Book Review

Far-off fields of conflict

Wings Over the Desert

With the recent death of the last British soldier to have fought in it, “the Great War” has finally receded into history. When we think back to it now, we remember mainly the war in the trenches and the killing fields of Flanders and northern France. But we had another significant adversary besides Germany and Austria-Hungary in the shape of the Ottoman Empire; and what was then called the Near East was another major ­theatre of war stretching from Egypt to the Caucasus, where lives were lost on a scale which is now almost as hard to realise as the scale of the losses on the Western Front. As Lloyd George reminded Clemenceau in October 1918, in Mesopotamia, Gallipoli and Palestine the British had “captured three or four Turkish armies and incurred hundreds of thousands of casualties” and by the end had no fewer than 500,000 British troops on Turkish soil – “British” then including Australians, New Zealanders and a large portion of the Indian army.

In Eden to Armageddon, Roger Ford gives us a detailed, comprehensive and carefully documented account (there are over 50 pages of footnotes) of each of these campaigns, the units which took part, the strategy and tactics followed and the mistakes made. The political and international factors – including Churchill’s role in relation to Gallipoli and the collapse of Tsarist Russia at a ­crit­ical moment – are well covered. There is an introductory chapter explaining the histor­ical background to the war and an epilogue summarising the attempted carve-up of Turkey by the Allies which followed, and its consequences for the shape of the Middle East as it is today. Essentially, however, this is a military history and the non-specialist reader may be tempted to move at an accelerating pace through the narrative of successive troop movements, battles, defeats and victories, studded with a bewildering profusion of Turkish and Arab place names.

Perhaps what strikes the contemporary reader most in Ford’s account are the parallels between the war he describes and today’s conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan: the inhospitable climate and terrain; the disagreements among the strategists; the complaints of inadequate equipment and, above all, the repeated and urgent requests for more men on the ground. What is different is the scale. At a time when the British Government is hesitating whether it can send 500 more soldiers to the war in Afghanistan, it is ironic to read of Lord Kitchener’s response to Sir Ian Hamilton, clamouring for massive re­inforcements in what was seen as the “subsidiary” war in Gallipoli, that “the best that could be done” would be an additional force of 25,000 men. And there seems to be something uncomfortably prophetic about the finding of the parliamentary commission of inquiry into the conduct and failure of the Gallipoli campaign (not published until the war was over) that “the expedition was ill-considered and the difficulties it posed underestimated, and that its execution was hampered by shortages of essential supplies, by personality clashes among its commanders and by all too frequent disagreements and procrastination at the highest levels.”

In Wings Over the Desert, a much shorter and more personal book than Ford’s, Desmond Seward combines an account of the Palestine campaign with a memoir of his own father who fought in it as a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps. His account vividly captures the daredevil attitude to aerial combat, tempered by fear, which was shared by the airmen on both sides, well aware of the painful death that awaited them if they were shot down or crash-landed in the desert to perish of thirst. Many of them were former cavalry subalterns who looked on their fragile and temperamental flying machines rather as though they were horses, and respected the skill and courage of their opponents. The Germans set an example of chivalry, regularly giving British pilots who were captured after being shot down “a damned good lunch” in their mess, and the British, despite the disapproval of their superiors, soon followed suit.

A pugnacious Franco-Irishman born in Australia, Eric Seward fitted well into this hard-fighting and hard-living company. He had been turned down for military service in the British army on health grounds, but in 1916 the intervention of a well-connected cousin secured him a commission in the RFC (the antecedent of the RAF). He then found himself flying primitive wood-and-canvas aircraft against the Germans (the Turks had virtually no aircraft of their own) in support of the campaign which began on the Suez Canal and ended with General Allenby’s entry into Jerusalem. Whether in the air, on leave with his brother officers in the brothels of Cairo or unashamedly displaying the class prejudices of his time, Seward’s father emerges as brave, hot-­tempered, awkward to deal with and unfailingly generous. He survived six major crashes, was haunted for the rest of his life by terrifying dreams about his wartime experi­ences and reverted in his old age to the devout Catholicism of his youth.

As well as being a movingly honest portrait of a father by his son, Wings Over the Desert is an admirable complement to Ford’s comprehensive history of an almost ­forgotten war, bringing to life what it was really like to be one of the participants.

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