With Our Army in Palestine Part 13

Infantry and mounted troops marched and fought to their utmost capacity, ignoring their hards.h.i.+ps. 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 sc.r.a.p 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 pa.s.sed 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 coa.r.s.e 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 advent.i.tious 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 pa.s.s of Beth-Horon.

Through here that picturesque a.s.syrian warrior Sennacherib must have pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sionate 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, pa.s.sed 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 quant.i.ties 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 p.r.i.c.kly 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 pa.s.s, 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 pa.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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-c.u.m-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 unp.r.o.nounceable name of which n.o.body 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 s.h.i.+ps 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-s.h.i.+ps 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-sh.o.r.e and pa.s.sengers and stores have to be landed in surf-boats.

In the rainy season the bar is almost impa.s.sable 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 Tars.h.i.+sh pa.s.ses 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-s.h.i.+p, 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 s.h.i.+ft 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 pa.s.s 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 una.s.suming entry, on foot, into the Holy City and his a.s.surance that every man might wors.h.i.+p 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.

Finally, to the notice of those interested in prophecy, I would commend the following: "Blessed is he that waiteth and cometh to the thousand three hundred and thirty-five days" (Book of Daniel, chap, xii., verse 12).

Jerusalem fell in the year 1335 of the Hegira, which is 1917 in the Christian Era.

CHAPTER XVII

Ou L'ON S'AMUSE

If I set out to make a categorical list of the things that existed or were made for our amus.e.m.e.nt in Palestine, it would, I think, consist of no more than four items, viz.: sea-bathing, military sports, sight-seeing, and concert parties; and I am not sure that the last-named ought to be included, for it was not until the final year of the campaign that they played any considerable part. Certainly Palestine was a difficult country in which to set up any of the more usual forms of relaxation. There were no neat little towns just behind the lines where a man could drink his gla.s.s of beer while he sat and watched the pictures, for example; nor were the Judaean hills exactly the ideal place wherein to set up a cinema or theatre of your own. Those who were fortunate enough to be stationed near Jaffa could, of course, visit that delectable spot, with its glorious surroundings and incredibly filthy streets; where they could see the alleged house of Simon the Tanner, or tread the sands whereon Napoleon slaughtered some three thousand prisoners in cold blood because he had no idea what else to do with them; and where, if they had a mind to renew the agony of their schooldays, they could pick out the extremely common-place rocks to which that unfortunate lady Andromeda was chained before her sensational rescue by Perseus.

These about exhausted the amus.e.m.e.nts of Jaffa, and you will notice that they do not exactly make for hilarity. A few miles away to the south were the Jewish colonies at Richon and Duran, whose inhabitants were extremely hospitable, and any troops quartered there subsequent to the fall of Jerusalem were a.s.sured of a warm welcome. At the former there was a considerable vine-growing industry and, as a natural concomitant, the troops showed commendable industry in drinking the produce.

Personally, I remember Richon chiefly because a tragedy befell me there.

The village contained a real barber's shop, if one may judge from the word "Coiffeur" writ large on the sign outside, and having heard of this startling phenomenon I rode over one evening for a hair-cut and shampoo. My foot was on the very threshold when a large person clad in fine raiment and wearing an armlet inscribed with the mystic letters "A.P.M." emerged from the shop, banged the door and pinned thereon a notice: "Out of Bounds." I pointed dramatically to my tangled mop of hair. "Eight weeks," I murmured brokenly. Whether or no that young man thought I was repeating the name of an erotic novel I cannot say, but he made a very tactless answer. I retired discomfited to find that my camel, having succeeded in breaking his head-rope, had returned to home and friends, leaving me to trudge back to camp and the tender mercies of the horse-clippers. I never heard for what crime the barber had been arraigned, though it would appear that the word "Coiffeur" can be sometimes misinterpreted; but I find it hard to forgive the A.P.M. for not allowing him to continue in his nefarious career, whatever it was, for another quarter of an hour. Successfully to cut your own hair needs, I imagine, considerable agility and a complicated arrangement of mirrors; and a pair of horse-clippers, the only alternative, was a fearsome weapon in the hands of a man whose sole experience in the hair-cutting profession was a murderous performance every morning with an army razor.

Elsewhere on the western portion of the front there were one or two similar small towns, but either they were out of bounds for sanitary reasons or were negligible in the matter of amus.e.m.e.nt; the average native village offered no inducement whatever for a visit. Even Ludd, which in the spring and summer of 1918 became a mighty depot and the terminus of the Military Railway for the time being, never rose to the dignity of a cinema. Like the inhabitants of a certain country village in the North of England, if you wanted distraction at Ludd you went to the station and watched the trains shunt.

After the Turks had made the last of a series of costly but abortive counter-attacks to regain Jerusalem and were finally and for ever driven back, the city was placed strictly out of bounds until Borton Pasha and the medical authorities had thoroughly purged it of all unpleasantness: the Germans and Turks were extremely uncleanly in their habits. Later, when this had been done, Desert Corps established a Rest Camp at Enab, about six miles from Jerusalem, and from time to time organised parties to visit the tombs and other holy places in the neighbourhood. As these were very well arranged and were usually in charge of padres from the various denominations they were much appreciated by the tired men coming up from the Jordan Valley for a rest. It is no part of my purpose to take the reader on a kind of personally conducted war-time tour of Jerusalem; the guide books will supply him with all the information he wants. Besides, he would inevitably be disappointed, unless his first glimpse of the Holy City was from the summit of Nebi Samwil or, coming out of the Jordan Valley on a moonlit night, he saw the s.h.i.+mmering radiance of the Mosque of Omar at the top of Mount Moriah.