The genre is older than jungle green, older even than Anzac. Its founder, and still its most successful author, was of all people the principal of a girls’ school and leader of the Methodist Church in Victoria. The Rev. W.H. Fitchett’s Deeds That Won the Empire (1896) and Fights for the Flag (1898) sold by the hundred thousand around the English-speaking world. As their titles suggest, his books were inspiring accounts of brave British redcoats and blue-jacketed sailors. Nothing to do with Australians? That very question prompted Fitchett to write. We were ‘an offshoot of a race with the most splendid history’, he said. Reading tales of old British battles could bind Australians more tightly together because it subtly bound us, ‘in spite of the separating power of space, to the parent stock’.

The world wars, the decline of the British Empire, and the repopulating of Australia by migrants from around the globe have changed the ‘parent stock’ from pink-cheeked men in red and blue coats to sunburnt ones in slouch hats. The ‘separating power’ is cultural now, not geographic. Still, the genre’s higher purpose remains what it was for Fitchett: that of crafting stories about real or imagined ancestors at war to honour an older generation and to move the hearts of new ones, to make us inheritors of what heroes once did, even to help us step forward and do the same one day. Peter FitzSimons, the genre’s current king, evokes Tobruk and Kokoda in the same way, and to the same end as Fitchett once evoked Trafalgar and Waterloo. Both authors make the experience of huge and painful wars seem shocking but somehow homely, remote but familiar, the property of an earlier time but of our own time as well. Old wars still belong to us, the genre murmurs, no matter what our age or attitudes, our gender, or ancestry. Those wars, and what those soldiers did, ought to feel as real as we are.

‘Real’ is an accolade by FitzSimons on the cover of Peter Rees’s Desert Boys. It’s the former journalist’s second book in the genre. The Other Anzacs: Nurses at War 1914–1918 (2008) related ‘tales of heroism, romance, heartbreak and adventure’, as ABC’s Stateline Canberra put it, of four or five thousand army nurses in World War I. Desert Boys, bigger and more ambitious, follows perhaps a hundred thousand Australians as they fight their way through Sinai and Palestine from 1916 to 1918 and through North Africa, the Middle East, Greece and Crete from 1941 to 1943. Rees’s technique remains the same, though, narrating ‘the experiences of people who fought the battles’.

Rees warns his readers at the outset that Desert Boys is ‘not meant to be a definitive account’, an enterprise he leaves to ‘official histories and war historians’. One of those historians, Michael McKernan, who also happens to be the pre-eminent theologian of what Ken Inglis once called ‘Anzac, the substitute religion’, praised Rees’s book in the Canberra Times as ‘a bit like walking down the cloisters at the Australian War Memorial, slowly examining the Roll of Honour’, with its bronze panels that whisper the names of the dead. Rees presents his characters to us not as the glorious fallen or curious inhabitants of a foreign past, but as they might have wanted us to see them today – as Aussies, mostly young, generally athletic, high-spirited, and quietly brave. Partly through the medium of frequent block quotes pulled from diaries and letters, we travel with these men to exotic places, watch them play sport and play up, sit with them as they write letters home, crouch with them as the bullets fly overhead. At seven hundred pages, this walk around the cloisters is overlong. Still, Rees has a Tolstoyan ability to keep his vast, argus-eyed narrative moving, partly by deploying unspectacular, perhaps deliberately clichéd prose that functions like Homer’s verbal tics (those ‘wine-dark seas’), always giving readers familiar phrases to return to and rest in.

But to see men as they might want to be seen is hardly the same as seeing them as they really were. Take the block quote on page 325, in which some soldiers of the 6th Division, landing in Egypt in 1940, cheer Anthony Eden and plot to knock the fez off, in their words, ‘that Gyppo with him’. Rees typically moves briskly on after presenting the scene in an eyewitness’s words, perhaps expecting us to smile at youthful high spirits. But weren’t the cheers for Eden political, reflecting his notorious sacking before the war by a British prime minister inclined to appease Hitler? There are no real politics in Rees’s book beyond echoes of frictions between Aussies and Brits and between soldiers and civilians; and few disputes or disagreements of any sort between Australians, unless they nudge us to cheer for approved underdogs like the two Gunditjmara brothers, Reg and Harry Saunders. The ‘Gyppo’ and people like him are denied such approval.

Rees does not ignore some of the violence done by Australians to the civilians they briefly lived among, ordered around, bartered with and bullied, sometimes killed; but he won’t risk staining his characters by admitting to their membership of the British Empire’s ruling caste. As Kipling said of Australian troops in an earlier African war, they were ‘a new brand of sahib’. The sahibs who speak in this book routinely denounce the ‘loud and truculent’ Arabs and ‘treacherous’ Bedouin, and Rees has too little interest in exploring those adjectives and what lay beneath them.

Then again, Rees is uninterested in almost everyone who stands metaphorically outside the frame of that dockside vignette of Eden, the Gyppo, and the Aussies. What of the enormous British and Egyptian logistical and technical effort that allowed Australians to fight almost entirely in the front line around the Mediterranean in two world wars, and to win so much attention from generals and newspaper barons? Rees might say his subject is simply the Australians. Where, then, are the sailors? The Royal Australian Navy spent much of the first two years of World War II patrolling the Mediterranean, but Rees barely mentions it. If this is because his subject is desert fighting, why throw in the campaigns in Greece and Crete? Desert Boys is almost arbitrary in its framing.

‘We will remember them’, we used to chant, as Rees himself reminds us. Books like his help shape what, how, and whom we remember. They are ‘not history’, in the words of an academic critic slapping down one of Fitchett’s books in 1900, and there is little point expecting them to be. The problem is when their narrative, their framing, their prose, their mythology shrink to a khaki cartoon. There are flashes of intelligence and insight in Rees’s book, as there were in Fitchett’s work, but over the past century the flashes have grown fewer and dimmer in this genre. For one Australian’s experience of a desert war without the sentimental and serviceable nationalism of so much popular military history – and for a history that is truly ‘real’ – find a copy of Alan Moorehead’s Desert War: The North African Campaign 1940–1943 (1943) and give that to your uncle, grandfather or brother-in-law.