Book: With Our Army in Palestine

A >> Antony Bluett >> With Our Army in Palestine




By the time Gaza was occupied by our troops, the remaining Turkish defences
except Atawina had fallen into our hands. This, too, was evacuated when the
garrison had done their work of delaying our advance and protecting the
main retreating body. It was due to their dogged defence that a larger
number of prisoners were not taken by the British, and the two almost
bloodless retirements were admittedly very ably carried out.

Thus, in six days the patient labours of six months had on the one hand
been brought to nought, and on the other had been crowned by complete
success. The fall of Gaza gave us the key to the whole of the Maritime
plain of Palestine. It was one of the five great cities of the Philistines,
and the only one that had retained even a degree of its former greatness;
with the others the cry is "Ichabod!"

Of the town itself it is unnecessary to say more than that while there are
several fine modern buildings, amongst them a German school, and a mosque
which had suffered from our shells on account of the Turkish persistence in
using it as an observation post, the greater part of the town is like every
other Eastern town in its utter disregard of the elementary laws of
sanitation. The white roofs in a ring of cactus and amid the scarlet
blossoms of the pomegranate make a delightful picture seen from the top of
a neighbouring hill, but there is the usual complete disillusionment when
you have passed the outskirts of the town. Not all the dirt and squalor,
however, could minimise the intense feeling of satisfaction amongst the
troops at having at last conquered the bogy that had for so long prevented
the advance into the Holy Land.

As usual the Turks did as much damage as they could before leaving. The
more pretentious houses had scarcely anything of value left in them; their
owners and, in fact, all the chiefs of the native population of Gaza had
long since been deported. Most of these were grossly ill-treated, and some
had been hanged, for what crime other than a desire to live at peace with
their neighbours only the criminals who executed them knew.

It took many weeks of labour before the engineers could repair the damage
done to the water-supply, which, in and around Gaza, was fairly ample. But
now, the Turks having been driven out of their strongholds, it was
necessary to keep them on the move northwards, to fight them whenever they
could be brought to the sticking-point and to harass them night and day.
After six months of comparative stagnation the troops were ready, and more
than willing for operations of this nature. They wanted a little moving
warfare for a change, and General Allenby supplied the need.

When the capture of the Turkish Lines was complete, the whole Army was
ordered to advance, and for the next fortnight the pursuit never slackened.
The story would fill a volume could you collect but half of the incidents
of those stirring days. It was an epic of endurance and utter indifference
to hardship. Few men, however, could tell a connected tale of what
happened, for, obedient to the command, the enemy was attacked whenever he
was encountered, which was every day.

The Turks were beaten, but they were by no means demoralised. On all parts
of the front our advance was stubbornly resisted. On our left flank they
fought with most bitter determination to save their railhead for long
enough to get their guns and stores away, and having succeeded in doing
this retired farther up the coast and prepared to fight again. On our right
flank the mounted divisions, who had started from Beersheba on the night
Gaza was evacuated to perform their usual function of cutting off the
enemy's retreat, were assaulted vigorously by a strong rearguard of Turks
who fought in anything but a beaten manner. It was here that the Yeomanry
made a charge reminiscent of the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava.

There was no blunder about this charge, however, which was made in face of
point-blank fire from "5.9's" and other guns, all of which were captured.
It is no more than bare justice to say that the Austrian gunners gallantly
stuck to their guns till the Yeomanry swept through them and cut them down
where they stood.

Later, the Yeomanry had further opportunities of which they availed
themselves to the full; they, too, had a few painful memories to wipe out.
After the occupation of Huj, where the Turks had an enormous depot, the
pursuit quickened, as could be seen by the increasing litter of stores the
enemy left behind. Some idea of the amount of material used in a modern
battle may be gathered from the fact that one of our cable-sections salved
forty thousand pounds' worth of copper wire alone, all of which had been
employed on the battlefield.

Infantry and mounted troops marched and fought to their utmost capacity,
ignoring their hardships. Rations arrived--when they arrived, and some days
they came not at all. If there were but four men to share in one tin of
bully-beef or one pound of biscuits they counted themselves fortunate.
Almost every man carried a "billy" slung on to the hook at the back of his
tunic, a habit learnt from the Australians. This was generally made out of
an empty fruit tin, with a piece of wire for a handle. Perhaps the drivers
of one team would have one billy-can, the genuine article, between them,
and this is large enough to hold about four mugs of tea.

