The Soldier as Tourist: The Australian Experience of the Great War

Foreign travel is commonly an accompaniment to war, but it tends to be seen - by commanders and historians though not always by the participants - as peripheral, incidental to the primary experience of battle. This article suggests, somewhat speculatively, that in the case of the Australians in the First World War, travel was more than fortuitous; that indeed one aspect of travel, a well-established tourist ethos, had a direct impact on the way the troops reacted to the face of battle.1