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 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.