The scarcity of wood was a great difficulty. Every man in the team was
strictly enjoined to "scrounge" any scrap of wood he could find en route,
and it was a common sight to see a driver suddenly hop off his horse, dart
across the road triumphantly to seize a stick he had spotted, after which
he rushed after his team and scrambled into the saddle again, the horses
meanwhile plodding patiently along. Then, the moment word of a halt for a
quarter of an hour came down the long line, every man in the team quickly
dismounted and a toll of sticks was collected from each by the "cook." Then
the billy was placed precariously on the heap and in a few minutes you
would see the tiny fires all along the column.

What wonderful tea that was! In hot countries there is no drink to equal
it, either taken scalding hot to prevent heat apoplexy or as cold as you
can get it, without milk or sugar, to be carried in your water-bottle. Many
a man was saved from collapse by a timely mug of hot tea, and if there was
a rum ration to go with it, so much the better.

But, alas, one of the essentials for making tea was often lacking; the
farther we advanced the scarcer did water become, and now there were no
pumps to draw it from the wells. Horses went three days and more without
drinking, and hundreds died from thirst and exhaustion. Infantry, starting
with empty water-bottles, marched thirty miles across country, with a
bayonet-charge thrown in, and found perhaps a pint of water per man at the
end of the day.

Then the rain came. Roads, at best no more than a travesty of the name and
already battered by Turkish transport, became quagmires of mud through
which artillery-horses, weakened by thirst and meagre rations, could
scarcely draw the guns. The transport, toiling along in the rear, had the
utmost difficulty in bringing up supplies, and as for the men, they were
unwashed, unshaven, and covered with mud from head to foot.

Through all the strongholds of the Philistines, through villages with
historic names the army passed as the line of pursuit swung north-westwards
across the plain of Philistia. Past ruined Ascalon on the coast; Mejdel,
farther inland, one of the largest native towns on the plain, with many
ancient industries established there; Esdud, the ancient Ashdod, where
later a station on the military railway was built; Gath, where the Turks
made a most desperate attempt to delay our advance; Akron, the once great
frontier fortress of the Philistines; these were among the chief. In
addition there were modern Jewish colonies, depleted of their male
inhabitants but otherwise untouched, where a kind of coarse red wine was
obtained which helped greatly to ward off ill-effects from cold and wet.

At last, after five days of hot pursuit, the Turks made a last great stand
in defence of the junction between the Jerusalem railway and the main line,
and also of Et Tineh, which connected the Gaza and Beersheba railway. The
Yeomanry, acting with the Scotch infantry, distinguished themselves in the
action for possession of the former, taking the main Turkish position after
a wild gallop for a couple of miles under heavy fire all the way.

The Light Horse captured Et Tineh and a host of prisoners besides.
Everywhere the Turks were forced back. Their army was cut in two, one half
retiring on Jerusalem, the other going north towards Jaffa. In their
efforts to speed the heels of the former the Yeomanry again made a
wonderful charge against a high hill, a few miles from Latron on the
Jerusalem Road, strongly defended by the Turks. It is an unusual feat for
cavalry even to attack a hill of considerable dimensions, but the Yeomanry
not only did this but galloped to the top of it and killed or captured all
the defenders. Yet at the beginning of the War there were people who said
that the day of cavalry was over! The campaign in Egypt and Palestine was
one long and continued refutation of this view.

On November 15th British troops occupied Lydda, or Ludd, as it was
afterwards called, which town, according to legend, contains the tomb of
our patron-saint St. George. With the capture of Jaffa the next day, the
advance for the moment ended.




CHAPTER XVI

THE ROAD TO JERUSALEM


Since the fall of Beersheba the twentieth-century Crusaders had marched and
fought across one-third of the most famous battle-ground in all history. It
is a melancholy and ironic fact that this land, hallowed by the gentle
footsteps of the Prince of Peace, has seen more bloodshed than any country
on the earth. There is scarcely a village from Dan even unto Beersheba
which has not been the scene of desperate carnage at some time or other in
its history; and around Jerusalem the hills and valleys have run with blood
at any time these four thousand years.

