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.

Chapter 6 examines the private memory of ex-servicemen who fought in the Middle East and Macedonia. It uses a source not meant to influence public opinion at all: scrapbooks. This chapter makes two arguments. First, it argues that scrapbooks were spaces of private memory and, to borrow from Pierre Nora, sites of memory. British and Dominion soldiers who had photographed the war and spent most of their service in the Middle East and Macedonia had to remember the war differently. Their campaigns bore little resemblance to the conflict on the Western Front. Ex-servicemen used scrapbooks as a way of actively constructing a past that was both recognisable and acceptable to them. Some ex-servicemen pictured the war as a relentless struggle against the Ottomans or Bulgarians, and the harsh climatic and environmental conditions of the Middle East and Macedonia. Others pictured the war as an exciting episode of travel. Others still pictured the war in chronological order, slotting their personal experience of the war into the narrative. While publicly, in memoirs, ex-servicemen made a number of claims that were meant to compete with the Western Front, privately, in scrapbooks, ex-servicemen focused almost entirely on travel, tourism, and camaraderie.