Camp And Combat On The Sinai And Palestine Front

Dunes, sandstorms, thirst, jackals, malaria, and desperate combat between freezing mountain boulders: these are not the most common images of the First World War. For hundreds of thousands of British Empire soldiers, this was the Great War. Far from the stagnation of the Western Front, these men lived lives of vast and sudden change: feast and famine, drought and flood, trench-fighting and clashes on the open sand.

Drawn from Britain, Australia, India, Ireland, South Africa, New Zealand, the Caribbean, and even from the US and Latin America, they faced a bewilderingly complicated mixture of races and religions: in their enemies, among the locals, and even in their own force. Based largely on common soldiers' accounts and official documents, this book analyzes the soldiers' daily lives, with their terrors, joys, and struggles.

It illuminates the hardships, variety and complexity of the soldier's experience in this oft-forgotten but important campaign and explains the causes behind the many faces of this war. Review: This important book restores the war in the Middle East to our attention and emphasises that the struggle against the Ottomans posed as many challenges and hardships for the men who fought it as did the better-known experiences at Gallipoli and on the Western Front. - Professor Jeffrey Grey, UNSW, Australia