Across these valleys and into these hills climbed the British cavalry, for
though Jaffa, the most considerable port in Palestine, had been captured
and held, a greater objective was in view.

All roads now led to Jerusalem. This expression, let me hasten to add, is
merely figurative. The exasperating fact was, that all roads did _not_ lead
to Jerusalem; most of them led nowhere except over a precipice; and they
were but glorified goat-tracks at best. You needed the agility of a
monkey, the leaping powers of a "big-horn" and the lungs of a Marathon
runner successfully to negotiate them. Moreover, by some oversight, the
authorities had neglected to provide the troops with alpenstocks. Without
these adventitious aids the cavalry penetrated the northern defiles of the
hills, following substantially the route taken by all the ancient invaders
from the north. Before the disorganised Turks were fully alive to their
advance they had reached the historic pass of Beth-Horon.

Through here that picturesque Assyrian warrior Sennacherib must have passed
when he "came down like a wolf on the fold; and his cohorts were gleaming
in purple and gold." It is to be hoped that the invasion did not take place
in the rainy season or the cohorts would have been sadly bedraggled before
they had reached Michmash. It will be remembered by most as the scene of
Joshua's passionate exhortation: "Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and
Thou, Moon, in the Valley of Ajalon," on that day when, having defeated the
Amorites with great slaughter, he was fearful lest night should fall before
he could turn the defeat into a rout. It must have been a wonderful and
uplifting day for the Israelites, after so many years of oppression.
Through Beth-Horon, twenty-five centuries later, passed our own Richard
Coeur de Lion on his last crusade; when, finding to his bitter
mortification that his forces were so depleted by disease and death that he
could not go on, he turned his back and refused even to look upon the City
he could not save.

After which brief incursion into the past let us return to history in the
making, not that the cavalry as a whole troubled themselves greatly about
anything so high-falutin'. Their immediate concern was to maintain their
precarious foothold in these melancholy hills; and if they worried at all
it was over the important question as to whether rations in satisfactory
quantities could be brought to them. With complete unanimity they cursed
the mist-like rain that shut out the surrounding hills from view; for they,
together with the whole army, had bitter reason for mistrusting fog, after
Katia and the first battle of Gaza.

Despite increasing pressure from the Turks, now awake to the seriousness of
their position, the cavalry held on to their positions and even advanced a
little, so affording the necessary protection for the advance of the
infantry farther to the south. These were marching on Jerusalem from the
British positions at Ludd and Ramleh, which latter place had been Turkish
G.H.Q.

From the west to Jerusalem there is but one road which can properly be
described as such, but it is one of the most travelled roads in the world,
and certainly amongst the most famous. In every age and from all countries
thousands of pilgrims landing at Jaffa have trodden this ancient road to
the Holy City. The first part of it is indescribably beautiful, leading as
it does through some of the orange groves which surround Jaffa. In the
springtime, if you turn your horse a mile or two away from the town an
incomparable view is spread before your eyes. On every hand stretch the
orange groves, great splashes of white and green, the scent from which is
almost overpoweringly sweet. Here and there you see the darker green of the
olive and the blazing scarlet of the pomegranate blossom, divided into
patches by hedges of prickly pear; and scattered about promiscuously are
oleanders, cypresses, and the stately sycamores. In the midst of it all
lies Jaffa the Beautiful, almost virginal in its whiteness, and beyond, in
almost incredible harmony of colour, the purple waters of the
Mediterranean.

Across the southern end of the Plain of Sharon the road leads through
cultivated fields, past vineyards and orchards, as far as Ramleh, where the
somewhat monotonous beauty of the plain ends abruptly. Some miles beyond,
the road, at the time the infantry advance was made, had degenerated into a
cart-track from the battering it had received from Turkish traffic.

