture of Jerusalem?’85 No more serious was the paper’s claim that Allenby’s name had been etched in gold on the entranceway of Jerusalem’s largest synagogue, or the Balkan News’s joke that even though the British Empire was handing over Palestine to the Jews, ‘there will be no reduction in the price of turkeys in Salonica’.86 Despite the obvious sarcasm, all three writings placed the campaign within the context of Zionism and the restoration of Palestine as the Jewish homeland. Men like Knott and Carlson were, however, the minority. More typical was the reaction of Lance Corporal William Mather of the 8th (Pioneer) Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. News of Jerusalem’s capture, which ‘really does cheer us up’, Mather wrote on 11 December while camped near Lake Ardzan in Macedonia, was ‘counterbalanced’ the next day by ‘bad rumours that Roumania has thrown up the sponge and that Russia is on the verge of doing likewise’.87 As important and uplifting as the capture of Jerusalem 83 84 85 86 87

Knott, diary, 10 December 1917, IWM Documents.7987. Papers of C. P. Carlson, Carlson to Mother, 7 February 1918, LC LIDDLE/WWI/ EP/007. Chlorine, 1 February 1918, 11. Chlorine, 1 February 1918, 11; Balkan News, 26 November 1917, 26. Mather, ‘Muckydonia’, 147.

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was, it paled in comparison to the news that the Allies were soon to be two states short. Although wartime propaganda in Punch cartoons and elsewhere often ignored Department of Information notices to avoid any suggestion that the conflict between Britain and the Ottoman Empire was a religious crusade, few soldiers during the war latched on to the idea that they were fighting a holy war. That is not to say that some soldiers’ use of crusade and liberation did not play to the theme of a clash of civilisations. In the Cacolet, the newspaper of the Australian Camel Field Ambulance, one soldier’s two-page history of warfare in Palestine finished with ‘and now again in 1918 her ancient roads echo the tramp of marching soldiery and the dream of the Crusaders has been fulfilled, Jerusalem the Holy being once more in Christian hands’.88 In its December 1917 issue, the Chronicles of the White Horse also pitted Christianity against Islam (Figure 3.1). It published a cartoon, ‘The New Crusaders’, depicting Allenby on dragon-back, perhaps the same dragon as the one slayed by St. George, leading a line of puttee-legged, pith-helmeted soldiers past a bowing, fez-capped Turk into Jerusalem. A handful of minarets rise out of Jerusalem’s sightline, leaving no doubt as to the city’s religious makeup and importance to Islam.89 One of the most over-the-top examples of this neo-crusading spirit and medievalism was the correspondence between Major Guy Paget and his wife, Bettine, in Northamptonshire. Paget descended from a long line of Leicestershire bankers, lawyers, and politicians. His privileged upbringing and education had instilled in him a love of all things medieval. After surviving a German gas attack in Flanders, Paget was transferred to Palestine in September 1918 and put in command of a howitzer battery attached to the 52nd (Lowland) Division. His letters home, published in 1919 as A Chronicle of the Last Crusade and serialised in The Household Brigade Magazine one year later, were written like a medieval chronicle, with grammar and language more common to the King James Bible than the small hamlet of Sulby in the East Midlands, where Paget’s manor was located. Throughout the letters, Paget constantly referred to himself and his comrades as crusaders sent to free the Holy Land from the ‘Infidel’. His conviction was confirmed when, at a Greek Orthodox church in Jerusalem, he had the chance to hold a piece of crusading history in his own hands:

88 89

Cacolet, 1 June 1918, 22–3. Chronicles of the White Horse, 1 December 1917, 14. Like The Crusaders’ poor understanding of medieval history, the Chronicles of the White Horse had Jerusalem’s demographics all wrong. By 1911, the city was predominantly inhabited by Jews, who numbered around 40,000, followed by 9,000 Christians and 7,000 Muslims.

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Figure 3.1 ‘The New Crusaders’, December 1917, Chronicles of the White Horse. IWM LBY E. 150$

‘I did see and hold King Godfrey of Bouillon’s sword, and felt that I, too, was a Crusader.’90 Others condemned the ‘gutter press at home’ for chasing headlines. One soldier, a pre-war architect from Yorkshire, singled out an ‘enterprising provincial rag’ for reprinting Australian painter Frederick Leist’s ‘Crusaders’ in December 1917, which featured a ‘beefy Anzac, opposite “a verye perfekte knyghte” and his large redcross shield’. The inconsistency astonished him. How, he asked, could Christian Britain, in control of Muslim Egypt, have crusaded to free the majority Muslim population of Palestine from the Caliphate in Constantinople. It was a tongue-twisting political and religious paradox that had made it ‘necessary to warn writers and preachers that a little forethought was expected in such matters’.91 90 91

Guy Paget, A Chronicle of the Last Crusade (Aldershot: Gale and Polden, 1919), 14. Martin S. Briggs, Through Egypt in War-Time (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1918), 228.

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Historians Eitan Bar-Yosef and James E. Kitchen are certainly right to argue that a strictly religious interpretation of crusade as holy war was both restricted to those with a public school, Oxbridge education, and those on the ‘religious fringe’ of the EEF.92 But if only a minority during the war found meaning in the campaign as support for Zionism or as a religious crusade, what did British and Dominion soldiers believe they were fighting for, and what did their wartime use of ‘crusade’ mean? On their way to Egypt and then to Palestine in August 1917, the 13th New Zealand Reinforcements began producing their own newspaper, The Crusader. With such an openly provocative title, was this done in recognition of a religious holy war against the Muslim Ottoman Empire? The evidence points to the contrary. In its inaugural and only issue, The Crusader’s editors explained that ‘in the modern acceptation of the meaning of the word we are as much Crusaders as Soldiers of the Cross of old’.93 The newspaper’s leading article clarified its editor’s position. ‘Our efforts’, it boasted, ‘are prompted by the same feelings of hatred towards oppression, persecution, and avarice, that sent the historical Crusaders, centuries ago, to the assistance of the persecuted Christians in the Holy Land’. This interpretation of the medieval crusades was a fanciful twist on history – a twist that was more common after the war, as the next chapter will show – that had more in common with French, German, and British nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century romanticism than the motivations of the medieval crusaders.94 Putting aside the author’s historical revisionism, the article pointed to the Ottomans’ centuries-long oppression of the Middle East, of which the ongoing massacre of Christian Armenians in Anatolia was a brutal reminder. Added to Ottoman tyranny was a new brand of ‘super-tyrant’, the militarist Prussian. Thus, the war was a dual crusade against both the Ottomans and Germans, what The Crusader called ‘the ancient and modern types of tyranny’, in chivalrous defence of those who could not help themselves.95 Language that represented the twentieth-century crusade for Palestine as the freeing of oppressed peoples and the return of good government 92 93 94

95

Bar-Yosef, Holy Land in English Culture, 250–6; Kitchen, ‘“Khaki crusaders”’, 141. The Crusader, 1 August 1917, 1. On the First Crusade and its participants, see Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). On reinterpretations of the crusades in nineteenth-century France and Germany, see Ines Anna Guhe, ‘Crusade Narratives in French and German History Textbooks, 1871–1914’, European Review of History, 20, 3 (2013), 367–82. On reinterpretations of the crusades in nineteenth-century Britain, see Adam Knobler, ‘Holy Wars, Empires, and the Portability of the Past: The Modern Uses of Medieval Crusades’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, 2 (2006), 309–17 and Mike Horswell, The Rise and Fall of British Crusader Medievalism, c.1825–1945 (London: Routledge, 2018). The Crusader, 1 August 1917, 2.

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and individual liberty was widespread. Crusading on the Western Front to free Belgium from German militarism and occupation or in the Middle East to free Arabs and Jews from Ottoman despotism were presented as essentially the same thing. Such an opinion was expressed in the Anzac Bulletin in Private Will A. Bevan’s ‘The Anzac Flag’. Bevan connected the wartime sacrifices of Australians and New Zealanders to a budding sense of nationhood born out of the war. After lauding the Australians and New Zealanders at Gallipoli and the ‘shell-swept fields of Flanders’, Pozières and Bullecourt, Bevan turned to Palestine: Oh, the glorious Flag of Anzac – like a starry diadem It has waved o’er troops victorious who have freed Jerusalem: ’Tis the emblem of a country, of our Nation young and free; And the Anzac Flag will ever stand for Right and Liberty.96

Defending the helpless and liberating the local peoples from Ottoman misrule was about safeguarding both Palestine’s Jews and Arabs (Figure 3.2). The Palestine News, without any overture of Zionism, wrote about the ‘The Liberation of Galilee’ and ‘The British liberation of Palestine’, which had ‘set the whole Jewish Community ablaze with joy’, as well as the ‘Liberators of Richon-Le-Zion’, the first Jewish colony of the new yishuv, made up of those who had fled the first wave of pogroms in Russia’s Pale of Settlement.97 In March 1918, it wrote that Jerusalem had been ‘delivered from the oppression of the descendants of the wild shepherds of Central Asia’.98 In November 1918, the men of the Wellington Mounted Rifles conducted a memorial parade in Richon le Zion to honour their dead. At the parade, the head of the Jewish colony addressed the New Zealanders. In his speech, he told the assembled New Zealanders that they had fought ‘for the future, for humanity and to prepare for a better future in all the countries where the light of liberty has not yet shone’. Furthermore, in a similar distortion of the medieval crusades made by the editors of the aforementioned Crusader, the Jewish colony’s head imagined a scene in which visitors to the gravesites of dead New Zealanders in Richon le Zion would ponder the similarities between the medieval crusades and the new crusade for which the New Zealanders had died. ‘These indications formed by your tombs, the future generations will hold them there, will cause them to meditate and they will say: 96 97 98

Anzac Bulletin, 2 August 1918, 6. Palestine News, 3 October 1918, 6; Palestine News, 28 November 1918, 5. Palestine News, 7 March 1918, 11.

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Figure 3.2 Australian Light Horseman with Jewish girl, Rehovot, Palestine, 1918. Source: Lowell Thomas Papers, Marist College Archives and Special Collections, 1493.61.1

“It is just about a thousand years where, on the same sacred soil, some Western lords, coming with the sacred flame of religion and in the name of the Cross to liberate this land from the infidel and now, after such a long delay, the same children from the West come by the thousands, glowing with ardour, animated by the thirst for liberty, justice, and fraternity, liberated by the same country from the yoke to which it had been subjected since nearly five centuries.”’99

In other cases, soldiers wrote about freeing Arabs and likely picked up the liberation trope from the liberated themselves, as the men of the Wellington Mounted Rifles Regiment had done at Richon le Zion. T. B. Minshall of the 10th Battalion, King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, wrote about the war in Palestine as bringing freedom and economic prosperity to the locals. ‘The Turks’ one object was to cheat them of their product and labour’, he wrote home in April 1917, ‘and force money and work from them. Today the British Authorities are finding them a market for their grain, giving them fair prices for it, which they marvel 99

Major A. H. Wilkie, Official War History of the Wellington Mounted Rifles Regiment, 1914–1919 (Auckland: Whitcombe and Tombs Limited, 1924), 235.

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at, and as they lead their camels away from the bases and dumps cannot resist standing about and looking at the wonderful white man.’100 Major Frank Steadman of the RAMC was in Jerusalem on 11 December 1917, the day of Allenby’s entry. Afterwards, Steadman wrote to his wife to tell her of an hour-long conversation he had with a Damascene woman whose family had been forcibly relocated by the Ottomans from Jaffa to Jerusalem. ‘She told me that the Turks had ruled very badly in Jerusalem’, Steadman informed his wife. The woman’s husband, a chemist, had been forcibly conscripted into the Ottoman Army. Worse, the Ottomans ‘had hanged some of the inhabitants when they entered the town. There was no justice in their rule – pardons were given according to the amount of bribes paid. Before they were driven out, they robbed wholesale!’ Left destitute by the departing Ottoman Army, her family broken up by the conscription of her husband, the woman told Steadman ‘in perfect English’ how happy she was to see the end of Ottoman rule in Jerusalem.101 Robert Fell of the 10th Light Horse Regiment had a similar experience. In the two days after Jerusalem’s capture, Fell was overwhelmed by the ‘harrowing stories of hardships’ he heard from Jerusalemites themselves, including one woman who invited him and his comrades into her home for tea. ‘Most people very pleased at our taking Jerusalem’, he wrote in his wartime diary.102 Another soldier in the 2/19th Battalion, London Regiment, was approached by a man ‘with great solemnity and pathos’, who told him ‘For three years we have waited for this day!’103 No soldiers mentioned the plague of locusts that had devastated Ottoman Syria and Palestine in 1915 and contributed greatly to famine conditions in the war’s latter years.104 Blame was placed squarely on the Ottoman government. British and Dominion soldiers could have also looked to some of their own newspapers and propaganda efforts from Wellington House for evidence that they had liberated the people of Palestine, whether Jewish or Arab, from Ottoman tyranny. An anonymous soldier from Manchester, writing in the Manchester Guardian, described Jerusalem’s inhabitants as ‘mad with joy’. ‘There was great cheering and clapping of 100 101 102 103 104

Minshall, typescript account, April 1917, IWM Documents.2792. Steadman to Wife, 12 December 1917, IWM PP/MCR/407. Papers of Robert Valentine Fell, diary, 10, 11 December 1917, SLNSW MLMSS 1216/ Item 2. Memories: The Magazine/Journal of the 19th London Old Comrades Association, 1 December 1920, 53–6. See Zachary J. Foster, ‘The 1915 Locust Attack in Syria and Palestine and its Role in the Famine During the First World War’, Middle Eastern Studies 51, 3 (2015), 370–94; Leila Fawaz, A Land of Aching Hearts: The Middle East in the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 93–6.

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hands’, he wrote, ‘also shouts of “You are welcome,” and old women and men crying with joy. People offered us wine, nuts, bread, and all sort of things to eat’, he boasted to the Guardian’s readers.105 Soldiers in Macedonia were told of a ‘reign of terror in Jerusalem’, which included public executions of ‘Christians and Arabs who were regarded as proEnglish’, likely a reference to Djemal Pasha’s brutal suppression of Arab nationalists, and the razing of farms and vineyards in an attempt to ‘destroy all cultivation in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem’.106 Much of the British press reworked crusade to read as liberation and the end of unjust government. A day after Jerusalem’s capture, the Liverpool Echo published a cartoon in which Richard Coeur de Lion and Allenby faced each other (Figure 3.3). Richard had fought in 1190 CE ‘Pro Christo’, for Christ, according to the Echo cartoon, while Allenby and the EEF were fighting for ‘Justitia et Veritas’, justice and truth.107 The Church Times, two weeks after Jerusalem’s capture, compared Palestine to France and argued that both were in service of liberation and other loftier goals: Our armies in France, as in Palestine, are on pilgrimage: they are fighting for the Cross; they are engaged in the same Holy War in which Richard Coeur de Lion and his crusaders pitted themselves against the Saracens in days of yore. For all of which Jerusalem is the symbol, for truth, for honour, for justice, for righteousness, for freedom – these are the things for which England is giving her all to-day.108

As James Renton and Sadia McEvoy have shown, Wellington House’s anti-Ottoman propaganda in 1917 and 1918 focused on presenting the benefits of British liberal imperial rule in contrast to German indirect rule or Ottoman misrule. Britain’s position on the Middle East was seriously affected by American President Woodrow Wilson’s call for national self-determination. The ‘Wilsonian moment’, as historian Erez Manela has called it, led to a shift in British representations of the Middle East and Britain’s role in the region. The language of ‘acquisitive imperialism’, as Sykes called it was reshaped along Wilsonian lines.109 In Wellington House’s ‘The Turk Must Go’ campaign, non-Turkish peoples, including Arabs, Jews, and Armenians, were presented as having been held back by Ottoman rule and prevented from achieving national greatness. Liberation and tutelage, not empire and imperial rule, was language that better aligned with the principle of self-determination which had come to dominate political discourse in 105 107 109

Manchester Guardian, 29 January 1918, 8. 106 Balkan News, 26 November 1917, 2. Liverpool Echo, 10 December 1917, 4. 108 Church Times, 21 December 1917, 536. Sadia McEvoy, ‘The Construction of Ottoman Asia and its Muslim Peoples in Wellington House’s Propaganda and Associated Literature, 1914–1918’ (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, King’s College London, 2016), 176.

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Figure 3.3 ‘The 8th Crusade’. 10 December 1917, Liverpool Echo. © British Library Board

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the US and the Allied states.110 Books and pamphlets, such as Arnold Toynbee’s The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks and E. F. Benson’s Crescent and the Iron Cross, did just that. In both an anonymously authored article in The Times and a standalone pamphlet, The Clean Fighting Turk, which Wellington House distributed over one hundred thousand copies of, Sykes wrote that the Turks had pursued the ‘most devilish policy’ of the war. The massacre of Armenians, forced starvation in Lebanon and Syria, the conscription of Jewish colonists, and the maltreatment of British and Dominion POWs were used by the author as evidence of a legacy of terror, a genetic predisposition to wanton destruction that stretched back to the rule of Tamerlane and the Turks’ ‘plundering Turanian ancestors’ in the fifteenth century.111 Whether a result of their own encounters with local peoples or the barrage of anti-Ottoman propaganda put out by Wellington House, soldiers easily transitioned from a moral crusade to free Jews and Arabs in Palestine from Ottoman misrule to a belief in the benefits of British rule and liberal imperialism. While pre-war Palestine was the site of considerable modernisation efforts by the Ottoman state, as discussed in the previous chapter and by Jacob Norris and Salim Tamari, the state of wartime Jerusalem, in particular, easily lent itself to a before-and-after appraisal of the city’s fortunes.112 Because of the war, pilgrim traffic, one of the city’s chief sources of income, had been disrupted. The Allied naval blockade of the Mediterranean coastline led to hyperinflation in basic foodstuffs and disrupted local commerce, as merchants and middlemen struggled to continue doing business.113 In July 1918, in the London Scottish Regimental Gazette, one soldier wrote of Jerusalem after the EEF’s occupation: ‘there are great improvements, at least, in the appearance of the place, and trade is making giant strides towards recovery. There is doubtless room for a lot more, but it is good that even in the circumstances the more or less benign influence of a civilised race is already evident.’ Crucially, the soldier wrote, British occupation had turned the city into a ‘centre of supply, and that brings employment and a certain amount of prosperity to the natives. Their employment, too, on the roads, under our Engineers, is of mutual benefit, and a much more healthy and lucrative state of things than selling oranges and nuts at street corners, which seemed formerly to be the sum total of their 110 111 112 113

James Renton, ‘Changing Languages of Empire and the Orient: Britain and the Invention of the Middle East, 1917–1918’, The Historical Journal, 50, 3 (2007), 646–50. The Times, 20 February 1917, 7; Anon., The ‘Clean Fighting Turk’ (London, 1917), 3; McEvoy, ‘The Construction of Ottoman Asia and Its Muslim People’, 86–140. Norris, Land of Progress; Tamari, The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine. Murphy, ‘The “Hole-y” City’, 348.

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enterprise’.114 The Balkan News wrote that ‘Jerusalem is to-day smiling and contented’. Food supplies had improved, a ‘remarkable change’ from the hoarding policies of the Ottomans, and the army was ‘giving employment to all men in road-making in the suburbs at ample rates of payment’.115 Even the aforementioned Paget occasionally moved from the language of holy war to a moral crusade. ‘It be pleasant to see our countrymen held in such high esteem and great respect for their justice, honesty, and kindness’, he wrote near the end of his published collection of letters to his wife in Northamptonshire. In Jerusalem, his dragoman had told him ‘that the natives be mightily impressed that all our men go about alone or in twos, notwithstanding that they be in an enemy’s country’, confident that British law and order would keep the peace.116 One soldier was confident that the British occupation of the city was ‘a great relief after the tyrannous corruption of the Turks, and is winning a reputation for fairness’.117 Another praised Allenby’s proclamation to Jerusalemites on 11 December, which had guaranteed the right of religious freedom to all faiths and creeds, as ‘the Magna Carta of religious and civil liberty in Palestine’ that would ‘remain for future centuries’.118 British rule, it seemed to one private in the Machine Gun Corps, had brought ‘a great light once more into this darkened land’ (Figure 3.4).119 An author in the Palestine News, anxious to give the newspaper’s mixed readership an understanding of what the army was doing in Palestine, proclaimed that the EEF was the ‘herald of reviving commerce’ and wrote about how its occupation of Palestine ‘indicates the restoration of a more normal state of affairs. It might, perhaps, be more justly phrased if we were to say “a less abnormal state of affairs,” for here in Palestine the situation cannot be so readily readjusted as in France, where every successive advance of the Allies restores so much recovered country to the body politic from which the Germans tore it in 1914’. Under British occupation, the army was laying railroads, modernising the road system, and developing the infrastructure necessary for commerce and trade to flourish, all for the benefit of the local people. Arabs were encouraged to best make use of the present by ploughing and sowing, and in general by taking every advantage that presents itself of profiting by the absence of the Turk. As communications are improved, commerce, though forcibly and unavoidably restricted as in the greater part of the rest of the world by the operations of war, 114 115 116 118 119

The London Scottish Regimental Gazette, July 1918, 108. Balkan News, 25 December 1917, 2. Paget, A Chronicle of the Last Crusade, 19. 117 Palestine News, 28 March 1918, 3. Palestine News, 7 March 1918, 6. Wilson, diary, 16 January 1918, IWM Documents.4070.

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Figure 3.4 British soldier standing guard on the Mount of Olives, Jerusalem, Palestine, 1918. Source: Lowell Thomas Papers, Marist College Archives and Special Collections, 1495.55.1

will revive, and it will be possible for the inhabitants of this country to give partial effect at anyrate [sic] to their often reiterated boast: “If only we could get rid of the Turks, just see what we could do with this country.”120

One British soldier writing in The Whippets, the newspaper of the 2nd Lowland Field Ambulance, in January 1919, saw early signs of the land’s boundless possibilities. Palestine was ‘now showing more evidence of cultivation and revealing the infinite possibilities of a soil long neglected through the mal-administration of the Turk’, he wrote, and in ‘the hands of an enterprising people the land will once more “blossom as a rose,” and prove itself to be, indeed, “a land flowing with milk and honey”’.121 Living conditions and commerce, especially in Jerusalem, had certainly improved. The Occupied Enemy Territory Administration, established in 1918, issued financial grants to local entrepreneurs and banned selected imports to stimulate the local economy. The work of philanthropic organisations such as the American Red Cross and the Syria and 120

Palestine News, 7 March 1918, 6.

121

The Whippets, 1 January 1919, 20.

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Palestine Relief Committee tackled sanitation issues and cared for orphaned children and refugees. Potable drinking water, drawn from nearby reservoirs, was pumped into the city by the Royal Engineers.122 Others were more certain that if the land were given to them instead of the locals, it would once again blossom. ANZACs were constantly talking about the commercial and agricultural potential of Palestine, and it was they, not the local population, who would make the desert bloom. They would settle the land after the war, ‘about an acre per man’, one soldier estimated, import modern farming methods, and begin exporting to Europe and the rest of the world.123 ‘Palestine, and especially the Philistine Plain’ were thought to be ‘very rich and pleasant homing land’, with ‘generous soils and an assured rainfall, and a wide diversity of rural industries which could be worked on modern farming lines at a substantial profit’. The land’s potential yield had gone unrealised due to ‘primitive’ tilling methods, the only one of which, one soldier wrote, was ‘plough with the early rains, and again plough or sow’. Not only was land ‘close to railways and the sea, without a stone or a stump and ready for the plough’ cheaper than in Australia, being at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, Palestine was also ‘at the very door of the markets of Europe’. Moreover, it was ‘relatively an empty land’ with access to an abundant supply of cheap labourers from British Egypt. None of the above, soldiers pointed out, was the case in Australia. ‘The colonist in Palestine will, perhaps, after the war, be able to travel by railway from Jaffa to Calais’, an author in the Anzac Bulletin pointed out, and ‘to those who have considerable capital, there are in Palestine and Egypt business opportunities rivalled in few countries in the world’. Up-to-date agricultural techniques such as ‘dry farming as practiced in the Mallee and Riverina’ would triple or quadruple the land’s yield and, like Jewish colonies, allow for fields of barley, oranges, and wine grapes to grow. ‘Officers and men of the Light Horse talk of those things’, wrote one soldier newspaper author, suggesting that the government pay close attention to the needs and wants of Australians and New Zealanders and work to satisfy them.124 Not all were on board with another reclamation project that would rely upon British finance, industry, and manpower. One soldier in the Balkan News argued that the empire was stretched too thinly as it was. After rejecting French conspiracy theories that Britain was angling to take control of the entire Mediterranean coastline after the war and deny 122 124

Murphy, ‘The “Hole-y” City’, 349. 123 Kia Ora Coo-ee, 15 April 1918, 16. Anzac Bulletin, 25 October 1918, 20–21. For soldier settlement in the British Empire, see Kent Fedorowich, Unfit for Heroes: Reconstruction and Soldier Settlement in the Empire between the Wars (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).

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France influence in the region which it had, for centuries, ‘carefully cultivated’, the soldier rejected any talk of Britain annexing Palestine and Syria. ‘We say with all the emphasis at our command, and without the slightest fear of contradiction, official or otherwise’, he stated emphatically, ‘not only that we do not want Syria for ourselves, but that nothing would induce us to take it. Englishmen of all parties, or political school of thought are agreed that the British Empire is quite big enough already and that at the close of war the danger will be not of our getting too much – of getting, that is, more territory than we shall have the man power or financial strength to manage and develop properly.’125 While no soldiers referred to the campaign in Mesopotamia as a crusade – Jury’s Imperial Pictures, however, produced ‘Advance of the Crusaders into Mesopotamia’ in 1919 – many also found meaning in the liberation of the rest of the Middle East from the Ottoman Empire, including Mesopotamia, and a British hand to guide the region’s development.126 Like propaganda that wrote of the British Empire regenerating Palestine, pamphlets, like the anonymously authored The Commercial Future of Baghdad, published after the city’s fall, wrote of revitalising Mesopotamia’s economy.127 Soldiers followed suit. Ottoman Mesopotamia had for too long suffered the ‘blight of the Turk’ and the ‘ravages of neglect’. Mesopotamia had been run into the ground by corrupt and incompetent governors and administrators who were like a ‘greedy, hungry and irresponsible child left in charge of the jam cupboard and pantry’.128 Private Harold H. Hill of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, after reading, sometime in August 1916, Sir Percy Cox’s proclamation to Basrans from November 1914, understood that the campaign was ‘to help to liberate the country from the Turks, to protect British trading interests, and to make a new Garden of Eden possible’.129 Baghdad’s capture in March 1917 convinced Hill that the campaign was morally just and a worthy sacrifice of the British Empire’s manhood. ‘O, Mesopotamia! rejoice at the flight of the Turks from thy soil’, he wrote from Sheikh Sa’ad to his parents. If properly developed, he reasoned, Mesopotamia had a ‘great future’ as the bread basket of the entire empire, its plains ‘richer than the prairies of Canada’, yielding endless fields of fruit and corn from Basra to Baghdad. ‘Hail Brittania!’, he closed his letter.130 125 126 127 128 129 130

Balkan News, 21 February 1916, 1. ‘Advance of the Crusaders into Mesopotamia’, IWM 78–80. Anonymous, The Commercial Future of Baghdad (London: The Complete Press, 1917). Palestine News, 12 September 1918, 11. Hill, typescript account, 1917, LC LIDDLE/WWI/MES/046. Hill to Parents, 24 May 1917, LC LIDDLE/WWI/MES/046.

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Land between Kut al-Amara and Kurna seemed especially promising. ‘One never dreamt to see anything like this in Mesopotamia’, wrote Captain Eric Bellers of the 1st Battalion, Gurkha Rifles, taken aback by the appearance of acres of farmable land between the two locations. While the locals had ‘taken some trouble to plant trees + cultivate, and built pukka houses’, he wrote, ‘they had not done enough’. ‘Between Kut + Kurna is the most fertile and if irrigated would supply enough cereals to feed the whole world’, he explained to his mother, ‘perhaps we are going to make it do so after the war.’ Bellers himself thought about moving to Mesopotamia after the war and starting a farm.131 Officers in the Royal Engineers, such as Robert Stewart Campbell, a pre-war Territorial from Dundee, argued that the army was literally paving the way for a more prosperous future under imperial rule. ‘The brightest feature about Mesopotamia is its prospect for the future’, he explained in a letter to his parents in September 1917: Now that Britain has taken the country in hand, improvements are springing up all round. Sanitation is being made satisfactory. Proper roads have been made. While towns have been raised in level by as much as 6 feet, to prevent flowing in water. The river has been dredged and deepened – great landing stages and docks built. Courts of Justice are established to which the meanest novice may appeal. Tribal raids are suppressed and wrong doers punished. In time these and other measures must tell for good upon the native population.132

In Baghdad, soldiers saw the modernising work of the British-Indian Army paying early dividends. F. L. MacFarlane of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force noted that ‘one is immediately struck by the vast improvement and progress everywhere, made under British occupation since our first advent here, some two years ago’. MacFarlane found signs of ‘modernity’ all over Baghdad, from the ‘flaring posters of “Movies”’ to motor lorries replacing ‘delipidated [sic], ramshackle “gharries”’ in which he had previously ‘risked life and limb’. Even river travelling, he wrote, ‘is now luxurious compared with our first experience, when horses, men, mules and gear of all descriptions left little room for comfort’.133 Another soldier was happy to report that the backsheesh attitude of the locals was being replaced by more British values. ‘I left Baghdad as it was settling down to enjoy the blessings of English rule’, he wrote in April 1918, ‘and to know the British maxim “Fair play”’.134 The benefits of imperial rule seemed to be on full display, even where soldiers least expected to find them. Campbell’s trip to a theatre in 131 132 133

Bellers to Mother, 24 February 1917, LC LIDDLE/WWI/MES/007. Campbell to Parents, 17 September 1917, IWM Documents.11870. Kia Ora Coo-ee, 15 June 1918, 3. 134 Diana’s Ditty Box, 1 April 1918, 6–9.

