2 - Touring

Summary

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.