About ten miles from Ramleh was Latron, a malaria-haunted swamp in the
rainy season and a plague-spot of flies in summer, and from here onwards
the road became increasingly difficult and dismal. You could see the
imprint of the oppressor in the very land itself, for though there are a
few patches of cultivation, the greater part of the countryside is
abandoned to a stony barrenness. The first check to the infantry came at
Bab el Wad, a rocky, desolate pass, which, had the Turks been allowed time
properly to fortify it, would have held up the advance and delayed the fall
of Jerusalem probably for months. As it was they fought desperately hard to
retain it, but having come so far in their pilgrimage, the infantry did not
allow this obstacle to stand in their way and carried the pass at the point
of the bayonet. After which spirited effort they proceeded onwards as far
as Enab, the "Hill of Grapes," a beautiful little place some six miles from
Jerusalem where later a Desert Corps Rest Camp was established. Here the
advance for the moment ended.

In the midst of the hills and valleys between the position of the infantry
and that of the cavalry near Beth-Horon towered the hill called Nebi
Samwil, the highest point in Palestine. This was a great serried mass of
rock rising by sharp degrees to a height of nearly 3000 feet, where the
infantry in some places had to sling their rifles and pull themselves up by
their hands, during their successful attack on the ridge. This kind of
alpine-climbing-cum-fighting was as different from the fighting on the
desert as it could well be, and only the infantryman, who did most of it,
could tell you which he detested the more. As one of them said, in the
Judaean hills you were mountaineer, pack-mule, and soldier all in one; and
it is not for a mere helpless artilleryman to paint the lily.

When Nebi Samwil had been captured and consolidated the whole line took
root, as it were, and prepared to beat off the increasingly violent attacks
of the Turks, while the engineers started to improve the roads and other
means of communication. The railway had to be brought up from Belah, no
easy task in the rainy season; for if laying the line across the desert had
been difficult, it was infinitely worse building it from Belah across the
Shephaleh to the British line. The Wadi Ghuzzee was a raging torrent by
now, and even a few miles from its mouth the turbulent waters were a
constant source of worry and anxiety to the engineers. I believe I am right
in saying that three times in the winter months was the bridge over the
wadi washed away by the floods, and each time the engineers had incredible
difficulty in building it up again. While it was down all traffic beyond
Belah was necessarily suspended and troops coming up the line from Kantara
were often three weeks on the journey to their respective units.

Frequently enough when men did at last arrive at their destinations it was
only to find that their battery or battalion had moved to some other part
of the front, generally with an unpronounceable name of which nobody had
ever heard! Few things are more wearisome than searching for a unit in such
a country as Palestine, especially in that part which comprises the Judaean
hills. Men coming up from the base in those winter months were often given
three, four, and sometimes six days' rations, so difficult was it for a man
to reach his unit.

The Turkish railway from Beit Hanun relieved the pressure to some extent,
when the damage it had suffered from our shells had been made good. The
only way it could be used was in conjunction with the mercantile marine,
who landed stores on to the beach as they had done at Belah before the
second battle of Gaza. One such landing-place was at Wadi Sukerier, a
bleak, inhospitable swamp north of Ascalon, where a great dump was
established in the mud, the supplies from which were transported north by
camel convoys. The great obstacles in the way of landing stores from ships
were the extremely dangerous coast and enemy submarines. The Mediterranean,
as elsewhere, was alive with "U" boats in the summer and autumn of 1917.
They levied a heavy toll on "troopers" and supply-ships coming out East,
and the Navy in its work of guarding the coast of Palestine during the
landing of supplies did not escape unscathed. That this was carried on
successfully and the troops in the Judaean hills were fed was very largely
owing to the untiring vigilance of British and Allied monitors and
destroyers.

The port of Jaffa was also used, and here the conditions were even worse.
Strictly speaking Jaffa is a port only in name, for all vessels have to
anchor off-shore and passengers and stores have to be landed in surf-boats.
In the rainy season the bar is almost impassable four days in the week and
the roar of the breakers can be heard miles away. Even when the sea was
calm enough for stores to be landed, the ground swell was such as to make
the ordinary landsman agree with Dr. Johnson's remark "that he would rather
go to gaol than to sea." It is easy to understand why the materials for
Solomon's Temple were brought to Jaffa on rafts; no other craft of those
days would have withstood the buffetings of the breakers.

