4 - Forgotten

Summary

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.