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

AbstractVisual 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. AcknowledgementThe 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.Notes1 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.Additional informationFundingResearch 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.