But why Jonah ever chose this place from which to start his long journey to
Tarshish passes my comprehension unless, indeed, it was Hobson's choice. He
must certainly have been violently ill ere ever his flimsy boat had crossed
the bar--a feat his whale could never have accomplished at all--and for a
man of his temperament, soured by many trials, this must have been the last
straw.

Patience, by the way, was a powerful characteristic of the sailors engaged
in landing stores on the coast. A supply-ship, finding the sea at the Wadi
Sukerier too high to permit of stores being landed, went on to Jaffa, found
the breakers impossibly high there and returned to Sukerier. This amusing
pastime went on for three days, when the waters abated somewhat and the
stores were safely landed. As there was a "U" boat in the offing most of
the time, however, the humour of the situation did not strike the sailors
till afterwards.

Such were some of the difficulties confronting those who were responsible
for supplying the army with rations; and those whose business it was to
carry them to the troops holding the line could tell a similar story.
Although the engineers made roads where none had previously existed, and
blew the side out of a cliff in order to improve one already in use, the
lot of the transport services, and more particularly of the "Camels," was
not a happy one. Everything was against them, especially the weather. Rain
and cold are the camels' worst enemies, and thousands perished of exposure,
but the work still went on at all hours of the day and night, in all
weathers, and over every imaginable kind of road but a good one.

Troops holding outlying positions in the hills were inaccessible to any
form of transport but camels, and these had frequently to climb up steep,
rocky paths just wide enough to take them and their burdens. On the one
side was a precipice; on the other an abyss. Each camel-driver usually led
a couple of camels, marching abreast, but when the narrowness of the path
made it necessary for them to climb in single file, one was tied by his
head-rope to the rear of the other camel's saddle. This, though it was
absolutely necessary, rather added to the dangers of the climb. The
incessant rains had made the paths slippery in the extreme, and the camel
at the best of times is not the most adaptable of creatures; his
conformation, moreover, is all against him in so far as scaling a cliff is
concerned.

The merest slip on one of these treacherous paths meant destruction. The
rear-most camel would stumble, oscillate violently for a moment, and over
the side he would go, probably dragging his fellow with him and not
infrequently the unfortunate driver as well. Sometimes a camel out of pure
cussedness would "barrack" in the middle of a precipitous, narrow path, and
only by crawling through the legs of the halted camels could he be reached
by the exasperated officer or N.C.O. in charge of the party.

Now a camel has all the obstinacy of a mule and, in addition, is almost
impervious to pain. Flogging has little effect on him and profanity none
whatever; violence is necessary. Frequently the only way to shift one of
these obstinate beasts was by lighting a fire under him! Then he moved,
sometimes in such a hurry that he fell over the precipice and broke his
neck. I am aware that this method is not mentioned in Field Service
Regulations, but a great many things are done on active service which do
not come within the scope of that admirable volume. Further, when men's
lives were dependent on their receiving food and water at stated times, any
methods were justifiable. You could not stop the War and wait till one
recalcitrant camel was ready to allow six hundred of his fellows to pass
on their lawful occasions.

I speak not without some small personal experience of the vagaries of the
camel, though fortunately I was never driven to the extreme measures
described above, for some time before the operations about Jerusalem began
I retired to "another place" _via_ a cacolet-camel and the hospital train;
and when I again emerged it was in another guise and under the aegis of the
"Camels."

This must also be my excuse for omitting further details of the fall of
Jerusalem; but as this part of the campaign at least attained the fullest
publicity and has already been described by many more capable pens than
mine, the omission need cause the reader no loss of rest. I would say,
however, that the deliverance of the Holy City after four centuries of
Turkish tyranny and oppression was the signal for extraordinary rejoicing
amongst the Jews not only in Jerusalem but all over Egypt. General
Allenby's unassuming entry, on foot, into the Holy City and his assurance
that every man might worship without let or hindrance according to the
tenets of the religion in which he believed, whether Christian or
Mussulman, profoundly impressed the inhabitants and made the whole
proceedings a triumph for British diplomacy and love of freedom. Moreover,
our prestige, which for three years had been at a very low ebb, by the
capture of Jerusalem leapt at one bound to a height never before attained
in Egypt, always a country of sedition and intrigue.

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