Art as a Source for the History of War: James McBey’s Long Patrol Images and Emotional Responses to the Sinai Campaign

Abstract

Visual sources, capturing aspects of life silenced or left untold in textual accounts, have the potential to offer new, historical understandings of the individual experience of war. During World War I, official war artist James McBey created a series of images of Australian soldiers – Cameliers – on reconnaissance in the Sinai Desert. This article reads a selection of those images, arguing that what they signified and the emotions they aroused can be retrieved historically by considering their multiple contexts. These include not only the social, political, and military environments, but also the cultural imaginaries which the artist shared with his audiences.

Introduction

12 July 1917, Serapeum Post, Suez Canal. Just before dawn, newly arrived British artist James McBey ventured outside his tent to find, as he recorded in his diary, ‘camel at door’. The Scotsman was about to accompany seasoned members of an Australian company of the Imperial Camel Corps on a long reconnaissance into the Sinai Desert. Together they would leave the camps, trenches, outposts and wire of the canal defences behind and trek east, moving from hard-packed sand into a terrain of drifting dunes, where the going was heavy. The artist would capture the moment in a colour-washed drawing.

Late in the day, the party would strike out along the dry bed of the Wadi-um-Mukhsheib, a watercourse descending from the highlands of Sinai. The patrol’s task was to check Bedouin wells and rock cisterns which in 1915 had facilitated an attack on the canal by Ottoman forces.¹ They would also seek evidence of enemy activity in the area, which the Cameliers had helped secure as part of the forces under General Sir Archibald Murray in the previous year, in actions which culminated in success in the battle of Rafa, the retaking of the Sinai Peninsula, and the appointment of McBey.² The artist and the Australians would camp two nights in the desert before returning along a camel road that stretched from well to well across the sands from the canal.³

As a result of this shared journey, McBey would produce a series of photographs, drawings and etchings documenting the life of nine Australian soldiers over three days during the Great War.⁴

Cultural histories of the war have begun to turn to lesser-known theatres on the margins of empire, listening for the voices of those who did not leave the textual archives associated with western soldiers, particularly officers.⁵ In this shift, sources beyond the written word have been invaluable.⁶

McBey’s Long Patrol images are arguably the earliest sustained official record of the campaigns in Sinai and Palestine, beyond the minutiae of unit administration, to focus on Australians. Unlike the British, who had had an official newspaper correspondent, William Massey, in Egypt since February 1916, the Australians in this theatre had no one recording their experience, a lack of acknowledgement that the men, including the Cameliers, felt keenly.⁷ Veterans of Gallipoli, these men had volunteered, after their evacuation from the Dardanelles, to form a Camel Corps: a mounted infantry unit suited to the demands of fighting and patrolling in Egypt’s Western Desert. So successful did they prove that, for the campaign in Sinai, the Corps was expanded into a multinational brigade, its companies made up of troops from across the empire. In April 1916 the first companies, including No.1 Company, from which McBey’s patrol was raised, sustained heavy losses at the second battle of Gaza. In May they were rotated out of the front line to the Canal Zone to regroup.

On the long patrol, McBey recorded the Cameliers’ lived experience: of setting out into the dawn (A Long Patrol in the Desert of Sinai), trekking across the desert landscape (The Long Patrol: Drifting Sand), and during halts for meals, including two at noon, when the men hastily contrived shelter against the sun (The Long Patrol: Breakfast, Noon, and Bivouacs). He shows us moments of tension (The Long Patrol: Tracks Discovered and Strange Signals), sunset at the evening halts, as the men lit fires and prepared meals (The Long Patrol: The Wadi and Nightfall), and the morning bustle (The Long Patrol: ‘Saddle Up’ and Dawn) as camp is broken. A portrait, The Long Patrol: The Sergeant, completes the cycle.

Though celebrated in their day, the images are separated now across continents and institutions, the photographs and drawings little known beyond their curators. They have remained largely unexplored by historians.⁸ The investigation here, part of a wider study of the series, reunites them intellectually, and focuses on one drawing, A Long Patrol in the Desert of Sinai (Figure 1), in the context of the series. It considers what the drawings reveal about an under-examined aspect of the desert soldiers’ war – their emotional experience – as well as the emotional responses of the artist himself, and, widening its gaze, the emotional reactions purposefully evoked in his war-time audiences.

Figure 1. James McBey, A Long Patrol in the Desert of Sinai, 1917, pen and ink and watercolour on paper, 464 × 635 mm. London, British Museum © Aberdeen City Council (James McBey) and The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

Visual images and the history of emotions

A central question, as historian Peter Burke has noted, is how to read such images critically as sources for the writing of history.⁹ A work of art operates at many levels, each offering insight into the artist, his subjects, his audiences and their intersecting worlds. This multiplicity suggests the value of a multifaceted and multidisciplinary approach in the analysis of images as a historical source. The twelve drawings, considered from one perspective, are genre works in the ethnographic sense.¹⁰ In each, as visual and historical anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards has suggested of anthropological photographs, time is stilled.¹¹ The viewer becomes witness to the transitory: a moment in nine desert soldiers’ lives, captured in the round, in all its intimacy and intricacy.¹² The opening out, in each image, of a horizontal space in the vertical march of time differentiates the visual from text, which is processual, telling a story temporally. It allows for the multiple examinations – of content, context and meanings – undertaken here.¹³ The Long Patrol images are apt sources for ethnographic history, given its concern with the ‘actions of particular people in particular circumstances in the past’ and the reconstruction of their worlds as they themselves saw them.¹⁴ Clifford Geertz’s method of ‘thick description’ of everyday events in a specific time and place, John Horne has argued, can be seen in the best work done in the cultural history of war today. Burke also foresaw the ‘historical anthropology’ or ‘cultural history’ of images becoming the most valuable approach to their interpretation.¹⁵ This inquiry will read the images closely within their frames, but also within the political, cultural, social and military environments in which they were created, used and understood.

In examining sources, as Jo Fox has observed, historians are necessarily concerned with questions of context.¹⁶ Since the 1980s, art historians have called for art to be examined in contexts beyond the narrowly art historical and aesthetic, for a more multidisciplinary approach to their examination, and for relationship rather than division between art history and history.¹⁷ Art historians in the field of art and war have echoed these calls.¹⁸ Referring to film, Jo Labanyi writes that ‘this kind of reading of cultural texts … might contribute to cultural analysis … in a particular historical moment’. As Walton notes of recent work, these analyses open new understandings of early twentieth-century war art.¹⁹ They are still few, however, especially in relation to the lesser-known theatres of war, and they can be specialised in their contextual focus.²⁰

My investigation of McBey’s visual record of his time with the Cameliers moves across disciplinary borders to consider his images as works of art, while elucidating relationships to the landscape depicted and experienced, drawing on the insights of art history and cultural geography respectively. Viewing the images as artefacts of a time and a place, and as objects with their own history, my analysis reveals changing meanings, adduced from documentary traces of their reception.²¹ Burke, considering art as a source for history, advocates a ‘plurality of contexts’.²² To focus on a single aspect, or on a metanarrative such as colonialism and orientalism, would close out other contexts.²³ A more wide-ranging approach results in a more textured account of the experience of the individual in World War I.²⁴

Research in the history of emotions has revealed not only the soldier’s life at war, but also the lives of civilians. Sarah Pinto, in reviewing histories of the emotions in Australia, suggests that over the last two decades, historians have revealed emotions in the course of their investigation of other topics, rather than treating emotions as objects of historical inquiry in themselves. She notes, as well, that the Australian experience of war in the twentieth century has been the most common focus of this work.²⁵ This is the scholarly lineage of my own project, which seeks to extend our understanding not only of individual experience in World War I but also of its forms of representation.

