ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at three fictional accounts of the First World War in Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine: Brereton’s With Allenby in Palestine, Helen Halyburton Ross’s Sin and Sand: A Romance of the Palestine Campaign, and Ernest Raymond’s The Jesting Army. It argues that these three semi-autobiographical/ fictional works demonstrated exactly the sort of balance that falls and other contemporary critics wanted to see in British and Dominion war writing. The chapter explains the stories behind With Allenby in Palestine, Sin and Sand, and Jesting Army, and the careers of their authors. It explores the content of the three fictional works. The chapter shows that fictional writing on the war in the Middle East realised a level of balance that authors writing about the Western Front often struggled to achieve, at least in the eyes of critical reviewers. The least renowned of the trio, Ross, provided perhaps the most accurate representation of active service conditions in Sinai and southern Palestine.