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Baghdad persuaded him that imperial rule was no imposition on the local people. It was, instead, responsible for fundamentally changing the disposition of local Arabs to the British. ‘One thing struck me as remarkable’, he wrote to his parents, that in a captured city a British officer could go there and monopolise the best seats in the Hall full of Arabs of the friendliest kind and apparently be welcomed. They were very friendly, I spoke to one or two and immediately a dozen answered all keen to speak. At first the Arabs (Mohammedans) resented being under British (Christian) rule; but that objection is being broken down. There is something about British rule that wins the people. From the general to the Tommy you can see the “fair play” spirit in which they deal with natives – fair play but firm.135

Everywhere Captain Harry J. Edwards, a pre-war printer and aspiring Liberal Party politician, looked, he wrote in the newspaper of the 2/6th Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, there was irrefutable evidence of ‘restoration, of “cleaning up,” and the beginning of a new era of prosperity, unprecedented in the present age’. With ‘complete absolute reliance, trust, and confidence’, Mesopotamia’s Arabs had put their future in the hands of Britain. Seeing Mesopotamia on the mend, ‘more than ever’, he bragged, ‘one feels conscious of the pride he has in being British’ (Figure 3.5). One incident, in particular, stood out to Edwards, and gave ‘an idea of the state of the city and the admirable policy whereby it is governed, and that was the Indian guard presenting arms to one of the Mohammedan dignitaries. What a contrast to the policies of our enemies’, he explained, pointing to the ‘the Turks in the East, the Germans in the West, the massacring of the Armenians, and the ruthless sacrilege and destruction of churches and cathedrals’. Respect for individual liberty and freedom of worship, he continued, ‘makes our name revered and honoured even in a country where every national trait is diametrically opposed to our own’.136 When the men and women of the British Empire looked back on the liberation of Mesopotamia, argued Lieutenant-Commander Conrad Cato, aboard the SS Odin on the Tigris River, he was confident that the campaign’s military success, despite some costly mistakes, would be commended as a model of liberal imperialism for later citizens and evidence that the ‘lives of Britain’s sons’ had been sacrificed for a better world in Mesopotamia: But a new era has dawned for Mesopotamia with the hoisting of the British flag over Baghdad Citadel; a future full of hope and promise has been opened up for this mournful land, debased from her proud estate by corruption and misrule. The brightest dawn, however, does not always disperse the clouds of yesterday, nor the golden promise of the future lighten the darkness of the past. There are those 135 136

Campbell to Parents, October 1917, IWM Documents.11870. ‘An Impression of Baghdad’, The Royal Sussex Herald, 1 October 1917, 17.

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Figure 3.5 Ariel Varges, British soldier with Arab refugees at base camp, Baghdad, Mesopotamia, 1917. IWM Q24540 among us whose private sorrows still rouse them to a bitter questioning of the why and wherefore of the blunders that have been made, who cannot forget that a heavy toll in the lives of Britain’s sons has been levied for the lack of foresight and the errors of judgment, committed by some of those responsible for the conduct of the campaign. Such errors, alas! form the staples of the Empire’s history. We Britons spend our lives in making blunders, and give our lives to retrieve them. But though the clouds remain, they are no longer dark and threatening; the dawn has come, and with it the confident assurance that in this new burden of Empire – the task of restoring Mesopotamia to her former prosperity – the generations to come will gain inspiration from the long chronicle of heroic deeds which make up the story of her deliverance. The lives of Britain’s sons have not been sacrificed in vain.137

Literature produced specifically for soldiers, such as The Land of the Two Rivers, a YMCA pamphlet published in four editions in 1917, added to the chorus of those who linked the campaign to post-war British rule and a return to Mesopotamia’s past glory. The author, ‘W.H.M.’, explained in the pamphlet’s foreword that ‘Mesopotamia has been won back from the blighting misgovernment of the Turk by our now victorious arms, and 137

Conrad Cato, The Navy in Mesopotamia 1914 to 1917 (London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1917), 117.

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the arms of our brothers who sleep by the old deserted camp-grounds. It will rise again’, the author promised. ‘The great rivers will be directed, harnessed, controlled for the service of its people. A great iron highway from the North to the South and to the East will link up the outer world.’ ‘Let us not forget’, the author continued, that Mesopotamia is a responsibility of ours, of the British Empire’s. The Arab, the Armenian, the Jew, with good government, good education, with an expanding and truer thought of God, will raise new glories on these plains. And as we watch and wish for the regeneration of Mesopotamia which our arms thus far have advanced, let us not forget the lesson of history. While her young men stood lithe and keen, her women pure; while just laws were made and observed; while a compelling faith in her gods shed its light over her communities, Mesopotamia stood great. But luxury and lasciviousness; misrule and anarchy; sins against God and man ‘brought down the mighty from their seat’. So, whether it be in Mesopotamia or Blighty, by Arab or Britisher, that the rebuilding now be done, ‘they will labour in vain that build’, unless all direct their efforts towards that aim, which has been the aim of the Y.M.C.A. in war and will be its aim in peace, ‘to extend the Rule of God among men’.138

Those who had been captured at Kut al-Amara, marched to Anatolia, and starved in Ottoman POW camps were less charitable. Despite the loss of Kut and the senselessness of being sent to occupy a ‘desolate outpost half a world away’, as Beatrix Miller had phrased it, the capture and long-term rule of Mesopotamia was about vengeance. As an anonymous lieutenant wrote in The Kronical: The Kin of us you murdered shall be masters of your lands, They shall batten down the bulwarks of your trust; The city of your Sultans shall be wrested from your hands, Your glory shall be trampled in the dust; And the tunnels that we drove for you, the roads that we have made Shall be highways for the Armies of your foe; We shall mock you from our graves, that in what we did as slaves, We helped, we too, to work your overthrow. Heart broken and forsaken, our Calvary we trod. Yet with our faith unshaken we turned from you to God; And God has greatly taught us, to count our losses gain. Since we who fought for England, Here too took thought for England, In bondage wrought for England, And have not died in vain.139 138 139

W. H. M., The Land of the Two Rivers (Calcutta: Association Press, 1918), NP. The Kronical, 1 May 1918, 25.

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Neither crusade nor liberation seemed to fit Macedonia, at least not for soldiers during the war. After all, Bulgaria, a late entrant into the war, had not behaved in a way that made it necessary for soldiers to invoke either a religious or a moral crusade. Most soldiers held ‘Johnny Bulgar’ in high regard. Moreover, there was no one to liberate. Separating the diverse, multi-ethnic population of Macedonia into distinct ethnic groups was hard enough for soldiers. These were men who would have had trouble finding either Macedonia or Salonika on a world map before the war, as Stanley Casson, who had fought with the East Lancashire Regiment, playfully joked when explaining why better precautions against malaria in Macedonia had not been taken.140 Furthermore, Greece was not officially at war when the Allies landed at and occupied Salonika. So, who British and Dominion soldiers would have been liberating would have been anyone’s guess. There was no propaganda either, no rhetoric akin to liberating Belgians, Arabs, or Palestine’s Jews during the war, to fill the gap. In place of the language of crusade or liberation, soldiers turned to the civilising mission, much as French soldiers in the Armée d’Orient had done.141 To be sure, as argued above, some soldiers considered the war in Macedonia as part of the British Empire’s wider war effort. Others, as we will see in the next chapter, connected the downfall of the Central Powers, which began with Bulgaria’s capitulation, to the end of the war. But as common was the idea that what soldiers were doing in Macedonia was helping a moribund and backwards civilisation and people, the Greeks, enter the twentieth century, much as the traditions and culture of the ancient Greeks and Romans, one soldier pointed out, had helped the Celts and Picts of ancient Britain. In N.Y.D. at 43, the newspaper of the 43rd General Hospital in Salonika, its editor noted how strange it was that men from the ‘windswept heather moors’ of the Grampian Mountains in Scotland and the ‘chalk hills of Surrey’ had gone eastwards. ‘A strange reversal this of the old order’, he wrote. Just as old Roman roads and landmarks dotted Britain, reminders ‘of those mighty empire builders and of an age when civilisation came west’, Britain had now gone east, bearing the same ‘torch of civilisation’ which the Romans had originally brought and which they had inherited from Greece, ‘its land of origin’.

140 141

Stanley Casson, Steady Drummer (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1936), 114–15. John Horne, ‘A “Civilizing Work”?: the French Army in Macedonia, 1915–1918’, in Joseph Clarke and John Horne (eds.), Militarized Cultural Encounters in the Long Nineteenth Century: Making War, Mapping Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 319–41.

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Moreover, it was with the ‘same ideals we have come east as the old races came west to us’.142 Part of civilising Greece was making it safe from brigandage. Although Lieutenant H. J. Arnold of the Third Mountain Brigade, RFA, held the people of the Balkans in low regard, including the Greeks, ‘their lives were never safe before the advent of the British’, he wrote proudly near the end of the war. ‘No one had ever dared travel four miles from Salonica, the British Consul had never done so’, he continued, ‘everyone was a Brigand and life held very cheap but now one can travel almost anywhere, at least by day, with comparative safety’. One still needed to be vigilant and remain armed, he admitted, but by and large a pax Britannica had pacified Macedonia and safeguarded the local population.143 While Arnold looked to the pacification of rural Macedonia, Private H. E. Brooks of the 7th Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, found meaning in the roads he and other soldiers walked on and the tracks Allied trains travelled. The French-built railway between Larissa and Salonika stood out to him, as did the military road built by the Royal Engineers that stretched from Salonika to Seres. Of the road, Brooks wrote in his diary, ‘It costs millions + must be priceless to the Greeks’, although he doubted that the Greeks had the engineering knowledge and work ethic to properly maintain either the tracks or the roadways.144 The need to find a moral meaning in the war in the Middle East and Macedonia, whether liberation, liberal imperialism, or the civilising mission, offers clear evidence that more than military professionalism or the primary group was needed to motivate soldiers to fight.145 A strong sense of regimental pride and identity, in combination with the desire to fight for the men of the primary group, were unquestionably important when the bullets were flying.146 But as it relates to pre- and post-combat motivation – when soldiers looked to justify what they were about to do and what they had done – there is ample evidence, as shown above, that ideological motivation, or as Stephen D. Wesbrook has

142 143 144 145 146

N.Y.D. at 43, 1 January 1917, 1. Papers of H. J. Arnold, typescript account, 31 September 1918, IWM Documents.3693. Papers of H. E. Brooks, diary, 5 September 1918, IWM Documents.12685. Kitchen, British Imperial Army, 1–23, 220. See Charles J. J. J. Ardant du Picq, Battle Studies: Ancient and Modern (Dodo Press, 2012 [1921]), 73–9; Samuel A. Stouffer et al., The American Soldier: Combat and its Aftermath, 2 vols. (Princeton: John Wiley & Sons, 1965 [1949]), 105–91; Edward A. Shils and Morris Janowitz, ‘Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II’, Public Opinion Quarterly 12 (1948), 280–315; Watson, Enduring the Great War, 44–84.

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shown, a sense of commitment that surpassed the primary group, was needed.147 Legitimate demand theory suggests that ideology also plays a role in motivating men to fight, a belief that the sacrifice being asked of a soldier is appropriate and worthy. Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau and Leonard V. Smith, for instance, in their separate works on the French Army during the First World War, have argued that a strong belief in national sentiment and ‘proportionality’, as Smith has termed it, were fundamental.148 The two theories of combat motivation, however, are not mutually exclusive and may, in fact, operate simultaneously.149 As Vanda Wilcox has argued of the Italian Army, combat motivation was a ‘complex matrix of issues leading to compliance’.150 In the case of soldiers looking for meaning in the wars in the Middle East and Macedonia, a legitimate demand was clearly part of that matrix, especially when the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria did not seem to pose an imminent threat to Britain or the Dominions. Simply put, it is impossible not to see in the wartime writings of soldiers, and, as we will see in Chapter 5, the writings of ex-servicemen, an ideological argument in favour of Britain’s imperial project and a sense that the war effort and the aims of liberal imperialism were compatible. Conclusion In addition to detailing the hardships of soldiering outside the Western Front and the pleasures of touring the Middle East and Macedonia, British and Dominion soldiers tried to find meaning in what they were doing so far from France and Flanders. Some, especially in the early days of the war in Egypt, Sinai, and Mesopotamia, felt fed up and embarrassed at being so far away from the ‘real’ war in Western Europe. But balanced against this anxiety was the very real advantage of standing a greater chance of surviving the war. Other, pre-war professional soldiers considered the impact of being outside the Western Front on their future careers. Finding meaning also involved an appreciation of grand strategy, 147

148

149

150

Stephen D. Wesbrook, ‘The Potential for Military Disintegration’, in Sam C. Sarkesian (ed.), Combat Effectiveness: Cohesion, Stress and the Volunteer Military (London: Sage Publications, 1980) 244–78. Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War, 1914–1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France during the First World War (Oxford: Berg, 1992), 18–86; Leonard V. Smith, Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division during World War I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Marie-Cécile Thoral, From Valmy to Waterloo: France at War, 1792–1815 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 100–2; Fuller, Troop Morale, 22–31; Nelson, German Soldier Newspapers. Vanda Wilcox, Morale and the Italian Army during the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 147.

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the wider war effort, and the place of the ‘sideshows’ in the world war. Soldiers in Palestine and, to an extent, Mesopotamia, considered their wars as crusades and liberations from Ottoman despotism, while those in Macedonia fell back on the language of the civilising mission. These ideological motivations point to a more complex and varied set of factors that affected combat motivation, and provide further evidence that military professional, the primary group, and a legitimate demand worked together. Yet explanations like crusade, liberation, and a civilising mission only had their genesis in the war years. All three themes blossomed in the interwar period when British and Dominion ex-servicemen felt even greater need to call attention to their wars as public memory narrowed its focus to include almost exclusively the Western Front. The biggest concern was that their campaign had passed by entirely unnoticed by the people at home. In the next chapter, we will explore the belief of soldiers both during the war and around the time of its end that the wars outside the Western Front had been forgotten.

4

Forgotten

Writing to The Times from Sofia on 24 October 1918, the Bishop of London Arthur Winnington-Ingram recalled his visit to Macedonia a week prior. There, he had toured the front lines, visiting as many units as he could, and read aloud King George V’s message of congratulations to the BSF for the capitulation of Bulgaria. Moved by the ‘touching welcome’ he had received from British and Dominion soldiers alike, before returning to England he felt compelled to write to his fellow countrymen about the neglect shown to the men fighting in Macedonia. ‘We have not appreciated at anything like its full value the fortitude, courage, and wonderful success of the Salonica Army’, he wrote to The Times, ‘and they have a sore and disappointed feeling that they are neglected and despised’. And who could blame them, he asked? Music hall songs in London, ‘which ought never to have been allowed to be sung’, had bragged, ‘If you don’t want to fight, go to Salonica.’ But Macedonia was no escape from the war, the Bishop pointed out, echoing what British and Dominion soldiers had consistently and stridently said in correspondence with loved ones, local newspapers, and popular journals, as will be seen, and what they continued to say in their memoirs (the subject of the next chapter). What of the fact that hundreds of thousands of men had not had leave for years, he asked? What of the hundreds of thousands of those who had suffered from malaria and other diseases unknown to the fighting man in Europe? What of the ‘consummate courage’ the BSF had shown in the face of the Bulgarian Army, which held ‘positions of such terrific strength’, and that the campaign had brought Bulgaria to the peace table? And, to top it off, what about the conduct of the empire’s soldiers in Macedonia which had been the ‘best piece of propaganda for the British nation’, exposing Greece and the world to the ‘clean-limbed, clean-living, courteous British soldier’? At the end of the letter, the Bishop pleaded with the Times’ readers for ‘full justice to be done at home to the work of the Salonica Army’.1 1

The Times, 8 November 1918, 5.

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An anonymous Times leader applauded Winnington-Ingram’s letter and, like the Bishop, argued that the BSF ‘should not be forgotten’. In a prescient passage, almost as if it was written by the hand of a soldier in Macedonia, the leader contended that ‘Few of us at home have any conception of how much our praise, and when necessary our criticism if only it is sympathetic, means for the Armies at the front’. While the men on the Western Front had been ‘well served’ by the press and public, ‘Not so the Armies in what have been irreverently called the “side-shows” – and most unjustly’. ‘These men in our Eastern Armies’, the leader continued, ‘have had the dust and toil without the laurel of the race to victory’.2 Winnington-Ingram’s accusation that the home front had neglected the war in Macedonia, which The Times had applied equally to those fighting in Mesopotamia and Palestine, was noteworthy enough that it also prompted a response from the Secretary of State for War Lord Milner. The night after Winnington-Ingram’s letter was published, Milner, at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet at the Guildhall in London, fired back that neither the press nor the public had ignored the soldiers in Macedonia, and certainly not the War Office, which always had the ‘needs of our troops in Mesopotamia, in Palestine, in Macedonia’ in their minds.3 By late November 1918, news of the Bishop’s spirited defence of the BSF had reached the men he was defending, who were likely unaware of the war of words between the Bishop and Milner. Winnington-Ingram’s letter was plastered in large, bolded font on the front page of The Balkan News, the largest English-language newspaper available to soldiers in Macedonia. But as welcome as the Bishop’s letter was for soldiers – and, surely, a touch of celebrity was worth celebrating – they knew how they had suffered and what they had accomplished. It was the home front, the target of Winnington-Ingram’s letter, that needed enlightenment. For New Year’s Eve 1918, the Balkan News repackaged the Bishop’s letter into a four-page pamphlet and sent it home for purchase. On the pamphlet’s cover was the line ‘These men in our Eastern Armies have had the dust and toil without the laurel of the race to victory’, drawn from the Times’ leader. Inside the pamphlet was a facsimile of the Bishop’s letter and a day-by-day timeline of the BSF’s advance from 15 September until the surrender of Bulgaria on 29 September.4 At least for two weeks in September 1918, the public could have no doubt about what British and Dominion soldiers were doing in Macedonia. Soldiers, such as R. J. Munt 2 4

The Times, 8 November 1918, 7. 3 The Times, 11 November 1918, 4. From the Salonica Army. Wishing You a Happy New Year and Hoping to See You Soon. IWM EPH.C.GREETINGS (WWI) K96/1481.

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of the 56th (R) Battery of the RFA, were heartened when loved ones at home – in Munt’s case, his fiancée, Daisy – had picked up the pamphlet and read the Bishop’s words.5 Others ‘welcomed the excellent prelate with open arms’ and likened the Bishop to a ‘Columbus of the twentieth century’ who had ‘discovered’ the BSF for the rest of the world.6 While Winnington-Ingram was notorious for his bellicose and jingoistic sermons and writings, which often called on the nation to show its unconditional support for the troops, the fear that the war’s ‘sideshows’ were unknown was rampant among soldiers.7 Were their campaigns known at all back home, they asked? Why did people accuse them of being on ‘picnic’, of sitting out the war in the comfort of Alexandria and Jerusalem, Salonika and Baghdad? Did the public understand the difficulties of fighting in Sinai or Macedonia, where railways and roads capable of meeting the needs of the army had to be built wherever soldiers set foot? Did they know that the battles for Gaza or Ctesiphon were as ‘hot’, to quote one soldier from the Punjabi Regiment, as the fighting at Loos and Neuve Chappelle?8 Wasn’t the capitulation of Bulgaria in September 1918 and the Ottoman Empire in October proof that they had contributed to, if not were singlehandedly responsible for, winning the war? These were serious questions that soldiers felt compelled to answer. At stake was more than a hankering for ‘cheap notoriety’, as one soldier in the 7th Battalion, Wiltshire Regiment in Macedonia, from whom we will hear again, wrote in his battalion’s newspaper, The Moonraker.9 In The Last Great War, historian Adrian Gregory argued that Christian, particularly Anglican, values, including a conviction in a Christ-like trinity of suffering, sacrifice, and redemption, combined with wartime rhetoric to produce an ‘economy of sacrifice’ in Britain. A ‘universal tax’, to be paid equally by all, had been levied on the population. Blood was the currency. While some classes and regions had paid more – whitecollar workers had suffered disproportionately compared to rural farmhands, and Scotland, on average, lost more men than England and Wales – all agreed that soldiers had made the ‘definitive’ sacrifice and stood atop a ‘moral hierarchy’.10 In other words, all men in uniform had paid enough. Gregory’s argument is convincing and is backed up by other studies of conscientious objection and soldiers conscripted under the 5

6 8 9

Papers of R. J. Munt, Munt to Daisy, 28 December 1918, IWM Documents.15456. The pamphlet can be found in many private paper collections at multiple archives, including the Papers of B. E. Foster-Hall, LC LIDDLE/WW1/SAL/026. 7 Seligman, Salonica Side-Show, 145. Gregory, Last Great War, 168–70. Van Buren Laing, Laing to Parents, 11 January 1916, LC LIDDLE/WWI/MES/058. The Moonraker, 1 October 1917, 7–10. 10 Gregory, Last Great War, 112–13, 150.

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Military Service Act in January 1916.11 Yet these studies all miss one key component: location. Where a soldier fought had serious consequences for where he was placed in that ‘moral hierarchy’ and how big a part he and his comrades had played in the nation’s ‘economy of sacrifice’. All soldiers had to be seen as suffering. And to many at home, those outside the Western Front had not suffered enough. ‘Forgotten Army Syndrome’, as former Lieutenant Harold James of the 3/2nd Battalion, Gurkha Rifles, has called it, has affected many armies in the twentieth century. James was referring to ex-servicemen of the 14th Army in Burma during the Second World War, and suggested that ex-servicemen of the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were suffering the same fate.12 Similarly, Canadian soldiers in Italy during the Second World War were on the end of criticism from home. Why, some Canadians asked, had these ‘D-Day Dodgers’ not taken part in the invasion of Normandy?13 The same feeling of being pushed aside affected those outside the Western Front during the First World War. Origins With the exception of the siege and surrender of Kut al-Amara, as well as the captures of Baghdad and Jerusalem, the press paid little attention to the men outside the Western Front. Newspaper coverage, whether in national dailies such as the Daily Mail or weekly illustrated newspapers such as the Sunday Pictorial, often wrote of political and diplomatic developments, from rumours of coups in Istanbul to political pressure to bring in Greece and Romania on the side of the Entente, but soldiers were rarely written about.14 Part of the reason why soldiering was not often written about was because the other wars still conformed to the rules of pre–twentieth-century warfare outside the western world; fighting was restricted to short campaigning seasons when the weather was cooler and heat and disease were more manageable. One soldier in the 32nd Field Ambulance, writing in his diary five days after the Third Battle of Gaza, expressed his frustration at the public’s misunderstanding of warfare in

11

12 13 14

Lois S. Bibbings, Telling Tales About Men: Conceptions of Conscientious Objectors to Military Service during the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 95; Bet-El, ‘Men and Soldiers’, 74; Bet-El, Conscripts, 176–81. ‘Forgotten Army Syndrome’, Spectator, 12 January 2008. Daniel G. Dancocks, The D-Day Dodgers: The Canadian in Italy, 1943–1945 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991). See Justin Fantauzzo, ‘The Finest Feats of the War? The Captures of Baghdad and Jerusalem during the First World War and Public Opinion throughout the British Empire’, War in History 24, 1 (2017), 64–86; Michail, ‘“A Sting of Remembrance!”’, 240.

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Sinai and Palestine. ‘The campaign on this front has a character of its own’, he vented: For many months there was no fighting, but day by day the desert railway was being pushed out for transport of supplies, and by its side a pipe-track to bring water to the troops and animals. As the railway advanced stage by stage the troops marched forward. No one who has not had some experience of the conditions of life in the desert can realize the severity of the strain put on the men. To see them trudging over the soft burning sand, sometimes over a wire road which they themselves have laid to make the going a little easier, carrying rifles and equipment weighing seventy pounds with the relentless sun blazing down on the shimmering sand desert, and little water to drink; to see them in camp sleeping on sand, breathing sand eating it with every morsel of food, ears and eyes full of it when the ‘khamsin’ blows – all this, if it does not make campaigning in Egypt the awful and infinitely perilous business which it is on other fronts does make it the supreme test of a man’s endurance. And lately, too, the perils of warfare have not been wanting. It is no garrison work, but a work tiring often to exhaustion with constant digging to be done, while eyes are weary for the sight of something green, weary with the blazing heat, weary with the deadly monotony of the desert sand.15

Also responsible for the home front’s attitude was newsreel films. ‘Defenders of Egypt’, released by the Transatlantic Film Company, a British division of Universal Studios, captured soldiers relaxing near a YMCA hut at Mena Camp, wrestling, boxing, playing football, getting tattooed, and peeling potatoes and carrots for a communal stew.16 Most of the Topical Film Company’s ‘47th Stationary Hospital, Gaza, and Troops in Palestine’ was film of almond-picking in Richon le Zion and Ottoman and German POWs being led through Jerusalem by the Australian Light Horse and Hyderabad Lancers.17 Although ‘General Allenby’s Entry into Jerusalem’, shot by the War Office Cinematograph Committee and released in February 1918 by Pictorial News (Official), was one of the most popular and successful films of the war, the advance to Jerusalem after the Third Battle of Gaza, fought in November 1917, was omitted.18 Pathé News’s ‘With the Allied Troops in Salonika’ showed British and Dominion soldiers camped in small groups, likely in the Struma Valley, chatting and eating peaceably, as well as the erection of huts and the assembly of 15 16 17 18

Original strikethrough. Knott, diary, 12 November 1917, IWM Documents.7987. ‘Defenders of Egypt’, 1916, IWM 1178. ‘47th Stationary Hospital, Gaza, and Troops in Palestine’, 1918, IWM 32. ‘General Allenby’s Entry into Jerusalem’, 1918, IWM 13; Luke McKernan, ‘“The Supreme Moment of the War”: General Allenby’s Entry into Jerusalem’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 13, 2 (1993), 169.

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a fatigue party.19 International Film Service’s ‘With the Forces in Mesopotamia’ presented the 7th (Meerut) Division marching in Baghdad, crowds of Baghdadis making their way through the city’s bazaar, soda water machines in operation, gunfire from artillery exploding somewhere in the distance, machine gunners firing from their trench, and Ottoman Army POWs marching through Baghdad.20 In ‘With the British Forces for the Defence of Salonika’, soldiers filled sandbags and dug trenches, drank tea, and accompanied convoys of Greeks and other Balkan refugees into and out of Salonika.21 None of these films showed soldiers fighting the enemy. Many of the newsreels were released in 1916, a year in which film was dominated by the August release of the ‘Battle of the Somme’, or afterwards.22 Even though newspapers and newsreel films rarely mentioned or ignored the fighting in the campaigns in the Middle East and Macedonia, the other wars weren’t completely out of sight and out of mind. In June 1916, the Kut Prisoners’ Fund was established in Dorset, as well as a Dorset Prisoners’ Day in Dorchester, to raise funds for POWs after the surrender of Kut al-Amara.23 The fund was relatively successful, raising nearly £4,000.24 In Britain, 13 April 1917 was declared ‘Mesopotamia Day’ (Figure 4.1). The day was sponsored by the Mesopotamia Comforts Fund for British Troops, which had Lady Robertson, the wife of William Robertson, on its committee, and Stella Maude, Stanley Maude’s wife, as an honorary organiser. In India, 12 December 1917 was declared ‘Our Day’ and made a public holiday by the Viceroy, The Lord Chelmsford. Every anna collected was to go either to soldiers fighting in Mesopotamia, the sick and wounded, or the families of those who had died. Judging by previous ‘Our Day’ celebrations, which raised over £1,000,000 in Britain in 1916 and over £100,000 in Egypt, the day and its cause were well known. In Australia, in 1917, the Reinforcements Referendum Council, advocating on behalf of conscription, produced posters which appealed to the need to reinforce ‘Our Men who have fought at Gallipoli, France, and in Palestine’.25 19 20 21 22 23 25

‘With the Allied Troops in Salonika’, 1916, IWM 100. ‘With the Forces in Mesopotamia’, 1917, IWM 61. ‘With the British Forces for the Defence of Salonika’, 1916, IWM 1062-22b. S. D. Badsey, ‘Battle of the Somme: British War-Propaganda’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 3, 2 (1983), 99–115. Western Gazette, 23 June 1916, 2. 24 Western Morning News, 18 May 1926, 5. ‘Reinforcements. What the Soldiers Say: Vote Yes’, Leaflet Collection 2/1/1, AWM RC00323.

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Figure 4.1 D. J. A. Dickson, Mesopotamia Day poster, 1917. IWM PST 10782

Unknown and Misrepresented Despite some attention by the press, newsreel films, and public philanthropic activities, the fear that the other wars were unknown was widespread amongst soldiers. What little notice Australians had taken of the campaign in Sinai, argued Major Oliver Hogue of the 14th Light Horse Regiment, was disproportionately focused on British, not Australian, soldiers. He called on the Australian Minister for Defence Sir George Pearce to send its own war correspondent to the region. ‘No one knows all the splendid work our Light Horse has done out in the desert’, Hogue grumbled to his brother. ‘The British War Correspondent’, referring to The Times’ W. T. Massey, ‘has done them but scanty justice. All the bullocking work + the risky work + the advance guard work + patrols are our boys [sic] work but the plums all go to the English. And the rewards too! It is high time some one [sic] told the story of the campaign

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here.’26 In the July 1917 column, ‘Military Terms Explained’, in the newspaper of the Imperial Camel Corps, Barrak, one soldier defined Egypt as ‘Censored’.27 Once the war ended, predicted Verner Gladders Knuckey of the 8th Light Horse Regiment, our fellow Australians will return home from their hard fought battles in France and some day at Broadmeadows or some other Parade grounds a huge Master Parade will be held when the space that should be occupied by the 8th Light Horse will be vacant. Then the G.O.C. will ask who should be filling it, and the Authorities will suddenly remember that our Regiment should be there, the records will be turned up and it will be published in our ‘Argus’ and ‘Age’ –‘missing, 8th Light Horse, last heard of in the Arabian Desert about the year 1916’.28

Putting aside the fact that Knuckey had confused Sinai for the Arabian Desert, the gist of his fictional scene was that the accolades of war were being showered upon the infantry, not the cavalry, and on those in France, not in Sinai. The 8th Light Horse Regiment was so forlorn, he predicted, that its own GOC would forget that it had gone ‘missing’ somewhere in Sinai, sometime around 1916. Making matters worse was the callous accusation by some on the home front that soldiers fighting the other wars were shirkers who had dodged the Western Front. Comedy shows in music halls, as Winnington-Ingram had mentioned, lampooned the campaign in Macedonia, telling audiences, ‘If you want a holiday go to Salonika!’29 Newspaper articles penned by mourning parents who had lost a son in France ‘did not think it was right’ that ‘no one was being killed in Salonika’.30 One war correspondent on the Western Front hoped for a speedy end to the campaign in Palestine, so that soldiers would be ‘be able to come to France to see what war is’.31 Major Lord Hampton of the Worcester Yeomanry recalled that ‘it was at one time in vogue in England to consider the soldiers, whom fate and the War Office had condemned to serve in Egypt, only one degree better than a conscientious objector’.32 ANZACs were subjected to more direct scorn. In January 1917, members of the 1st Light Horse Regiment received a care package from an Australian woman through the Comforts Fund. The parcel included a clean, thickly woven pair of socks. Nestled deep in the sock’s toe was a small message 26 28 29 30 31 32

Hogue to Clarence, 17 January 1917, AWM 1DRL/0355. 27 Barrak, 1 July 1917, 4. Knuckey, diary, 19 June 1916, AWM PR03193. Collinson Owen, Salonica and After, 151. Major Vivian Gilbert, The Romance of the Last Crusade: With Allenby to Jerusalem (New York: D. Appleton, 1923), 59. W. T. Massey, The Desert Campaigns (London: Constable and Company, 1918), v. Papers of Major Lord Hampton, unpublished memoir, ND, IWM Documents.9900.