The value of the visual image

Historians of emotion have generally gravitated towards written sources, even as evidence of an emotion’s physical expression.²⁶ The written sources of war can be unrepresentative, however, and their evidence uneven. More may be learned about those with the time, inclination, and skill to write.²⁷ Oral historian Alistair Thomson has also pointed to the loss of visual clues to emotions in the written record. Most importantly, written sources, reflecting the emotional conventions of any given time, have their silences.²⁸ An artist’s depiction of a moment in time, while itself not an unfiltered view, offers a valuable alternative to text for the more nuanced, or silenced, aspects of the experience of that moment: for reading the emotions at play. The ability of art to capture, evoke and convey emotions has been recognised by art historians in the field of war art.²⁹ Monique Scheer, a historical and cultural anthropologist who studies emotions as embodied practices, has challenged historians of emotion to look more to such sources: to ‘[try] to get a look at bodies and artefacts of the past’, in order to ‘[think] harder about what people are doing’ – their observable behaviour – and to work out the ‘specific situatedness of these doings’.³⁰

During World War I contemporaries believed that for conveying the lived experience of the ordinary soldier, art had something to offer beyond both written war correspondence and photographs. The role of the artist as eyewitness was crucial in both the British and Australian official art schemes, as it is now in the analysis of war art as a source.³¹ Work by men who had served – as McBey had from 1916 – was especially trusted and valued. As art historian Sue Malvern has written, their art ‘gave testimony to something not just witnessed but also experienced’.³² Audiences expected that the artist would portray, as in McBey’s own case, ‘what was felt and known, as well as seen’.³³ The first exhibition of McBey’s war art, ‘Drawings of Egypt and Palestine by Lieutenant James McBey’, took place in a West End gallery in early 1918. Of the 121 drawings received from McBey to that point, only fifty-eight were chosen for the exhibition: nine of the twelve Long Patrol images were among them. Every review drew attention to them, with Strange Signals’ documentation of a tense moment in open, desert warfare garnering the most attention (Figure 2).³⁴

Figure 2. James McBey, The Long Patrol: Strange Signals, 12 July 1917, pen and ink with watercolour on paper, 421 × 604 mm. London, British Museum © Aberdeen City Council (James McBey) and The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

Critics unanimously endorsed the drawings as art, with all the extra dimensions they were aware art had to offer; they were not simply ‘pictorial war correspondence’.³⁵ In comparison, while we recognise today that the taking and composition of a photograph is a highly conscious act, the clinical detail captured by a camera was dismissed at the time as merely ‘photographic’.³⁶ What was ‘felt and known’ included emotion. In December 1919 several official war artists whose work was ‘of a character generally described as post-impressionist’ and who had ‘experienced War at first hand’ explained that they were ‘not attempting a direct photographic representation … They were trying to depict the kind of feeling aroused in the mind of a man, at the time and under the circumstances depicted’.³⁷ Such artists captured not only their subjects’ emotional responses, but also their own.

McBey too aimed to convey what he described as ‘[t]he something which is not tangibly there, the something more than can be seen’, that he regarded as giving ‘abiding value to a great work’. McBey would write that a work of art is the glorified statement of an emotion. He read emotion in the work of others, describing the etcher Forain as ‘a master of pity and terror’.³⁸ McBey was in the first instance an etcher, and he had the etcher’s instinctive eye for the essentials – the ‘spirit’ – of a scene. It was a quality noted by Morning Post critic James Greig in his review of the 1918 exhibition. The spontaneity of McBey’s response to a scene – ‘the fine and swift utterance given to the moment's thought’, a key characteristic of the Impressionists – was a frequent theme of his reviewers.³⁹ It was a method of work much valued by both official schemes and the public for its immediacy, and thus its aura of authenticity.⁴⁰ McBey’s resulting lack of photographic detail is perhaps one reason that historians of the war have thus far overlooked him. His passionate conviction, in his own writings, of the importance of this ‘first strong impression’, of essence and spirit rather than ‘mere transcription of accumulated detail’, however, encourages the modern viewer to shift the angle of their vision away from a search for photographic detail in the Long Patrol images to garner other kinds of understandings of the personal experience of war, including emotional experience.⁴¹

Reading the Long Patrol images for emotion

The emotional responses of McBey, his subjects and his audiences to experience of the desert war – recorded, conveyed and cued by his images – overlap and intersect. While McBey’s images, by intention and expectation, captured his own response and that of his subjects, when they appeared in magazines or galleries, as film theorists have written of cinema today, they offered a safe space, in turn, for the audience’s experience of the emotions that were prompted by the compositions, their colours, the close-ups of expressions and, as we shall see, body language.⁴² Each of the Long Patrol drawings has an emotional tone. In the artist’s depiction of the second night’s halt, Nightfall, the twilight colours and shadows contribute, along with the elements of the composition – the unsaddled camels, the cook over his fire, and the men other than the sentry turned to domestic tasks – to the air of peace and contentment. McBey conveys the quiet relaxation of the day’s end, as the heat recedes, and objects merge into each other in the dying light (Figure 3).

Figure 3. James McBey, The Long Patrol: Nightfall, 13 July 1917, pen and ink and watercolour on paper, 213 × 342 mm. London, British Museum © Aberdeen City Council (James McBey) and The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

At the same time the sentry in the background in both Nightfall and The Wadi speaks to the vulnerability to attack of a small patrol in this vast space at night, and to the underlying anxiety that awareness of this reality might bring (Figure 4).

Figure 4. James McBey, The Long Patrol: The Wadi, 11 July 1917, pen and ink and watercolour on paper, 304 × 495 mm. London, Imperial War Museum (Art.IWM ART 1439) © Aberdeen City Council (James McBey).

Nightfall provides a contrast to the blinding, unrelieved landscape through which the patrol travels in Drifting Sand, in which sky merges into sand (Figure 5).

Figure 5. James McBey, The Long Patrol: Drifting Sand, 11 July 1917, pen and ink with watercolour on paper, 317 × 501 mm. London, Imperial War Museum (Art.IWM ART 1674) © Aberdeen City Council (James McBey).

