1 - Soldiering

Summary

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’.