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explaining her hope that the package would reach a brave ANZAC infantryman in France, not a ‘cold footed Light Horsemen in Egypt!’33 According to Ion L. Idriess of the 5th Light Horse Regiment, the parcel’s recipient wrote back to the Comforts Fund. He returned the letter with a handful of photographs of ‘our desert graves, with compliments from a cold-footed squib in Egypt’.34 Trooper Ashton Rhoades of the 1st Light Horse Regiment wrote about the incident in a spirited defence of ANZAC cavalrymen in Sinai and Palestine to his parents. ‘What do the people at home imagine we are doing here?’, he asked them: Do they imagine that a chap has only to ask for a transfer to France, and he can get it? There are hundreds of men in the Light Horse who have tried again and again to get into the infantry, and havn’t [sic] been able to, and anyway during these months we’ve probably been through more fighting, and certainly more hardships, than most of the Australian Infantry. These people want to remember that it is generally only one Australian Div. at a time that goes into action there, while here its [sic] our Div. that gets cut about.

Rhoades hoped that ‘somebody sits down and writes that girl the worst letter she ever had in her life’. If she had seen what the Light Horse were doing in Sinai, he continued, ‘I guarantee she would never talk about cold footed L.H. again’.35 Like Rhoades, other soldiers objected to any misrepresentation of the other wars as ‘soft’ (Figure 4.2). Cambridge-born Second Lieutenant Leslie Missen of the North Staffordshire Regiment, a graduate of the Perse School, wrote to his alma mater’s magazine, Pelican, in 1916. ‘The man at home takes up his illustrated paper and looks at the pictures from Mesopotamia’, he wrote. Pictures of soldiers fishing, boating, and touring ‘Ashar, the Venice of the East’ or strolling alongside a ‘beautiful creek near Basra’ were all the public saw, Missen worried. ‘Mesopotamia seems to be quite a pleasant “sideshow” is the comment of the man at home. Let him come and see’, jibed Missen, who went on to detail the hot morning sun, clouds of insects, constant sweating, and polluted, choleric drinking water. ‘Don’t mention sand + dust + smells + ditches + mud, and thieves + beggars + Arabs and – but my brain will crack if I go on. It’s not a bad place is it?’, he ended.36 W. E. Merrill of the 1/1st Battalion, Hertfordshire Yeomanry, hoped 33

34 35 36

Papers of Edwin Colin Murdock McKay, unpublished memoir, Kippenberger Military Archive, Queen Elizabeth II National Army Memorial Museum, Waiouru, New Zealand, 1998.31. Ion L. Idriess, The Desert Column (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1932), 228. Original emphasis. Papers of Trooper Ashton Rhoades, Rhoades to Parents, 30 January 1917, SLNSW MLMSS 5176. Papers of Leslie R. Missen, Letter to Pelican, 1916/1917, LC LIDDLE/WWI/MES/071.

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Figure 4.2 ‘Ever Glorious Profession of Arms’. July 1917, Chronicles of the White Horse

that the high-profile death of Sir Victor Horsley, a well-known Londonbased surgeon and neuroscientist, by sunstroke at Amarah, would ‘convince the people at home that Tommy is not in clover out here’.37 An author in the Anzac Bulletin, one month away from the Ottoman Empire’s capitulation, opined that it was ‘not, perhaps, generally realised on what a large scale the Palestine campaign is carried on. This is brought out in a geographic phrase in the [Red Cross] report, which points out that the operations cover an area larger than that of Tasmania.’38 ‘For further accounts of the Palestine Picnic’, one soldier wrote sarcastically in the Palestine News, ‘please see the well-informed Home papers’.39 Soldiers in Sinai and Macedonia, wrote Thomas W. Hutton of the First Scottish Horse Brigade, who had spent 1916 in the former and 1917 in the latter, were so used to being mocked that

37 38

Merrill, diary, 21 July 1916, IWM Documents.13385. Anzac Bulletin, 20 September 1918, 7. 39 Palestine News, 1 August 1918, 5.

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the boys at this just wink for they’re used to printer’s ink And they go on smiling, smiling thro’ it all.40

Private T. B. Clark of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps also put his anxiety about being misrepresented into verse: We try to keep cheerful, we haven’t much chance, The life makes you feel like a man in a trance, There is not a man wouldn’t sooner have France, Than Macedonia. If half that we read in the papers is true, The people at home think we’ve nothing to do, If they tried it a week they would alter their view, Of Macedonia.41

An officer in the 12th Battalion, Cheshire Regiment, was irate when a close friend ‘said that he could not see from the papers that we were doing much’ in Macedonia. That allegation was the one thing ‘the poor old Salonika army always has pushed down its throat’, he wrote in his wartime diary, and if any man wants to be murdered all he has to do is to say ‘You dont [sic] seem to be doing anything in Salonika’ or ‘Why dont [sic] you make a push in Salonika’ to any officers, NCO or man in the Salonika Forces and he will be knifed at once. Anyone who has not been out here cannot tell the difficulties, the impossibilities that would have to be got over and all the thousand and one things that could be done in France but not out here.42

‘There broods an atmosphere of desolation which is almost intangible’, one soldier wrote of the area around the Petit Couronné, the smaller of two hills fortified by the Bulgarian Army near Lake Doiran. He described the Second Battle of Doiran, fought between April and May 1917, as a hell that ‘Dante would have known’ and ‘Doré drawn’ and not at all ‘the picnic that some people imagine’.43 Few showed as much disdain for the home front as Captain Owen Rutter of the 7th Battalion, Wiltshire Regiment. An editor and writer for The Balkan News, Rutter also wrote for The Moonraker under the pen name ‘Klip-Klip’. In the Moonraker, he corresponded with a fictional character, ‘James’, who served as a go-between for the battalion and the home front. Rutter proposed a daring solution to the problem of the 40 41 42 43

Hutton, Rhymes of Four Fronts, 84–6. T. B. Clark, Poems of a Private . . . A Souvenir of France and Salonica (London: William Nicholson and Sons, 1919), 26–7. Papers of Second Lieutenant E. M. Stuart, diary, 7 March 1918, IWM Documents.13440. Lines of Fire, 1 February 1919, 20.

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BSF’s poor public profile. ‘I want you to do something for me’, he asked James: Its [sic] rather difficult but I rely on you to do your best. There are a few worthy gentlemen at home to-day that we want to see in Macedonia, and you’ve got to get them here. Go to each one in turn and (having got him slightly inebriated) swear that you’re Mr. Lloyd George and that he’s a King’s Messenger. Give each one an important-looking sealed document addressed to me with a ticket to Salonique and pack the lot off. You want to know who those gentry are, James? I will tell you. They are the gentlemen who say in the daily papers (at odd intervals) that the Salonika Expedition is a picnic, the gentlemen who make frightfully funny remarks about its having been justified because Allied Control Officers found some potatoes in Athens, to say nothing of the gentleman who (so I am credibly informed) goes about London singing the song ‘If you don’t want to fight go to Salonika’.

Upon their arrival, Rutter pledged to organise the civilian expedition into a platoon and march them to the front line. There, he wrote, tongue-incheek, they’d ‘enjoy picnicking on the way up, and will spend their spare time taking photographs of each other “partaking” of what (I am sure) they will call “Al Fresco” meals, thinking it great to have their stew served in a dixie, and to eat it from canteens instead of off ordinary hum-drum plates’; ‘the pleasures of camping out in nice air bivouacs on a bright sunny Balkan hill’, where ‘there are a few more flies in Macedonia than in Tooting’; ‘spend delightful evenings with picks and files and coils of wire’; and quench their thirst with a ‘small chlorinated water in lieu of their usual evening whisky and soda’; and play a ‘screamingly funny game of hide and seek’ with the Bulgarians, ‘where they could munch their bully beef and biscuits with a trench mortar playing round them like a gigantic watering can’. As much as Rutter was criticising those at home who treated soldiering in Macedonia as a glorified Boy Scouts excursion, he had a more serious point to make about the BSF’s public profile. ‘Don’t think I’m being bitter, James, and don’t think we hanker for cheap notoriety’, he clarified, ‘because we don’t. All we ask is that people at home should realize that we occasionally do a job of work out here, and should refrain from making rather ill-timed jests at the expense of an army that (at present) isn’t in a position to answer back.’ He went on to catalogue all the hardships of soldiering in Macedonia, which we explored in Chapter 1, including two years of ‘toil[ing] and moil[ing] about these Balkan hills without seeing our ’appy ’omes’; ‘blizzards and blazing suns’; ‘bivouacs on barren hills where no shade ever comes’; ‘flies as countless as the sandbags in Macedonia’; the digging of ‘innumerable trenches’; performing ‘stunts and raids’; sentry duty ‘in a foot of water in the teeth of the Vardar wind’; ‘long waits for Mail Day and the tragedy of the mince pie

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that gets inextricably entangled with a melted cheese’; and ‘the weary rustle of the 5.9 with its shattering crash and the sudden swiftness of the pipsqueak’.44 The problem facing soldiers also seemed to be one of terminology. Soldiers complained that loved ones and the public had mistakenly conflated Egypt with Palestine and Salonika with Macedonia. In both cases, soldiers pointed out, the two were not one and the same. ‘Do please realise the difference between Egypt and Palestine’, wrote one soldier in the Welsh Howitzer Battery to his sister a week after the armistice, ‘There is as much difference between the two as between England + France when the war was on’.45 Sydney Herbert Powell pointed out to his mother that ‘Salonica is in the Mediterranean Sea, in Greece’, and ‘not very far from the Dardanelles’.46 One soldier in The Snapper lamented that ‘In Salonica’ instead of ‘In Macedonia’ was commonly used, which was ‘misleading to the great majority of those at home whose knowledge of the geography of these parts is very scanty’.47 F. S. Davies of the 32nd Field Ambulance was upset that the public imagined ‘we are doing the grand out here’. ‘As I have told you before’, he lectured his sister, ‘to be “out at Salonika” is very vague. We are about forty miles from the town’.48 Corporal Walter E. J. Francis of the Queen’s Westminster Rifles acknowledged to his mother and sister that the BSF was camped around Salonika, but, like Davies, was careful to point out that they were not in the city itself. Those that were near or in the city, in any case, were there because ‘Neither side can live in those swamps on the Struma in the hot weather as the mosquito breeds in millions + the bite of one variety means illness + often death’. ‘People in England’, he closed his letter, ‘do not realize the nature of the eastern countries’.49 Soldiers themselves took part in the debate. An apocryphal rumour of a heated quarrel between soldiers on leave in London, dubbed the ‘Battle of Waterloo Station’, reached William Mather of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry near Kalinova in February 1918. Mather was told that a party of soldiers on leave from Macedonia ‘were abused and jeered at by “comrades” from France regarding the supposed cushy job we had “in Salonika”’. A number of Scots, he wrote, ‘being somewhat impetuous, finally saw red, fixed bayonets and charged. The result was 44 45 46 47 48 49

The Moonraker, 1 October 1917, 7–10. Peerman to Carrie, 19 November 1918, LC LIDDLE/WW1/EP/056. Papers of S. H. Powell, Powell to Mother, 25 August 1916, IWM Documents.17030. The Snapper: The Monthly Journal of the East Yorkshire Regiment (The Duke of York’s Own), 1 July 1918, 274–5. Papers of F. S. Davies, Davies to Maggie, 8 December 1916, IWM Documents.11626. Francis to Mother and Sister, 22 July 1917, IWM Documents.16018.

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said to be six killed and a number wounded but the whole story lacks confirmation.’50 In what might have been a shockingly distasteful jibe at soldiers on the Western Front, one soldier in Barrak’s July 1916 issue, the same month that the Battle of the Somme started, wondered whether ‘they really do things so much better in France as we are daily told’.51 The 60th (London) Division’s Christmas 1917 postcard positioned France, etched in ribbon, above a laurel wreath and adorned with the royal crown. Lower down the wreath and extending to the left was the position of Macedonia, while to the right was Palestine. Behind Macedonia and Palestine lay two rifles and field artillery, while France, crowned by the jewels of the monarchy, stands in front of the Union Jack. A pencilled sketch of the battlefield of St Eloi, with planes circling above a devastated forest, forms the main background. Ruined buildings sprawl across the card from left to right, testimony of the destruction of the civilian rear. Even though the 2/2nd Battalion, London Regiment, had taken Jerusalem weeks before the card was printed and mailed home, the battlefields of the Western Front were pictured as the division’s crowning achievement.52 To become a part of that ‘economy of sacrifice’, as Gregory has described it, and to show that they had paid the tax, soldiers reminded their loved ones that they had fought and suffered as much as those on the Western Front and at Gallipoli. ‘The troops who have come from France’, wrote Captain Robert Palmer of the 1/4th Battalion, Hampshire Regiment to his father, the Earl of Selbourne, about the Battle of Sheikh Sa’ad, ‘say that in this respect this action has been more trying than either Neuve Chappelle or Ypres, because, as they say, it is like advancing over a billiard-table all the way’. The Palmer family ended up paying the ultimate price when Robert was killed in January 1916 near the Tigris River at Umm el-Hanna.53 Another soldier wrote that those ‘who had fought for a year in France and had been through the fighting at Neuve Chappelle, Ypres, and Loos’ were convinced that ‘they had never experienced anything that approached in violence and destructiveness that day’s tornado of fire’.54 One officer in the Punjabi Regiment described the Battle of Ctesiphon to his parents as ‘the hottest show we have had’ and ‘probably the most severe fighting 50 52 53 54

Mather, “Muckydonia”, 156. 51 Barrak, 1 July 1916, 6. The postcard can be found in many private paper collections. See the Papers of F. E. Collis, IWM Documents.12699. Robert Palmer, Letters from Mesopotamia (London: Women’s Printing Society, 1917), 112. William Ewing, From Baghdad to Gallipoli (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1917), 266–7.

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outside Europe during the war’.55 ‘Those who have experienced war in France only’, wrote Malcolm Murray Thorburn of the 2nd Battalion, Black Watch, who had fought at the Battle of Sheikh Sa’ad, the Battle of Wadi, and the Battle of Hanna, to family, ‘do not know what war is’.56 After the Battle of Wadi, Thorburn derided the Western Front as ‘very nearly child’s play to this’, omitting the ‘really sordid parts’ of the fight to pass censorship.57 By the time of the Battle of Hanna on 21 January, done to aid besieged British and Indian soldiers at Kut al-Amara, the fighting at Sheikh Sa’ad still weighed heavily on Thorburn. ‘You cannot imagine being brought in two broken legs and shot through the stomach in a mule cart’, he wrote home, ‘bumping over irrigation cuttings, etc.’ Thorburn had then watched as injured officers waiting to be transported on a boat were picked off by snipers. ‘One shot in the face and broken arm, two other shattered arms, one both wrists hanging, another with lung pierced, all just bandaged. I leave out the more sordid parts’, he ended.58 Another soldier compared Kut to the Somme. Writing home to his family who had recently seen the 1916 film, The Battle of the Somme, C. E. W. Brayley was keen to point out that the war he was fighting in Mesopotamia was a match for the Somme. ‘Substitute sun helmets for steel headgear, reduce the caliber of the guns, remove the tanks, and all the rest is exactly as I have been through it out here’, he told them. ‘We had more violent bombardments near Kut than are shown on the picture’, he explained, ‘and men who were at the Somme and who were in our trenches wished they were back’.59 Captain Arthur Mackenzie of the 14th Light Horse Regiment wrote to his wife after the First Battle of Gaza. ‘Old hands from Gallipoli’, he told her, ‘say they never had anything like it at any time on the Peninsula + several officers from the Western Front said it was a good imitation of what is happening in France today’. The battle had ‘more than justified’ the Camel Corps’ ‘existence’ and had ‘proved themselves one of the finest fighting units of the Desert Column in Sinai’.60 Compared to Gallipoli, wrote Trooper Gordon Birbeck of the First Australian Machine Gun Squadron to his mother, the Battle of Rafa was ‘the hottest “scrap” our boys said they had ever taken part in’.61 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

Van Buren Laing to Parents, 11 January 1916, LC LIDDLE/WWI/MES/058. Thorburn to Family, 10 January 1916, IWM Documents.511. Thorburn to Family, 15 January 1916, IWM Documents.511. Thorburn to Unknown, 17 January 1916, IWM Documents.511. Brayley to Family, 9 February 1918, IWM Documents.7599. Papers of Arthur Arundel Mackenzie, Mackenzie to Nell, 10 June 1917, AWM 1DRL/ 0446. Birbeck to Mother, ND, SLNSW, MLMSS 810.

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Clearly, soldiers were insecure and anxious about their place in the war. No better example of this insecurity exists than the wartime correspondence of Sapper Frank Doughty Day of the Royal Engineers. For the two years he was in Palestine, Day maintained an almost unbroken stream of correspondence with his parents in Doncaster. In correspondence with his mother, he boasted that the EEF had captured thousands of wounded men and ‘inflicted very severe losses on the others’ at Romani. He took particular aim at the ‘grumblers at home’ and hoped that by relaying details of the army’s battles his parents could make them ‘understand now why troops are required out here at all’.62 The logistical build-up in Sinai that paved the way for the march into southern Palestine had a purpose, he argued. Romani was clear evidence ‘that our preparations were not at fault’. The fact that Day’s own father was one of those ‘grumblers’ who saw no reason to be fighting outside the Western Front was deeply upsetting to him. In response to his father’s stubborn strategic opinion on the war, Day constantly tried to impress him with the success and scale of the EEF’s march across Sinai. It was true, Day admitted, that the EEF’s campaign was ‘naturally small when one thinks of the Somme or Russia’, and that it couldn’t ‘be compared with France’. But that was not to suggest that the war against the Ottomans was without its victories. Defending not just the EEF’s war but also his own contribution to Britain’s wider war effort, Day regularly relayed the number of Ottoman casualties, POWs, and, unlike his letters addressed to his mother, he made a point to highlight the capture of any Germans. Recapping the Battle of Romani, for example, he bragged with precision about the capture of ‘3900 prisoners + 9000 casualties’, including ‘20 or 30 Germans amongst the prisoners’.63 Day’s letters hint that as the war dragged on his father softened his stance on the campaign in Sinai. After Rafa’s capture in January 1917, Day expressed his relief to his mother that ‘Father appreciates the work we are doing out here’.64 He continued to seek his father’s approval as late as the Third Battle of Gaza and the advance toward Jerusalem, writing, ‘I hope things have satisfied you out here, the lads have done very well + I hope before long we shall hear of the fall of Jerusalem’.65 To be fair, Day’s parents had made an effort to understand why their son was fighting in Palestine and not in France. After Jerusalem’s capture, they attended a public presentation on Palestine’s 62 63 64 65

Day to Mother, 7 August 1916, LC LIDDLE/WWI/EP/015. Day to Father, 24 August 1916, LC LIDDLE/WWI/EP/015. Day to Parents, 17 January 1917, LC LIDDLE/WWI/EP/015. Day to Parents, 6 December 1917, LC LIDDLE/WWI/EP/015.

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historical and geographical importance in Doncaster, where they were also lectured to about the water and supply difficulties of desert campaigning.66 Still, it seems that Day’s father could not let go of his prejudice against the empire’s war in Sinai. Britain’s conservative press, namely John Bull, may have been the reason why. Three days before Jerusalem’s capture, Day wrote to his father predicting the city’s imminent fall. Responding to his father’s previous letter, he felt obliged to defend Archibald Murray, Allenby’s predecessor, and the failed First and Second Battle of Gaza in March and April, as Murray was ‘starved for everything’. Referring to John Bull’s well-known editor, Horatio Bottomley, Day lashed out: ‘Bottomley is of course a fool to talk as he does, he hasn’t the faintest idea of the facts of the case.’67 Day almost certainly had in mind an article in John Bull from 1 December, in which Bottomley had contended that Britain ‘should have crushed the hated Turk long ere’ but for the ‘damnable blindness of British statesmen’.68 Indeed, Bottomley had made a habit of such strategic criticism. Later in December, he published ‘Why I Went to War’, where he insisted that ‘had Haig not been denuded of many divisions of his best men’, the British might have been able to land a knock-out blow in France before the arrival of battle-hardened Germans from the Eastern Front. The only way to end the war, Bottomley charged, the war that was fought because ‘Germany meant mischief to Britain’, was to dictate a settlement by force of arms. Tellingly, as it relates to the views of Day’s father, the article ended in full support of the Western Front’s staunchest advocates, ‘Let it be Haig and Robertson all the way’.69 For the rest of their correspondence, Day and his father continued to trade blows over British war strategy until he was demobilised in 1919 and returned to Doncaster. Whether they felt forgotten, misrepresented, or mislabelled, soldiers weren’t content to air their grievances to a select few in the pages of their own newspapers, in their diaries, or in correspondence with family. Many wrote directly to the popular press. Multiple soldiers wrote to The Tatler, a weekly magazine covering high society in Britain, and to one of the magazine’s and the war’s most popular gossip columns, ‘Letters of Eve’. The column began in May 1914 and was penned by ‘Eve’, a pseudonym for the writer and journalist Olivia Maitland-Davidson, to a fictional friend, ‘Betty’. Eve was a precocious, chatty, and fun-loving society girl, whose self-deprecation and wit were intended to hold up a mirror to the 66 67 68

Day to Parents, 26 December 1917, LC LIDDLE/WWI/EP/015. Day to Father, 6 December 1917, LC LIDDLE/WWI/EP/015. John Bull, 21 (1917), 8–9. 69 John Bull, 21 (1917), 8–9.

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high society from which she came.70 Articles were accompanied by stylised, linear sketches drawn by Annie Fish, a well-known cartoonist. In January 1917, Eve had to apologise to soldiers in Macedonia with whom she had ‘fallen from grace ‘cos I sed the poor dears weren’t very busy or something’. ‘We all agree that you’re a very nice girl’, one soldier wrote, but where on earth did you get the idea that we are having a good old rest on this front? Are your Salonika correspondents all in the A.S.C.? Or are they on the Staff? And do you really believe we live in Salonika and spend our spare time at the cafés of that evil-smelling and generally objectionable town? If so, my dear girl, someone’s been kiddin’ you.

The soldier pointed out the constant shelling by the Bulgarian Army, the heat, flies, mosquitoes, malaria, rain, and ‘general discomfort’ before pleading to her, ‘Give us our due, Eve’.71 Other columnists in the Tatler also reached out to the men fighting away from the Western Front after receiving letters of complaint. After acknowledging what ‘“sodjering” in a beastly climate means with rotten bad rations, dirty clothes, not many baths, and where everything that flies or crawls has got a sting,’ ‘Sabretache’ reassured ‘the people in Salonika, who also, I fear, sometimes think that we forget. We don’t, I assure you – at least those of us who know what malaria is, and how it makes you feel as if you had eaten a top-hat and two pairs of worsted stockings.’72 In other periodicals, like The Era, a weekly publication that focused on theatre, Sapper J. S. Clarkson of the 107th Field Company, Royal Engineers, wrote that ‘Illustrated papers have been publishing pictures of sports, circuses, and other amusements and a large number of people at home must think that the British Tommy is having a rattling good time out here but that is not the case for us at all’. The majority of soldiers, he pointed out, were stationed ‘miles from Salonika’.73 Despatch riders in Macedonia wrote to The Motor Cycle, a popular motorcycle enthusiast magazine, and included photographs of the roads in Macedonia. ‘The roads behind the firing line in France must be as billiard tables compared with what our men have to contend with in Macedonia’, wrote one author.74 Heeding the aforementioned Hogue’s desperate, albeit private, plea for publicity, Australian soldiers in Palestine took it upon themselves 70 71 72 74

Lucinda Gosling, Great War Britain: The First World War at Home (Stroud: The History Press, 2014), 17–18. Original emphases. Olivia Maitland-Davidson, The Letters of Eve (London: Constable and Company, 1918), 153–4. The Tatler, 28 November 1917, 274. 73 The Era, 3 May 1916, 14. Motor Cycle, 2 March 1916, 214.

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to bring the campaign into the public’s eye, much as the men of the BSF had done with their reprint of the Bishop of London’s Times letter or how others had written to periodicals like the Tatler and Era. Australia in Palestine was one such effort. Edited by Sir Henry Somer Gullett and Charles Barrett, the collection included thirty-one short chapters written and previously published in wartime soldier newspapers. The editorial duo of Gullett and Barrett spent all of 1917 and 1918 taking submissions and assembling the collection, and it was finally printed and distributed in 1919.75 What made the edited collection special was that it was funded entirely by Australians and New Zealanders who had fought and were still fighting in Palestine.76 From senior officers in the AIF to rank-and-file men of the ANZAC Mounted Division, all pitched in. And the cost was considerable. Squadrons were asked to contribute upwards of £6, or the modernday equivalent of approximately £350. Sapper William Charles Allen of the Field Squadron Engineers was happy to hand over a part of his pay for the project. Near the campaign’s end in September 1918, Allen wrote enthusiastically to his mother and sister about the collection. ‘You will receive in the course of time a book titled “Australia in Palestine”’, he informed them, ‘I want you to take great care of it + preserve it because I will want to have a look at it when I come home’. Men on active service wrote all of the articles, took all of the photographs, and pencilled all of the sketches, he told them, and everything in it was ‘dinkum’.77 Allen kept writing home until the war’s end, always asking whether or not Australia in Palestine had arrived.78 Soldiers in the 7th (Meerut) Division, in Mesopotamia, had tried to the do the same, according to Edward J. Thompson, a chaplain in the division. In May 1917, he wrote, ‘the 7th Division tried to put together, for the Press, a connected account of their campaigning since Maude’s offensive began’. The project was never completed.79 75

76 77 78 79

Gullett was an Australian war correspondent in Palestine from 1917 onwards. He later became director of the Australian War Museum. Barrett was a pre-war journalist before enlisting and serving with the Camel Brigade Field Ambulance in Palestine. He also edited the Cacolet, the Australian Camel Field Ambulance’s soldier newspaper, and for a short time the Kia Ora Coo-ee. All articles were reprinted from a variety of wartime soldier newspapers. Allen to Mother and Sister, 3 September 1918, SLNSW MLMSS 4500 (MLK 3506/ Item 3). Allen to Mother and Sister, 15 November 1918, SLNSW MLMSS 4500 (MLK 3506/ Item 3). Edward J. Thompson, The Leicestershires Beyond Baghdad (London: The Epworth Press, 1919), 8.

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Who Won the War? Four days after Sir William Robertson, CIGS, attended the Inter-Allied Conference in Paris in July 1917, he sent a memorandum to the War Cabinet expressing his dismay at the plans for an advance in Macedonia. ‘The Salonika forces will never materially contribute to the winning of the war’, Robertson wrote, ‘while we may well lose it if we fail to have sufficient shipping to meet all and sundry requirements. As I have always pointed out to the War Cabinet, the Salonika expedition has been from the first strategically unsound.’ Robertson’s disregard of the campaign in Macedonia as a logistical waste that threatened to sabotage Allied victory reflected the same concerns about war strategy that played out in British society. The joint Anglo-French force in Macedonia was often mocked as the ‘gardeners of Salonika’, the ‘Anglo-French internment camp’, or the ‘bird-cage defence line’. The ultimate irony was that soldiers in Macedonia and Palestine believed that it was they who had won the war. This attitude towards the other wars, one which fundamentally reorganised their importance, was a complete reversal of the difficulty soldiers had in identifying the strategic meaning of these campaigns, as we saw in the previous chapter; the ends, according to soldiers, had justified the means. Responsible for the first Central Powers state to fall, Bulgaria, the men in the BSF had claimed that they had set in motion a chain reaction that had led to Germany’s surrender. T. G. Craddock of the 244th Motor Transport Company, RASC, marked Bulgaria’s exit as ‘the beginning of the end of the war’ in his wartime diary.80 Another soldier wrote to his cousin, upset that by January 1919 he had not been demobilised. ‘I think it is a shame keeping us so long without a leave’, he wrote, ‘and apart from that it is about time some of the heads of England spoke for us’. ‘I think they are treating the Salonica army like a lot of dirt’, the soldier complained, ‘But who finished the war for them. The men who have been hiding behind the hills for nearly 4 years.’81 ‘Who Won the War and Why!’, a musical monologue, was composed by Sapper Jim Morris on 1 October 1918, two days after the armistice with Bulgaria. Recited by a female impersonator, ‘Trooper Laurie Sweetapple’, with music from the GHQ Concert Party, the monologue followed a Cockney soldier’s return to England and a conversation between the soldier and his grandson. Less serious than the fictional conversation between a returned soldier, his wife, and his children, detailed in Chapter 3, Morris’s monologue was a whimsical 80 81

Craddock, diary, 1 October 1918, IWM Documents.16826. Letters from India and Salonika, First World War, Edwin to Louie, c. December/ January 1919, IWM Documents.12478.

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criticism of the lack of attention paid to the BSF and the hardships of their campaign. ‘You wants [sic] me to tell you a story’, the monologue began, ‘Of who won the war, and why? Well, your Grandad ain’t quite what he was, boy, But as you wants [sic] the truth, well, I’ll try. ... You say that you’ve read all the histories! Of who started the war and when; But you can’t find out just who won it, And why they won it – and then You comes [sic] to your poor old Grandad Who’ll tell you the truth, as you know

Morris’s fictional grandfather recounted the opening days of the war and the entries of the Ottomans and Italians before moving on to the unknown war in Macedonia. And each day read in the papers How the boys out there in West With their tanks, and planes, and gas shells, Were spoiling old Fritz’s rest, While we out in Macedonia Were doing ourselves real fine. Yes, with dysentery, ‘dingey’ and suchlike, M. and D., Castor Oil and Quinine. Did I ever come home on leave, boy? Did I leave Salonique? Did I h – l! Did you ever see an oyster Come out for a walk from his shell. It was like that with us, we was fixtures, We was in but we couldn’t get out, And the chances we had of leaving Was nothing to shout about. The years went by, still we waited; They said we was having a rest, Abasking all day in the sunshine While the boys did the work on the West. We’ll admit they was doing some scrapping. And at times catching Fritz on the bend; But they never seemed to get nearer, What we wanted to see, ‘THE END’.