Drifting Sand calls up in the viewer feelings of danger and fear – of heat, lack of water, and hidden enemies, Turkish or Bedouin, waiting in ambush, encountered in surprise, or watching and relaying their presence.⁴³ McBey’s ability to arouse such emotion in his audiences was enhanced by the narrative dimension of the Long Patrol series and its focus on characters – one of which is the landscape itself. His story arc, carried through the twelve now scattered drawings, emotionally engaged the viewer in the lives of his subjects, who were themselves of interest in the context of the times. McBey shaped the story line in his numbered ordering of the drawings (which differs from their order of execution), his selection of scenes, his titles and his captions. The final versions of the latter formed part of a travelogue-style narrative aimed at the audience at home.⁴⁴ Responses to the drawings at the time show that audiences were engaged in this way. Critic Malcolm Salaman, in a review in the Studio, wrote of Tracks Discovered (Figure 10) that ‘the dramatic interest of the picture is intense’ and noted the ‘thrill almost’ it evoked. Another wrote of the ‘play of feeling’ across the exhibition.⁴⁵

The record and evocation of emotion in the Long Patrol images for artist, audience and the men themselves is at its most dramatic in McBey’s successive representations of the patrol’s departure into the dawn. ‘Landscape wonderful’, the artist had recorded of the second morning. He captured the original moment in a photograph and responded to it in the subsequent drawing, A Long Patrol in the Desert of Sinai, created two weeks later, with which he framed the narrative and the series. He included the scene in his plans for a set of postwar etchings based on the patrol, made in his sketchbook while still at war.⁴⁶ After the war, McBey distilled his impressions to their very essence in the print that critics would consider one of his masterpieces: Dawn: The Camel Patrol Setting Out. As he progressed through each incarnation, McBey increasingly stripped back the elements of the composition. Each step made clearer his intentions – what he felt was essential to convey about this moment – although each stage also needs to be considered in the changed context of the time and place of its creation.

The photograph McBey took (Figure 6), now found in his album in the archive at Aberdeen Art Gallery, shows the soldiers setting out across the desert, into the east. In the subsequent drawing, A Long Patrol in the Desert of Sinai (Figure 1), made when the developed photograph was to hand, the artist focused on the sky, expanding it to take up two-thirds of the vertical space. Fewer tracks are shown, to emphasise the feeling of isolation. The figures are grouped in the right half of the drawing. The left half – traditionally in the west the place we begin to read a painting – is space, conveying the vastness of the desert into which the party is travelling. The diminishing figures of the guides, which lead the gaze of the viewer into the distance, accentuate this impression.

Figure 6. James McBey, Camel Patrol, July 1917, Aberdeen Art Gallery (ABDAG000686.55) © Aberdeen City Council (James McBey).

In the 1919 etching, for which the artist was also able to access his drawing at the Imperial War Museum, he further increased the immensity of the sky, of the dawn into which the patrol was moving.⁴⁷

It now takes up four-fifths of the vertical space. The image conveys, friend and art critic Martin Hardie would write of the Long Patrol etchings, ‘not the desert, but its vastness and silence’.⁴⁸ In drawing and etching, McBey evokes in his audience what sensory scholar Constance Classen has called ‘the terror and wonder of infinite, uncontained space’. This was a time when, Sue Malvern argues, a recasting of the idea of ‘Englishness’ was invested in a particular construction of the English landscape as a ‘domesticated and fertile garden landscape’, with small pockets of land, hamlets and neat hedgerows. Malvern notes that such skies offered drama, invoking the ‘terrifying power of nature’.⁴⁹

As McBey’s articles, published letters and autobiography show, the Scotsman was a wordsmith, as well as an artist.⁵⁰ He captured his own reaction to this intensely different landscape – so full of wonder – visually. Yet after the patrol, as he tried to compose the captions for his images, McBey struggled to articulate that reaction in prose. This difficulty, shared ‘universally’, as British Museum curator Kim Sloan has noted, by landscape artists in watercolour, itself points to the value of the drawings as a source for emotion.⁵¹ McBey repeatedly crossed out then returned to the words ‘majestic’ and ‘desolate’: a reflection of the tension between wonder and trepidation in his response, and of his sense of being overwhelmed. He caught all three emotions in the images and sought to evoke them in his audiences. In colour, light and the immensity of the sky, McBey conveyed his impression of the moment, not simply the detail. Paradoxically, while McBey’s lack of photographic detail may be one reason for the series being passed over by war historians, its label as war art may have led to A Long Patrol in the Desert of Sinai being ignored more widely, as a ‘significant example of the art of landscape’.⁵² The drawing did however form part of a recent exhibition, Places of the Mind, at the British Museum, which focused on the attempt by watercolour artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to capture their emotional response to a landscape – a sense of place – rather than simply detail its physical qualities. The selection of A Long Patrol recognises McBey’s success in this regard.⁵³ While the exhibition criteria did draw attention to one lost aspect of the drawing, they also distanced the image from many of its other contexts, including its place in a series, highlighting the value of a multifaceted approach to its fuller understanding.

Both historians and geographers have considered landscape in relation to emotion. Some argue that landscapes themselves have agency, affecting emotions; others that spaces and places assume cultural and individual meanings that affect people as they move through the landscape, in their turn giving it meaning.⁵⁴ The meanings people gave to and took from the desert landscape McBey portrayed would change across time and cultures. McBey’s own wonder – ‘wirelessed’, as one critic described it, from his work – encompassed not only his aesthetic appreciation, but also his presence in a storied landscape.⁵⁵ To understand fully the meanings McBey was creating and conveying in the drawing – what he was prompting his audiences to think and feel – we need to look beyond the margins of the drawing to its social, political and military contexts and to the cultural imaginaries which the artist shared with his audiences.

The overlapping cultural frameworks within which A Long Patrol in the Desert of Sinai was created by its artist and understood by its audiences can be read in McBey’s drafts of his captions, and in the iconography of the image itself. McBey situated the scene for his viewers by referencing these frameworks, not only to convey a sense of the magic of time and place, but to reduce the strangeness of the landscape, making it familiar, containing its threat, and reassuring them.⁵⁶ The discursive imaginaries he drew upon included a shared biblical literacy, encompassing the idea of testing in the wilderness, as well as the constellation of ideas that held Australians to be exemplars of the kind of frontier masculinity believed necessary to secure a threatened and expanding empire.⁵⁷ Overarching all was the western cultural imaginary of ‘the East’. ‘[T]he start is made as the East begins to lighten’, McBey wrote in the final version of the caption, replacing a reference to the route of the Israelites of the Exodus.⁵⁸ ‘[T]he men ride out towards the dawn … ’. Dawn or sunset in the desert was an iconic image of orientalist paintings of the time, and McBey tapped into the viewers’ impressions of the ‘East’ as mysterious, of its haunting landscapes.⁵⁹ Reviewers responded within these multiple frameworks. Malcolm Salaman, in the Studio, referred to the ‘sun-swart, bush-trained Australian riders’ and their ‘keen and expert observation’. T. Martin Wood noted of the watercolours in the exhibition that McBey’s work ‘has a certain emotional value, from his appreciation of the … figures silhouetted against the skies of the East’.⁶⁰

Tropes of orientalism are recognisable in the images. Palestinian scholar Edward Said has described the orientalism both artist and critics were referencing as ‘an internally structured archive’ created by and for western eyes, built up through the writings of scholars, travellers and fabulists. It assumed a static Orient, in comparison to a ‘dynamic, innovative and expanding West’; it contained as a motif an Orient that insinuated danger, rendered less fearsome by its inequality to the West, and it characterised oriental life by a series of demeaning stereotypes, including lack of civilisation.⁶¹ McBey’s war-time audiences had been brought up, as he had, within these discourses.⁶² Viewing the Long Patrol series, they were prompted to the conclusion that the desert landscape may be exotic and dangerous, but the empire, through its bush-trained colonial troops, was capable of dominance over it.⁶³ Fear was aroused, and relieved.

