Lawrence of Arabia’s War: the Arabs, the British and the remaking of the Middle East in WWI
NEIL FAULKNER

For most Britons, the First World War is synonymous with Flanders mud – that or Verdun – while Australians and New Zealanders remember Gallipoli as a defining moment in their history. The Ottoman front is largely forgotten here. It is Flanders that our war poets wrote about and where our ancestors died – almost half a million at the Somme.

At the time, however, the British and the Germans set great store by achieving a breakthrough on the Sultan’s southern flank. Neil Faulkner writes that the Germans had been investing in the Ottoman Empire for years. Hoping to restore the “Sick Man of Europe” to a semblance of health, they retrained its army and financed the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway – whose construction aroused great apprehension in Britain – while the Kaiser made a showy trip to Jerusalem, where he was florid in expressions of admiration for Islam, styling himself Islam’s “protector”. If push came to shove, Germany hoped to stir up a jihad among the restive Muslims of India and Egypt that would see the British thrown out of both. The game would then be up for Britannia, irrespective of what ­happened in Europe.