While the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the Western Front had failed to end the war, the BSF in Macedonia, in Morris’s view, had figured out how to win the war. In a subtle nod to those who believed in an

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eastern, indirect strategy, one in which the Entente powers targeted the weaker links in the Central Powers alliance, Morris explained how the BSF set in motion the beginning of the war’s end, motivated both by the desire to end the conflict and because they, unlike those in France, had not had leave home. You see, we worked it out this way – If we made Johnny Bulgar collapse, We could tie the Turk up and he’d chuck it, Then we might get to Blighty, perhaps! ’Course the Austrians, well, they’d be easy, And without all the others, the Hun Wouldn’t stand very long on his lonesome, And the blooming old war would be won. Well we got fairly fed up with waiting, So, one day, without any fuss, We went out and toused Johnny Bulgar, We thought it was right up to us. Gave him one in the neck, a good ‘un, Got him groggy and well on the run, In a fortnight he’d chucked the old sponge up, And that’s how the war was won. You’ve asked for a story, you’ve got it, ‘Who won the war?’ Now you can see. Never mind what it says in the books, boy, When you want the truth come to me. Now you wants [sic] to know ‘WHY’ we won it? The reply you must surely perceive, ‘THE SALONIKA FORCE WON THE WAR, BOY, ’CAUSE THEY COULDN’T GET HOME ON LEAVE’.82

Like their counterparts in Palestine and Mesopotamia, who, as we have seen, were keen to engage with the public in magazines, newspapers, and privately published books like Australia in Palestine, soldiers in the BSF also made efforts to send the ‘truth’ home. Private Victor Greenbaum of the RAMC had a transcript copy of Morris’s monologue sent home and published in a number of provincial newspapers in Hull and Yeovil.83 The December 1918 Christmas card of the 8th Field Survey Company, Royal Engineers, pictured a British ‘Tommy’ finishing off ‘Johnny Bulgar’ and ‘Johnny Turk’ (Figure 4.3). Not to be outdone, soldiers in the EEF saw the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which followed Bulgaria, as the more important 82 83

Located in Powell, IWM Documents.17030. See Hull Daily Mail, 11 March 1919, 4; Western Chronicle (Yeovil), 25 July 1919, 6.

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Figure 4.3 ‘Finish Johnny!’, Christmas card, 8th Field Survey Company, Royal Engineers, 1918. IWM LBY K05/78

phase in a domino-like effect that had ended the war. In the Palestine News, four days before the German Army on the Western Front had collapsed and sued for peace, one soldier predicted that the war was nearing an imminent end. Looking for an end to the war on the Western Front was a mistake, he argued. Others ‘more wisely looked to the East to usher in the Dawn. From the East it is coming’. While the author didn’t discount the failure of the German Spring Offensive and gave some credit to the ‘extraordinary and unexpected advance’ of the army in Macedonia, it was in Palestine, he argued, that the final blow to the Central Powers had been dealt. Macedonia was ‘overshadowed by the almost unprecedented advance of General Allenby’s forces’. The EEF’s northwards advance into Syria, Lebanon, and Anatolia had ‘produced the desired effect. It broke Turkey completely.’ Most importantly, the soldier wrote, ‘It crushed all German aspirations in the East’ and ‘sent the Central Powers agog

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with excitement’. As a result of the defeat of the Ottomans, support for the war in Germany, he continued, had disintegrated, as it had already done in Bulgaria, in the Ottoman Empire, and as it was, he thought, about to do in Austria-Hungary, too.84 Still, the home front was tough to convince. In the 1 November 1918 issue of the Dagger, or London in the Line, the newspaper of the 56th (1st London) Division, a fictional conversation between ‘The Optimist’ and ‘The Pessimist’ took place. In the conversation, ‘The Pessimist’ made clear that, no matter the successes in Macedonia and Palestine, Germany was the real enemy that had to be defeated: the the the the the

optimist.‘Well, we looks [sic] like wintering on the Rhine, my boy!’ pessimist.‘And a plaguey, ill-favoured place to winter in, too.’ optimist.‘We are attacking all along the line and have broken through.’ pessimist.‘The Hun has something up his sleeve!’ optimist.‘Well, you must admit that the news from Macedonia and Palestine is good.’ the pessimist.‘Germany is the enemy!’ the optimist.‘Quite so, and the Yanks will be there in a month.’85

Conclusion By the time the First World War was over, British and Dominion soldiers in the other wars had experienced a unique set of hardships in soldering, offset by some pleasures in tourism. While they had struggled to define what exactly they were doing away from the Western Front – whether it was playing their part in a global war, crusading, liberating, or civilising – of one thing they were certain: their sacrifices and their contribution to the victorious war effort had been either forgotten by those at home, or, as troubling, badly misrepresented. The feeling of being forgotten and misrepresented, whether in Macedonia, Mesopotamia, or Palestine, didn’t go away when the war ended. Indeed, the sense that these men had been tossed aside and excluded from public memory, a perception that became more and more the reality by the late 1920s, when disillusionment and the supposed folly of the war on the Western Front perhaps reached its height, was a very real concern of theirs.

84 85

Palestine News, 7 November 1918, 4. The Dagger, or London in the Line, 1 November 1918, 15.

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Already, by February 1920, thirteen months after the armistice, John W. R. Fenning of the Army Cyclist Corps had penned an article titled ‘Those “Side-Shows”’ in Chevrons, the soldier-newspaper of the National Federation of Discharged and Demobilised Sailors and Soldiers. Fenning had spent most of the war in Macedonia. It was both public ignorance of the BSF and its misrepresentation that concerned him. After seeing a letter in an unnamed newspaper from an ex-serviceman of the BSF, in which he had asked, ‘“When are the public to be told of the services rendered by that Force”’, Fenning, as many of his comrades had done during the war, took up the cause. ‘The public do not know that the troops in Macedonia “carried on” under enormous difficulties and discomforts’, he began, ‘such as were almost unexampled during the war’. Like those writing during the war, distraught over the shoddy reputation of the BSF, Fenning pointed to a number of difficulties of campaigning in the Balkans, from a lack of home leave and disrupted mail and parcels from home, to a ‘stubborn foe who was entrenched in natural granite fortresses in the heart of the Balkan mountains’, and from ‘suffering from the ravages of malaria, dysentery, and climatic conditions’ to ‘say nothing of the thousands who were killed in action’. Not only had the BSF itself been forgotten, and the hardships it faced, but also, as others had pointed out, the campaign had been derided in public as a place where the war was not at all being fought. After pointing out the above-mentioned difficulties, Fenning noted disappointedly, ‘These are but a few of the hardships endured in stoical silence by the BSF, whilst the public asked “What is the Salonika Force doing,” and comedians (save the mark!) sang a song to the effect that “If you don’t want to fight, go to Salonika!”’ What seemed so offensive to Fenning, and what he wished the men in Macedonia could have told the public ‘had not the censor forbade such a course’, was that ‘a big percentage of the flower of the British Regular Army and also thousands of the New Army lie in desolate Macedonia, after safely coming through the 1914 actions in France and the Gallipoli campaign’. ‘Let it never be forgotten’, he closed, echoing those who had connected the BSF’s victory over the Bulgarians with the beginning of the end of the war, ‘that this “hush-hush” Force was the first to actually fight its opponent, the Bulgars, to a standstill, thereby connecting that rapid crumbling of the Central Empires which hastened the end of the war’. Even though the BSF had, in Fenning’s and others’ opinions, brought about the downfall of the Central Powers, as one by one Germany’s allies deserted her, it was still necessary, he lamented, ‘for the soldiers returning from the Balkans to label their

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horse-box-carriages-deluxe “Hush, don’t cheer, we’re merely troops from Salonika, creeping home!”’86 Once soldiers outside the Western Front had finally ‘crept home’, to use Fenning’s words, the search for meaning continued. Ex-servicemen took hold of the memory of their other wars in public, in memoirs, and in private, in scrapbooks.

86

Original italics. Chevrons, 1 February 1920, 6.

Part II

Memory

5

Public Memory

In the introduction to Major John Robertson’s memoir of his service with the Imperial Camel Corps, With the Cameliers in Palestine (1938), Sir Harry Chauvel, the wartime commander of the Desert Mounted Corps, ruminated on the importance of Robertson’s memoir. ‘In New Zealand as in Australia’, he explained, ‘it is only natural that more interest has been shown in the Western theatre of the Great War than in the Eastern theatres as the great bulk of their soldiers served in the former. The Palestine campaign’, he continued, ‘is consequently little known in these countries’.1 Curiously, he thought, the campaign was better known in the United States, especially amongst American cavalrymen who likened the EEF’s northwards drive to Aleppo to Stonewall Jackson’s campaign in the Shenandoah Valley during the American Civil War, than it was in Britain and the Dominions. The memory of the campaign was alive and well, though, Chauvel was happy to report, amongst the men of the 14th and 15th Australian Light Horse Regiments, who had adopted the motto Nomina Desertis Inscripsimus, ‘In the Desert we have written our names’.2 Chauvel had first pointed out the relative obscurity of the war in Sinai and Palestine seventeen years earlier, when he praised R. M. P. Preston’s regimental history, The Desert Mounted Corps (1921), for bringing attention to a campaign ‘but little known to the general public’.3 He did so again in the foreword to Ion L. Idriess’s The Desert Column (1932).4 Yet little, it seemed to him on the eve of the Second World War, had changed. Chauvel wasn’t exaggerating. Although the campaign in Sinai and Palestine and elsewhere had long been overshadowed by the war on the Western Front, much to the dismay of soldiers during the conflict, as we have seen in previous chapters, the situation had worsened in the interwar period. Twenty years after the start of the war, the ‘popular definition of 1 2 3 4

John Robertson, With the Cameliers in Palestine (Dunedin: Reed Publishing Ltd., 1938), 7. Robertson, Cameliers in Palestine, 8. R. M. P. Preston, The Desert Mounted Corps (London: Constable, 1921), VII. Idriess, Desert Column, NP.

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culturally legitimate war experience’ in Britain, as Janet Watson has argued, ‘had narrowed to that of the soldier in the trenches: young junior officers or possibly men in the ranks, preferably serving in France or Belgium, and almost certainly disillusioned’.5 The very worst fear of the men who had fought outside the Western Front – of men like ALA, whose reinterpretation of the wartime poster ‘Daddy, what did You do in the Great War?’ opened Chapter 3 – had been realised. To paraphrase Watson, it seemed as though they had fought a different war altogether – a war that had not been waged in the trenches of France or Flanders and was undeserving of attention, inclusion, admiration, or even sympathy.6 How were soldiers going to fight back? The answer, as Chauvel’s comments implied, was to put pen to paper and to write for the public. By bearing witness to their war in memoirs and battalion and regimental histories, ex-servicemen would set the record straight, as only those who had experienced the privations of soldiering in the Jordan Valley or the Struma Valley, had seen the army roads running from Salonika to Summerhill Camp, or had watched jubilant Arabs and Jews welcome them in Baghdad and Jerusalem could do. In this way, ex-servicemen were ‘agents of memory’, as Jay Winter and Antoine Prost have labelled them, and their memoirs were ‘political weapons’.7 The goal was to persuade and ‘to shape the memory of others’, as Peter Burke argued of memoir writing some time ago.8 The reading public had to know why they had fought, suffered, and sacrificed so far from the Western Front, especially at a time when a stable and functional government was being put together and rebellions were being put down viciously in Mesopotamia/Iraq, ethnic and religious violence were tearing apart Mandate Palestine, and when, in public, politicians such as Bonar Law, during the Conservative Party’s campaign in the general election in 1922, had condemned the campaign in Mesopotamia, telling the press ‘I wish we had never gone there’.9 First, this chapter will explore the main reason ex-servicemen gave for writing their memoirs, which was the belief that they were still forgotten in the interwar period and that their memoirs were meant to correct that oversight. And if the other wars were still forgotten, as ex-servicemen argued, that means that the hardships of their wars, which we explored in 5 6 7 8 9

Watson, Fighting Different Wars, 186. This is not to say disillusioned narratives of the Western Front dominated all facets of popular culture. See Paris, Warrior Nation. Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 174–5. Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 47. Daily Mail, 18 November 1922, 7–8.

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Chapter 1, also were unknown. Thus, we will move from ex-servicemen feeling forgotten to ex-servicemen defending their fronts as active and ‘real’ warfare. Again, as soldiers did during the war, they often compared their campaigns to the Western Front. To add extra meaning to their campaigns, ex-servicemen also connected them to history and the past. We will then move on to how ex-servicemen constructed the memory of their campaigns. Linking back to Chapter 3, we will see how ex-servicemen returned to themes such as crusade, liberation, and the civilising mission. Yet laying the groundwork for the spread of liberal imperialism and seeing their campaigns as civilising missions were far more widespread in the post-war period. The main difference was that, during the war, there was little doubt that France and Flanders mattered more. With the benefit of hindsight, however, some soldiers questioned the supremacy of the Western Front. Last, and tied to a reassessment of the importance of the peripheral fronts and the Western Front, we will look at how ex-servicemen, particularly those who had fought in Palestine and Macedonia, claimed (once again) that they had played an instrumental part in ending the war. Still Forgotten Returning to Chauvel’s comments, he was by no means alone in alleging that the campaign in Sinai and Palestine, or the campaigns in Macedonia and Mesopotamia, had been forgotten, if they were ever known, by the public. As we saw in Chapter 4, British and Dominion soldiers throughout the war wrote to loved ones, periodicals, newspapers, and to other press outlets, afraid, upset, and indignant that their part in the wider war effort had been either misrepresented, giving the public the misconception that their campaigns were ‘cushy’ compared to the Western Front, or overlooked. The fear that the other wars were still forgotten continued to haunt ex-servicemen in the interwar period and was one of the main reasons, as they explained in forewords, introductions, and prefaces, for writing their memoirs. But were ex-servicemen airing a legitimate grievance? Had they been squeezed out of interwar memory? At least for the first four or five years after the conflict, the campaign in Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine was very much a part of the memory of the war throughout the British Empire. Across the empire, Lowell Thomas, an American journalist and official war correspondent to New York’s The Globe, presented his travelogue With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia. Between 1919, the year the show debuted in New York and then went to London, and 1925, the travelogue was delivered around four thousand times and total ticket sales

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exceeded four million. In 1923, British Instructional Films (BIF) released Armageddon, a full-length film about the campaign that combined official war films, photography, animated maps, and dramatic re-enactments. Three wartime events that resulted in the awarding of a Victoria Cross were shown, including the rescue of two English soldiers from Ottoman shellfire and the storming of an Ottoman machine-gun position by a lone Scottish corporal. The surrender of Jerusalem along the Jaffa Road was dramatised and starred F. G. Hurcomb, the British soldier to whom the mayor of Jerusalem surrendered the city. Elements of the scene were reconstructed with the benefit of Hurcomb’s own collection of wartime souvenirs. In addition to scenes of personal bravery, the film covered the extension of the water pipeline and railway from Egypt into Sinai, the cavalry charge at Huj, and parts of Allenby’s entry into Jerusalem. Importantly, too, Armageddon portrayed the Ottoman Empire’s involvement in the war as part of a centuries-long expansionist policy of the House of Hohenzollern, dating back to the fifteenth century. The film was an immediate commercial success, drawing an opening week audience of nearly 27,000. After a two-week season at the New Tivoli Theatre in London, the ‘British Film for the British People’, as New Era Films, the chief distributor for Armageddon, called it, its popularity led to a second season at the Pavilion, Marble Arch. Critical reviews were overwhelmingly positive, too. The Star called it ‘perhaps the most remarkable film ever made’, while Bioscope, a trade journal, praised the average British ‘Tommy’ as the film’s star. The film’s use of ex-servicemen to dramatise events had lent Armageddon a ‘convincing realism which one generally associates with animals or little children’.10 Armageddon’s realism was enhanced by a live, in-person presentation at the film’s premier by Hurcomb and a soldier who had swum the Jordan River, Lieutenant G. E. Jones of the London Regiment. The presence of Hurcomb and Jones blurred the line between Armageddon as educational film and interactive media. Moderated by Sir George Aston, a member of the War Cabinet Secretariat and a military historian, Hurcomb and Jones fielded questions from the crowd following the film’s exhibition. The Daily Graphic, impressed both by the film and by the presence of the two ex-servicemen, suggested that people ‘will go to this picture as on a pilgrimage’.11 Crucially, the film’s focus on British and Dominion heroics and on the Allies’ ultimate victory over the Central Powers, as well as the commercial and critical popularity of Armageddon, lends more weight to historian Michael Paris’s argument that interwar 10 11

The Star, 9 November 1923, 8; Daily Express, 10 November 1923, 3. Daily Graphic, 10 November 1923, 10.

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society considered the First World War as ‘another bloody but glorious page in the history of the British Empire’. As Armageddon’s popularity demonstrates, that ‘page’, at least in the early 1920s, included the war in the Middle East.12 Juvenile and fictional literature, such as With Allenby in Palestine: A Story of the Latest Crusade and On the Road to Baghdad, both written by F. S. Brereton, a popular writer for Blackie’s Publisher who served as a lieutenant colonel with the RAMC, were also popular throughout the empire.13 Watercolour paintings of the war in Mesopotamia, particularly the actions of the Royal Flying Corps, later the Royal Air Force, at Kut, featured in the Royal Academy’s exhibition in 1919.14 In Australia, the campaign in Sinai and Palestine was also well known in the interwar period and beyond. George Lambert, an official war artist in the Middle East in 1917 and 1918, had his painting, The Charge of the Light Horse at Beersheba, 1917, exhibited at the Australian War Memorial Museum in 1920. The Museum also loaned official war photographs of Palestine to local war exhibitions. An entire court in the Australian War Memorial Museum, ‘Palestine Court’, was devoted to the war in Sinai and Palestine.15 Towns in Australia, such as Mena Creek, paid tribute to the Australian encampment at the foot of the pyramids. Soldier settlements were named after battles in the region. El Arish was established in Queensland in 1921. Three of the settlement’s streets were named after high-ranking officers who had fought in Sinai and Palestine, including Chauvel, John Royston (who had commanded the 2nd and 3rd Light Horse Brigades), and Granville Ryrie (who had commanded the 2nd Light Horse Brigade). When Australian film-makers looked to boost recruitment in the Second World War, they turned to First World War Palestine. In December 1940, Forty Thousand Horsemen, shot between 1938 and 1939 and directed by Charles Chauvel, the nephew of Harry Chauvel, was released in Australia and subsequently in the United Kingdom and the United States. The film follows three Australian Light Horsemen, one of whom is tangled in a love affair with a French woman working at a vineyard in Palestine, up to the Battle of Beersheba in October 1917. 12

13 14

15

Michael Paris, ‘Enduring Heroes: British Feature Films and the First World War, 1919–1997’, in Michael Paris (ed.), The First World War and Popular Cinema, 1914 to the Present (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 53. Paris, Warrior Nation, 112, 150. Tim Buck, ‘The Imagining of Mesopotamia/Iraq in British Art in the Aftermath of the Great War’, in Michael J. K. Walsh and Andrekos Varnava (eds.), The Great War and the British Empire: Culture and Society (London: Routledge, 2017), 152–62. Jennifer Wellington, Exhibiting War: The Great War, Museums, and Memory in Britain, Canada, and Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 133, 219, 224.

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Despite the clear attention paid to both the capture of Jerusalem and the broader campaign, British and Dominion soldiers who had fought in Sinai and Palestine, as well as those in Macedonia and Mesopotamia, alleged in their memoirs that their part in the war effort had been forgotten. Macedonia was a ‘forgotten expedition’ which had been fought by a ‘Forgotten Army’.16 Mesopotamia had ‘been neglected by military students and historians alike’.17 The campaign was ‘so distant from Europe that even the tragedy of Kut and the slaughter which failed to save our troops and prestige were felt chiefly in retrospect’, wrote another. The public knew something of the surrender of Kut al-Amara and Baghdad’s capture, but ‘of the hard fighting which followed, which made Baghdad secure, nothing has been made known, or next to nothing’.18 Another ex-serviceman, who was certain ‘that the tragedies and hardships of our troops on the lesser war fronts passed almost unnoticed’, guessed ‘that there are many people who have never heard of the Siege of Kut, much less the bloody battle of Ctesiphon and the subsequent rearguard action we fought back on to Kut-el-Amara’.19 ‘Little did the British public, more immediately affected by the greater wars’, wrote Lieutenant-Colonel J. E. Tennant of the Royal Flying Corps, who had served in Mesopotamia, ‘realise how forgotten British officers were dying in nameless fights, or rotting with fever in distant outposts, “unknown, uncared-for, and unsung”’.20 ‘As a rule, only the dramatic portion of the work has been chronicled in daily newspapers’, complained Major Kent Hughes in Modern Crusaders (1918), referring to Jerusalem’s capture, ‘and very little information ever appeared of the conditions under which the troops lived, whether on the desert of Sinai or on the fields of Palestine’.21 ‘LITTLE has been said, and less written of the campaigns in Egypt and Palestine’, wrote Antony Bluett of the Camel Transport Corps in With Our Army in Palestine (1919). ‘The Great Crusade began with the taking of Jerusalem and ended when the Turks finally surrendered in the autumn of 1918’, he wrote of the public’s perception of the campaign. ‘This view, entirely erroneous though it be, is not unreasonable’, he continued, ‘for a thick veil shrouded the doings of 16 17 18 19 20 21

Casson, Steady Drummer, 97; Papers of C. W. Hughes, unpublished memoir, 1925, IWM Documents.4432. Lieut.-Colonel A. H. Burne, D.S.O., Mesopotamia: The Last Phase (London: Gale and Polden, 1936), NP. Thompson, Leicestershires, 8. Papers of F. S. Hudson, unpublished memoir, c.1925, LC LIDDLE/WWI/MES/049. Lt.-Col. J. E. Tennant, In the Clouds above Baghdad: Being the Records of an Air Commander (London: Cecil Palmer, 1920), 7. Major W. S. Kent Hughes, Modern Crusaders: An Account of the Campaign in Sinai and Palestine up to the Capture of Jerusalem (Melbourne: Melville and Mullen, 1918), 2.

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the army in Egypt in the early days, and the people at home saw only the splendid results of two years’ arduous preparation and self-sacrifice’.22 Even Allenby, the subject of so much celebrity during and immediately after the war, joked to ex-servicemen at the regimental dinner for the Dorset Yeomanry in February 1933 that he ‘was dining in London a few nights ago when a lady next to me said, “Have you ever been to Jerusalem?” That tore my reputation to shreds.’23 Memoirs were meant to fill the gap and to present the soldier’s truth to the public. Bluett’s memoir was to give the public an ‘idea of the work and play and, occasionally, the sufferings of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force’.24 F. H. Cooper’s Khaki Crusaders (1919) was meant to ‘interest rather than instruct the people at home’.25 Another ex-serviceman, who had fought with the 20th Machine Gun Squadron in Palestine, wrote to allow ‘friends and relations to obtain some idea of their experiences whilst they were serving with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force’.26 Captain John More’s With Allenby’s Crusaders (1923) was written not only for his fellow ex-servicemen, for whom his memoir would be ‘merely a reminiscence of the Palestine Campaign’, but also ‘to give an honest account of life in the Palestine Campaign’ for a public who had neither been there, he thought, nor read about the campaign’s hardships.27 Sir George Milne, the wartime general officer commanding in chief of the BSF, praised A. J. Mann’s The Salonika Front (1920) for helping the public ‘pierce the supposed veil of mystery with which popular fancy has enshrouded these forces, and to form his own opinion as to their weight in the scale of the military operations which eventually led to the debacle of the Central Powers and their allies’.28 Alexander Douglas Thorburn’s Amateur Gunners (1934), his memoir of his time in France, Macedonia, and Palestine, was written ‘to present an entirely truthful picture of a varied experience of the Great War’.29 Lieutenant V. J. Seligman of the 60th (London) Division, in the first of his two memoirs, Macedonian Musings (1918), had written because ‘France is so near home, and abler pens than mine have done the work. But of the Salonica campaign those at home know next to nothing. If I have done a little to bring before my readers a picture of life in the Salonica Army, its hardships and difficulties, its interests and pleasures’, he explained, ‘I shall not have laboured 22 23 25 26 27 28 29

Antony Bluett, With Our Army in Palestine (London: Andrew Melrose, 1919), 2. Yorkshire Evening Post, 27 February 1933, 6. 24 Bluett, With Our Army, NP. Cooper, Khaki Crusaders, 3. A. O. W. Kindall, Through Palestine with the 20th Machine Gun Squadron (London: J. M. Baxter and Co., 1920), NP. John More, With Allenby’s Crusaders (London: Heath Cranton, 1923), 9. A. J. Mann, The Salonika Front (London: A. & C. Black, 1920), VII. Thorburn, Amateur Gunners, 5.

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in vain’.30 Major E. W. C. Sandes of the 6th (Poona) Division hoped that his recollection In Kut and Captivity (1919), which detailed the deplorable conditions in which the POWs of Kut al-Amara saw out the remainder of the war, would serve as a testament to the ‘British soldiers and their Indian comrades who succumbed during captivity’ and ‘died for their country’. ‘May they not be forgotten by the sons of the new and glorious British Empire created by the Great War!’, he closed his memoir.31 ‘So far as I can discover’, W. J. Blackledge pointed out in The Legion of Marching Madmen (1936), ‘the Mesopotamian Campaign has been recorded only by militarists, historians who never write anything “indiscreet or contrary to public policy,” and political deceivers’. His memoir, instead, was ‘the untold story – an account of what one rather young Tommy saw from the fighting line’.32 By the mid-1920s, nearly a decade before Watson has suggested that the Western Front became the only ‘culturally legitimate war experience’, ex-servicemen were already concerned that they had been shut out of public memory. ‘So much has been written concerning the Great War’, wrote Robert H. Goodsall, formerly a lieutenant in the RFA, in Palestine Memories (1925), ‘that some justification would seem necessary for the present work’. His ‘excuse’ for writing, given how inundated the public was with accounts of the war on the Western Front, was the ‘hope that these pages will mirror a little of the life, duties, and pleasures which fell to the lot of those who served in Palestine’ and to ‘stir the memory of those who were “out East” in 1917 and 1918’.33 Fatigue with the disillusioned, hyperrealist accounts of the war by the end of the 1930s presented an opportunity that ex-servicemen hoped to seize. In Henry C. Day’s Macedonian Memories (1930), General Milne wrote that Day’s memoir came at an opportune time. ‘After the recent flood of somewhat unpleasant war literature, mostly from the “other side of the line”’, he explained, ‘the general public will no doubt turn with relief to a book such as this, which looks upon war in the healthy British way’. Milne was ‘very glad to have the opportunity of welcoming a book of such sturdy character’, and one, he was optimistic, ‘which will help towards the long delayed recognition, by the general public, of the work done by the British rank and file in Macedonia’.34 30 31 32 33 34

V. J. Seligman, Macedonian Musings (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1918), 11. Major E. W. C. Sandes, In Kut and Captivity with the Sixth Indian Division (London: John Murray, 1919), 451. W.J. Blackledge, The Legion of Marching Madmen (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1936), 3. Robert H. Goodsall, Palestine Memories 1917–1918-1925 (Canterbury: Cross and Jackman, 1925), 1. Henry C. Day, Macedonian Memories (London: Heath Cranton, 1930), 5.

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If the public weren’t listening, as ex-servicemen feared they weren’t, some literary critics and reviewers were. In April 1923, Orlando Cyprian Williams, a clerk of committees in the House of Commons and literary critic for The Times Literary Supplement, thought it was ‘impossible not to be struck by the difference of tone in war diaries’ when comparing More’s With Allenby’s Crusaders to memoirs of the Western Front. Williams was no friend of the downcast and heavy-hearted types of memoirs, such as C. E. Montague’s Disenchantment (1922) and H. M. Tomlinson’s antiwar Waiting for Daylight (1922) that had, he lamented, become all too common in the early part of the decade. ‘In spite of all the elaborate apparatus for recuperation behind the front in France and the nearness of home’, he wrote, ‘the unabating horror of soul-destroying monotony of war on that front affected even the most cheerful of men’. By contrast, More’s memoir of Palestine, and other memoirs of other fronts he had read, ‘where back-of-the-line organization was, in early stages, far more primitive, the spirit of sport and adventure was never extinguished. This was peculiarly true of the great campaign which led from the Suez Canal to the conquest of all Syria.’ Williams wasn’t naïve, though. He was well aware of the difficulties that had troubled British and Dominion soldiers in Sinai and Palestine, including ‘the weary desert, now scorching, now freezing, the septic sores, the fleas, the flies, the frequent thirst, the first failure at Gaza that cost so many lives’.35 Seven years later, Cyril Falls, the well-known Irish military historian and ex-serviceman, felt the same. In his annotated bibliography of war books, Falls lambasted disillusioned memoirs as ‘propaganda founded upon a distortion of the truth’, for appealing ‘to the emotions rather than to reason’, for pandering to ‘a lust for horror, brutality, and filth’, for belittling the British Empire’s war effort, and for pretending that ‘no good came out of the War’. Some of the books that caught Falls’s eye as better representations of the war came from outside the Western Front, and included Gerald B. Hurst’s With Manchesters in the East (1918), Adams’ The Modern Crusaders (1920), Vivian Gilbert’s The Romance of the Last Crusade: With Allenby to Jerusalem (1923), More’s With Allenby’s Crusaders, and Edward Cooke’s With the Guns West and East (1924). Still Misrepresented Williams and Falls, writing at opposite ends of the decade following the war, were but two voices championing the memoirs of those who had fought outside the Western Front. They were not enough to convince ex35

The Times Literary Supplement, 12 April 1923, 238.