In contrast, the etching, Dawn: The Camel Patrol Setting Out (Figure 7), was created within the context of a different time: the sombre commemorative atmosphere of postwar Britain. Published as part of McBey’s First Palestine Set at the end of 1919, in the coming decade sales of the print would break auction house records. The shift of interest from the war-time preference for Strange Signals, also part of the set, to Dawn: The Camel Patrol Setting Out, is instructive, as is the contrast between the latter’s reception and that of post-modernist war art. Both reflected the shift in the work the public expected of official war art – from information to memorialisation – and the consequent preference for realism.⁶⁴ In the drawing, the sideways stance of Cameliers waiting for those behind them adds to the impression of the patrol as an event still unfolding. In the etching, all nine men are now visible, facing forward, riding more dynamically than in the drawing, now the outcome of the war is known, into the dawn of a new day.⁶⁵ The success of the print reflects the appeal, in Malcolm Salaman’s words, of ‘the campaign in the Holy Land with all its Biblical glamour and romantic adventure’, in the wake of, as Lord phrases it, the mechanised slaughter in the mud of the Western Front.⁶⁶ The thrill of the etching’s appeal was echoed, in the year of its publication, in the popularity of Lowell Thomas’ lecture-film show With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia, which delayed the opera season at Covent Garden by six weeks, and, tapping into the same orientalist discourses, Edith Hull’s international best-seller, The Sheik.

Figure 7. James McBey, Dawn: The Camel Patrol Setting Out, 1919, etching, 226 × 382 mm. © Aberdeen City Council (James McBey).

Thus far we have considered the emotional response of McBey himself, as well as that evoked in his audience, represented by reviewers. One question that demands an answer, as asked by Susan Matt, herself a historian of emotion, is: ‘How did ordinary men and women receive the art? Did they see it as reflective of their own emotions or widely divergent from them?’ While some historians of emotions such as friendship have turned to art to uncover the felt experience of the past, Matt has argued that art offers an elite view – the view of the artist – and that it does not ‘capture the inner lives of ordinary men and women’.⁶⁷ Public access to the Long Patrol drawings was controlled by McBey’s employer, the War Propaganda Bureau – later reorganised as the Department of Information – based at Wellington House. (The contemporary meaning of ‘propaganda’, in British terms, was more akin to purposeful publicity.)⁶⁸ McBey had a twofold brief: to make ‘drawings of appropriate war scenes in Egypt and Palestine for the purposes both of propaganda at the present time and of historical record in the future’.⁶⁹ The Bureau’s targeted audience was the educated, and therefore influential, elite.⁷⁰ McBey’s exhibition in a West End gallery and the reproduction of the Long Patrol images in magazines such as Country Life and the Studio found this audience, but not exclusively. By 1917 the concerns of propaganda had expanded to include morale. The tragic losses on the Somme had left war-weariness in their wake, German submarines were decimating British shipping and the pacifist movement was gaining support.⁷¹ Reproductions of McBey’s Long Patrol images, from a theatre where there had been or soon would be victories, were also offered widely to illustrated newspapers, including the Manchester Guardian, Scots Pictorial and the Illustrated London News.⁷² In addition, Charles Masterman, in charge at Wellington House, requested that McBey’s exhibition at Colnaghi & Obach’s gallery be free. James Fox has documented the ‘voracious social demand for images of war’, which secured ‘vast new audiences’ for such art.⁷³ Two thousand people visited the exhibition within the first month; there were requests for it to travel to Dublin and Glasgow, and the Religious Tracts Society made the images into lantern slides. The inclusion of the Long Patrol images in Massey’s book The Desert Campaigns, explicitly intended to increase knowledge of a front whose soldiers felt forgotten, widened the audience further.⁷⁴ By recording and publicising the experiences of those in the campaigns in Sinai and Palestine, McBey’s work also answered a need in the men themselves. Certainly, reviewers conceded ignorance of conditions in this theatre prior to viewing the works.⁷⁵ The Long Patrol images that reached audiences did reflect McBey’s own view. But as Jonathan Black has observed, McBey’s background was unusual amongst official war artists. He was a working-class by birth, education and training.⁷⁶ In addition, given his brief, the artist’s images are also faithful records of what he observed. Reviewers made this point at the time, and a later exhibition curator characterised the artist as ‘meticulous and painstaking in his factual record of the Egyptian campaign’.⁷⁷ Most tellingly, this was the assessment of the men themselves.

McBey’s depiction of the Australians resonated with his subjects, and was considered a shared, insider’s view. Hector Dinning, an enlisted teacher and author attached to the War Records Section in Cairo, used three of the Long Patrol etchings in his own account of the campaigns in the Middle East, writing that ‘James McBey dwelt amongst Australians as one of them. He studied them and drew them’.⁷⁸ While McBey was recording the empire at war, his images of the Cameliers also fitted with Australian aims to ‘celebrate and remember the AIF’s experience of the war and to use it to inspire a distinct national spirit within the empire’.⁷⁹ McBey reserved a set of the etchings for the Australian War Memorial. Hutchinson notes that new acquisitions were scrutinised by veterans for accuracy; the Long Patrol images were valued and displayed.⁸⁰ Copies of the etchings based on the Long Patrol drawings are found in the papers of old Cameliers, donated by their families to archives around the world. Seventy years after their creation, Rory Moore, editor of the Cameliers’ Old Comrades Association journal Barrak, reprinted two in an Anzac Day edition of the newsletter. An old Camelier himself, he wrote that McBey had ‘truly captured the atmosphere of life amidst the sand-dunes’. In his estimation they were ‘faithful representations of a typical patrol among the sand-dunes of Sinai’.⁸¹ The artist’s subjects were soldiers whose experiences he had shared. The images can be read not only for McBey’s emotional range but also for the emotions of the men he depicted.⁸² It is to these soldiers that we now turn.

Campaign histories are meticulous in covering overall strategic operations in Sinai and Palestine, but they provide only a sparse and disembodied understanding of the experiences of those who served.⁸³ More recent considerations of the war have largely concentrated on policy, strategy and operations.⁸⁴ Edward Woodfin’s high-level survey of British and Dominion forces for commonalities of experience across different stages of the war is a rare exception.⁸⁵ While the focus of Woodfin’s work is unique, other analyses at this level, for example those by James E. Kitchen and Justin Fantauzzo, form part of a welcome turn of attention to the soldiers themselves. Such studies draw upon the personal accounts of a variety of soldiers from a range of regiments, establishing inventories of shared experiences. McBey’s Long Patrol series, documenting a single patrol, and focusing on the rhythms of its daily life, makes possible a qualitatively different analysis of desert soldiers’ lived experience of war.

