Justin Fantauzzo's The Other Wars: The Experience and Memory of the First World War in the Middle East and Macedonia is an important reminder that the First World War was a global conflict fought in numerous theater thousands of miles apart. Based on his doctoral thesis with new research, the focus is on the experience of service in Egypt, Sinai, Palestine, Mesopotamia (which he sometimes describes together as “the Middle East”), and Macedonia. The book is not, however, a conventional military history of the campaigns in these territories but an enjoyable insight into the lives of British and Dominion soldiers who served there. Fantauzzo uses a wide variety of sources, such as diaries, letters, memoirs, scrapbooks, and photographs to convey the experience of war service. Fantauzzo's stated aim is to explore their experience and memory in a theater “away from the Western Front” (2). The soldiers, not material culture, are the “agents of memory” in this book (9), which is organized into two parts. The first part explores soldiers’ feelings about their war service in the Middle East and Macedonia. The second part is about the memory of the war in these locations in the interwar years.

In part one, Fantauzzo argues that the Western Front came to be understood as the only front where it mattered to serve. He uses the propaganda image of “Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?” to posit that a person would respond differently if the answer was “the Middle East” or “Macedonia” (176). Soldiers responded in a variety of ways to their service in these non-European theaters. One response was to express their belief that there had been equality of suffering across all theaters. While the casualty figures were incomparable with those on the Western Front, soldiers in these theaters suffered from illness and diseases (many of them insect-borne) such as malaria, diphtheria, cholera, dysentery, and sunstroke, all of which had the capacity to lay low thousands of troops at a time. Fantauzzo also explores the views of the soldiers as tourists. Although they were not able to return home on leave, they did have the opportunity to visit sites of great cultural significance such as Jerusalem and Giza, which, in normal times, they could not have afforded to see. Here, Fantauzzo eschews analytic concepts such as “othering” and the “racializing” of individuals when discussing descriptions of the locals by the visiting soldiers. He prefers to use Gabriel Liulevicius's framework of the “mindscape” and extends this to British and (white) Dominion troops. He argues their views on “backward” populations were formed by an “imperial mindscape” that blended with notions of civilizing missions (52–54). Fantauzzo reveals the ways in which soldiers sought to find meaning for their service, whether in characterizing it as the liberation of Christian and Muslim peoples from Ottoman rule, the need to open up another front, or in more personal ways. He concludes the first part by providing evidence that soldiers felt they had been forgotten by the British public transfixed by events on the Western Front and the belief that their war service had been misrepresented as having an easier time of it.

As noted, part two of the book focuses on the memory of the war. Here Fantauzzo explores the public memory of the campaigns in contradistinction to private memories of war service. His readings of the sources reveal a dichotomy between the public and private memory of the war, and he thus provides studies of both. In the interwar period, many memoirs were written by participants in these campaigns to counter the narrative that the Western Front was the only front that mattered and the misrepresentation that service elsewhere was a “picnic” (176). He argues “To the public, machine-gun fire and artillery shrapnel were obvious symbols of . . . war . . . not the vector-borne illnesses and bacterial water of campaigning in the Middle East or Macedonia” (182). Soldiers linked their service in Palestine to the crusades of old as a way of showing that they had made a mark on world history and in an effort to shape the public memory of the war.

In an illuminating final section on private memory, Fantauzzo studies the scrapbooks, used by soldiers as sites of memory. In these private spaces, many of the claims about equality of suffering on the battlefield, crusading against Ottoman oppression, liberating Arabs and Jews, coming to the aid of the Serbs, civilizing Middle Easterners and Southeastern Europeans, and playing a decisive part in the wider war effort are absent. Instead, they are mostly about travel, tourism, and camaraderie.

Some of Fantauzzo's decisions regarding the structure of the book are left unexplained. Why were the experiences of British, Australian, and New Zealand soldiers the only ones considered when the Indian Army made up most up the soldiers across the Middle Eastern and Macedonian campaigns? Could service in Africa also be considered? Could other British colonial forces who served in noncombat roles in these regions, such as the West Indians and Nigerians in the Inland Water Transport and the Mauritian and Maltese Labour Corps, be included in the study? Also, given the prevalence of racial thinking in Britain and the Dominions in this period, I would have liked more discussion of Fantauzzo's views on the “imperial mindscape” and its origins. And lastly, could there have been more discussion on gender and masculinities?

This book will be useful for scholars and public alike who wish to know more about what it was like to serve in theatres “away from the Western Front” (20). That I found it rich in intimate, personal detail throughout underscores Fantauzzo's decision to center the experiences of soldiers as “agents of memory” (168), the heart of his thesis.