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servicemen, if ex-servicemen knew of their reviews and support at all, that the public had taken notice of their campaigns. Fear that the war outside the Western Front had been badly misrepresented – that it was bloodless and a ‘picnic’ from the real war on the Western Front – first arose during the conflict, as we saw in Chapters 1 and 4. Soldiers wrote letters home to popular periodicals, journals, and newspapers to make clear that they had done their bit, had suffered, and, in some cases, had a hand in winning the war. That men had fought, been wounded, and/or died during the war was paramount in the interwar period. For British society, the war’s ‘greatness’, as Dan Todman has explained, went hand in hand with a ‘morbid revelling in mass fatality’ and an ‘amazement with vast catastrophe’.36 Scale and numbers mattered, and the campaigns in Macedonia or the Middle East, by most measures, fell far behind the Western Front. Northern Irishmen who had fought at the Somme, for example, had bled for Britain and were ‘valiant unionist heroes’, as historian Jane G. V. McGaughey has shown of Northern Irish attitudes to its ex-servicemen. Those who had fought away from the Western Front, like the 10th (Irish) Division, which spent considerable time in Macedonia and Palestine, were ‘omitted from this pantheon of warrior masculinities’ and often discriminated against in the interwar period.37 The problem was obvious to Major C. S. Jarvis of the 60th (London) Division. ‘We imagine always’, he wrote in Through Crusader Lands (1939), ‘that most of our soldiers were killed in France or Flanders, and forget that thousands lost their lives fighting their way through the mountains of Palestine to free Jerusalem from the Turk’.38 On the frontispiece to the Legion of Marching Madmen, Blackledge, much like ‘ALA’ had done in his fictional scene for the Chronicles of the White Horse, appropriated Saville Lumley’s Parliamentary Recruiting Committee poster: ‘What did you do in the Great War?’ It appeared by the girl’s manner that this was a witticism rather than a question. ‘I was in Mesopotamia.’ ‘Oh, you were in that picnic, were you?’ ‘Yes – one of the boys flogged across Asia Minor.’ ‘Really! What an extraordinary thing to say!’39 36 37 38 39

Todman, Great War, 67. Jane G. V. McGaughey, ‘The Language of Sacrifice: Masculinities in Northern Ireland and the Consequences of the Great War’, Patterns of Prejudice, 46, 3–4 (2012), 299–317. Major C. S. Jarvis, Through Crusader Lands (London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, 1939), 65. Blackledge, Legion of Marching Madmen.

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The co-authors of the history of the 2nd Essex Battery, RFA, titled Romford to Beirut: Via France, Egypt and Jericho, rejected any suggestion that soldiers in Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine had it easier than their comrades on the Western Front. ‘There was certainly cause for righteous indignation among the troops in Palestine and Egypt’, they wrote, when they continually learned from the old country that everyone regarded this hazy venture as a glorious picnic. War and hardships? Not on your life. They’re romping in the sylvan glades of the Holy Land, or lazily languishing on the line of communications somewhere east of the Canal. There was a war on, and at times as fierce in intensity as France could show.40

Other soldiers were compelled to point out that there ‘was domesticity even in the life of soldiers on a campaign’. ‘Apollo is not forever bending his bow’, wrote Rowlands Coldicott in London Men in Palestine and How They Marched to Jerusalem, and ‘yet, when pens and cameras and returned warriors have done their best, it is difficult, so fearful are the quick sympathies of those who perforce remain behind, to convince them that we do not use cold steel daily, or kill men as a matter of course every forenoon before we have our dinner’.41 Nonetheless, Coldicott promised ‘young and old a right good piece of battling at the end of the story’.42 Others were convinced that the root of the problem was terminology. ‘How many people there are’, wrote C. W. Hughes in the ‘The Forgotten Army’, ‘who form their ideas of a thing by the name that is given to it. The “Salonika Campaign”, the “Salonika Army”, were unfortunate titles. They were too local, even the Macedonian Campaign was misleading’, he explained. ‘It would have been far more satisfactory and also more accurate to call it “The Balkan Campaign” and the “Balkan Army” for its activities were not confined to a single town or a single country.’43 Although soldiers on the Western Front had fought more than they had, those outside the Western Front had campaigned. Bluett described the army’s time in Sinai as ‘days of unremitting toil. We turned our attention to road-making and with bowed backs and blistered hands shoveled [sic] up half the desert and put it down somewhere else; the other half we put into sand pits and made gun pits of them.’ (Figure 5.1)44 ‘It should be understood that Mesopotamia is largely a flat expanse of sanded waste, with many miles of barrenness between the towns and the village and the occasional date palm groves’, wrote Blackledge, ‘and at 40 41 42 43 44

Original emphasis. Axe and Blackwell, Romford to Beirut, 100. Rowlands Coldicott, London Men in Palestine and How They Marched to Jerusalem (London: Edward Arnold, 1919), 89. Coldicott, London Men in Palestine, 97. Hughes, unpublished memoir, IWM Documents.4432. Bluett, With Our Army, 22.

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Figure 5.1 ‘What He Did in the Great War’, April 1917, Chronicles of the White Horse. © British Library Board

that time the country was entirely without railways, the only means of transport being the camel and the donkey’. Exacerbating the problem was the poor conduct of the Indian Government, which ‘seemed unaware of the fact that an-ever-advancing army required an increasing body of transport to bring up rations, equipment and munitions. We just muddled on from day to day, not knowing how far our successful engagements would carry us. We went on without lines of communication. We went on to our doom.’45 ‘Considering that this Expeditionary Force of barely one division of troops had fought its way for some 240 miles over extremely difficult country’, F. S. Hudson, a bombardier with the 86th (Heavy) Battery, lectured, ‘maintaining lines of communication, providing garrisons for occupied towns and villages, considerably reduced in numbers by tropical sickness apart from the many casualties inflicted upon us by the Turks, we wonder if the armchair critics of General Townshend’s tactics really did realise the whole state of affairs, and had full and fair appreciation of the situation’.46 Milne’s preface to Mann’s Salonika Front argued that the ‘campaign communications were the main difficulty, but like the work of the Romans of old, the roads of the British Army in Macedonia will long remain the best memorial of its presence’.47 E. P. Stebbing, a transport officer stationed at the Field Hospital at Lake Ostrovo, wrote an entire chapter, ‘Some Description of the Country in which the Western Armies Were to Operate’, on the difficulties of campaigning in Macedonia, from miles of hillsides covered in ‘large boulders 45 46 47

Blackledge, Legion of Marching Madness, 10. Original underline. Hudson, unpublished memoir, c.1925, LC LIDDLE/WWI/ MES/049. Mann, Salonika Front, viii.

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or rocky masses, varied by lengths of naked projecting rock masses of all sizes and sharpnesses’, to the poor roads on which ‘no car had ever been seen’.48 The title of Harold Lake’s memoir, Campaigning in the Balkans, was indicative of its content. Large parts of Lake’s memoir described the difficulties facing British and Dominion soldiers in Macedonia, especially compared to those who had fought in France and Flanders. Of having to traverse the Seres Road, Lake wrote, all that they are feeling is so plainly written on their faces. They are so far away from home and all the beloved, accustomed things. Enthusiasm and love of adventure might have carried them triumphantly through some wild brief rush in France, but in this there is no adventure. Here is no glory, no swift conflict and immediate service. This is nothing but dull, unending toil, with all the pains of thirst and weariness in a strange and friendless land.49

Of the poor roads near the Struma River, Lake continued, ‘In Sir Douglas Haig’s report on the Somme offensive he told how hundreds of miles of railway had to be laid down in preparation for that great move. We have only fifty miles of a disastrous road and no railways at all.’ Unpublished memoirs, such as C. W. Hughes’ account of his time with the Wiltshire Regiment in Macedonia, made the same argument. ‘The campaign in the Balkans had many unique features’, wrote Hughes, ‘consider the difficulties to be overcome in this Country compared with France’. France had ‘many excellent roads and many railways’, he explained, while in Macedonia there were only three major roads and three railways; the lines of communication in Macedonia ‘served a front of 250 miles, nearly the total length of the line in France from Switzerland to the Sea’; the region’s rugged terrain, especially the ridges between Lake Doiran and Vardar made ‘these main routes almost impassable for a modern army’; Greece lacked the supplies necessary to support the Allies’ war effort; and Macedonia, which had ‘suffered terribly from recent wars and villages were nothing but heaps of stone’, lacked ‘any accommodation for troops such as was to be found in the villages of France’. ‘I have no wish to make excuses’, Hughes ended, ‘but if a fair understanding of the campaign is to be gained these difficulties must be understood’.50 Campaigning seemed to be the one thing that all men who had fought outside the Western Front shared in common. ‘There is no doubt that it was in fronts like Mespot, Salonica, and Palestine’, wrote Second 48 49 50

E. P. Stebbing, At the Serbian Front in Macedonia (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1917), 61. Lake, Campaigning in the Balkans, 30. Hughes, unpublished memoir, IWM Documents.4432.

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Lieutenant R. Skilbeck Smith, who had fought in Macedonia with the 1st Battalion, Leinster Regiment, that one got one’s fill in the matter of campaigning. Whether there was fighting or not, there was always campaigning, and that of a very strenuous nature, too. One was continually on the move, and one had not the benefit of good billets or huts. Whether behind or in the line one’s home was one’s bivvy, a delightful thing for a children’s picnic, but at times wretchedly at the mercy of the weather. Nor were opportunities of real change and relaxation of very frequent occurrence. At the best you got an occasional amateur pantomime. So that men were at times liable to lapse into a mood of ennui.51

Campaigning also meant being ravaged by tropical diseases, none more so than malaria. ‘It is not’, Lake pointed out, ‘our fault or our choice that we had so little actual fighting, and the only sort of picnic which our experiences could be said to resemble would be one in which the picnic basket had been left behind and half of the party were more or less ill all the time’.52 Lake insisted that he was not griping to garner sympathy, since ‘Hundreds and thousands of our men have endured as much and more in that country, and for that reason only the thing is mentioned’. Their ‘suffering’ and ‘misery’, he continued, must be set down to the account of the Salonika force as surely as the agony of the wounded is credited to the account of our troops in France. We were bitten by mosquitoes instead of being shattered by bullets, but the result was not different in the end, and one can do no more than go on suffering up to that point where Nature sends the saving gift of unconsciousness; there is that limit fixed to all that a man can endure, and it has been reached not once but very many times by those who have played their part in the war by marching up and down and across Macedonia. And there are graves in that remote, inhospitable land.53

In Macedonia, there were ‘wide spaces’ of land ‘where every battalion which occupies the ground is certain to be decimated. You could not be more positively sure of reducing its strength if you were to put it in the most perilous part of the line in one of the big offensives in France.’ Every battalion, whether in the Struma Valley, near the Galliko River, the Vardar, or Lake Langaza, he argued, knew ‘quite well that it will be losing men day after day, week after week while it stayed there’.54 Ex-servicemen understood, however, that campaigning was not fighting and that neither military labour nor being worn down by disease were the same as suffering in the trenches of France and Flanders. Gerald 51 52 53 54

Smith, Subaltern in Macedonia and Judaea, 85. Lake, Campaigning in the Balkans, 129. Lake, Campaigning in the Balkans, 130–1. Lake, Campaigning in the Balkans, 153–4.

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B. Hurst’s With Manchesters in the East (1918) prophesied that the backbreaking work of the Manchester Regiment in Sinai, of erecting desert outposts to fortify the peninsula, would never measure up to the Western Front. ‘It is clear that this particular phase of soldiering has in itself no place in the annals of the Great War’, he wrote. ‘Ashton is already nothing but a desert site. The tide of victorious warfare has left it high and dry. It was always high and dry.’55 Expanding the railway from Kantara into Sinai was ‘not such a simple affair as it sounds because the sand is continually blowing on to the line and covering it up’, according to E. V. Godrich of the Worcestershire Yeomanry in Mountains of Moab (1925). The railway was ‘a wonderful piece of work’ and had not, he argued, ‘received the notice it deserves in the “Home Press”’.56 The steady build-up of a transport system capable of delivering the tools and bodies of war from Egypt to Sinai to Palestine ‘was a colossal task’, wrote Bluett, ‘the magnitude of which was never even imagined by the people at home’.57 People at home, he continued, who from time to time, asked querulously, ‘What are we doing in Egypt’ should have seen Kantara in 1915, and then again towards the end of 1916. Failing that I would ask them, and also those kindly but myopic souls who said: ‘What a picnic you are having in Egypt!’ to journey a while with us through Kantara and across the desert of Northern Sinai. For the former there will be a convincing answer to their query; the latter will have an opportunity of revising their notions as to what really constitutes a picnic.58

Although there was ‘none of the pomp and circumstance of war about their work’, he admitted, ‘no great concentration of men and horses and guns, no barrage nor heavy gunfire for days in preparation for an attack, no aircraft’, alluding to the industrialised warfare on the Western Front, there was ‘nothing but a few thousand men in their shirt sleeves; and it was out of that sweat and blood that the way was made clear for them that followed’.59 The ‘nation should know what manner of task that is which its soldiers were performing’, wrote Lake of the army’s work on the Seres Road, ‘lest there be a tendency to judge without knowledge and to condemn without the evidence for the defence’.60 Over a decade after the war had ended, Smith was still agitated when recalling the suggestion that the soldiers in Macedonia had not done their bit, even though ‘the actual campaigning was, as the soldiers say, “hard graft”; sometimes strenuous’. 55 56 57 59

Gerald B. Hurst, With Manchesters in the East (Manchester: At the University Press, 1918), 90. E. V. Godrich, Mountains of Moab: The Diary of a Yeoman 1908–1919: Including Gallipoli and Palestine during the Great War (NP, 2011 [c.1930]), 81. Bluett, With Our Army, 44. 58 Bluett, With Our Army, 45. Bluett, With Our Army, 66–7. 60 Lake, Campaigning in the Balkans, 36–8.

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‘There was nothing that annoyed the soldier on service more’, he ended, ‘than the impression that those at home considered him to be on a “cushy” front, or garrisoning the town and having a good time generally’.61 Lake took particular issue with the plight of the diseased, who seemed invisible, he bemoaned, to the public. ‘There is a great tendency’, he wrote, to regard the wounded man as being on a far higher plane than the man who merely contracted sickness in the service of his country. The wounded man is given gold stripes to wear. If he is an officer he is presented with a large sum of money as a wound gratuity – but there is nothing for the man who has merely fallen ill. He may be one of those who came away from Gallipoli with their constitutions shattered beyond hope of repair by dysentery; he may be tortured and twisted and crippled with rheumatism from the trenches in France; he may be so poisoned by malaria in Mesopotamia or Macedonia, that the trouble will remain with him while life lasts, but in any event there is nothing for him. He has no gold stripes or gratuities, nor is it likely that his pension will reflect what he endured. In hospitals, in convalescent camps, and even at home in England, he is given to understand that he is a bit of a failure – a ‘wash-out’ in the slang of the day – and not to be compared with some lucky youngster who has had a finger shot off or a tibia fractured.62

Lake’s main point was unmistakable. To the public, machine-gun fire and artillery shrapnel were obvious symbols of the modern, industrialised, and technological war that had been waged on the Western Front, not the vector-borne illnesses and bacterial water of campaigning in the Middle East or Macedonia. Palestine: A Crusade? During the war, The Gnome, the newspaper of the Middle East Brigade, Royal Flying Corps, tried to fathom why some soldiers were hung up on the region’s past. What purpose, the soldier author of ‘Gaza and the Crusades’ asked, did the past serve in the present? ‘The gift of historical imagination’, he argued, ‘is one of the rarest and most delicate ever vouch-safed to mortals, for it gives one the power to enter into the thoughts and feelings of men of other ages and of other countries’. Thinking of Gaza and wondering why so many armies, including the crusaders, had fought over the city, he concluded that ‘doubtless it may be that there is some purpose in all this turmoil of history’.63 Past history

61 62

Smith, Subaltern in Macedonia and Judaea, 86. Lake, Campaigning in the Balkans, 131–2. 63 The Gnome, 1 January 1917, 12.

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had lent meaning to the present. Gaza mattered because it had always mattered, from the crusades of the Middle Ages to the present war. But that soldier writing in the Gnome was unusually thoughtful. As we saw in Chapter 3, few soldiers in Palestine, with the exception of some Salvationists, romantics, and the odd author in a soldier newspaper, considered the campaign in Palestine as either part of the fulfilment of Zionism or a holy war between Islam and Christianity. After the war, however, references to the crusades were everywhere. Memoirs often used crusade in the title, including The Modern Crusaders, The Romance of the Last Crusade, Through Crusader Lands, Temporary Crusaders, Khaki Crusaders, and Crusader’s Coast. What had changed? John More, formerly of the 1/6th Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers, whose own memoir was titled With Allenby’s Crusaders, offered an explanation. Time and hindsight, he argued, had allowed ex-servicemen to make comparisons they never would have made during the war. ‘It was hard to realise at the time’, More closed his memoir, ‘that many outlandish places we passed through or lived in were so steeped in Biblical or historical interests. There was no time to think about such things’, he explained, ‘and it is only by reading the history of Palestine that one comes to grasp that one has been among the scenes of great conflicts, tragedies and events with which the Holy Land has ever been associated’.64 Soldiers during the war were well aware that they were in historic lands, as we saw in Chapter 2. But thinking of themselves as modern-day crusaders or twentieth-century knights? For most, More wrote, that had to wait. Soldiers needed time to reflect. More’s reasoning is backed up by the unpublished memoir of L. J. Matthews, formerly of the 5th Siege Company, Royal Monmouth Royal Engineers. ‘While we were stationary’, he wrote of his time in Palestine, we did talk at times about the nations which had crossed these desert lands in the centuries gone by. We thought and talked about the Israelites who, under Moses had wandered for 40 years in the Sinai Desert; we talked too of the Crusades in the Early Middle Ages; not that we felt much like Crusaders – all we wanted to do was to get on with the job – knock Johnny for six – if we could and then return home to England and back to peace-time activity.65

With the passage of time, the benefit of hindsight, and a chance to delve into the region’s past, many ex-servicemen turned to the crusades. It was an obvious choice. Medievalism had taken society by storm in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chivalry, honour, and knightly conduct were once again revered, and not only by the upper echelon of 64 65

More, With Allenby’s Crusaders, 224–5. Papers of L. J. Matthews, unpublished memoir, IWM Documents.3685.

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society, as all classes reacted to the dual strains of industrialisation and urbanisation by looking backwards.66 Families took an interest in finding crusading ancestors and fitting them into their family tree.67 Children’s literature and fiction were set during the crusades.68 Artists and composers looked to them for inspiration.69 If not out of some misguided sense of religious zealotry, then why did average, working-class British and Dominion ex-servicemen, some of whom, to be fair, were middle class and well educated (perhaps a disproportionately high number in the EEF, which was composed mainly of Territorials), refer to their wartime experience in the context of the crusades? There are three answers, some of which overlapped in exservicemen’s memoirs. The first uses an alternate understanding of the crusades that did not rely upon its medieval and inherently religious connotation. The meaning of the crusades changed considerably in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reflecting new attitudes towards nationalism, imperialism, and European history. While ‘pseudocrusading language’, according to the late crusades historian Jonathan Riley-Smith, had taken hold in Britain, France, and Germany, it had ‘no correspondence to the old reality, but borrowed its rhetoric and imagery to describe ventures – particularly imperialist ones – that had nothing at all to do with the Crusades’.70 In France, under the Bourbon Restoration, the July Monarchy, and after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871, the crusades were reimagined as a part of French national history and as an event that had united Europe. As it related to France’s mission civilisatrice, its civilising mission, the crusades were linked to the occupation of North Africa and used to defend French influence in Ottoman Syria and Mount Lebanon.71 The crusades also became ‘embedded in the concept of German imperialism’.72 In Britain, the crusades were ‘de-Catholicized’, as Adam Knobler has argued, and made a part of Christian militarism or muscular Christianity. Crusading heroes such as Richard the Lionhearted epitomised model for nineteenth-century Englishness. As in France and Germany, crusading and imperialism 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

Marc Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). Elizabeth Siberry, The New Crusaders: Images of the Crusades in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 39–63. Horswell, Rise and Fall of British Crusader Medievalism, 39–63. Siberry, New Crusaders, 161–87. Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 54. Riley-Smith, Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, 52–61. Guhe, ‘Crusade Narratives’, 376.

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became almost interchangeable. Soldiers in the Crimean War and the First and Second Anglo-Sikh Wars, defenders against the Indian Mutiny, and imperial heroes such as Sir Henry Havelock and General Charles Gordon were all written about in pseudocrusading language.73 Protestant Christian missions, such as the Christian Missionary Society, envisioned their proselytising work as akin to that of the crusaders.74 In short, crusading in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was almost always divorced from the reality of the medieval crusades. More often, it elided with imperialism, so that crusading and the imperial project became one and the same. It was also reworked in nineteenthcentury histories and children’s textbooks to read as the arrival of western governance and institutions in the Middle East and the defence of political or moral right and justice against tyranny. ‘Will our campaign be passed down to history as “The Last Crusade”?’, asked Major Henry Osmond Lock, formerly of the Dorsetshire Regiment. ‘Presumably not. Throughout the campaign there was little or no religious animosity except that the Moslem Turk extended no quarter to the Hindoo. To speak of this as a campaign of The Cross against The Crescent is untrue’, he concluded.75 Unsurprisingly, then, the capture of Jerusalem was almost exclusively remembered as a liberation. Coldicott of the 60th (London) Division wrote: ‘That Jerusalem was to be visited by us in the guise of liberators was an idea now handed freely about from man to man.’76 To Captain John More, ‘Jerusalem was delivered out of the hands of the terrible Turk after four centuries of misrule’.77 The unpublished memoir of J. C. F. Hankinson of the London Scottish recalled that he and his comrades had ‘helped to free Jerusalem from Turkish occupation’.78 Many soldiers were convinced that Ottoman rule had retarded the economic development of Palestine, mirroring the wartime anti-Ottoman propaganda of Wellington House. Captain Alban Bacon of the Hampshire Regiment in The Wanderings of a Territorial Warrior looked back to the disparity between the Rothschild colonies of Akir and Katrah and nearby Arab villages as proof of Ottoman oppression. With the helpful hand of European finance and direction, Akir and Katrah were model colonies filled with ‘prosperous-looking houses and moderately well-clad inhabitants’. In comparison, Arab villages ‘seemed sparse and apathetic’. ‘Turkish rule’, Bacon concluded in his post-war 73 74 75 76 78

Knobler, ‘Holy Wars’, 310, 312–14. Horswell, Rise and Fall of British Crusader Medievalism, 89–109. Major H. O. Lock, With the British Army in the Holy Land (London: Robert Scott, 1919), 145. Coldicott, London Men in Palestine, 76. 77 More, With Allenby’s Crusaders, 134. Papers of J. C. F. Hankinson, typescript memoir, IWM Documents.3081.

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memoir, ‘evidently acted like a blight. Some of the country had been cultivated, but there were scant signs of enterprise.’79 In Major A. H. Wilkie’s Official War History of the Wellington Mounted Rifles Regiment, it was ‘Turkish oppression and maladministration’ that had ‘been responsible for the degeneration of the once fertile Valley’, referring to Jericho and the area around the Jordan River. The ‘Apple of Sodom’ had replaced ‘the grapes and figs which once grew in profusion there’.80 Just as Prussian militarism had trapped helpless Belgians and French under the boots of the German Army, ex-servicemen pointed to a number of peoples who had been in desperate need of deliverance from the Ottoman Turks. In addition to freeing the Holy Land ‘from the ambitions of a modern Herod’, Bluett of the Camel Transport Corps suggested that Britain’s victories over the Ottomans had kept Egypt politically free and independent. His fantasy of Egyptian sovereignty completely ignored the fact that Egypt had been under British military occupation since 1882. Nonetheless, he was certain that the Ottomans had designs on Egypt and would turn it into an economic backwater like Palestine. In a way, then, Bluett’s understanding of the campaign in Egypt and Palestine was like a preventive war of self-defence.81 Donald Maxwell’s chance meeting with an Armenian, possibly a political exile, on a train from Taranto to Egypt convinced him that to defeat the Ottomans was to free the Armenians. Lodged together in the same carriage, the Armenian traveller lectured Maxwell on Armenia’s Christian past, its role in supporting medieval European crusaders, and convinced him that the Ottoman Empire had brought nothing to civilisation except destruction. ‘For this war is a Crusade of Crusades’, Maxwell recalled the Armenian shouting, ‘and it has overthrown the unspeakable Turk and liberated a subject people’. Maxwell seemingly agreed and provided in his memoir a lengthy catalogue of Ottoman misdeeds such as its expansion into Europe and the enslavement of Slavs along the Black Sea.82 However important was the freeing of the Arabs, and few soldiers, if any, doubted that the Ottomans had devastated Palestine, others felt that the liberation of the Jews had been the war’s crowning achievement. A. O. W. Kindall, formerly of the Machine Gun Corps, connected Jerusalem’s capture to the Maccabees. ‘After four centuries of conquest, the Turk was ridding the land of his presence in the bitterness of defeat’, he wrote. ‘It was fitting’, Kindall continued, ‘that the flight of the Turks 79

80 82

Captain Alban F. L. Bacon, The Wanderings of a Territorial Warrior. A Territorial Officer’s Narrative of Service (and Sport) in Three Continents (London: H. F. G. Witherby, 1922), 90–1. Wilkie, Official War History, 186. 81 Bluett, With Our Army, 64, 72. Donald Maxwell, The Last Crusade (London: John Lane, 1920), 9–10.

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should have coincided with the national festival of Hanukah’ and the ‘re-capture of the Temple from the heathen Seleucids’.83 Edwin C. Blackwell and Edwin C. Axe of the 2nd Battalion, Essex Battery, also wrote that it was no coincidence that the capture of Jerusalem occurred on the same date that Judas Maccabaeus had liberated the Holy Temple ‘from the heathen Seleucids’ in 165 BCE. Much to the satisfaction of Palestine’s Jews, wrote the pair, in nearly identical language as Kindall, ‘After four centuries of conquest the Turk was ridding the land of his presence in the bitterness of defeat’.84 In Lieutenant Colonel B. H. Waters-Taylor’s post-war memoir The Eighth Crusade, published under the pseudonym ‘British Staff Officer’, he linked the war in Palestine with the end of Ottoman Turkish misrule, as so many others had done, but charged that Britain had been duped by Zionist Jews. Serving under Allenby’s staff during the war, Waters-Taylor was chief of staff, Occupied Enemy Territory Administration, from 1919 to 1920. Staunchly pro-Arab and anti-Zionist, he admonished Britain for betraying the Arabs and gave voice to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, including his belief that Whitehall had been infiltrated by disloyal Jews and half-Jews. Of the war in Palestine, he wrote, Britain had failed as the previous seven crusades had done. The ten years following the war had convinced him that ‘whereas these [the medieval crusades] failed because their campaigns were abortive, they themselves being defeated on the field of battle, Britain had to forego the fruits of victory because a craven and corrupt Government had mortgaged them to its paymasters, the Jews. Consequently’, he ended, ‘Allenby’s troops fought to their own detriment, for an alien oligarchy to whom they had been sold, and at whose behest and for whose material advantage Britain had surrendered the heritage of Empire’.85 Even though Waters-Taylor was retrospectively consumed with Zionist plots undermining Britain’s war effort, he was the exception and not the rule. Far more ex-servicemen looked back fondly on the campaign as one of liberation and far more were sure that they had done the right thing. With the Ottoman Turks evicted from Palestine, liberal imperialism, they wrote, was free to reshape Palestinian politics, economics, and society in Britain’s image. Colonel Philip Hugh Dalbiac’s History of the 60th Division insisted that the capture of Palestine had ‘restored the blessing of civilisation and good government to a country that for upwards of four hundred years had had to submit to the abominations of Turkish misrule’.86 With 83 85 86

Kindall, Through Palestine, 62. 84 Blackwell and Axe, Romford to Beirut, 123–4. British Staff Officer, The Eighth Crusade: Uncensored Disclosures of a British Staff Officer (Berlin: Internationaler Verlag, 1939), 1. Colonel P. H. Dalbiac, History of the 60th Division (2/2nd London Division) (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1927), 234.

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Britain as the international guardian of a ‘New Jerusalem’, it was hoped that the laws and social mores of its liberal empire would reform the city. Frank Fox’s The History of the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars Yeomanry anticipated that British Jerusalem would be a city of open worship – which, probably unbeknownst to him, it had been under Ottoman rule – under the benign sovereignty of the British Empire: The British people have no place in their minds for religious intolerance. More perhaps than any other people of the world they have a sincere respect for whatever form the aspiration towards God takes in the human heart. In their world-wide Empire, which has more non-Christian than Christian inhabitants, there is the fullest religious liberty. To be not only just but reverent towards the religious views of Moslems, Buddhists, Jews, Pagans, is part of their innate character as well as of their policy. Regarding Jerusalem, they recognise that it was, and is, a Holy City for Moslems and Jews as well as for Christians.87

Fox’s point was clear: people of all faiths would be welcome in the ‘New Jerusalem’, which would be governed with the same tolerance and spirit of religious freedom as the rest of the British Empire. Bluett considered Allenby’s promise of religious freedom made during his speech in Jerusalem on 11 December 1917 ‘a triumph for British diplomacy and love of freedom’.88 ‘Within three weeks of the signing of the Armistice’, wrote R. M. P. Preston, formerly of the Desert Mounted Corps, ‘unarmed pedestrians travelled alone and unafraid through all the land. On every road were to be seen throngs of refugees returning to their ravished homes.’ It was, in his words, a ‘Pax Britannica’.89 Nowhere was the civilising drive greater than in Vivian Gilbert’s memoir The Romance of the Last Crusade. Although Gilbert was occasionally enchanted by the romance of fighting where the medieval crusaders had fought, he never revealed any sort of religious hostility towards Islam nor the belief that Palestine belonged to Christendom. In fact, Gilbert’s first reference to crusading comes early in his memoir and in relation to the war on the Western Front, not Palestine. ‘I wanted to believe that we were all knights dedicating our lives to a great cause’, he wrote of his decision to enlist, ‘training ourselves to aid France, to free Belgium, to crush Prussianism, and make the world a better world place to live in. What did it matter if we wore drab khaki instead of suits of glittering armour?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘The spirit of the Crusaders was in all these men of mine who worked so cheerfully to prepare for the great evidence.’90 87 88 90

Frank Fox, The History of the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars Yeomanry, 1898–1922: The Great Cavalry Campaign in Palestine (London: Philip Allan, 1923), 188–9. Bluett, With Our Army, 221. 89 Preston, Desert Mounted Corps, 296. Gilbert, Romance of the Last Crusade, 37.