A Long Patrol in the Desert of Sinai conveys what we might infer was common to both artist and soldiers in that moment – their experience of the silence, of their insignificance under the huge sky, and their trepidation at their coming isolation. McBey’s meticulous record offers more than this, however. The war-time desert, for the men of the patrol, was, in Mark Seymour’s term, an emotional arena, a place where emotions were performed and witnessed.⁸⁶ These emotions can be read in the figures of the men. Across the series, they illustrate an advantage of McBey’s images over textual sources in conveying emotion. Emotions are experienced physically, as well as recognised consciously. They can be read, expressed and portrayed in the language of the body: in posture, gesture and facial expression.⁸⁷ All are habitual movements that are, to different degrees in the eyes of different scholars, both instinctive and learned.⁸⁸ McBey’s ability to capture the emotions of his subjects was recognised in his work before the war. Reviewers wrote that he conveyed the excitement of boys fishing and the wonder of a Moroccan crowd, held spellbound by a storyteller.⁸⁹ Later critics noted McBey’s ‘ability to make eloquent a pose or gesture and to so place figures in their settings that they are related both pictorially and psychologically to their surroundings’.⁹⁰ Certainly, reviewers discerned emotion in the posture of the men in the Long Patrol images on exhibition. One critic wrote of the ‘intense expression’ of the Cameliers in Strange Signals (Figure 2), ‘their figures the very image of nervous force’ as they leant forward to scrutinise distant smoke.⁹¹ As their validation by the soldiers themselves indicates, the emotions McBey captured in the soldiers’ expressions, gestures and postures were read and understood by his contemporary audiences, particularly by ordinary men and women who shared the same physical vocabulary.

Today, the businesslike bustle of the men in ‘Saddle Up’ (Figure 8), with the order echoing in the air – a contrast to his drawing of an earlier moment that day – speaks to us of anticipation, and their reclining forms in Breakfast (Figure 9) and The Wadi (Figure 4), of relaxation and relief.⁹²

Figure 8. James McBey, The Long Patrol: ‘Saddle Up’, 12 July 1917, pen and ink with watercolour on paper, 203 × 342 mm. London, Imperial War Museum (Art.IWM ART 1674: The Long Patrol, Wadi-um-Mukhsheib) © Aberdeen City Council (James McBey). Note: I have used the title given by McBey, as reflecting the intended atmosphere of this piece.

Figure 9. James McBey, The Long Patrol: Breakfast, 11 July 1917, pen and ink with watercolour on paper, 151 × 311 mm. London, British Museum © Aberdeen City Council (James McBey) and The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

In Tracks Discovered (Figure 10) the intent expressions of patrol members and their posture, bent acutely forward in examination or straining backwards to see as camels are circled, reveal the heightened emotion – of tension and urgency – which is reflected in McBey’s own caption: ‘Suddenly the guides draw up’.⁹³ (These emotions are also evoked in the viewer, as their eye is drawn around the circle of turning camels and peering men, to focus, as the soldiers are, on the tracks.)

Figure 10. James McBey, The Long Patrol: Tracks Discovered, 13 July 1917, pen and ink with watercolour on paper, 311 × 495 mm. London, Imperial War Museum (Art.ART IWM 2937), in Malcolm C. Salaman, ‘Drawings by James McBey, Official Artist in Palestine’, Studio 299 (February 1918), 13. © Aberdeen City Council (James McBey). Image courtesy of the Studio International Foundation and the State Library of Victoria.

In the present, however, the images need to be read with an awareness that ‘display rules’ for emotions, as Rosenwein and Cristiani term them, may change across history and cultures.⁹⁴ Attention to the emotional conventions of the society beyond the images’ frames enhances our understanding of the emotions expressed in the body language of the soldiers. In the drawing A Long Patrol in the Desert of Sinai a sense of unease can be read in the forward-leaning stance of the Camelier on the right, a feeling heightened by the insignificance of the scouts in the far distance. It is seen too in the hesitancy of those in the middle ground, awaiting those behind them. Despite being, as McBey had noted, ‘almost all rough riders from the outback’, the soldiers’ posture suggests that the military context and sensory keynotes of the landscape McBey captured – so different from city or camp or home country – induced in them a degree of alienation and sharpened awareness.⁹⁵ The waiting Camelier conveys the trust built up operationally in the patrol as a unit, an emotion shaped by this time and place, and the ‘emotional community’ which the men of the patrol formed. The fraternity of the Camelier company’s basic unit, the four-man groups, depicted by McBey around their individual hearths during the halts, was another. McBey’s Long Patrol images generally, and A Long Patrol in the Desert of Sinai in particular, offer insight into the emotional standards of this community of men.⁹⁶ During World War I emotions were strongly aroused, assigned value and directed for the purposes of the prosecution of the war.⁹⁷ Pride in endurance and sticking power, celebrated in the Anzacs and a forceful template for enlistees who followed, was approved within this dominant emotional regime.⁹⁸ The men curled under hurriedly improvised shade during the midday halts in Bivouacs and Noon evoke this quality (Figures 11 and 12).

Figure 11. James McBey, Bivouacs, 12 July 1917, pen and ink and watercolour, 213 × 337 mm. London, British Museum © Aberdeen City Council (James McBey) and The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

Figure 12. James McBey, The Long Patrol: Noon, 11 July 1917, pen and ink with watercolour on paper, 325 × 507 mm. London, British Museum © Aberdeen City Council (James McBey) and The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

Within the emotional community of the patrol itself, the expression of particular emotions was approved or disapproved of among its members.⁹⁹ McBey recorded that the Cameliers initially looked at him askance, but when he bore the conditions without complaint, they shared their company and their food with him.¹⁰⁰ Such standards would overlap with the expectations of working-class culture on the job.¹⁰¹

There is a calmness, however, about the The Long Patrol in the Desert of Sinai. McBey recorded the ‘cool blue’ of the first morning in his diary.¹⁰² In the drawing the colour mirrors the sense he captures of familiar routine – a contrast with the remarkable setting – conveyed also in the posture of the Cameliers. The commander of the men’s battalion, Lt.-Col. George Langley, recorded that the work of patrolling was ‘very regular’. Long patrols were undertaken once or twice a week, and a Camelier could expect to be allocated a shorter, daily, patrol between posts every second or third night.¹⁰³ In the drawing, a composed purpose, but no urgency, is told in the upright posture of the rear Camelier, in the regular gait of the camels, and the scouts disappearing slowly towards the horizon. During the war, valour was regarded as another of the qualities of the age, particularly in Australia, a nation reliant on volunteers for enlistment. The dominant national rhetoric focused on the courage and patriotism of the Anzac soldier and those who followed him, as deserving of the admiration, pride and gratitude that flowed from the nation for his exploits at Gallipoli. Shame, scorn and guilt were reserved in equal and opposite measure for the shirker, who was regarded as a coward. In this hot-house atmosphere, there was widespread consternation amongst the Cameliers that, far from the Western Front, their service unknown and unrecognised, they might be regarded as ‘cold-footed’.¹⁰⁴ Allowing anything but resolution to show in their demeanour risked shame. Yet McBey allows viewers to see a deeper reality, in the balance he portrays between the soldiers’ confidence – in their capabilities and in their belief in the justness of their cause – and their trepidation, which together made for courage.¹⁰⁵

Finally, in the drawing, McBey portrays pleasure in the freedom of open space. The patrol is also moving away from the monotony of camp routines, drills, parades, fatigues and bugles. ‘By Jove, I did enjoy that trip’, the artist wrote to Martin Hardie in August. It was the only event he described of a busy five-week period.¹⁰⁶ The slouched posture of the soldier on the right suggests that for the men this is likely tinged with resignation. Here, conveyed to and evoked in audiences, were indeed all the ‘feelings aroused in the mind’ of the men of a small patrol, and the artist who accompanied them, as they moved out into the desert in July 1917, a time of war.

