In the introduction to Major John Robertson's memoir of his service with the Imperial Camel Corps, With the Cameliers in Palestine (1938), Sir Harry Chauvel, the wartime commander of the Desert Mounted Corps, ruminated on the importance of Robertson's memoir. 'In New Zealand as in Australia', he explained, 'it is only natural that more interest has been shown in the Western theatre of the Great War than in the Eastern theatres as the great bulk of their soldiers served in the former. The Palestine campaign', he continued, 'is consequently little known in these countries'. 1 Curiously, he thought, the campaign was better known in the United States, especially amongst American cavalrymen who likened the EEF's northwards drive to Aleppo to Stonewall Jackson's campaign in the Shenandoah Valley during the American Civil War, than it was in Britain and the Dominions. The memory of the campaign was alive and well, though, Chauvel was happy to report, amongst the men of the 14th and 15th Australian Light Horse Regiments, who had adopted the motto Nomina Desertis Inscripsimus, 'In the Desert we have written our names'. 2 Chauvel had first pointed out the relative obscurity of the war in Sinai and Palestine seventeen years earlier, when he praised R. M. P. Preston's regimental history, The Desert Mounted Corps (1921), for bringing attention to a campaign 'but little known to the general public'. 3 He did so again in the foreword to Ion L. Idriess's The Desert Column (1932). 4 Yet little, it seemed to him on the eve of the Second World War, had changed. Chauvel wasn't exaggerating. Although the campaign in Sinai and Palestine and elsewhere had long been overshadowed by the war on the Western Front, much to the dismay of soldiers during the conflict, as we have seen in previous chapters, the situation had worsened in the interwar period. Twenty years after the start of the war, the 'popular definition of 1