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Still, it was the chance to liberate Palestine and return it to its past glory that dominated his writing. Gilbert dedicated his memoir ‘to the Mothers of all the boys who fought for the freedom of the Holy Land’.91 Although he had fought in both France and Macedonia in addition to Palestine, Gilbert thought that the former two had produced nothing more than strategic deadlock and appalling casualties. ‘I had the same feeling’, he wrote, ‘about Macedonia that I had with regard to France; it was all so futile, so little worth while. Men were dying by the thousands but it never seemed to lead anywhere.’92 Modern combat and the stalemate of trench warfare had turned Gilbert and his comrades into ‘an army of “wearers down” and “economic exhausters!”’93 Coming long before the tide of disillusioned war books, Gilbert’s disenchanted view of the fighting in France and Macedonia was made easier by the fact that he returned to neither front following his transfer to Palestine. He missed both the Hundred Days Offensive that ended with the collapse of Germany and the Allied breakthrough in Macedonia that forced the surrender of Bulgaria. And in trying to answer the question of what his soldiering had done for the war effort and, more broadly, the world at large, Gilbert could only find proof of a just, righteous war in Palestine. Before he turned to the edifying effects of British governance, he catalogued at length the horrors of ‘Turkish misrule and oppression’. Whatever qualities the Ottoman effendi possessed, Gilbert argued, and there were many – ‘charming manners’, ‘highly educated and most hospitable’, ‘overbearing, suave, extortionate and conscienceless’ – the backwardness of Palestine was undeniable proof that Ottoman rule had stifled civilisation. Overtaxation, deforestation, and neglect of social works had made twentieth-century Ottoman Palestine no better, if not worse, than first-century Roman Palestine. At least under Roman rule, wrote Gilbert, aqueducts carried fresh water right into Jerusalem. Under Ottoman administration the inhabitants of Palestine had no other choice but to ‘catch the rain that fell during the winter months on the flat roofs of their houses and store it in tanks in the cellars, where it became foul and polluted as the summer advanced’.94 Gilbert concluded his memoir with a passage detailing what he had seen from atop the Umayyad White Mosque in Ramla in October 1920: In the fields below me they were gathering in the harvest, Christians, Jews, Moslems, Syrians, Bedoueen, Arabs – all gathering in the golden grain . . . In the 91 92 93 94

Gilbert, Romance of the Last Crusade, 1. Gilbert, Romance of the Last Crusade, 63. Gilbert, Romance of the Last Crusade, 66. Gilbert, Romance of the Last Crusade, 229.

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distance I could hear a military band at divisional headquarters playing the latest popular dance tune; nearer an Arab boy was playing on his reed flute as he drove his goats to water. We had finished our crusade, peace and freedom were in the Holy Land for the first time in five hundred years – and it all seemed worth while.95

High above Ramla, Gilbert had watched as the city’s multi-ethnic and multi-confessional populace tilled the field together, a sure sign of the religious freedom guaranteed by the British Empire; the faint sound of a military band was a reminder of the stabilising force that was the British Army, and the Arab boy tending his flock signalled a return to individual economy and freedom of movement. For Gilbert, it was the pacifying hand of the British Army, a Pax Britannica of sorts (like R. M. P. Preston), that had made Palestine’s return to glory under liberal imperial rule a real possibility. At least for Robert H. Goodsall, the chance to return to Palestine seven years after the war ended and to see how Palestine had improved under British mandate rule was confirmation that what he and other men had done was worthwhile. ‘At times, perhaps, we are inclined to ask “was it worth while?”’, he ruminated in the final chapter of his memoir. ‘And before the question is formed, in our minds, we know the answer to be “yes,” otherwise the gallant sacrifice of so many of the Sons of our Empire would have been in vain.’ Of his return to Palestine, he wrote, This year [1925] I have seen a little of the good which follows as war’s aftermath in the great work of reconstruction which is going on in Palestine. Future decreed that I should visit the Holy Land once more. To thus renew acquaintanceship, under happier and more peaceful circumstances, with many well-remembered spots, and to note the great development which has taken place, as a result of British influence during the last seven years, was wonderfully interesting. I make no excuse, therefore, in adding this chapter as an epilogue to my story of the Story of the Last Crusade.96

For others, referring to the crusades and other moments in military history was done to lend continuity, order, and purpose to their memoirs. Ex-servicemen had made their mark on world history, so to speak, as the crusaders of medieval England had done. The sociologist James Olney has proposed the critical significance of metaphor in the assembly of meaningful patterns, writing, ‘They are something known and of our making, or at least our choosing, that we put to stand for, and so to help us understand, something unknown and not of our making’.97 By relating 95 97

Gilbert, Romance of the Last Crusade, 235. 96 Goodsall, Palestine Memories, 193. James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 30.

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the past to the present, autobiographers not only ‘organize the self into a new and richer entity’ but also, according to Regina Gagnier, enhance the author’s status as a historical agent.98 Thus, to soldier memoirists, El Arish became the place ‘where Baldwin the Crusader, King of Jerusalem’, had died in 1185 CE and where ‘Napoleon’s flag once floated’.99 Arsuf was where ‘one of our own kings, Richard the Lionhearted, fought Saladin’, and Acre where ‘Napoleon suffered the first reverse of his meteoric military career’.100 Beth-Horon was where ‘our own Richard Coeur de Lion on his last crusade’ had passed.101 It was in the footsteps of the ancients that British and Dominion soldiers had fought. The march along the Mediterranean coastline towards Gaza was done on ‘one of the oldest routes in history, the highway between Egypt and Syria, trodden through the ages by “Egyptian and Syrian Kings, by Greek and Roman conquerors, by Saracens and Crusaders, and lastly by Napoleon from Egypt and back again”’.102 Palestine had seen ‘some of the fiercest battles of the world’ and was where ‘Thotmes, Rameses, Sennacherib, Cambyses, Alexander, Pompey, Titus, Saladin, Napoleon and many another led his armies where Allenby led us!’103 For H. O. Lock, formerly of the Dorsetshire Regiment, Palestine ‘was the cock-pit of the known world’ long before ‘Belgium became the cockpit of Europe’ and where ‘the great wars of Egyptians and Assyrians, Israelites and Canaanites, Greeks and Romans, Saracens and Crusaders’ had been fought.104 ‘Verily, history repeats itself!’, wrote the co-authors of a brigade of the RFA, likening their advance to that of Egypt’s pharaohs.105 ‘Napoleon’s task was not unlike General Murray’s’, wrote another soldier. ‘His dream was to reach Gaza, and thence to march to Constantinople by way of Damascus and Allepo [sic].’106 Lastly, he pointed out, ‘our own troops have passed’.107 Lieutenant Colonel E. D. M. H. Cooke of the RFA, an Etonian who had also fought in France, reminded his readers in With the Guns East and West (1923) that the liberating march of the EEF was the latest triumph of an Anglo-Saxon civilisation that had been on an endless moral quest since the Middle Ages. Cooke reworked the medieval 98 99 100 101 102 103 105 106 107

Olney, Metaphors of Self, 32; Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of SelfRepresentation in Britain 1832–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 41–2. Wilkie, Official War History, 111; Major J. H. Luxford, With the Machine Gunners in France and Palestine (Auckland: Whitcombe and Tombs Limited, 1923), 191. Captain F. A. M. Webster, The History of the Fifth Battalion the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment (T.A.) (London: Frederick Warne, 1930), 143. Bluett, With Our Army, 213. Blaser, Kilts Across the Jordan, 97. Blaser does not reveal the source of his quotation. Gilbert, Romance of the Last Crusade, 239. 104 Lock, With the British Army, 1. Blackwell and Axe, Romford to Beirut, 55. Luxford, With the Machine Gunners, 191–92. Kent Hughes, Modern Crusaders, 10.

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crusades into a defence of liberty and justice and slotted the EEF’s campaign into a history of British righteousness, closely connected to the modern people’s knightly ancestors. ‘It seems no part of the Recorder’s duties’, he wrote, ‘to remind us occasionally that England’s renown all the world over for fair play, for chivalry, indeed for her finer points, is the result of traditions and customs handed down to us for generations’. The fair name we still hold to-day is chiefly due to Britain’s loyal subjects, sailors, soldiers and civilians doing their bit unheard of, many of them living their lives in the far outposts of empire, spreading their influence and justice amongst their fellow-subjects of many races, for ever [sic] conscious of our great heritage. Originated early in our history with the solid foundations and backbone of Great Britain, i.e. the country-bred squires . . . It was these men, not only in their example of loyalty to king and country, but also in their fighting qualities, who rode as Crusaders to the Holy Land under Richard Coeur de Lion; lord and retainers, who, master and man, from Nottingham and Warwick, Dorset and Gloucester, and other counties, again in this War fought side by side against the enemies of England.

Like nineteenth-century families who looked for crusading ancestors in their line, Cooke told the reader that ‘there were instances in Palestine, in that brisk affair at Huj, of squires and their yeomen, both descendants of those former Crusaders, riding knee to knee for those guns’.108 Not only had British and Dominion soldiers written the most recent chapter of the history of warfare and the empire in the Holy Land, they had also succeeded where the ancients and other greats had failed. The regimental history of the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars Yeomanry boasted that the army had achieved ‘that full measure of success which had been denied to Napoleon and to the armies of the Crusades. Their share in that achievement makes their fame secure for ever [sic].’109 The history of the 5th Battalion, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment, bragged that the army had moved quickly up the coastline towards Jerusalem, sparing little time and avoiding the ‘fate of the Assyrian, Roman and Crusader forces’.110 And they had done so with more obstacles in their way. Neither the crusaders nor Napoleon, who had both sieged and captured Gaza, wrote Adams, had to deal with the logistics or bureaucracy of twentieth-century warfare. ‘Things were altogether less 108 109 110

Original emphasis. Arnewood, With the Guns East and West (Plymouth: The Mayflower Press, 1923), 66. Frank Fox, The History of the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars Yeomanry 1898–1922: The Great Cavalry Campaign in Palestine (London: Philip Allan, 1923), XV. Captain F. A. M. Webster, The History of the Fifth Battalion, the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment (London: Frederick Warne, 1930), 210.

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complicated then’, he wrote, ‘one simply spent the morning working up to a suitable pitch of fanaticism or intoxication, foregathered round the walls after a hashish lunch and waited for the holy man to fire the Verey arrow’. The offensive ‘was not allowed to cool under the influence of operation orders and preliminary reconnaissance, but glowed with the promise of well-earned loot and pleasurable atrocities’.111 So far we have established that crusading was a byword for the liberation of Palestine from Ottoman misrule and the extension of liberal imperialism, and that connecting their war to the past, both to the crusades and to other periods in military history, was one way exservicemen showed that they had made a mark on world history. A third and final answer is that crusading to liberate Palestine also allowed exservicemen to compete with the liberation of Belgium. Like soldiers on the Western Front, wrote Wilkie, New Zealanders had fought and died in Palestine for ‘freedom and humanity’.112 Some even argued that the crusade to liberate Palestine was fought for more honest reasons than the crusade to liberate Belgium. Bernard Blaser, formerly of the 2/14th Battalion, London Regiment, pushed this argument to its limits. In Kilts Across the Jordan, he dismissed the morality of the war on the Western Front. Britain fought not for the safety and security of the Belgians, he claimed, but most contemptibly to extend its economic sway in Europe. The war in Palestine was fought for different, purer reasons. Here in Palestine there could be no empty and fallacious reasons for the war we were waging against the Turks, no selfish aims for commercial supremacy, no ‘Remember Belgium’ and other shibboleths which had so sickened us that they became everyday jokes, but the purest of all motivations, which was to restore this land, in which Christ lived and died, to the rule of Christian peoples.

Much like the post-war exasperation with Belgium that had led to antiBelgian resentment, Blaser believed that it was only in Palestine that the war had been fought for a just cause.113 ‘To free the Holy Land’, he explained, ‘from a policy of organized murder, tyranny so awful and despicable as to cause the hearts of the most apathetic to revolt in disgust, was in itself sufficient to urge us to great efforts, to suffer increased hardships without complaint’.114 Blaser was not fighting, though, to subject Muslims to the authority of the Anglican Church. Although he referred to the benefits of Christian government, by this time Christian 111 112 113 114

Captain R. E. C. Adams, The Modern Crusaders (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1920), 22. Wilkie, Official War History, 240. de Schaepdrijver, ‘Occupation, Propaganda, and the Idea of Belgium’, 269. Blaser, Kilts Across the Jordan, 97–8.

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rule and the British Empire had started to shift closer towards a secular and enlightened, although perhaps nominally Christian, definition of governance. He was instead fighting to allow for the transmission of British liberal imperialism – civics, democracy, and enlightenment – to flourish in Palestine. It is tempting to suggest that soldiers referred to the crusades as a simple marketing gimmick. On the cover of F. H. Cooper’s memoir Khaki Crusaders, for example, is a knight, likely of the Third Crusade, watching the EEF pass by and saluting them. But by exploring how publishers advertised these memoirs and how the public received them, the claim that ex-servicemen used crusading language for commercial purposes quickly breaks down. Cecil Sommers’ Temporary Crusaders was marketed by its publisher, John Lane The Bodley Head, as an ‘amusing account of campaigning in Palestine and the East’.115 The publisher Edward Arnold’s announcement of Coldicott’s London Men in Palestine and How They Marched to Jerusalem contained no reference to crusade despite Jerusalem featuring in the title.116 Given that both memoirs were published in 1919, when the campaign in Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine was still hailed as an imperial success, is telling. Publishers also ignored crusading language in later memoirs. Heath Cranton’s publicity for John More’s With Allenby’s Crusaders marketed the memoir alongside works on equatorial Africa and world travel.117 In one of the longest advertisements for an ex-serviceman’s work on Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine, Ernest Benn praised Edward Thompson’s Crusader’s Coast as a welcome escape from the ‘alleged realism’ of other war books but still ignored the EEF’s connection to the medieval crusades.118 Just as the publicity of book publishers had ignored crusading language, so too did reviews written by literary critics in the press. Punch’s review of More’s With Allenby’s Crusaders presented the memoir as one of travel and tourism. ‘Captain J. N. More’, the reviewer argued, ‘has, perhaps unconsciously, written an account of places and people in Palestine as they appeared to a lover of the Bible who chanced to explore the country in the middle of a war, rather than a history of a campaign against the Turks’.119 In the left-wing Nation, Coldicott’s London Men in Palestine was acclaimed not as a story of a triumphant crusade – in spite of the book’s 115 116 117 118 119

The Times Literary Supplement, 3 July 1919, 359. The Times Literary Supplement, 11 September 1919, 484. The Times Literary Supplement, 21 June 1923, 422. The Times Literary Supplement, 12 September 1929, 691. Punch, 18 July 1923, 72.

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subtitle, and How They Marched to Jerusalem – but instead as a ‘pleasant book of travel with an army’ told ‘in an honest prose’.120 Captain Adams’ The Modern Crusaders was reviewed favourably by The Times Literary Supplement as a ‘slight’ and ‘chatty’ account of the army’s advance under Allenby.121 According to the Observer, Thompson’s Crusader’s Coast was best described as a ‘guide to the flora of the Holy Land’. ‘Those who seek excitement’, the reviewer warned, ‘may avoid this book’.122 In the Anzac Bulletin’s review of Oliver Hogue’s The Cameliers, the reviewer acknowledged that memoirs on the war in Palestine were a welcome addition to Australian war literature, if only because it records some of the doings of the Light Horse Regiments and other Australian units, who were unable to share in the fights on the Western Front, but who worthily bore in the Eastern theatre of war the standard of fighting for which the Commonwealth soldiers are so famous.

The reviewer made only one reference to the crusades – apart from the review’s title – referring to the infrastructural developments made in Sinai and southern Palestine by the ‘new Crusaders’ as they marched towards Jerusalem.123 No more receptive to crusading language were institutional journal reviews written by other ex-servicemen. In the Army Quarterly, for example, reviewers were more inclined to comment upon a memoir’s handling of military strategy, logistics, or decision-making than the memoir’s worth as a story of holy war against the Muslim Ottomans. Reviewed by C. T. Atkinson, a captain with the Oxford University Officers Training Corps, Preston’s The Desert Mounted Corps was praised for its concision and meticulous attention to detail, and for ‘telling the story of that important force clearly and fully’.124 Other reviews acknowledged but rejected the use of crusading language. Reviewing More’s With Allenby’s Crusaders in the Times Literary Supplement, Orlando Cyprian Williams expressed his cynicism of the crusading analogy. ‘Members of the E.E.F., then – Crusaders, if they liked to be called so’, he jibed at the end of his review.125 The above points to two conclusions. First, ex-servicemen’s memoirs were neither advertised nor received as stories of a twentieth-century holy war or religious crusade. Publishers’ advertisements did not market them as such and instead promoted their value as travel and geographical 120 121 122 124 125

The Nation, 6 December 1919, 340. The Times Literary Supplement, 22 January 1920, 53. Observer, 8 September 1929, 4. 123 Anzac Bulletin 23 May 1919, 10–11. C. T. Atkinson, ‘General Liman von Sanders on his Experiences in Palestine (with Map)’, Army Quarterly, 3, 2 (1922), 258. The Times Literary Supplement, 12 April 1923, 238.

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literature as well as eyewitness accounts of soldier life in Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine. This explanation is further supported by the fact that unpublished memoirs, such as F. V. Blunt’s ‘The Last Crusade: The Diary of a Private Soldier in the Palestine Expeditionary Force 1917–1919’, also employed crusading language when no commercial incentive existed.126 Furthermore, no critical reviews bought into the idea that British and Dominion soldiers had crusaded in a holy war. Instead, greater stock was put into a memoir’s truthfulness, its writing style, its grasp of grand strategy, and, in some cases, what it revealed about the daily lives of those who had fought in Sinai and Palestine. Liberation and Liberal Imperialism Although one newsreel film by Jury’s Imperial Pictures, ‘Advance of the Crusaders into Mesopotamia’, released in four parts between 1918 and 1920, extended crusade to Mesopotamia, no ex-serviceman remembered the campaign as a holy war.127 The crusading narrative had clear limits when applied to the Muslim Ottoman Empire and the Middle East. Exservicemen did, however, remember the campaign, like ex-servicemen had remembered Palestine, as a war of liberation and the extension of liberal imperialism. Lieutenant Colonel J. E. Tennant’s In the Clouds above Baghdad charted a ‘chain of corruption’ that had ‘started in Stamboul and ended with the Arab beggar in the bazaar’ of Baghdad. Liberal imperial rule had liberated the people and ended the corruption. ‘The educated Armenian and Jewish classes’, he wrote, ‘hailed us with delight. They knew that the arrival of Englishmen meant fair play, and that their women-folk would be freed from an everlasting peril.’ Armenian and Circassian women were able ‘to walk abroad’, when before, A Turkish officer might be attracted by the appearance of a Christian woman in the street, and she, under pain of being put in the public hospital by the health officer as diseased, must needs surrender herself for the satisfaction of the Turk. Within a few days of our occupation they had cast off their veils and somber clothing and appeared in bright European creations reminiscent of the accumulations in a Whitechapel emporium.128

Tennant was sure that the people of Baghdad found it strange ‘that the conquering British Army did not immediately engage in wholesale looting, massacre, and rape. Instead’, he pointed out, ‘the Baghdadi gaped 126 127 128

Blunt, unpublished memoir, IWM Documents.2512. ‘Advance of the Crusaders into Mesopotamia’, IWM 78–80. Tennant, In the Clouds, 113.

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open-mouthed at the Trooper from the Home Counties or the Jock from Dundee who, after many weeks’ marching and fighting, offered him his last cigarette and carried on strange conversation’, for hatred had ‘no place’ in the ‘heart of the British Tommy’.129 Captain J. A. Byrom, formerly of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, thought that Basra under liberal imperial rule was confirmation of the British Empire’s superiority. Commerce had been restored, everyday life made peaceful, and individual liberty returned to the city’s inhabitants. Baghdad’s Jews, he pointed out, had even been allowed to return to wearing western clothes instead of ‘Eastern garments’. ‘The work that had been done in and around’ the city, he wrote in his unpublished memoir, ‘was extraordinary. It is only on seeing things like this that one can appreciate to the full extent what a wonderful little nation we really are. The greatness of Britain can only be realised when one travels from home.’130 Reshaping Mesopotamia was about more than making up for the disastrous siege and surrender of Kut al-Amara, as historian Priya Satia has argued.131 Ex-servicemen had fought to liberate Mesopotamia as others had fought to liberate Belgium. Lieutenant Colonel Arnold Talbot Wilson compared the plight of Ottoman Mesopotamia to that of Germanoccupied Belgium. Mesopotamia had been ‘devastated by the supine folly of its former rulers’ like the ‘stricken fields of Flanders’ had been pummelled by the ‘colossal machinery of modern war’ and the German Army. The only difference between the two fronts, argued Wilson, was that British finance and British labour would rebuild Mesopotamia. ‘We, and we alone’, he wrote, ‘had it in our power to enable the peoples of the Middle East to attain a civic and cultural unity more beneficial and greater than any reached by the great Empires of their romantic past’.132 Like the aforementioned Blaser and Wilson, who considered the liberation of Palestine and Mesopotamia alongside, if not more important than, the liberation of Belgium, Douglas Walshe of the 708th Motor Transport, ASC, wrote that Macedonia was fought over to liberate the Serbs from Austro-Hungarian occupation. ‘You don’t forgit [sic] about the Belgian’s wrongs’, he wrote as Cockney ‘Private Smith’ in his memoir, With the Serbs in Macedonia, (Poor blighter! ‘eaven knows ‘e copped it bad), But quite as deep as symperfy belongs 129 130 131 132

Tennant, In the Clouds, 115. Papers of J. A. Byrom, unpublished memoir, 1920, IWM Documents.8503. Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 173, 177. Lt.-Col. Sir Arnold T. Wilson, Loyalties Mesopotamia, 1914–1917: A Personal and Historical Record (London: Humphrey Milford, 1930), XIV.

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Public Memory To Serbia, whose woes is just as sad! Old Serbo fairly got it in the neck – The ‘Un’s a saint to what them Bulgars did! They made ‘is ‘appy ‘ome a ‘opeless wreck, An’ ‘ardly spared a woman or kid!133

Walshe, like Blaser, was tired of Belgium dominating the memory of the war. ‘Belgium has always been written up in the Press’, he griped, ‘Belgium has all our sympathies. Belgium was fine – at first. But Serbia has been fine all through.’ ‘We are sick’, he concluded, ‘of the war and irresponsible war-books, and there are so many axes to grind. Enthusiasts are wearisome, foolish people, but facts are facts’.134 Another exserviceman was confident that ‘Nothing in the whole history of the war, not even the overwhelming of Belgium, is comparable with the mental and physical sufferings of the Serbs during their march across Albania’.135 The British Army’s ‘occupation provided a foothold for the remnants of the Serbian army and a starting-point for the hopes of the Serbian people. If we had not been there’, wrote Harold Lake, ‘it is hard to think what would have become of those fine soldiers’.136 Liberal imperialism also had a role to play in Greek Macedonia, including Salonika, where the ‘terrible Turk’ had kept Greece ‘down-trodden’ and ‘beneath the heal’ of Istanbul for too long, wrote Lieutenant V. J. Seligman, formerly of the 60th (London) Division. For Seligman, the post-war rebuilding of Greek Macedonia, guided by British and French hands, was the paying off of a centuries-long debt owed to the ‘priceless civilization of Ancient Greece’. Greece stood ‘forth to take her part in history’, he wrote: She has within her all the fine qualities of a Great Nation; she needs only a wise Government and a noble example to bring them forth. The former she possesses in M. Venizelos: may we not hope that in the latter the example of France and England may be of some real assistance? If so, the thousands of Frenchmen and Englishmen who have fallen in Macedonia will not have died in vain.137

War Winners Crusading to liberate Palestine and Mesopotamia from the clutches of the Ottoman Empire, freeing the Serbs from Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian occupation, and clearing the ground to rebuild Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Greek Macedonia into places befitting a modern, 133 134 136

Douglas Walshe, With the Serbs in Macedonia (London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1920), 95–6. Original emphasis. Walshe, With the Serbs, 272. 135 Mann, Salonika Front, 121. Lake, Campaigning in the Balkans, 216. 137 Seligman, Salonica Side-Show, 49.

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twentieth-century state were not the only ways that ex-servicemen found meaning when looking back to the war. The ‘sideshows’ in Macedonia and Palestine had also won the war, ex-servicemen claimed. The claims of ex-servicemen who had fought in Macedonia were only strengthened by German General Erich Ludendorff’s post-war assertion that it was indeed the collapse of the Macedonian Front that had made Germany’s position untenable. Those at home who had ‘argued’ about and ‘criticized’ the campaign in Macedonia ‘had to admit, one and all, that it was in the Balkans that the last decisive stroke began to be played’.138 The men of the BSF were ‘immensely tickled with our victory’, wrote another exserviceman, ‘for it was indeed rather ironical that the first knock-out blow of the War should have been dealt not by the mighty armies of France, not by the conquerors of Baghdad or Jerusalem, but by our unknown, motley collection of ruffians, the Salonica Army’. ‘It would perhaps be well to remind the reader’, he continued, ‘that, as it was in France, so too it was in the Balkans “the last ten minutes which counted”’.139 Captain A. J. Mann, formerly of the 22nd Balloon Company, was confident that ‘the survivors from our long watch in the Balkans are conscious of having participated in a campaign as essential to the winning of the war as was the Gallipoli adventure, knowing well that their perseverance in the face of huge obstacles finally achieved its full measure of success’.140 Even Sir George Milne got in on the act. In the foreword to Harry Collinson Owen’s Salonica and After: The Sideshow that Ended the War, Milne contended that the BSF had ‘struck at the Achilles heel of the Central Powers and materially aided in their rapid collapse during the dramatic Autumn of 1918’.141 These were arguments that few had made during the war. As Lake explained of his memoir’s penultimate chapter, ‘The Importance of Salonika’, ‘If you were to put the phrase which I have placed at the head of this chapter before any ordinary member of the Salonika force and ask him to tell you all about it, he would be badly puzzled. In my time – and I cannot doubt it is the same today’, he guessed, ‘it did not occur to us that we were important or that our remote and undistinguished occupations had anything to do with the war of which we read in the papers sent out from home.’142 Hindsight led ex-servicemen to conclude that Macedonia was part of an international, inter-continental Allied line. ‘“One Front from Belgium to the Adriatic”’, wrote one ex-serviceman of the 60th (London) Division, ‘should really be extended – for the Salonica Front 138 139 141

Smith, Subaltern in Macedonia and Judaea, 39. Seligman, Salonica Side-Show, 138, 144. 140 Mann, Salonika Front, 4. Owen, Salonica and After, iv. 142 Lake, Campaigning in the Balkans, 212.

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was just as much part of the “One Front” as was Italy’.143 The campaign was more than a ‘subsidiary affair’ or a ‘troublesome side-show’, wrote Stanley Casson, formerly of the East Lancashire Regiment, in defence of the campaign. ‘The flanks of a hostile front are not rolled up by subsidiary expeditions.’ British and Dominion soldiers had held a ‘key position in the Balkans’ as the ‘right flank of the whole Allied front’, and ‘the war ended, as most large battles have always ended, by the turning of a flank’. The Allied breakthrough in September 1918 had ‘opened the way to the Danube and to Austria and so brought about the final collapse of the whole opposing front’.144 Macedonia was like ‘a pawn on the chess-board which, so long as it remains’, wrote Harold Lake, forbids the progress of the more majestic pieces and has power to destroy even the greatest of them. It has a moral effect which is far greater than the material inconvenience which is caused to our foes, and it is possible to imagine what an amount of irritation there must have been to the German High Command in the presence of the bit of occupied and fortified territory on their flank. For such a base is very much like a gun. In itself it is small and of little importance, but when it goes off it has a disturbingly long range.145

Had British and Dominion soldiers not kept the Bulgarian Army pinned down and prevented Greece from joining the Central Powers, opined C. W. Hughes, formerly of the Wiltshire Regiment, the entire Allied war effort, from the Western Front to Palestine and Mesopotamia, would have been jeopardised. ‘Even to this day’, he wrote in 1925 in his unpublished memoir, ‘few realise how serious the position in the Mediteranian [sic] would have been had there been no force landed at Salonika’. Greece, he was sure, would have entered the war on the side of the Central Powers. With Salonika turned over to the German Army, opening that city’s ports to enemy submarines, ‘it is possible that we should have been prevented from using the Eastern end of the Mediteranian [sic] altogether which would have rendered it quite impossible to carry on either the Palestine or the Mesopotamian campaigns’. If that had been the case, Hughes contended, the Ottoman Empire would have been free to recapture Basra and to turn its armies towards the Suez Canal, threatening the entire war effort outside of the Western Front.146 In November 1928, Milne penned a full-page article in The Times. Not only was Milne writing for an audience which, increasingly throughout the 1920s, had perhaps grown disillusioned with the war, he was also writing more specifically for the family members of those who had died in 143 145 146

Seligman, Salonica Side-Show, 251–52. 144 Casson, Steady Drummer, 8. Lake, Campaigning in the Balkans, 215–18. Hughes, unpublished memoir, IWM Documents.4432.

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Macedonia. According to Milne, there was ‘ample proof that those who died on that front did not do so in vain’. To make his argument for the importance of Macedonia, and to lend meaning to the deaths of British and Dominion men, Milne raised two serious counterfactuals, much like Seligman had nearly a decade earlier. The first was that, as he understood the situation, had British and Dominion soldiers not been sent to Macedonia – a move he admitted came too late – the Serbian Army would have been trampled and ‘the great nation of the Yugoslavs’, a product of the post-war peace, ‘would never have been born’. Thus, for Milne, the BSF laid the groundwork for the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Second, had the BSF not occupied Salonika, Greece, ‘willingly or unwillingly’, he explained, would have fallen ‘under the domination of Germany’. And if Germany had been allowed to take hold of Salonika’s ports, giving the main cog in the Central Powers alliance an outlet to the Mediterranean, then the British Army’s operations throughout the rest of the region, including at Gallipoli and in Palestine, would have been jeopardised. Not only had the BSF saved Serbia and restrained Greece, it had also struck the first blow against the Central Powers – a blow that was felt strongly in Berlin. Like the rank and file of the BSF, who, as we saw in Chapter 4, had also positioned Bulgaria’s surrender as the catalyst in a chain reaction that ended the war, Milne drew a direct line from Bulgaria’s capitulation to the Ottoman Empire’s, and from the Ottoman Empire’s surrender to Austria-Hungary’s and Germany’s, and, thus, to the end of the war. In sum, he wrote, the part played by the BSF alongside its French, Serbian, and Greek allies showed the ‘extent of the contribution made to the Allied victory by those who served and died in that theatre of war’. While he and other ex-servicemen understood well that there were those who felt that the war in Macedonia was a waste, and that the defence of Salonika was one of many positions ‘that were not worth defending’, retrospect had justified the campaign’s purpose.147 Ex-servicemen also weighed in on the debate that had pitted ‘easterners’ against ‘westerners’ during the war, a debate that continued in the memoirs of prominent politicians such as Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. Lloyd George, for example, never rested his case that Sir Douglas Haig and the CIGS Sir William Robertson had stubbornly, almost criminally, remained devoted to defeating the German Army in France and Flanders at the expense of other operations in the Balkans and elsewhere.148 Withdrawing from Macedonia would have released British 147 148

The Times, 10 November 1928, 16. George W. Egerton, ‘The Lloyd George War Memoirs: A Study in the Politics of Memory’, Journal of Modern History 60, 1 (1988), 76–7.

