Part 5 (1/2)
Yet even these odds were not too great. Taken completely by surprise as they were, the Yeomanry fought with everything they could lay their hands on: sabres, rifles, bayonets, mallets, pegs, even with bare fists, asking no quarter and with no thought of surrender. They knew that no help could possibly arrive in time, for the Turks attacked simultaneously at both places; yet they fought on with desperate courage until the Turks at length retired, unable to break the gallant little band.
And who now remembers the names of these places, except the relatives of those who fell there, and the few who, fighting, came safely through? They were little affairs of outposts, mere skirmishes, perhaps, but they paved the way for the larger task. And who now speaks of Romani? Yet it was one of the decisive battles of the war. Here the Turks made a magnificently organised attempt to break through our defences and reach the Ca.n.a.l. It was indeed a wonderful feat to bring an army of nearly 30,000 men across a spa.r.s.ely watered desert, with their nearest railhead a hundred and fifty miles away. We found it difficult enough later with the help of the railway. Not only did they bring an army, but dragged, on sledges, heavy guns up to 8 inches in calibre with them--a very rude shock to our experts, who p.r.o.nounced it impossible until they saw our observation posts on the summit of Kattigannit literally plastered with heavy sh.e.l.ls.
For nearly a fortnight the Turks struggled to get through. First they tried to break down our defences between Romani and the sea. Foiled in this they swung across to the other flank and fought for possession of the chain of hills dominating this region. Mount Royston, Mount Meredith, and the long, whale-backed Wellington Ridge all changed hands at least once, and the last-named became the princ.i.p.al Turkish position, around which a terrible struggle raged for nearly two days.
The infantry and dismounted cavalry advancing to the attack had first to cross a broad stretch of uneven country as bare as the back of the hand, and swept from end to end by machine-guns. They sank over the boot-tops into the sand at every step, they were hampered by their equipment, and the blazing August sun made their rifles almost too hot to hold.
Painfully the long line struggled on, halted a little while and lay down, for human endurance has its limits, then went forward again. So, alternately forcing themselves through the sand, and lying down for very want of breath, the sweating men came to the foot of the ridge, sadly decimated in numbers, but unconquerable in their determination to get to the top.
Now they made a last great effort, and, swearing, sliding, sometimes sinking up to the knees, sometimes crawling, and all the time swept by a murderous fire, these wonderful men reached the redoubt and at length got to grips, only to be thrust back again by the no less determined Turks.
Again they came, a mere handful, and again they were driven back. Now a second wave reached the slope, and with the shattered remnant of the first made a great rush, obtained a footing and kept it. It was sheer hand-to-hand fighting of the fiercest kind; every man marked his man and went for him with the bayonet.
The Turks gave back thrust for thrust; they yielded no ground, but died where they stood. Quarter was neither asked nor given. Men fought in little groups until one or the other was wiped out, when the survivors rushed away and gave a hand elsewhere. And at last victory was to the strong, and Wellington Ridge was won--at a price.
Yet although the capture of the ridge turned their position, the Turks elsewhere retired but slowly, contesting every attempt at an advance with most bitter determination.
All through these scorching days the battle raged, and even the fine work of the cavalry failed to break them, for they knew that with every yard they retreated, their cherished dream of crossing the Ca.n.a.l receded farther and farther. It was not a question of ”reculer pour mieux sauter”; the Turks knew that if they were driven out of a position they left it for good; wherefore they fought with the courage of despair. They had to go, however, for nothing human could stand against the inexorable advance of our men.
But the fighting, b.l.o.o.d.y and desperate though it was, was not the worst of the hards.h.i.+ps endured by both victor and vanquished; many things pa.s.s unnoticed in the heat of battle. It is afterwards, when the pursuit is spent, and a man thinks of a meal and a drink, that he counts up his hurts.
In the fight he has perhaps thrown away his haversack to give himself more freedom of movement, or a chance bullet has pierced his water-bottle; and there he is, miles from anywhere, with neither rations to eat nor water wherewith to slake the thirst that seems to be gnawing his throat away. Nor has he the chance of obtaining more, except from a comrade.
