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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.
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