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and Dominion soldiers for the Western Front or elsewhere, C. W. Hughes admitted, but as many Germans, Bulgarians, and Greeks would have turned up in France and Flanders. The two moves would have cancelled each other out.149 Would the men in the ‘Salonica “packet” have been sufficient to turn the scales in our favour’, asked Seligman, ‘and bring us Peace earlier, either in 1916 or in 1917? No doubt’, he responded, ‘if we included all the different Eastern theaters of War – Egypt, Palestine, Mesopotamia and Salonica – it would be found that an Army not far short of a million and a half had been diverted from the Western Front’. But in his ‘humble opinion’, the ‘addition of some twenty-five Divisions to the B.E.F. France would not have been sufficient to turn the scales in our favour’. The Allies’ numerical advantage had not won them victory in 1917, Seligman reasoned, nor had the German Army’s superior numbers at the start of the Spring Offensive led it to victory.150 For those who had fought in Palestine, the Ottoman Empire’s capitulation was also retrospectively constructed as the catalyst that had set in motion Germany’s surrender and the end of the war. Palestine had helped ‘an indirect settlement of our Western quarrel’, wrote Rowlands Coldicott.151 The effect of Istanbul’s capitulation, according to the regimental history of the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars Yeomanry, ‘was by no means confined to the East; its earthquake shock was felt throughout the whole theatre of war, and it brought down in utter ruin the entire edifice of the alliance of the Central Powers’.152 ‘The collapse of Turkey quickly brought Bulgaria to her knees’, wrote Vivian Gilbert, ‘followed by Austria who sued for peace, thus leaving Germany to face certain defeat alone’. Had the BEF in France not siphoned British and Dominion soldiers away from Palestine, he wrote, the Ottoman Empire’s surrender might have come six months earlier.153 To Sergeant Sydney Hatton, formerly of the 1st County of London Yeomanry, in The Yarn of a Yeoman, the ‘withdrawal of Turkey from the war undoubtedly did much to dispirit the already beaten German troops on the Western Front’.154 Contemporary opinion was not on their side. Cyril Falls and Lieutenant General George MacMunn, co-authors of the campaign’s official history, pushed back. Palestine on its own was not enough to knock out the Ottoman Empire. Progress in Mesopotamia and Macedonia, in tandem with Palestine, had led to a multi-front 149 150 151 152 153 154

Hughes, unpublished memoir, IWM Documents.4432. Seligman, Salonica Side-Show, 251–2. Coldicott, London Men in Palestine, 121. Fox, History of the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars, 315. Gilbert, Romance of the Last Crusade, 218. S. F. Hatton, The Yarn of a Yeoman (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1930), 272.

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breakthrough that threatened to rupture Istanbul’s lines of communication and cut off the capital city from its field armies. All three campaigns, the pair wrote, had contributed to the defeat of the Central Powers, but none on their own. ‘The E.E.F. had no direct effect upon the decision in the main theatre’, they insisted.155 While those who had fought in Macedonia and Palestine claimed that they had won the war, or at least played a major role in its conclusion, that argument was almost impossible to make by those who had served in Mesopotamia. For ex-servicemen of Mesopotamia, the timeline didn’t add up in the way that the BSF’s breakthrough in September 1918 had coincided with Bulgaria’s surrender and how the EEF’s northwards drive towards Aleppo seemed to coincide with the Ottoman Empire suing for peace. F. L. Goldthorpe’s appreciation of Mesopotamia’s part in the wider war effort was typical. In his unpublished memoir, written in 1934, he described the war in Mesopotamia as the ‘extreme right wing of the vast arm, which, with a few gaps here and there stretched from the Belgian coast, down the frontiers of France and Italy, Salonica, Egypt and Arabia, to this little outpost almost on the borders of Persia’.156 Conclusion Throughout the interwar period, ex-servicemen who had fought in the Middle East and Macedonia were anything but silent about their wartime role and their perceived absence from national narratives about the war. This was part of a process of renegotiation, of collective bargaining that, taken as a whole, tried to use the power of their shared experiences outside the Western Front to redefine their wartime service. For most exservicemen it was clear that, by 1919, their wars were still forgotten if they had ever been known. And if they had been forgotten well into the interwar period, that meant that the hardships of their wars, which we explored in Chapter 1, were also forgotten. To correct the public’s misconception that their campaigns were bloodless vacations from the ‘real’ war on the Western Front, soldiers went to great lengths in their memoirs to present their campaigns as harsh, active, and meaningful. To find meaning in their part in the war, ex-servicemen framed their campaigns in a number of different ways, as ‘crusading’ wars of liberation, as a civilising mission, and as the campaigns that had actually won the war. In this way, there was some continuity between efforts to find meaning 155

156

Captain Cyril Falls and Lieutenant-General Sir George MacMunn, Military Operations: Egypt and Palestine: From the Outbreak of War with Germany to June 1917 (London: HMSO, 1928), 634. Papers of F. L. Goldthorpe, unpublished memoir, c. 1934, IWM Documents.9896.

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during the war, as we saw in Chapter 3, and efforts to find meaning after it. But whether the campaigns in the Middle East and Macedonia were a crusade, a war of liberation, or just part of the wider war effort, one thing was beyond debate: what they had done mattered, in some way, shape, or form. By repositioning themselves as the men who brought about Germany’s end, by lionising themselves as war winners, British and Dominion ex-servicemen revealed deep insecurities about the public memory and commemoration of the First World War and the place of the war’s peripheral theatres in the empire’s collective mythology. Yet when we turn to private memory, as we will in the next and final chapter, what is striking is that many of these themes do not appear, further suggesting that what and how soldiers remembered in public, in memoirs, was significantly different from what and how they remembered their war in private, in scrapbooks.

6

Private Memory

Lying on a cot at the British Red Cross Hospital in Giza, hobbled by a leg infection, Captain Robert Wingham of the 10th Battalion, King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, sifted through hundreds of photographs he had taken in Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine. Anticipating a flood of requests for duplicates from family and friends in Leeds, who were eager to see and not only read about his war in the Middle East, he started to post his photograph negatives home to Yorkshire. Wingham eventually made it back to Leeds in July 1919. But instead of bundling together small parcels of his photographs and distributing them amongst family and friends, he transformed his wartime photograph collection into a commemorative, three-volume scrapbook, the largest of which was titled ‘Account of My Visit to Upper Egypt’. The First World War produced thousands if not hundreds of thousands of soldier photographers in all armies and on all fronts.1 Perhaps more than any other British or Dominion soldiers during the First World War, those who served in the Middle East and Macedonia documented their campaigns through the lens of a camera. Small, low-cost roll film box cameras were stuffed into kit bags and photographs were taken at the front line and on leave. The prints and negatives were mailed home, often bundled with their correspondence. These men, unlike their comrades on the Western Front who photographed the war in spite of harsh rules forbidding photography, had benefitted from lenient or non-existent regulations regarding photography. Demobilised and returned home, many ex-servicemen cut, cropped, organised, and pasted their loose wartime photographs and postcards into scrapbooks. Historians of the First World War have increasingly been interested in the link between material culture, expressed in a number of different ways, from postcards to battlefield souvenirs to trench art and private 1

Jane Carmichael, First World War Photographers (London: Routledge, 1989); Sebastian Remus, German Amateur Photographers in the First World War: A View from the Trenches on the Western Front (Atglen: Schiffer, 2008); Richard Van Emden, Tommy’s War: The Western Front in Soldiers’ Words and Photographs (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

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memory.2 Yet historians of all stripes have rarely considered soldier photography and scrapbooks when exploring how soldiers remembered the war in a private space. One part of the reason for this neglect has to do with numbers. Compared to the bewildering number of diaries and letter collections left behind by soldiers, photograph collections and scrapbooks are rarer (although not as much as one would think). The second part has to do with accessibility. Put simply, they are harder to find than soldierproduced writings. Seldom do archives indicate whether or not a soldier’s private paper collection contains loose photographs, a proper photograph album, or a post-war scrapbook. Truly, searching for them can feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. This chapter makes several arguments. First, it argues that scrapbooks were a unique medium in which ex-servicemen remembered the wars outside the Western Front. This was due primarily to lax regulations and rules governing soldier photography outside France and Flanders and, as explored in Chapter 2, the part that tourism played in the wartime experience of soldiering in the Middle East and Macedonia. Second, it argues that scrapbooks were used as an early form of data management and as a way to make sense of the war on a personal level. In this way, ex-servicemen after the First World War were very much like Union and Confederate veterans after the American Civil War who, as Ellen Gruber Garvey has shown, constructed scrapbooks as a way to make sense of a conflict that had disrupted American society, both northern and southern, like nothing had before it, and in an effort to understand what the war meant to families and individuals.3 To that end, I will also argue that scrapbooks were spaces of private memory. They were, in effect, sites of memory.4 British and Dominion soldiers who had photographed the war and spent most of their service on the war’s non-western fronts, in Sinai, Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Macedonia, had the chance to remember their war differently. Indeed, they had to remember it differently. Their war, as we have discussed, bore little resemblance to the conflict on the Western Front. Moreover, ex-servicemen who had fought outside the 2

3 4

John Laffin, World War I in Postcards (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1988); Tim Cook, ‘Tokens of Fritz: Canadian Soldiers and the Art of Souveneering in the Great War’, War & Society 31, 3 (2012), 211–26; Paul Cornish, ‘“Just a Boyish Habit” . . . British Commonwealth War Trophies in the First World War’, in Nicholas J. Saunders and Paul Cornish (eds.), Contested Objects: Material Memories of the Great War (London: Routledge, 2009), 11–26; Nicholas J. Saunders, Trench Art: Materialities and Memories of War (Oxford: Berg, 2003). Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), chapter 3. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations 26 (1989), 9, 16.

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Western Front were making their scrapbooks at a time when commemorative activities across the British Empire were breaking ground for tributes to ex-servicemen and women in the form of cenotaphs, statues, and memorials, few of which mentioned the wars outside France and Flanders.5 Furthermore, Armistice Day ceremonies were becoming less about celebrating the war’s victorious conclusion – which mattered even more to those who had ‘won the war’ in Palestine and Macedonia, as we saw in Chapters 4 and 5 – and more about the war dead and the civilian bereaved.6 Stonework tributes and symbolic silences emphasised commonality, not distinctiveness, and above all else concentrated the memory of the war on the trenches of the Western Front and on a narrative of loss.7 Ex-servicemen who fought in the Middle East and Macedonia used scrapbooks as a way of actively constructing a past that was more recognisable and acceptable to them, a sort of ‘cognitive map’, as Ron Eyerman has characterised the process of memory making.8 For some ex-servicemen, this meant picturing the war as a relentless struggle against the Ottoman or Bulgarian armies and the harsh climatic and environmental conditions of the Middle East and Macedonia. Others pictured the war as an exciting episode of travel or simply as a pictorial record of the conflict in chronological order, slotting in their personal experience of the war. Last, this chapter will also show that there was a clear divide between exservicemen’s public memory, as expressed in memoirs in Chapter 5, and private memory, expressed here. Publicly, ex-servicemen made a number of claims that were meant to compete with the Western Front, including an equality of suffering on the battlefield, crusading against Ottoman oppression, liberating Arabs and Jews, coming to the aid of the Serbs, civilising Middle Easterners and southeastern Europeans, and playing a decisive part in the wider war effort. Except for the climatic and environmental difficulties of campaigning in the Middle East and Macedonia, none of these themes are reflected in scrapbooks. Ex-servicemen’s scrapbooks are almost entirely about the lighter side of their wartime experience, namely travel, tourism, and camaraderie. Soldier Photography Although the First World War saw an enormous increase in the number of soldiers using cameras, officers and specialised units in the British Army 5 7 8

King, Memorials of the Great War. 6 Gregory, Silence of Memory. Watson, Fighting Different Wars. Ron Eyerman, ‘The Past in the Present: Culture and the Transmission of Memory’, Acta Sociologica 47, 2 (2004), 161.

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had been practising photography since the mid-nineteenth century. Unsurprisingly, the origin of soldier photography was tied to imperialism. Photography was routinely instructed at the Staff College at Camberley before officers left for the Indian subcontinent. Once in India, especially after the Second Anglo-Sikh War, forward-thinking bureaucrats such as Governor General Lord Canning encouraged officers to take photographs as they trekked throughout India, which were later used for ethnographic reports, studies, and publications. In the years after the Crimean War, the Royal Engineers also underwent photography training to assist military topographers in regional map-making.9 While early amateur photography required some degree of technical training, including a basic understanding of chemistry, in addition to enough leisure time to maintain equipment and develop negatives in a personal dark room, technological breakthroughs in film composition and shutter stabilisation near the century’s end opened photography to the masses.10 Led by Kodak in the United States and George Houghton in Britain, roll film box cameras found a receptive market in both countries. In Britain, the No.1 Kodak Brownie camera sold almost 50,000 units in 1900, and an updated version, the No. 3 Folding Pocket Kodak, sold 100,000 between 1900 and 1914.11 Improved and cheaper technology meant that more and more men in the British Army, men from middle-class and professional backgrounds, were carrying cameras in their kitbags. By 1914, the camera of choice was Eastman Kodak’s Vest Pocket Kodak (VPK). With an all-metal rustproof body and a pigskin carrying case that clasped to a soldier’s belt, the camera was compact, rugged, and durable. Sales of the VPK grew fivefold in Britain in 1915. It was even marketed as ‘The Soldier’s Kodak Camera’; the tagline encouraged troops to ‘Make your own picture record of the War’.12 Photographic equipment was cheap and of good quality by the time of the war, but was soldier photography legal? At the start of the war, the Field Service Regulations, written in 1909 and amended in 1914, did not list soldier photography as a punishable offence.13 On the Western and Italian Fronts, the Army Council and Press Bureau firmly regulated soldier photography by passing a number of General Routine Orders (GRO) either restricting or forbidding the use of cameras and threatening 9 10 11 12 13

Gus Macdonald, Camera, Victorian Eyewitness: A History of Photography: 1826–1913 (New York: Viking, 1979), 92–8. Susan Bright and Val Williams, How We Are: Photographing Britain from the 1840s to the Present (London: Tate, 2007), 10–15. Brian Coe and Paul Gates, The Snapshot Photograph: The Rise of Popular Photography 1888–1939 (London: Ash and Grant, 1977), 17–24. Coe and Gates, The Snapshot Photograph, 29–34. Field Service Regulations (London: HMSO, 1914 [1909]).

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corporal punishment as a consequence. GRO 464 was issued to the BEF in France on 22 December 1914, prohibiting the sending of private photographs to press outlets. Enforcement was always difficult, as attitudes to soldier photography varied between regiments and the mood of command.14 A successive GRO, issued in September 1915, outlawed the possession of a camera and the taking of photographs. Military authorities were instructed to confiscate and return soldier-owned cameras to Britain.15 Even after the War Propaganda Bureau, the forerunner to the Ministry of Information, commissioned official war photographers in 1916, soldier photography was actively discouraged and controlled through censorship.16 As a result, soldiers on the Western Front often turned to postcards, many of which were official war photographs provided by the Daily Mail.17 In contrast, military law regarding the possession and use of cameras in the Middle East and Macedonia was either lax or non-existent. Soldiers outside the Western Front and Italy were still subject to the Official Secrets Act, which listed the possession of any ‘prohibited place’ as a misdemeanour, but no GRO seems to have been issued to any of them.18 Even if the military authorities had wanted to put a stop to soldier photography, little could be done. Placing the commercial hubs of Alexandria, Cairo, Jerusalem, Baghdad, or Salonika out of bounds would have been a nightmare to police. Soldiers relied upon the dozens of locally owned and operated stores that sold wares, food, and other goods. There also would have been the problem of mail, the presence of charitable organisations, and the willing help of locals. Air Mechanic Reginald Forder of the Royal Flying Corps regularly received photographic paper from his sister in Wolverhampton.19 The YMCA’s Anzac Hostel Guide listed every photography shop in Cairo. Soldiers could have their portraits taken at the YMCA in Jerusalem and mailed anywhere in the British Empire free of charge. Retailers on Cairo’s bustling Manakh Street and Bulac Avenue sold equipment, developed film negatives, and printed enlarged copies. Some were able to return negatives and printed photographs in as little as five days. On tours of the pyramids, especially the great pyramid of Cheops, Egyptian guides brought candles and 14 15 16 17 18 19

Carmichael, First World War Photographers, 11, 31. Janina Struk, Private Pictures: Soldiers’ Inside View of War (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 30–8. Carmichael, First World War Photographers, 16–20. Laffin, World War I in Postcards, 4. War Office, Manual of Military Law (London: HMSO, 1917 [1914]), 799. Papers of Reginald Forder, Forder to Mabel, 2 February 1918, Forder Family Private Collection.

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magnesium flares to illuminate the pyramid’s inner passages to make them easier to photograph.20 Some sections of soldier newspapers were dedicated entirely to photography. In the Army Ordnance Corps’ newspaper, The Mosquito, published in Alexandria, ‘HYPO B’s’ monthly advice column on photography recommended the best equipment for shooting in Egypt. The light was so favourable, he wrote, that even the cheapest cameras produced good results. Without saying so, what HYPO B implied was that any soldier, regardless of rank or class, could afford to practice photography in Egypt. Smaller cameras were preferable, he thought, and more suitable for active service, as ‘the camera can always be carried on one’s person ready for use as opportunity occurs’. Importantly, HYPO B also urged soldiers to stop taking so many photographs of themselves and their comrades. ‘Most of us here buy a camera to record our impressions of Egypt for the benefit of those at home’, he wrote. But too many soldiers were turning the camera on themselves and their comrades, missing an opportunity to photograph Egypt’s architecture and wildlife, as well as the places they were touring and the peoples they were seeing. ‘We can always photograph our pals when in England’, he explained, ‘but we do not always have such opportunities as we have now of the subjects at hand’.21 Composition and Audience As shown in Chapter 2, wartime soldier photography was widespread outside the Western Front. But picturing the war didn’t stop with the armistice. As part of the transition towards collective mourning, whether in stonework tributes or symbolic silences, the individual soldier became increasingly marginalised from attempts to commemorate the war effort.22 Stemming from the same psychological and emotional needs to piece together the randomness of the war, photograph scrapbooks gave soldiers a private tool with which to construct and publicise, at their discretion, their individual wartime experience.23 The composition of photograph albums in the post-war period afforded ex-servicemen a space to exercise control over their personal remembrance of the war 20 21 22 23

Papers of W. G. Cadenhead, unpublished memoir, IWM Documents.3831. The Mosquito: Organ of the Army Ordnance Corps in Alexandria, 1 June 1916, 12. Mark Connelly, The Great War: Memory and Ritual Commemoration in the City and East London 1916–1939 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002), 25. Susan Kingsley Kent, Aftershocks: Politics and Trauma in Britain, 1918–1931 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 1–3; Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Pimlico, 1992 [1990]), 270.

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during a period of competing representations and debate over who belonged to Britain’s national war narrative.24 Post-war photograph albums largely resisted a standard interpretation of the wars outside the Western Front, which suggests instead the diversity of individual patterns of remembrance.25 Albums varied and could be based upon the soldier’s desire to promote a masculine, martial identity; they could be attuned more directly to a sense of adventure and sightseeing or they could create a campaign narrative in picture form. Of the scrapbooks themselves, they usually contain tens if not hundreds of wartime photographs. Hand-written captions, some lighthearted and playful, others straightforward and descriptive, were etched into pictures or more commonly drawn in pencil below them. Mementos from the places ex-servicemen had visited during the war, such as tram tickets, concert party programmes, leave passes, hand-drawn pencil sketches, commercial postcards, and newspaper clippings were fixed to the pages. Most of these scrapbooks rarely, if ever, left the bookshelves and sideboards of home, remaining tucked away in privacy. Confined to a limited circle of family, friends, and perhaps the odd British Legion or local regimental get-together, the impact of these scrapbooks on the broader public memory of the war was intentionally limited. These were not objects of public memory, but instead personal histories of ex-servicemen’s very different experiences of the war. Soldiering Memories For Driver Norman Clifford Allinson of the Light Armoured Motor Battery, the war in Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine was a terrific martial undertaking in an exotic colonial space. Allinson’s scrapbook demonstrates a competing fascination between mechanised warfare and the hardships of desert campaigning. Over a dozen photographs, neatly cut and pasted to the scrapbook’s pages, picture him on or inside his RollsRoyce armoured car, posing with tanks, or straddling a motorcycle. He even highlighted his access to technological innovation by captioning the tank photos ‘One of the first “Tanks” in Palestine’. The war had given Allinson, a pre-war taxi driver, a unique opportunity to engage with the war’s technological advancements in an open space. Naturally, he presented the war’s non-western, open spaces as a mechanised playground with tanks, armoured cars, and motorcycles as the toys of war. Other photographs detail the barrenness of the desert and the difficulty of waging war in an unindustrialised land. Photographs of Allinson posing 24

Gregory, Silence of Memory, 78–9.

25

Eyerman, ‘Past in the Present’, 161.

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in Sinai were captioned with ‘Longing for homeland in the desert’/ ‘Lonely patch of desert in Egypt’/‘Rough going in desert patrol’/‘The desert is very wearisome’. Allinson’s emphasis on the machines of war and the harsh conditions of active service perhaps addressed his own sensitivities to soldiering. He stood just 5 ft tall, or around 152 cm, and was deemed unfit for service at a Leeds recruiting office in August 1915. In his unpublished memoir he described the rejection as a ‘heartrending turning down’. ‘Determined to get through by hook or crook’, he was eventually accepted for service in Coventry for the mechanised transport with the Machine Gun Corps.26 What that in mind, it’s not surprising that his scrapbook also contains cuttings from the Evening Yorkshire Post recording his survival of the sinking of the HMS Aragon in December 1917. Other photographs show him unfurling copies of the Post with fellow soldiers, its headline in large, bold font, reading ‘TURKS HEAVILY DEFEATED IN EGYPT’. Allinson used his scrapbook as a space in which he created a private memory of the war that catered to his own psychological and emotional needs. If warfare was seen as the supreme measure of manliness in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, as so many historians have argued, and volunteers, especially, were praised as the embodiment of an ideal, heroic masculinity, then Allinson’s scrapbook allowed him to reconcile his initial volunteer rejection with an undeniably martial narrative and to authenticate his service with the most incontrovertible proof: photographs.27 With pictures showing him traversing the desert in armoured cars and on motorbike, surviving submarine attacks, and helping to defeat the Ottoman Army, Allinson’s scrapbook was a clear representation of his travel and of a soldier who had done his bit far from the Western Front, a ‘bit’ he could display to family and friends, if he chose to, to show them his small part in the empire’s war effort. Tourist Memories But for other ex-servicemen, it was the other half of their wartime experience and identity, which we explored in Chapter 2, tourism, that dominated their private memory. The aforementioned Captain Wingham’s three-volume scrapbook, the largest of which was his eighteen-page ‘Account of My Visit to Upper Egypt’, was about travel and adventure. It depicts Wingham’s journey up the Nile to Karnak, Luxor, and Aswan. Aping the literary style of popular colonial travel writing, Wingham 26 27

Papers of N. Allinson, typescript memoir, LC LIDDLE/EP/001. Bet-El, ‘Men and Soldiers’, 78–81.

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described wily Egyptian dragomen, the Temples of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel, village life in Nubian settlements, and encounters with Dervish wanderers. He also offered judgements on local sanitation and cleanliness. The two smaller albums show his explorations of Egypt and include photographs of the sphinx, the Giza pyramids, the Zoological Gardens, and Alexandria Port. Only a handful of photographs depict scenes of soldiering. Like Allinson, Wingham’s personal disposition towards soldiering likely shaped his scrapbook’s content. As he awaited embarkation at Harrowby Camp in Grantham in October 1916, he volunteered to go to Macedonia when France looked like a certainty. His preference for service in Macedonia was made clear in several letters home to his future wife. In them, he wrote of his ‘appetite for travel and adventure’ and his ‘hope’ that his eastern request would be fulfilled.28 After he arrived at Alexandria and toured the European quarter, his enchantment with the eastern Mediterranean even spawned dreams of settling in Egypt after the war.29 Wingham’s love affair with the east and the opportunity modern soldiering provided for travel suggest that he viewed the war, both at the time and in retrospect, at least in private, as a chance to see the world. The story of Wingham’s scrapbook fits more into the wave of adventureseeking youths who volunteered for service, and of a historicalethnographic instinct that had defined colonial expeditions long before the war, rather than those seeking to defend Britain’s national existence or to escape chronic unemployment. In the minds of British and Dominion soldiers, the war in the Middle East and Macedonia not only looked different from its counterpart on the Western Front but was also filled with different-looking people. Europe’s fascination with the ‘orient’ and the ‘other’ was widespread between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (as explored in Chapter 2). Like British Army officers in India before them, other ex-servicemen exercised a cultural and ethnographic impulse that had formed the cornerstone of colonial encounters from the nineteenth century onwards. The scrapbook of Lieutenant B. E. Foster-Hall of the 4th Battalion, East Surrey Regiment, includes photographs of Cairo’s mosques, the sphinx and pyramids at Giza, the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, and aerial views of the Struma and Rupel Pass. He also included an ethnographic page, titled ‘Some of My Friends in Macedonia’, which shows a collection of peoples, including Greeks, Bulgarians, Turks, and village children. There are only 28 29

Wingham to Nell, 3 October 1916, LC LIDDLE/WWI/GS1772; Wingham, diary, 30 May 1917, LC LIDDLE/WWI/GS1772. Wingham to Nell, 4 March 1917, LC LIDDLE/WWI/GS1772.

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eleven images of soldiering out of nearly a hundred photographs in his scrapbook, likely reflecting both what interested Foster-Hall (his fascination with ethnography), the fact that capturing images of combat was nearly impossible, and the reality that soldiers spent little time fighting in Macedonia and considerably more time carrying out logistical and infrastructural work.30 Similarly, the scrapbook of Second Lieutenant Sir Charles Campbell Woolley, an intelligence officer with the 8th Battalion, South Wales Borderers in Macedonia, which he dedicated to his mother in August 1920, contains pages of photographs titled ‘Types of Macedonians’, which show Greeks, Turks, Italian and French labourers, and others in Salonika.31 The scrapbook of Reginald Boulton of the 8th Battalion, Cheshire Regiment, is much the same. Boulton’s scrapbook opens with images of himself inside his officer’s billet in Baghdad, captioned ‘My Little Grey Home in the East’. Following that, on page after page, are images of local Iraqis. Images of Arab women are captioned with ‘Rare types of beauty’ and ‘Dark Indies’, while images of Boulton and comrades together with an Arab family are captioned ‘East and West’, playing to the theme of the war as a time of intercultural interaction. The most ethnographic section of his scrapbook contains thirty-six images of peoples and places over four pages, including ‘Arab Sheiks’, ‘Arab girls’, ‘Little Jewesses’, an ‘Arab leading his flock’, ‘Washing girls’, ‘A dark-eyed maid’, ‘A dirty scruffy Arab’, ‘Khurdish labourer’, ‘Arab shopowner’, ‘Arab labourer’, ‘Indian cooks’, ‘Religious fanatic (Indian)’, a ‘Jew’, and ‘Arab kiddies’ – almost every imaginable group one could have found in Baghdad. Tens of images also showcase Baghdad as a city, including images of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway, city streets, and the bazaar. Tellingly, an entire section was also devoted to ‘A Trip to Babylon – Good Friday 1919’ and displays the remains of Babylonian civilisation, including the Ctesiphon Arch, the Ishtar Gateway, and a number of bas reliefs. As mentioned in Chapter 2, Islam was of great interest to soldiers, and Boulton’s scrapbook contains tens of images of Islamic holy sites, including Sheikh Omar’s Tomb, Ezra’s Tomb, the Golden Mosque, the Al-Kadhimiya Mosque in Kadhimayn, a suburb of Baghdad, as well as Muharram celebrations by Baghdad’s Shia Muslims, commemorating the first month of the Islamic calendar and the death of Hussein, Muhammad’s grandson.32 F. E. Buckley’s scrapbook, picturing his time as a clerk in the Royal Army Service Corps in Macedonia, is comprised only of postcards, but all 30 31 32

Foster-Hall, photograph scrapbook, LIDDLE/WWI/SAL/026. Papers of Sir Charles Campbell Woolley, photograph scrapbook, LIDDLE/WWI/SAL/026. Original emphasis. Papers of R. Boulton, photograph scrapbook, IWM Documents.9722.

