from Part II - Memory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2019
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.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.