Part 13 (1/2)
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.