There were small parties of men concerned in the remoter fighting who advanced too far, and when night fell, lost touch with the main body. For forty-eight hours some of them were lost in the desert; water and rations were soon all gone, and they suffered intolerably with the heat. Hunger they could endure, but they were driven to dreadful and unnameable expedients to quench the thirst that consumed them.
When at last they did find their comrades, their tongues and lips were so blackened and swollen that the first drinks had to be given through a straw.
Imagine the plight of the wounded, lying on the slopes of Wellington Ridge and elsewhere, racked with pain, and tortured almost to madness by flies and thirst, exposed for hours to the merciless rays of the sun, until the stretcher-bearers, working though they were like men inspired, had the opportunity to carry them away to the rear.
And then, what? Here were no swift, easy-running cars, no comfortable hospital-trains to whirl them down to a Base where there were baths, clean linen, and kindly sisters to make them forget what had pa.s.sed. Instead, two or three bell-tents wherein doctors and orderlies, worked almost to a standstill and rocking on their legs with fatigue, strove to dress the wounds of the maimed and shattered men.
Nor was this the worst. After the wounds had been cleansed and bound up as well as might be, came the journey down to Kantara. The lucky few were carried in sand-carts, but the large majority went on camel-back, lying in a cacolet. A cacolet is a kind of stretcher-bed with a rail round it, and a hood over the top to protect the occupant from the sun. Each camel carried two cacolets, one clamped to each side of a specially constructed saddle.
To a wounded man the motion was the very refinement of torture, especially if the other cacolet were occupied by a heavier man. At one moment the cacolet swung high in the air, and the sufferer was banged against the lower rail; the next, it was at the other extreme, and he was almost thrown out--there was no rest from the maddening motion until a merciful unconsciousness brought relief to the tortured body.
By means of cunningly placed blankets the medical authorities did all that was humanly possible to mitigate the terrible jolting, but with all their care and ingenuity even the shortest journey in a cacolet was a nightmare.
The miracle was that even the uninjured men could endure so much. One could--and did--live on bully-beef and biscuits for weeks at a time and take no harm, provided one could get water. But the Turks had a habit of poisoning the wells as they retreated, and the most stringent orders had therefore to be issued, forbidding men to drink of water unexamined by a medical officer. It was pitiful to see the horses, too, after two or three days' hard riding, watered perhaps once in all that time; for the lightest driver or cavalryman, with his equipment, rides at least eleven stone, a heavy burden to carry over the sand in the heat.
Out of such troubles was the victory of Romani won. It meant that a few more miles of railway could be built; that the wire road could go forward once more; that the pipe-line could carry onward its precious freight; and that the Ca.n.a.l was safe.
Of like nature, too, were the victories at Bir El Abd, where the Turks held on to their positions with such extraordinary tenacity that it was literally touch-and-go which side retreated; but those dour Scotchmen could take a deal of hammering, and the Turks had to go in the end; at Mazar, at Maghdaba, and at Rafa, on the border, where the Turkish dream of an Ottoman Egypt was shattered for ever. So they retreated into Palestine, with the shadow of yet a greater cataclysm upon them.
This, then, was the work accomplished by those early pioneers, and scarcely the half of it has been told. Let those who sat in their arm-chairs in England demanding querulously what we were doing in Egypt judge of their achievement.
They marched and toiled and fought--a few scattered, solitary graves mark the places where some of them lie buried. If they fought only in their thousands and not in their tens of thousands, the reason is simple: in all the peninsula between Kantara and El Arish the wells may be numbered on the fingers, and before an army can be used, its means of procuring food and drink must be a.s.sured. Water did not exist in sufficient quant.i.ties for a big army, nor was there any transport available for food. Dysentery, heat, flies, bad water, no water--they took them as a matter of course, and went forward nor stayed for any man.
In the course of twelve months they cleared the enemy out of a hundred and fifty miles of desert over which they built the railway, laid the pipe-line, and made the wire road, that their comrades who followed later might come safely and quickly to the Great Adventure over the border.
And these are their memorials, for they did a great work.