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depict Salonika’s people and landmarks. His scrapbook incorporates postcards of the city’s landmarks, including colourised postcards of Salonika from the Thermaic Gulf, the Rue Egnatia, Venizelos Street, the Hagia Sophia, and the New Mosque in Salonika, as well as the quayside, market square, and the Arch of Galerius. Other postcards show Salonika’s peoples, including Greeks and Slavs (presumably Bulgarians) in traditional costume, colourised ‘Macedonians’ towing oxen, a refugee family from the Vardar, gangs of comitadji, Jewish and Muslim women, newspaper sellers, peddlers, small shop owners, and ‘curiosity’ dealers. Most interestingly, Buckley’s collection also features a series of postcards produced by Color Paris in France and drawn by an artist named ‘Guyet’. The coloured sketches illustrate the mingling between soldiers and the people of Salonika, emphasising the city’s cosmopolitanism and, like Boulton’s scrapbook of Mesopotamia, the war as an intercultural meeting space. One image shows a local playing violin, leading a mixed group of Salonikans with varying skin tones and clothing. Another shows a British ‘Tommy’ getting his shoes shined by a local boy. A French officer and an Indian soldier are strolling by, while a local hauling a crate of goods passes them and another hocks goods to a member of the Royal Navy. The final image shows British VADs walking amongst a crowd of Salonikans, including a Greek Orthodox priest and a Muslim couple, while to the side of the postcard a Greek soldier buys meat from a local carver. The scrapbooks of Wingham (Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine), Foster-Hall (Mesopotamia), Boulton (Mesopotamia), and Buckley (Macedonia) are reminders not only that soldiers in the Middle East and Macedonia experienced what they thought were strange lands and peoples as part of a once-in-a-lifetime travel opportunity but also that their first instinct, when camera was in hand, and as HYPO B in The Mosquito had urged them to do, was to turn their cameras towards the people they were seeing – to photograph them, categorise them, and store them. Chronologies and Personal Histories of the War Not all scrapbooks blended photographs, postcards, and ephemera into manly tales of soldiering or a grand tour of southeastern Europe and the Middle East. Some were simply chronological narratives of the war, expressed in visual form, and others personal chronologies or histories of the conflict. As Stephen Keck has written of soldier tourism in colonial Burma, ‘The soldier’s narrative . . . invariably is shaped by the need to recount events retrospectively and to explain his or her place in it. Normally, this means that the author contextualizes his or her own experience by connecting it to the larger causes and the dimensions of

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the conflict.’33 The scrapbook of C. P. Carlson of the Honourable Artillery Company, born and raised in the small town of Tynemouth, is simply a pictorial timeline of his wartime experience in Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine. Carlson’s scrapbook contains photographs of almost every imaginable scene from the war set in chronological order. It shows the fighting at Bir Shola in western Egypt in 1916, the rubbled streets of Gaza in 1917, Christian holy sites in Jerusalem, and the EEF’s advance into northern Palestine in 1918. When Carlson had no photographs that fit his narrative, he used official photography such as stock images of the German General Otto Liman van Sanders and the Commander of the Ottoman Fourth Army Djemal Pasha. The fact that Carlson himself didn’t take these photographs didn’t stop him from adding his own captions. One photograph, in particular, depicts the military staffs of Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, and France, as well as what appears to be Egyptian officers and a number of Arab tribal sheiks. With a touch of awe and humour, Carlson captioned the multi-ethnic scene, ‘Representations of the Allies on the Palestinian Front. What!’ Yet Carlson’s scrapbook was no less a tribute to his personal experience of the war outside the Western Front than those of Allinson, for example, or Wingham. Tellingly, the first page of his scrapbook has a single photograph of Carlson posing for the camera in khaki. His sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, exposing his tanned arms. The seemingly endless desert sand flanks him on all sides. The caption simply reads ‘Myself’. The scrapbook of Captain D. M. M. Fraser, titled ‘Greece Egypt Palestine 1916-1919’, is a hybrid scrapbook/memoir. Long stretches are nothing but photographs with captions, punctuated by short memoir entries.34 Again, the photographs are mostly touristic shots of people and places, including French postcards showing ‘Type Albanaise’ at Salonika, photographs of Greek and Bulgarian women in ‘Costume du pays’ and ‘Costume de femme Turque’, ‘Scenes in the village of Kapujular’, an embroidered cloth from the café-restaurant at Olympos Palace in Salonika, the staff of the 43rd Division, images of the Struma, including ‘Balkan Cottages’, Fraser’s ‘First Patient’, and the ‘Mule Train by which we reached the Field Ambulance’. In water colours, Fraser also sketched the route he took from Salonica to Crete and then to Alexandria in July 1917; images of the troopship, the SS Sicily, he took to Alexandria; ‘Glimpses of Alexandria’, showing its buildings and squares, the Suez Canal, camel cacolets, and mule transports; and Kantara, including its 33 34

Stephen Keck, ‘Involuntary Sightseeing: Soldiers as Travel Writers and the Construction of Colonial Burma’, Victorian Literature and Culture 43 (2015), 390. Fraser, scrapbook, IWM Documents.14662.

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church and railway to el-Arish. Another watercolour sketch, the ‘Rough Sketch for Route Aug-Sept-Oct 1917’, shows the advance of the EEF through Sinai into southern Palestine. It includes images of the desert, Muslims praying near Enab, and other shots of the topography he titled ‘Palestinian Scenery’.35 The scrapbook of Second Lieutenant A. Jackson, who had fought in Macedonia with the 2nd Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment, tells a similar chronological narrative but ends by recognising that it was in Macedonia, as we saw soldiers in Chapter 3 and ex-servicemen in Chapter 5 argue, that the war was won. Jackson’s photograph album begins with a big, beautiful, French-produced coloured map of Salonika and the Thermaic Gulf. Subsequent pages contain photographs of Greek Orthodox Churches, mosques, redoubts, and trenches in the Struma Valley; photographs of artillery, Lake Butkova, the historic sites of Salonika, including the Old Roman gateway, scenes of displaced Salonikans after the great fire of 1917; photos of Salonika before and after the fire, as well as photographs of the Seres Road and of his regiment on road duty. On the final page of the scrapbook is a typescript copy of Arthur Winnington-Ingram’s appeal to the British public in The Times.36 In the scrapbook of Lieutenant E. F. Bolton of the 1/5th Battalion, Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment, titled ‘Mesopotamian Souvenirs’, he affixed hand-drawn pencil sketches of the sun setting on the Tigris, outpost lines near Ramadi, and evening scenes on the Euphrates. Bolton’s scrapbook starts with his embarkation papers, followed by newspaper clippings from the Daily Mirror and the Illustrated Times of India of the BritishIndian Army’s march to Baghdad. Two British Army commanders make an appearance in Bolton’s scrapbook, with newspaper clippings of Maude’s death and Townshend’s surrender of Kut al-Amara. Bolton also included logistical and topographical visuals, such as an aerial sketch of the Ottoman Army’s trenches at Hit. Also in his scrapbook are photographs of street scenes and Arab families in Basra, mosques, road making, the defences at Ramadi, as well as picnics with nurses in Baghdad and Amara.37 The scrapbooks of Fraser (Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine), Jackson (Macedonia), and Bolton (Mesopotamia) make clear that whether or not soldiers were consciously constructing their post-war collections as visual reminders of a martial or leisurely past, ex-servicemen put considerable care and effort into their scrapbooks. For the most part they were meticulously constructed, using commercially produced, hardbound 35 36 37

Fraser, photograph scrapbook, IWM Documents.14662. Papers of A. Jackson, photograph scrapbook, LC LIDDLE/WWI/SAL/035. Papers of E. F. Bolton, photograph scrapbook, LC LIDDLE/WWI/MES/012.

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albums made by Kodak and others. The arrangement of photographs either by theme or chronology would have been a time-consuming affair, forcing the soldier to sift through hundreds of wartime photographs. Soldiers made a concerted effort to produce a rounded narrative by combining personal photography with official images and postcards and filled their scrapbooks with images not only of themselves, the geography, and the hardships of war but also of their comrades and the campaign’s dominant personalities. To an interested family member, these albums could serve as an adequate narrative in visual form, enhanced by the personal touch of a loved one at war. Conclusion Writing of Canadian soldiers’ notoriety as souvenir-hunters on the battlefield, historian Tim Cook has described war souvenirs and material culture: ‘They remembered the war because it was imprinted on them. Moreover, it was not just the horrors of war that shaped the soldiers’ experiences . . . For many veterans the war was worth remembering, even as it could never be forgotten.’38 In the years after the First World War, photography, practiced on such a wide scale by soldiers outside the Western Front during the war, took on new meaning. When ex-servicemen compiled their wartime photographs into scrapbooks, they did so at a time when efforts to commemorate the war were becoming more about the needs of the community and the nation rather than the men who had fought. As private sites of memory, scrapbooks were a space where ex-servicemen could generate an entirely different, and entirely personal, memory of the conflict – one that ran counter to that of the infantryman on the Western Front. Sometimes that memory was about soldiering far from France and Flanders, subject to the climate and environment of the Middle East and Macedonia. Other times scrapbooks were about exploring these ‘non-European’ spaces – Macedonia was always a grey area – and showing the peoples, places, and landmarks soldiers had seen. And, further still, scrapbooks could be about an ex-serviceman’s personal experience of the war, from start to finish. Moreover, scrapbooks show that, at least privately, ex-servicemen unquestionably retained a dual identity that was one half soldiering and one half tourism. Perhaps this was a way to forget the bad, to focus on the good and the pleasures of their wartime experience. Despite all the hardships they endured, the travel that they engaged in seemed to outweigh 38

Cook, ‘Tokens of Fritz’, 226.

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the hardships in private. Additionally, there’s also a clear difference in how ex-servicemen remembered their campaigns privately, in scrapbooks, where none of the language of liberation or crusade appears, and publicly, where they fought tooth and nail to improve the public profile of their campaigns. It may be that in private, and in retrospect, the moral meaning of the war paled in comparison to the opportunity to travel and encounter different peoples and different cultures. The politics of the day took a back seat to the peoples and lands that soldiers had travelled. In private, there was no need to remind themselves that what they had done mattered. This reminds us that the ways in which ex-servicemen chose to remember the First World War in public and in private were very different and catered to different needs. Although he never composed a scrapbook – at least not one that was deposited in any archive – Lance Corporal Loudon of the Royal Scots Regiment and his use of photography as a site of memory is a fitting way to end. Loudon, from Edinburgh, was nineteen years old when he first tried to volunteer for service in March 1915. His original attempt to enlist was rejected due to poor eyesight. Yet Loudon was determined to take part in the war. He spent the following six months memorising the placement of characters on the eyesight test. In July 1915, after months of preparation, he passed the test and enlisted in the 4th Battalion, Royal Scots. Over the next three and a half years Loudon fought at Gallipoli, in Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine, and finally on the Western Front. Yet what he chose to remember, decades after the war, was not the bloody beaches of the Dardanelles or the ferocious fighting he witnessed during the German Spring Offensive and the Hundred Days Offensive. Sixty years after he fought in the Middle East, the only memory of his war that he kept out in the open was a framed photograph of himself and his travelling party at the sphinx, which hung from the living room wall of his home in Glasgow.39

39

Papers of R. Loudon, unpublished memoir, IWM Documents.1387.

Conclusion

In August 1932, Field Marshal Lord Allenby, formerly the commander in chief of the EEF, spoke to members of the British Legion in Portmadoc, Wales. Many of the Welsh Legionaries in the small crowd had served with him in Palestine.1 Others had likely been with the Welsh Regiment or the Royal Welch Fusiliers in Macedonia and Mesopotamia. Fourteen years after the war had ended, he informed the gathering, he still heard and was often pulled into ‘disputes as to which theatre of operations, which front or field of war, was the scene of worst hardship. France, Palestine, Salonika, Dardanelles, Mesopotamia, or elsewhere.’ On the day, Allenby was in no mood to put one campaign above the others. All had suffered equally. ‘From what I saw of war; in Flanders, France, Palestine, and Syria’, he told the Legionaries, ‘and from what I know, from others, on other fields; I am assured that, whether in East or West, or Sea or Land; from the ice and snow of Northern Russia, to the torrid heat of East and Central Africa there was nothing to choose’.2 His speech, in any case, was meant to impress upon the crowd of ex-servicemen the folly of war and the need to learn from past mistakes at a time when the world political situation was deteriorating and disillusionment with the war, focused overwhelmingly on the horrors of the trenches of France and Flanders, was perhaps at its height. The debate that Allenby kept hearing about and being dragged into was not new. As this book has shown, soldiers during the war knew of it and engaged in it, writing home to family, friends, and loved ones, newspapers, and periodicals. Ex-servicemen after the war, long before Allenby’s speech at Portmadoc, continued to engage in it, in public in their memoirs and to a lesser extent in private in their scrapbooks. Both during the war and after, they argued, they had fought, suffered, and they too mattered. 1 2

Edinburgh Evening News, 29 August 1932, 6. Allenby Speech at Portmadoc, 27 August 1932, Allenby 3/4, LHCMA.

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The hardships of soldiering, or perhaps more accurately campaigning, in the Middle East and Macedonia were a constant subject of discussion. Soldiers experienced and wrote of oppressive heat and brutal cold, khamsin winds, and the isolation of manning desert outposts in Sinai and Mesopotamia or rock-strewn hillsides in the sparsely populated peaks and valleys of rural Macedonia. Swarms of flies frustrated men and made basic tasks such as eating and sleeping a struggle. Disease was a major problem at all times. Non-battle casualties far exceeded battle casualties, and malaria, more than any other disease, hospitalised soldiers in the hundreds of thousands. During the war, soldiers such as C. E. Winterbourne began to understand that suffering from disease in the Middle East or elsewhere held little social capital; only being wounded or dying on the Western Front was thought to be a worthy sacrifice. Some soldiers even suggested that it was preferable to be fighting on the Western Front because of its lack of disease and sickness. Not only had soldiers been subjected to extreme climatic and environmental conditions, made worse by tropical diseases that the RAMC struggled to treat and the imperial public failed to recognise as equal to more traditional battlefield wounds, but also the links to home that made fighting in France and Flanders more bearable were either unavailable or unreliable.3 Leave home was rarely granted, even for officers. The feeling of being condemned to sit out the war in the Middle East or Macedonia, what V. J. Seligman wrote of as ‘solitary confinement’, weighed heavily on the minds of the troops, manifesting as curious psychological conditions like ‘Balkan Tap’ or ‘Macedonian Madness’.4 While one link to home, leave, was completely broken, the other link, correspondence, was bent to the point of breaking. Most letters certainly got through to a soldier, of that there is little doubt. Yet letters often arrived weeks or months late, leaving soldiers anxious, worried, and sometimes distraught over the delays. Some letters never made it at all and instead ended up at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, the ships that carried them torpedoed by German submarines. Likewise, due to long mail delays, the contents of parcels often arrived spoiled. It was during the war, after experiencing the hardships of the fighting in Sinai, Palestine, Macedonia, and Mesopotamia, that soldiers were first concerned that what they were doing wasn’t fully understood by those at home and that the Western Front was the measuring stick with which ‘true’ soldiering would be assessed. While soldiering or campaigning was one half of experiencing the other wars, touring was the other half. The war was the first and likely only 3

Roper, Secret Battle.

4

Seligman, Salonica Side-Show, 61.

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chance most of these men from Britain, Australia, and New Zealand were to have to travel so far afield and to do so at no personal expense. Wartime tourism gave soldiers the opportunity to tour the sites of the biblical world, whether in Palestine, Mesopotamia, or Macedonia, the remains of Greco-Roman, Sumerian, and Babylonian civilisations, Islam (which was more a subject of fascination than scorn or derision), and the cosmopolitan urban city-centres of Alexandria, Cairo, Salonika, Jerusalem, and Baghdad, which wowed soldiers with their polyglot, multicultural populations – cities that seemed to soldiers, perhaps naively, uniquely cosmopolitan compared to London, but certainly more diverse than Leeds or Doncaster, Sydney or Wellington. Some sites disappointed, such as the Christian holy sites of Palestine, while some enchanted, such as the Dome of the Rock or the sphinx and the pyramids at Giza. Yet the pleasure of viewing the tourist attractions of the Middle East and, to a lesser extent, Macedonia (almost exclusively Salonika) was never thought to be an adequate substitute for leave home. More importantly, British and Dominion soldiers alike, although Australians might have paid greater attention to agriculture than their British counterparts, developed an imperial mindscape, similar to but not identical to what German soldiers developed in Eastern Europe. To them, the signs of social, cultural, and economic backwardness, of a kind of irreversible civilisational decay, were everywhere. Having experienced a much different war than their counterparts on the Western Front or at Gallipoli, British and Dominion soldiers tried to find meaning in their Middle Eastern and Macedonian campaigns. In 1914 and 1915, being away from the Western Front and the Dardanelles led to feelings of embarrassment and ‘fed-upness’ for both British soldiers and ANZACs. But from 1916 onwards, with the failure of Gallipoli behind them and with the realities of attrition on the Western Front clearer, the relative safety of the campaigns in the Middle East and Macedonia took on new meaning. Soldiers, who we are reminded again and again were civilians first and soldiers second, wanted to survive the war. Staying away from the Western Front increased the odds of surviving and returning home to their families, and if that meant sitting out the Somme or the German Spring Offensive, even when it appeared that the outcome of the war was hanging in the balance, so be it. Soldiers also tried to understand what their campaigns meant on a strategic level; were they leading the empire closer towards or further from victory? A surprising number of soldiers placed their campaigns in the context of the empire’s wider war effort and recognised that the war was, in fact, a global conflict and not one confined to Western Europe. In short, their campaigns mattered to

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the outcome of the war. There were those, too, who, like ‘westerner’ politicians and military strategists, felt that the ‘sideshows’ were unnecessary and unwarranted distractions from the war’s main battleground, the Western Front. In finding a moral meaning to their campaigns, some soldiers in the Middle East, following the Balfour Declaration and the capture of Jerusalem in December 1917, turned to Zionism. Yet more wrote about the campaigns against the Ottoman Empire as a liberation from Ottoman despotism and misrule. Soldiers used a secular, not religious or medieval (at least not one that the medieval crusaders would have understood) language of crusade to justify the empire’s war effort. While this language may have in part derived from Wellington House’s anti-Ottoman propaganda and a need to play to the ‘Wilsonian moment’ of self-determination, the benefits of indirect and liberal British, not direct and authoritarian Ottoman rule, as soldiers perceived the two systems, seemed to be on full display in 1917 and 1918 in Palestine and Mesopotamia. Neither crusade nor liberation seemed to fit Macedonia, at least not for soldiers during the war. Instead, fighting in Macedonia became about paving the way for a future Greece to reclaim its past glory. Soldiers’ use of a language of liberal imperialism and the civilising mission further suggests that many fighting outside the Western Front not only relied on the primary group and military professionalism to sustain combat morale and motivation (more important during than before or after battle) but also on the belief that a legitimate demand had been asked of them and that the cause for which they were fighting was just. While the meaning of the other wars was open to debate, all soldiers were certain that their sacrifice and their part in the empire’s war effort, and maybe even its victorious outcome, had been either forgotten by those at home or, just as upsetting, misrepresented. To become a part of the empire’s ‘economy of sacrifice’ and to show that they had paid their fair share, soldiers reminded their loved ones that they had fought and suffered as much as those on the Western Front and at Gallipoli. Cowards and shirkers they were not. Some soldiers, such as F. D. Day, battled scepticism and opposition from those closest to them – in Day’s case, his own father. Other soldiers took aim at the press and popular wartime figures such as The Tatler’s Eve. After all, some soldiers argued, had the campaigns in Palestine and Macedonia not almost single-handedly won the war or at the very least set in motion the downfall of the Central Powers? After the war ended ex-servicemen continued to fear that they had been forgotten and misrepresented. This fear looked more and more the case

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by the late 1920s and early 1930s, when disillusionment with the war, focused mostly on the Western Front (in Britain), intensified. As I have argued, all men in the interwar period had to have a claim to suffering, and having suffered for the empire became a central theme for men in Sinai, Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Macedonia. Ex-servicemen fought back by writing for the public, publishing their wartime diaries, memoirs, and other accounts. Retrospectively, themes such as liberation (Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Serbia), the civilising mission (Macedonia), and a belief that the ‘sideshows’ had played a decisive role in the empire’s and the Allies’ victory (Palestine and Macedonia) were made more forcefully and by a greater number of ex-servicemen than they had been during the war. The circumstances were, of course, different. As John More, who had fought in Palestine with the 1/6th Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers, had explained, looking back allowed him to see the war years more clearly and to make connections that had never occurred to him during the war. Indeed, the benefit of hindsight allowed ex-servicemen to look at the capitulation of Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire and to draw what they thought was a clear line that led to the defeat of Austria-Hungary and, ultimately, Germany. In public, in their memoirs and other retrospective writings, ex-servicemen persistently presented the other wars as hard fought, meaningful campaigns. In contrast, in private, ex-servicemen’s scrapbooks are almost entirely about travel and camaraderie. In these intensely personal sites of memory, there was no need to persuade the public that their campaigns had mattered. From the beginning of the First World War to the end of the interwar period, soldiers who had fought outside the Western Front – against the Ottoman Empire in Sinai, Palestine, and Mesopotamia, and against Bulgaria in Macedonia – were locked into a somewhat hopeless struggle, a struggle to persuade those at home that their campaigns were worthwhile contributions to the war effort. Today, it seems, the worst fears of the nearly two million men who fought in the Middle East and Macedonia have been realised. Romani, Gaza, Beersheba, Jerusalem, Amman, Kut al-Amara, Sheikh Sa’ad, Baghdad, and Doiran – these towns and cities of the Middle East and southeastern Europe do not hold a prominent position in the collective memory of the war in Britain, Australia, or New Zealand, at least not at a national level, perhaps with the exception of Gaza and Beersheba in Australia. Unlike Loos or the Somme, Ypres or Gallipoli, they were not the scenes of industrialised carnage and appalling human loss that have, rightly or wrongly, come to define the conflict. But for millions of British and Dominion soldiers who were sent overseas to fight the Central Powers, that medley of

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Middle Eastern and European places, some remote and unknown, some cosmopolitan and well known, were the names that mattered most to them. That was where their war was fought. And for the tens of thousands buried in Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries from Ismailia to Mount Scopus and from Basra to Lake Doiran, that was where they died.

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Institutional Journals Army Quarterly

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Index

Alexandretta, 35 Alexandria, 70 soldier attitudes to, 78–9 Allenby, Edmund, 6, 28, 29, 33, 36, 60, 67, 109, 116, 117–18, 124, 127, 143, 173, 188, 191, 220 American Civil War, 167, 206 American Red Cross, 128 Amery, Leo, 67 Arabs dislike of, 80, 82 liberation of, 122–4 women, 87 Armageddon, 170 Armenian genocide, 120, 126, 186 Armistice Day, 207 Army Quarterly, 195 Arsuf, 191 artillery, 3, 103, 144, 182 Artois, Battle of, 102 Assur, 82 Aswan, 67 atrocities in Belgium, 95 Australia in Palestine, 157 Australian military formations 1st Light Horse Regiment, 146 8th Light Horse Regiment, 37 Australian and New Zealand Mounted Division, 106 Australian War Memorial Museum, 171 Austria-Hungary occupation of Serbia, 197 surrender, 114, 201–2 backsheesh, 83–4 Baedekers, 64 Baghdad, 52, 58, 131–2 capture of, 46, 111, 115 improvement under British, 112, 131–2 Ottoman modernization efforts, 81 soldier attitudes to, 79, 81

244

Balfour declaration, 116 Balkan tap. See Macedonian madness Basra, 35, 200 improvement under British, 197 soldier attitudes to, 38, 81–2, 84 Basra sore. See illness:septic sores Bedouins, 74 Beersheba, 81 Beirut, 81, 90 Belgium liberation of, 193–4 bell tents, 22 Bethany, 80 Bethlehem, 82 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 63, 191 Bottomley, Horatio, 155 British military formations 2/15th Battalion, London Regiment, 60, 67 2/16th (County of London) Battalion, 106 2/2nd Battalion, London Regiment, 152 2/5th London Field Ambulance, 24 54th (East Anglian) Division, 106 60th (London) Division, 35, 59, 152 9th Mountain Artillery Brigade, 68 Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment, 192 East Riding Imperial Yeomanry, 46 Imperial Camel Corps, 43 Royal Welch Fusiliers, 220 Shropshire Yeomanry, 23 South Nottinghamshire Hussars, 30 Welsh Regiment, 220 British-Indian military formations 7th (Meerut) Division, 157 Bulgarian Army, 149, 156, 200 Bulgarians refugees, 82 Cairo, 52 red-light district, 87

245

Index retailers, 209 soldier attitudes to, 78, 209 Cairo Express Agency, 67 campaigning, 177–80 casualties in Macedonia, Mesopotamia, Sinai, and Palestine, 26, 108 chaplains as tour guides, 61 Chauvel, Charles, 171 Chauvel, Harry, 167 Christianity difference between Orthodoxy and Anglicanism, 76 language of sacrifice, 141 missionaries and crusading language, 185 Christmas cards from Mesopotamia, 35, 111 from Palestine, 152 Churchill, Winston, 201 civilizing mission in Macedonia, 135–6 combat motivation, 136–7 comfort funds, 144 concert parties Who won the war and why, 158 Cox, Percy, 130 crusades Mesopotamian campaign, 196 nineteenth-century revival, 184–5 Palestine campaign, 118–22, 182–96 Ctesiphon, Battle of, 108, 141

Falls, Cyril, 175 fear of being unknown, 145–57 forgotten feeling of, 169–73 Forty Thousand Horsemen, 171 Franco-Prussian War, 71, 184 Gaza, 183, 192 capture of, 100 Gaza, First Battle of, 153, 175 Gaza, Second Battle of, 20, 108 Gaza, Third Battle of, 143 German Army, 106 German spring offensive soldier attitudes to, 106–7 Greeks compared to ancient Greeks, 198 dislike of, 198 refugees, 82 women, 198 Gullett, Henry, 157 Haig, Douglas, 155, 201 Hanna, Battle of, 153 Haret al-Wasa, 87 Holy Land in popular culture, 64 home front soldier attitudes to, 146–57 homesickness, 88–91 Huj, Battle of, 170, 192

Damascus soldier attitudes to, 80, 90 Dardanelles campaign casualties, 30, 108 compared to Egypt, 96, 102 disease cholera, 28, 108 compared to physical wounding, 31–3 malaria, 28–30, 32–3, 101, 135, 139, 156, 163, 180, 182 typhus, 28 Doiran, Battle of, 88, 108, 149

I, King Richard, 124, 184, 191 illness dysentery, 28, 30, 35, 163, 182 fever, 24, 28 septic sores, 25–7 sunstroke, 23–4, 148 Indian government, 178 war effort, 110 insects flies, 25–6, 150, 156 mosquitoes, 26, 29, 40, 151, 180 Islam, 118 importance of Jerusalem, 118 soldier attitudes to, 86–7

economy of sacrifice, 141–2 Egypt nineteenth-century fascination, 63–4 Egypt Exploration Fund, 63 El Arish, 191 estaminets, 37

Jackson, Stonewall, 167 Jerusalem advance to, 43 capture of, 116, 117–18, 155, 172, 187 disappointment with, 72–7 guidebooks, 57 improvement under British, 126–9

246

Index

Jerusalem (cont.) liberation of, 120–4, 176, 185, 188 Ottoman modernization efforts, 81 retailers, 209 soldier attitudes to, 79 soldier tourism, 58–62 under Roman rule, 189 Jessop, William, 76 Jewish colonies, 129 Akir, 185 Katrah, 185 Richon leZion, 121 John Bull, 155 Jordan River, 170, 186 Jordan Valley, 23, 25, 29, 30 Kalamariá, 83 Kantara, 181 Karnak soldier tourism, 67 Kodak, 208 Kosturino, Battle of, 27 Kut al-Amara POWs, 174 siege of, 103, 108, 109, 142, 153, 172 soldier attitudes to, 81, 172 Lake Ardzan, 29 Lake Doiran, 29, 179 Law, Bonar, 168 leave, 33–7, 40–1, 47, 55, 59, 66, 88–91, 107, 139, 158–60 letter writing causes of delays, 41–5 emotional effects, 45–7 green envelope, 97 liberal imperialism postwar, 196–8 wartime, 126–37 Lloyd George, David, 2, 5, 8, 109, 201 Loos, Battle of, 102, 141, 152 Ludd, 78 Ludendorff, Erich, 199 Luxor soldier tourism, 67 Macedonian madness, 40–1 Maitland-Davidson, Olivia, 155 Malta, 42 Manchester Guardian, 31 Mangin, Charles, 112 Massey, W. T., 145 Maude, Stanley, 6, 28, 115 Maxwell, John, 57

McMahon, Henry, 99 medievalism, 118, 183 Mediterranean Sea, 191 dangers of, 35, 42 memoirs critical reviews, 175 soldiers’ use of, 168 memory of the Sinai and Palestine campaigns in interwar British and imperial culture, 169–71 of the war in interwar Britain, 167–8 Miller, Beatrix Brice, 110 Milne, George, 6, 33, 173, 174, 178, 199, 200–1 Milner, Lord, 140 mindscape, 52–4, 77–88 misrepresentation post-war feeling of, 175–82 wartime feeling of, 145–57 Montague, C. E., 175 motorcycles, 156, 211 Murray, Archibald, 9, 155 Neuve Chappelle, Battle of, 141, 152 New Zealand military formations New Zealand (Maori) Pioneer Battalion, 99–100 New Zealand Mounted Rifles, 100 New Zealand Reinforcements, 120 Wellington Mounted Rifles Regiment, 121 Newfoundland, 101 newsreel films, 143–4 North Africa Second World War, 20 Occupied Enemy Territory Administration, 128 Ottoman Army, 29, 48, 123 Ottoman Empire modernization efforts, 81 parcels causes of delays, 43, 44–7 emotional effects, 44–6 Pasha, Djemal, 124 Pathé News, 143 Pearce, George, 145 Port Said, 50, 80 prisoners-of-war British, 144 German, 143, 154 Ottoman, 143, 144, 154

247

Index propaganda anti-Ottoman, 124–6 prostitution, 87 Punch, 47, 118, 194 quinine, 29 Qurna soldier attitudes to, 82 Rafa, Battle of, 153 reintegration of soldiers, 32–3 Robertson, William, 36, 109, 144, 155, 158, 201 Romani, Battle of, 154 Royal Flying Corps, 171 sacrifice, 132 Salonika soldier attitudes to, 78–80, 83 Sassoon, Siegfried, 104 Scotland casualties, 30 Serbia liberation of, 197–8 Shaw, Bernard, 1 Sheikh Sa’ad, Battle of, 152 Shepheard’s Hotel, 67 shirking, 146–7 Smuts, Jan, 67, 109 soldier photography, 62, 70, 207–10 soldier settlement Australia, 171 Mesopotamia, 112, 131 Palestine, 129 Somme, Battle of, 20, 94, 103 fear of, 105–6 South Pacific Second World War, 20 Storrs, Ronald, 61 Struma River, 179 Valley, 23, 29, 38 Suez Canal, 42 survival soldier attitudes to, 102–8

Sykes, Mark, 115, 124–6 Syria and Palestine Relief Committee, 129 tanks, 153 The Lancet, 27 The Times, 31 Thomas Cook, 64, 65 Thomas, Lowell, 169 Townshend, Charles, 28, 46, 178 Urabi Revolt, 63 Venizelos, Eleftherios, 91 Verdun, Battle of, 114 victory soldiers’ belief in Macedonia, 158–60 soldiers’ belief in Palestine, 160–2 Wadi, Battle of, 153 Wales casualties, 30 water, 25 water pipeline, 25 weather cold, 99 heat, 20–3 khamsin, 20–3 Wellington House, 124–6 Western Front compared to the Palestine campaign, 194 desire to go to, 96–102 disillusionment, 162, 168, 174 Wilson, Woodrow, 124 Winnington-Ingram, Arthur, 139–41 With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia, 169 YMCA evangelical efforts, 76 promotion of tourism, 58, 61 recreation, 143 Ypres, Battle of, 103, 152 Zeppelin raids, 35 Zionism, 116–18, 121