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.

Chapter 2 looks at soldier tourism. This chapter argues that perhaps no other British or Dominion soldiers during the war embodied the dual identity of soldier-tourist more than those who fought in the Middle East and Macedonia. Soldiers were keen to tour the sites of 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. Utilising historian Gabriel Liulevicius’ 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 in the Middle East and Macedonia did much the same. British and Dominion soldiers 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 demonstrates, what soldiers saw while touring the Middle East and Macedonia directly contributed to how they found meaning in being away from the Western Front.

Chapter 6 examines the private memory of ex-servicemen who fought in the Middle East and Macedonia. It uses a source not meant to influence public opinion at all: scrapbooks. This chapter makes two arguments. First, it argues that scrapbooks were spaces of private memory and, to borrow from Pierre Nora, sites of memory. British and Dominion soldiers who had photographed the war and spent most of their service in the Middle East and Macedonia had to remember the war differently. Their campaigns bore little resemblance to the conflict on the Western Front. Ex-servicemen used scrapbooks as a way of actively constructing a past that was both recognisable and acceptable to them. Some ex-servicemen pictured the war as a relentless struggle against the Ottomans or Bulgarians, 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 pictured the war in chronological order, slotting their personal experience of the war into the narrative. While publicly, in memoirs, ex-servicemen made a number of claims that were meant to compete with the Western Front, privately, in scrapbooks, ex-servicemen focused almost entirely on travel, tourism, and camaraderie.

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 in France and Flanders, such as at Gaza or Ctesiphon, harsh environmental and climatic conditions, geographic isolation, the threat of insects and tropical diseases such as malaria, 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 on the Western Front, and that they had done their ‘bit’.

Chapter 5 looks at the public memory of the campaigns in the Middle East and Macedonia as expressed in the memoirs of ex-servicemen. This chapter 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. Using Jay Winter and Antoine Prost’s argument about soldier memoir writers as ‘agents of memory’, this chapter argues that ex-servicemen used their memoirs as a tool to persuade the public that they, too, had suffered and sacrificed during the war. This chapter also 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 holy war but instead of liberal imperialism and a crusade on behalf of western civilisation. This chapter also returns to the soldiers’ ideas, shown in Chapter 3, that their campaigns had brought civilisation to Arabs and 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, emphasising the need to consider as separate wartime writings from post-war memoirs.

Chapter 3 looks at what the campaigns in the Middle East and Macedonia meant to soldiers. In the early stages of the campaigns, many soldiers were fed up at being ‘exiled’ from the Western Front and embarrassed not to be fighting Germans. So far from the Western Front, they had to find a different meaning for their campaigns. Some soldiers found a personal meaning in the greater likelihood that they would survive the war, while others, mostly pre-war regular soldiers, were concerned about career mobility. Strategic and moral meanings were also found. In diaries and letters home, soldiers argued that they were contributing to the global war effort and the defeat of the Central Powers. Others argued that they were liberating Arabs and Jews from Ottoman misrule and bringing the benefits of liberal imperialism to the supposedly backward peoples of the Middle East and the Greeks. 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.

Chapter 4 examines the idea of the ‘forgotten army’. Whether in the Middle East or Macedonia, soldiers during the war were absolutely certain that their part in the conflict – 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 ways worse was their fear that those at home had badly misrepresented the war outside the Western Front, recognising 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 British Salonika Force (BSF), alongside their French, Greek, and Serbian allies, forced the surrender of Bulgaria, while the Egyptian Expeditionary Force’s (EEF) northwards 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.