Conclusion

Visual sources, capturing aspects of life silenced or left untold in textual accounts, have the potential to offer new, historical understandings of the individual experience of war. Recording a moment stilled from the flow of time, and as objects with a life history of their own, they offer the opportunity for a multifaceted – and multidisciplinary – examination of their content, context and meaning. This examination of James McBey’s Long Patrol images has demonstrated the value of exploring the art of war in such a ‘plurality of contexts’, in order to reach to the contemporary meanings and uses of the images captured and conveyed by the artist and received by audiences, to look beyond more dominant interpretations to more subtle readings, and to provide a fuller, more textured account of the lived experience of soldiers who served in lesser-known theatres of war on the periphery of empire.

Acknowledgement

The author thanks the anonymous reviewers and the AHS editors, and the members of Melbourne Lifewriters, as well as Bill Breen, Liz Dimock, Lucy Ellem, Richard Haese and especially Lee-Ann Monk, for their expert comments, and Annalisa Giudici for her sound guidance. Gratitude is also due to Griffin Coe and Ann Steed of Aberdeen Art Gallery, Sandra Still of Aberdeen City Council, and Barbara Kehler for the Estate of James McBey, for their great kindness and assistance with permissions, and with archival and curatorial assistance, along with Andrew Webb, Sophie Fisher and Jenny Wood (Imperial War Museum), Jade Murray (Australian War Memorial), Elizabeth Bray (British Museum) and Neil Hodge (University of California, Los Angeles Library Special Collections). Katie Eglinton kindly allowed access to family papers. The reproduction of McBey’s Long Patrol series was made possible by the generosity of Aberdeen City Council, and additionally, in the case of Tracks Discovered, the Imperial War Museum and Martin Kennedy, Creative Director of the Studio International Foundation.

Research for this article was supported by a grant from Pat and Rob Lesslie, daughter and grandson of Camelier and educator George Langley. Their interest in the work is gratefully acknowledged. This article is dedicated to their memory.

Notes

1 H.S. Gullett, The Australian Imperial Force in Sinai and Palestine 1914–1918 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1937), 69.

2 Pre-censorship caption to No. 57, A Long Patrol in the Desert of Sinai, list attached to letter, Major Foster to Ivor Nicholson, 4 November 1917, First World War Artist’s Archive (hereafter FWWAA) 83-3 James McBey 1917–28 Part 1, Imperial War Museum (hereafter IWM), London; James McBey Sketchbook-War, ABDAG003075.43, Aberdeen Art Gallery.

3 The Bir el Murr-Moiya Harab Road. James McBey, Diary, 12 July 1917, ABDAG9037; War Office Geographical Section, General Staff, No.2427/Lieut.Pratt RGA/Egyptian Survey Department, Egypt: Great Bitter Lake: Africa 1:125,000 (sheet North H-36/I-III) [Cartographic material], Great Britain, War Office, 1912.

4 The Cameliers carried supplies for five days, and the Long Patrol is usually framed as this length.

5 John Horne, ‘End of a Paradigm? Cultural History and the Great War’, Past & Present 242, no. 1 (February 2019): 185.

6 See Santanu Das, India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

7 Photographer Frank Hurley arrived in August 1917. Henry Gullett, the Official (Australian) War Correspondent, arrived in November 1917. George Lambert, the Official Australian War Artist, did not leave London for Palestine until late December 1917. Oliver Hogue, Letter to Whyte, 17 January 1917, 1DRL/0355, Australian War Memorial (hereafter AWM). For Allied soldiers feeling forgotten in theatres beyond the Western Front more generally, see J. Fantauzzo, The Other Wars: The Experience and Memory of the First World War in the Middle East and Macedonia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), esp. ch. 4; James E. Kitchen, The British Imperial Army in the Middle East: Morale and Military Identity in the Sinai and Palestine Campaigns, 1916–18 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 11.

8 Art historian Alexandra Walton’s study of official print collecting does include the acquisition of McBey’s Long Patrol prints. She comments perceptively on the etchings in passing. Similarly author Alasdair Soussi, in his recent biography focusing on McBey the man, aptly quotes McBey’s friend and fellow artist Martin Hardie’s brief but sensitive reflection, in 1925, on the artist’s three sets of etchings from this front taken as a whole. Alexandra Walton, ‘Bold Impressions: A Comparative Analysis of Artist Prints and Print Collecting at the Imperial War Museum and the Australian War Memorial’ (PhD thesis, Australian National University, 2017); Alasdair Soussi, Shadows and Light: The Extraordinary Life of James McBey (Edinburgh: Scotland Street Press, 2022), 120; Martin Hardie, ‘Introduction to the 1925 Catalogue’, in The Etchings and Dry-Points of James McBey, eds Martin Hardie and Charles Carter (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 1997), x.

9 Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Use of Images as Historical Evidence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

10 For the British tradition of genre painting, see Nicholas Tromans, ‘Genre and Gender in Cairo and Constantinople’, in The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, eds Nicholas Tromans et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 78, 84.

11 Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 117.

12 Drawing is an intimate medium. Hartwig Fischer, introduction to Kim Sloan, ed., Places of the Mind: British Watercolour Landscapes 1850–1950 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2017), 7.

13 See Edwards, 121.

14 Rhys Isaac, ‘Ethnographic Method in History: An Action Approach’, Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 13, no. 1 (Winter 1980): 43.

15 See Horne, 165. Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–30. See also Edwards, drawing upon Geertz, fn. 16, 104. Das has skilfully applied Edwards’ perspectives and methodologies to photographs of Indian Sepoys: see Das. Burke, 220.

16 Jo Fox, ‘Propaganda, Art and War’, in War and Art: A Visual History of Modern Conflict, ed. Joanna Bourke (London: Reaktion Books, 2017), 200.

17 See Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth Century Art and Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 33; Charles Ford, ‘Visual Storytelling’ (review of ‘Art in History, History in Art’), Art History 15, no. 4 (December 1992): 536; Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 8.

18 Laura Brandon, Art and War (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 5.

19 Jo Labanyi, ‘Doing Things: Emotion, Affect, and Materiality’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 11, no. 3–4 (2010): 230; Walton, 18.

