From Anzac Book to Horse and Morse: First World War Australian 'soldiers' books' and the discourse of empire.

With Horse and Morse in Mesopotamia: The Story of Anzacs in Asia (Burke 1927) memorializes the service of various units in that theatre during World War I. It is uncharacteristic of the standard unit history genre in that it adopts the format of so-called soldiers' books. These, key examples of which are The Anzac Book (Bean 1916) and Australia in Palestine (Gullett and Barrett 1919), consist chiefly of contributions from service personnel themselves, and thus are informed to varying degrees by the pre-war populist imperialism espoused in boys' weekly papers and adventure novels by Henty and others. In its self-proclaimed role as 'memory book' of the Mesopotamian veterans' 'great adventure', With Horse and Morse is characterized by the same mix of residual imperial and emergent nationalist discourses to which its predecessor works had subscribed. However, that emergent nationalism in turn has its roots in an earlier discourse of comradeship long upheld in popular boys' papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]