An interesting piece from journalist Neil Prior which appeared on BBC Wales news website pages last weekend to coincide with the 105th anniversary of the Armistice in November 1918.

This weekend people throughout Wales will be contemplating the words of Canadian World War 1 poet John McCrae: “In Flanders fields, the poppies blow”.However, for many commemorating their Welsh fallen, neither poppies nor Flanders hold much resonance.

Up to 40% of Welsh soldiers, particularly in Mid and North Wales, served in other theatres of war, and never even set foot in Belgium or France.

Whilst South Wales is synonymous with the 38^th Division who fought valiantly on the Western Front at The Somme and Passchendaele, many from an area stretching from Ceredigion to Denbighshire joined the 53^rd Division, who mostly saw action in the Mediterranean and Middle East.

Yet while the 38^th are remembered with a sculpture of a Welsh Dragon at Mametz Wood, no such tribute exists for the men of the 53^rd.

Llanidloes historian Nia Griffiths covered the phenomenon of what she calls “The Forgotten War” as part of the thesis for her masters degree.

She discovered that of the 114 names on the town’s war memorial, 35 died in action at Gallipoli and Gaza, but also in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Salonika.

“It’s true to say that 68 of the fallen were killed on the Western Front, and they should rightly be honoured, but around 40% died in the Middle East, and surely that’s a high enough percentage for those men’s stories to also be heard?

“I think official commemorations, especially in the media, can be a little bit lazy.  Each Remembrance Sunday we say they shall never be forgotten, but for a large chunk of our men, that’s precisely what we are doing.”

Ms Griffiths added that on top of the death toll in sheer numbers alone, often the impact on rural Welsh communities was even more pronounced.

“Across the four parishes of Llanidloes, many of the men volunteered in the early stages of the war.

“They were early and enthusiastic adopters of Kitchener’s ‘Pals Battalions’, maybe because there was a closer sense of community spirit than in the industrialised south, maybe because work wasn’t as plentiful or financially rewarding in Mid and North Wales, but the effect was that often entire generations of rural towns and villages were wiped out.”

She said: “On the Western Front the casualties tended to be spread out across communities and over the duration of the war, but in Llanidloes for example, the majority of the 35 in the Middle East died on just two days of fighting, in August 1915 at Gallipoli and March 1917 in Gaza.”

Prof Sian Nicholas, Professor of Modern British History at Aberystwyth University says the picture was very similar in her town.

As part of a Heritage Lottery Fund programme to mark the WW1 centenary in 2014 she created an interactive map of the 1,000 or so servicemen from Aberystwyth known to have seen action, and where they had fought; she was astonished by the findings.

“Looking just at the army, of the 603 verifiable records we have, over 200 went to theatres other than the Western Front.

“Yet whenever I teach school children, or even students for that matter, and ask them for the first thing which comes into their heads when they think of WW1, almost all of them say mud, trenches, poppies etc; no-one ever mentions sand or camels or flies.

“It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, by remembering the troops in the Middle East we wouldn’t be denigrating the memories of those who fought on the Western Front, merely giving everyone the same respect.”

Writer and journalist Rhys David from Cardiff has written an account of the war in the Near East, based on Dewi’s letters home, entitled “Tell Mum Not to Worry”.

Dewi David was just 17 when he lied about his age to volunteer in 1915.

As a post office worker he was assigned to the Royal Engineers fighting with the 53^rd, in order to lay vital telegraphy and field telephone systems.

He spent the agonising winter of 1915 trying to cling on to their almost undefendable toehold at Gallipoli, in an utterly misconceived campaign botched by their commanders.

Eventually evacuated in December after their trenches were deluged by floodwater, he had some brief respite in Egypt on garrison duty defending the Suez Canal, before once again being pressed into action as they were tasked with pushing the Ottoman Empire’s troops over the Sinai Peninsula, to Jerusalem finally succeeding after three attempts to take Gaza with a flanking action at Beersheba.

Rhys David said: “I don’t think we ought to look at it in purely Welsh terms – as a South versus Mid and North Wales thing – Dewi was from Cardiff, and even at the time he felt the injustice of the Forgotten War every bit as bitterly as the troops you mention from Llanidloes.  I think the ‘Forgotten War’ is something which the whole of Britain is guilty of, not just us here in Wales.

“Initially his letters were bright and breezy, ending each with the phrase ‘I’m in the pink’, but by 1918 he was increasingly fed up; at first with small things like the troops on the Western Front receiving Christmas puddings in 1917 when they got nothing, but latterly more serious grievances, like when their men were taunted by those in France, saying they should come to the trenches to experience a ‘real war’.”

Dewi said food and water were in very short supply, the fighting was brutal with very little opportunity to dig Western Front-style defences into the desert sand, and yet they were still being mocked, with songs such as that by music hall star Marie Lloyd: “Go to Palestine if you want a rest”.

“It started even before the end of the war. The 38^th were volunteers, whilst the 38^th were mostly conscripted. But the message of supposed superiority from those who’d fought in France and Belgium was reinforced throughout the 1920s, with the ‘Unknown Warrior’ taken from there, the popularity of Western Front poetry, and through films such as ‘All Quiet on The Western Front.”

Prof Nicholas concurs: “We call it ‘WORLD’ War 1, yet our focus is always on a hundred or so square miles in Northern France. 

“If we’re ever going to properly understand the conflict we need to appreciate the truly global aspects, and make sure that’s something which is better reflected in our school syllabuses.”