20 See, for the Western Front, Caroline Lord’s elegant analysis of the work of New Zealand war artist Edmund Butler, and for the Middle East, Tim Buck, who in a brief article examines postwar images of Mesopotamia/Iraq. McBey’s official war art has received little scholarly attention, a reflection, in part, of the focus of World War I Studies until very recently on the Western Front. Art historian Jonathan Black recently considered McBey’s images of non-white soldiers within cultural and political contexts, and that of the statistics of participation, though he does not read the images themselves. Caroline Lord, ‘A Forgotten Contribution: Re-Discovering the Production and Re-Establishing the Significance of New Zealand’s Official First World War Artists’ (PhD thesis, University of Canterbury, 2015). Tim Buck, ‘The Imagining of Mespotamia/Iraq in British Art in the Aftermath of the Great War’; and Jonathan Black, ‘“Our Warrior Brown Brethran”: Identity and Difference in Images of Non-White Soldiers Serving with the British Army in British Art of the First World War’, in The Great War and the British Empire: Culture and Society, eds Michael J.K. Walsh and Andrekos Varnava (London: Routledge, 2017), 151–62, 129–50.

21 See Edwards, 13–15. Recent work by art historians recognises the changing meanings of art works in different times and spaces. See Walton, 29.

22 Burke, 9.

23 Tromans, introduction to The Lure of the East, 25; Das, 133; Edwards, 12.

24 For the value of heterogeneous sources in recreating the experiential texture of lives at war, see Das, 14, 23, 25, 168.

25 Sarah Pinto, ‘The History of Emotions in Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 48, no. 1 (March 2017): 109–10.

26 B.H. Rosenwein and R. Cristiani, What Is the History of Emotions? (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 28; Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 51, no. 2 (May 2012): 218.

27 Susan J. Matt, ‘Recovering the Invisible: Methods for the Historical Study of the Emotions’, in Doing Emotions History, eds Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 44.

28 Alistair Thomson, ‘Indexing and Interpreting Emotion: Joy and Shame in Oral History’, Oral History Australia Journal 41 (November 2019): 2. For emotional conventions, see introduction to Matt and Stearns, 4–5. For silences in Sepoy letters, and the value of paintings and photographs in recovering emotion, see Das, 156; he includes a brief but sensitive reading of McBey’s images of Punjabi soldiers.

29 See, especially in relation to the work of Australian war artist Will Dyson, Lord, 39, 220, 332, 342, 354, 451; Walton, 189.

30 Scheer, 217–19.

31 Walton, 94. See also Margaret Hutchinson, Painting War: A History of Australia’s First World War Art Scheme (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 116; Burke, 8.

32 Sue Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War: Witnessing, Testimony and Remembrance (New Haven: Yale University Press/Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2004), 44–5.

33 Hardie, in Hardie and Carter, ix.

34 Letters, McBey to Yockney, 26 December 1917, 1 January 1918, FWWAA 83-3 James McBey 1917–28 Part 2, IWM; see, for example, ‘The Conquest of the Sands’, the Field, 9 February 1918, FFWAA 468/10, IWM.

35 James Greig, ‘Mr James McBey’s Drawings: Sinai and Palestine’, Morning Post, 29 January 1918, FFWAA 468/10, IWM.

36 See ‘The Nation’s War Paintings’, Saturday Review, 3 January1920, FWWAA Press Cuttings, IWM; Malvern, 47–8; ‘A Real War Picture: The Kensingtons at Laventie’, The Times, 20 May 1916, 9, referenced in Paul Gough, A Terrible Beauty: British Artists in the First World War (Bristol: Sansom & Co., 2010), 20.

37 TS (Draft), ‘Yorkshire Post’, 1 March 1920, Press Cutting, FWWAA 468/10 (James McBey Exhibition), IWM.

38 James McBey, ‘Etchings: The Quick and the Dead’, The Bookman’s Journal and Print Collector 9, no. 27 (December 1923): 98–9.

39 ‘Watercolours by Mr James McBey’, Queen, 14 February 1914, ABDAG009098.51, Press Cuttings Relating to James McBey.

40 Hutchinson, 160; Lord, 59.

41 For ‘spirit’ in McBey’s work see Malcolm Salaman, ‘James McBey’s Etchings’, in Hardie and Carter, xvi; Greig; McBey, ‘Etchings’, 98.

42 See Rosenwein and Cristiani, 103–4; Labanyi, 230; Lord, 220. Rosenwein and Cristiani also draw upon the work of Margrit Pernau and Imke Rajamani, ‘Emotional Translations: Conceptual History Beyond Language’, History and Theory 55, no. 1 (2016): 46–65.

43 Lord also notes the unseen enemy in an image heightening suspense and a sense of foreboding, simulating the everyday experience of the men. Lord, 91, 344.

44 Gough makes this observation of the role of journalist Charles Montague’s text, added to Muirhead Bone’s drawings of the Western Front. Gough, 54.

45 Malcolm Salaman, ‘Drawings by James McBey, Official Artist in Palestine’, the Studio 299 (February 1918): 12; Press Cutting, FWWAA 468/10468/10 (James McBey Exhibition), IWM; ‘Mr McBey’s Official Work’, Aberdeen Journal, 29 January 1918, Press Cutting, FWWAA 468/10, IWM.

46 McBey, Diary, 12 July, 2 August 1917; James McBey, Sketchbook – Palestine 1917(–18?), ABDAG003064.

47 Walton, 100. Photographs of the drawings are also in McBey’s papers at Aberdeen Art Gallery.

48 Hardie, in Hardie and Carter, xi.

49 Constance Classen, The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 29; Malvern, 101, of Nash’s Menin Road.

50 See, for example, James McBey, ‘An Artist’s Wanderings’, The Graphic 7, 14, 21 and 28 January 1922.

51 James McBey, 1917 Sketchbook, ABDAG003074; Kim Sloan, ‘The Search for a Sense of Place’, in Sloan, Places of the Mind, 9.

52 Sloan has made a similar argument for William Simpson’s topographical images. Sloan, ‘The Search for a Sense of Place’, 14.

53 Sloan, ‘The Search for a Sense of Place’, 22. See also Jessica Feather, ‘A New Golden Age’, in Sloan, Places of the Mind, 70–1, 73–4 and 89.

54 See the discussion in Rosenwein and Cristiani, 77–80.

55 Quotation from Greig.

56 See Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994), 49–50, considering Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 56–7.

57 For biblical references see McBey, draft caption, Sketchbook-War. For frontier masculinity see, for example, Robert H. MacDonald, Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890–1918 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1993).

58 McBey, Sketchbook-War.

59 Said, 1.

60 Salaman, ‘Drawings’, 12; TMW, ‘Desert Visions’, n.d., Press Cutting, FWWAA 468/10, IWM. Salaman also referenced biblical testing in the wilderness for another drawing set in Sinai, and the mysterious atmosphere of the desert dawn. Salaman, ‘Drawings’, 16, 12, also 9.

