Pyramids and Fleshpots tells the true story of the experiences and achievements of British military personnel serving in Egypt in the First World War fighting a determined enemy to protect the Suez Canal – the lifeline of the Empire. The popular impression that the campaigns were merely a sideshow, with troops enjoying a holiday among the pyramids and the 'fleshpots' of Cairo, is far removed from the truth. Troops faced appalling heat, abrasive sand, poor rations and water shortages. In the desolation of the Western Desert they fought the Senussi, an Islamic sect supported by the Ottomans, in a reversal of Lawrence's later work with the Arabs, while in the Sinai Desert they countered German-backed moves to dominate this strategically important area. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy fought to keep the supply lines to Gallipoli open, and keep men and materiel flowing to France from India, Australia and New Zealand. These arduous and hard-fought land, sea and air campaigns in Egypt, Libya and the Eastern Mediterranean are comprehensively covered by Stuart Hadaway in this groundbreaking analysis of an often overlooked theatre of war so vital to Britain's empire.

Born in June 1883 to an aristocratic Scottish family, Dorothy Gibson-Craig was brought up with dogs and horses. In 1926 she married Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Brooke, recipient of the Distinguished Service Order in World War I and a writer on equine culture. She followed her new husband to Cairo, where she discovered thousands of malnourished and suffering former British war horses leading lives of backbreaking toil and misery. Brought to the Middle East by British forces during the Great War, these ex-cavalry horses had been left behind at the war’s end, abandoned like used equipment too costly to send home. In Dorothy Brooke and the Fight to Save Cairo’s Lost War Horses Grant Hayter-Menzies chronicles not only the lives and eventual rescue of these noble creatures, who after years of deprivation and suffering found respite in Brooke’s Old War Horse Memorial Hospital, but also the story of the challenges of founding and maintaining an animal-rescue institution on this scale. The legacy of the Old War Horse Memorial Hospital and its founder endures today in the dozens of international Brooke animal-welfare facilities dedicated to improving the lives of working horses, donkeys, and mules across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The author, Grant Hayter-Menzies, is making a donation of 20% of the royalties from the book to The Brooke Hospital for Animals and 20% of the royalties to its affiliate in Egypt, Brooke Hospital for Animals (Egypt). Neither the author or the publisher receives any payment from Brooke or any other party in connection with sales of this book.The Brooke Hospital for Animals is a charity registered in England and Wales no. 1085760.

Tracing Your Great War Ancestors: The Egypt and Palestine Campaigns is the first book explicitly aimed at helping the descendants of those who fought in this part of the Middle East find out more about their ancestors actions, experiences and achievements. Their wartime lives were very different to those who served on the Western Front, and yet have never before been explored from this angle.Hundreds of thousands of British and Imperial troops fought in the Western Desert, Sinai Desert, Palestine, the Jordan Valley and Syria. They served in conditions quite unlike those more familiarly faced in France and Flanders, with everyday challenges to survival including the heat, lack of water, hostile wildlife and rampant disease. The fighting too was of a different character, with more open, sweeping campaigns across desert and mountains, and comparatively little systematic trench warfare.As well as giving the reader a vivid impression of the experience of wartime service in the region, Stuart Hadaways handbook provides a guide to the main sources, archives and websites that researchers can consult to get an insight into their ancestors role and their contribution to the war effort.

Winston Churchill called it 'the unknown war'. Unlike the long stalemate of the Western Front, the conflict 1914–18 between the Russian Empire and the Central Powers was a war of movement spanning a continent – from the Arctic to the Adriatic, Black and Caspian seas and from the Baltic in the west to the Pacific Ocean. The appalling scale of casualties provoked strikes in Russia's war industries and widespread mutinies at the front. As the whole fabric of society collapsed, German money brought the Bolsheviks to power in the greatest deniable dirty trick of the twentieth century, after which Russia stopped fighting, eight months before the Western Front armistice. The cost to Russia was 4 million men dead and as many held as POWs by the Central Powers. Wounded? No one has any idea how many. All the belligerent powers of the Russian fronts were destroyed: the German, Austro–Hungarian and Russian empires gone forever and the Ottoman Empire so crippled that it finally collapsed in 1922. During four years of brutal civil war that followed, Trotsky's Red Army fought the White armies, murdering and massacring millions of civilians, as British, American and other western soldiers of the interventionist forces fought and died from the frozen Arctic to the arid deserts of Iran. This is the story of that other First World War.

Ultimately these cross purposes brought disaster, pulling a fatally weak and woefully unprepared Ottoman state into a global war, and unleashing vicious, internal ethnic repression that brought it defeat and dismemberment. The diaries and official reports of German spy and propagandist Curt Prufer - translated here into English in their entirety for the first time - chronicle the complexities of the fragile Ottoman-German alliance from the perspective of a participant. Much like fellow soldier-scholar T.E. Lawrence, Prufer and his colleagues tried to steal the loyalties of the Muslim subjects of the opposing sides. The book explores these episodes of sabotage, subversion and subterfuge - from managing spies to preparing for the attack on the Suez Canal in 1915 - and in the process sheds light onto the ways World War I played out across the Middle East. Complemented throughout by in-depth and meticulously researched footnotes, this primary source collection is an invaluable addition to the extant corpus of late Ottoman and World War I historical documents.

The book addresses the important global role of the Indian Army during the First World War. It is an academic reassessment of the army by both established and early career scholars of the Indian Army, as well as naval historians. It looks at the historiography of the army - taking into account the recent work on the army (particularly on the Western Front in 1914-1915). The edited volume covers the traditional areas of the Indian Army on the Western Front, in Palestine, Mesopotamia and the defence of the Suez Canal; however, there are also chapters on combined operations; Indian prisoners of war in Germany and Turkey; the expansion of the officer corps; and the Sikh experience, as well as the mobilisation of the equine army at the beginning of the war and the demobilisation of the army in the period from 1918 until 1923. Three additional chapters are related to the theme, such as the role of the Royal Indian Marine; the Territorial Army in India; and Churchill’s portrayal of the Indian Army during the Gallipoli campaign in his account The World Crisis.

This is an important reassessment of British and Italian grand strategies during the First World War. Stefano Marcuzzi sheds new light on a hitherto overlooked but central aspect of Britain and Italy's war experiences: the uneasy and only partial overlap between Britain's strategy for imperial defence and Italy's ambition for imperial expansion. Taking Anglo-Italian bilateral relations as a special lens through which to understand the workings of the Entente in World War I, he reveals how the ups-and-downs of that relationship influenced and shaped Allied grand strategy. Marcuzzi considers three main issues – war aims, war strategy and peace-making – and examines how, under the pressure of divergent interests and wartime events, the Anglo-Italian 'traditional friendship' turned increasingly into competition by the end of the war, casting a shadow on Anglo-Italian relations both at the Peace Conference and in the interwar period.