61 Said, 2, 40, 56, 93, 148.

62 McBey had earlier referenced the orientalist imaginary to convey his meanings in text. See James McBey, ‘An Artist’s Wanderings’, The Graphic, 7 January 1922.

63 McBey’s own caption to The Sergeant – https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/17961 (accessed 4 July 2023) – is indicative: ‘For him the desert holds no secrets, even that which is beyond Bedouins is not hid from him’. Beyond McBey’s control, the discreet hand of his employer, the War Propaganda Bureau (considered more fully later in the article), is visible in the editorial choice that included such a high proportion of the Long Patrol images in the exhibition.

64 With the restructuring of the Department of Information into the Ministry of Information in March 1918, commissioned works had a commemorative purpose – a characteristic of the Australian scheme from its inception. On the resulting preference for realism, see Hutchinson, 76; Walton 118.

65 We know from trial proofs of the etching that this sense of movement was something McBey worked to convey. Hardie and Carter, 178.

66 Salaman, ‘James McBey’s Etchings’, xviii; Lord, 282.

67 See Carolyn James and Bill Kent, ‘Renaissance Friendships: Traditional Truths, New Dissenting Voices’, in Friendship: A History, ed. Barbara Caine (London: Equinox, 2009); Matt, 49.

68 Michael Sanders and Philip Taylor, British Propaganda during the First World War 1912–1918 (London: Macmillan, 1982), 75; M.L. Sanders, ‘Wellington House and British Propaganda during the First World War’, The Historical Journal 18, no. 1 (March 1975): 127; Philip M. Taylor, ‘The Foreign Office and British Propaganda during the First World War’, The Historical Journal 23, no. 4 (December 1980): 886–7; Gary S. Messinger, British Propaganda and the State in the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 38.

69 T.O. Willson, Letter of offer to James McBey, 28 April 1917, FWWAA 83-3, Part 1, IWM.

70 Malvern, 52–4; Walton, 102, 107.

71 Sanders and Taylor, 28–9, 64–7.

72 Ibid., 66 (regarding victories and morale).

73 James Fox, British Art and the First World War, 1914–1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 9.

74 Letter, Yockney to editors, 11 December 1917, FWWAA 83-3, Part 2, James McBey 1917–28, IWM; Morning Post, 5 February 1918, Press Cutting, FWWAA 468/10, IWM; Letter, Yockney to McBey, February 1918, FWWAA 83-3, Part 1, James McBey 1917–28, IWM; Letter, E.G. Baillie to McBey, 14 February 1918, FWWAA 83-3, Part 2, James McBey 1917–28, IWM; Letter, George Davidson to Yockney, 9 January 1918, FWWAA 83-3, Part 2, James McBey 1917–28, IWM. W.T. Massey, The Desert Campaigns (London: Constable & Co., 1918).

75 See Aberdeen Free Press, 29 January 1918, Press Cutting, FWWAA 468/10, IWM.

76 Black, 135.

77 ‘War Artist in Palestine’, Daily Telegraph, 11 February 1918, FFWAA 468/10, IWM. Robert Cumming, Artists at War 1914–1918, Kettle’s Yard Gallery, Cambridge, 19 October to 15 November 1974 (Exhibition catalogue), 12.

78 Hector Dinning, Nile to Aleppo, with the Light-Horse in the Middle-East (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1920), 10–11. See also George F. Langley and Edmée M. Langley, Sand, Sweat and Camels: The Australian Companies of the Imperial Camel Corps (Kilmore: Lowden, 1976), 140.

79 Hutchinson, 169.

80 Ibid., 167; ‘Pictures– McBey’s Etchings’, AWM265 46/1/9/2.

81 Imperial Camel Corps Old Comrades Association, Barrak 70 (Anzac Day 1989); Letter to ‘Peter’, 16 February 1981, EP051 Laurence (Rory) Moore Papers, Liddle Collection, Leeds University.

82 For the comparable reflection of filmmakers’ emotional repertoire and instincts in their oeuvre, see Rosenwein and Cristiani, 103.

83 See Gullett.

84 See, for example, David R. Woodward, Hell in the Holy Land: World War 1 in the Middle East (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006); Matthew Hughes, Allenby and British Strategy in the Middle East 1917–1919 (London/Portland: Frank Cass, 1999). Kristian Ulrichson, The First World War in the Middle East (London: Hurst & Co., 2014) represents the new shift in focus, considering the impact upon the civilian population, though not at the level of individual experience.

85 Edward C. Woodfin, Camp and Combat on the Sinai and Palestinian Front: The Experience of the British Empire Soldier, 1916–18 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

86 Mark Seymour, ‘Emotional Arenas: From Provincial Circus to National Courtroom in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy’, Rethinking History 16, no. 2 (2012): 177–98.

87 Desmond Morris argues that while a conscious decision is made by the artist in depicting posture, gestures and expressions, they are not studied for what they signal to the viewer and the emotions they reveal. Desmond Morris, Postures: Body Language in Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2019), 6.

88 See Rosenwein and Cristiani, 4, 71–3.

89 Salaman, ‘James McBey’s Etchings’, xiii, xvii.

90 Charles Carter, The H.H. Kynett Collection of Etchings by James McBey (Aberdeen: Aberdeen Art Gallery, March 1960), 3, ABDAG8361.22.

91 Aberdeen Free Press, 29 January 1918, Press Cutting, FWWAA 468/10, IWM.

92 The Long Patrol: Dawn: see https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C188173 (accessed 4 July 2023).

93 List attached to letter, Foster to Nicholson, FWWAA83-3, James McBey 1917–28 Pt 1, IWM.

94 Rosenwein and Cristiani, 18, 23. See also Scheer, 220, 188, 193.

95 Meirion Harries and Susie Harries, The War Artists: British Official War Art of the Twentieth Century (London: Michael Joseph, 1983), 25.

96 Gerd Althoff, considered in Rosenwein and Cristiani, 45.

97 For emotions being assigned value, see Matt and Stearns, 2.

98 Sydney Stock and Station Journal, 24 December 1915, 1.

99 For the idea of an emotional regime see William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 124–9, cited in introduction to Matt and Stearns, 9. Barbara Rosenwein first developed the idea of ‘emotional communities’. See Rosenwein and Cristiani, 39.

100 Harries and Harries, 25.

101 Introduction to Matt and Stearns, 6.

102 McBey, Diary, 11 July 1917.

103 George Langley, 14th Australian Light Horse Regiment formerly ICC, History, Jan 1916–Sept 1918, 25–6, AWM 224 MSS 39 Part 2.

104 Alvin Eglinton papers, Letter to Father, Abbassia, 31 August 1916, 3, courtesy Eglinton family.

105 See Daniel Putman, ‘The Emotions of Courage’, Journal of Social Philosophy 32, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 463–70. Putnam wrote about the ‘look’ of confidence. Ibid., 467.

106 Letter, James McBey to Martin Hardie, 17 August 1917, 940, Hardie, Martin, 1875–1952, Box 4, Letters James McBey to Martin Hardie, Department of Special Collections, University of California Southern Regional Library Facility, The University of California, Los Angeles.