IN THE WADI
At Fig-tree Camp we had what the army calls a "rest," which must not in any
way be confused with the word that implies repose. There is nothing of a
reposeful nature about an army "rest." It means that you come out of the
line for periods varying from two hours to two months, usually a great deal
nearer the former than the latter, and spend the time doing what the
authorities term "smartening up," after the gay and festive season through
which you have just passed. This generally takes the form of parades every
other hour, when the officers prattle amiably of matters to which you have
long been a stranger, and the Sergeant-Major takes the opportunity of
preventing his vocabulary from falling into disuse. Also, if you are in the
artillery, you clean your harness and polish up the steel-work thereon till
it twinkles like a heliograph in the sun. Then you go out and dirty
everything again.
When you come to examine the various forms of army discipline there are
usually to be found sensible and logical reasons for their existence; but
we amateur soldiers could never understand the necessity, on active
service, for polishing and burnishing steel-work, especially in a country
of strong sunlight; and there was certainly nothing in our daily duties
that we loathed half so much. For ceremonial parades, of course, you turned
out as "posh" as the next man, but in a parched land where you could with
difficulty keep your own person clean, it seemed a grievous waste of time
and energy polishing bits and chains and stirrup-irons merely for the sake
of doing it. Besides, think of the hours so spent which might have been
devoted to sleep! The afternoon we arrived at Fig-tree Camp most of us
would have liked to follow the sound example of that Lord Chesterfield who,
when he felt tired, used to say to his servant: "Bring me a dozen of sherry
and call me the day after to-morrow!"
We rested (army pattern) for five days, and, amongst all the pother of
parading and cleaning up, knew again the glorious delight of a daily dip in
the sea. Then we took the trail again and in due course took up a position
in another part of the wadi, Tel el Fara by name, the second of the great
boundary-hills built by the Crusaders. Here our position was at the edge of
the wadi, fortunately in one of the places where water was fairly abundant
both for horse and man. As an off-set to this we had ten miles a day to
travel for rations and forage, so the balance was about even as things were
in Palestine. At dawn on the first morning of our arrival the familiar
crash of bombs was our réveillé, and for a month the Turks repeated the
performance every morning as soon as it was light and every evening just
before sunset. With enormous difficulty, for the ground here was mainly
sandstone, we dug burrows for ourselves on the bank of the wadi. Some of
them were just large enough to contain the body stretched at full length;
others, more ambitiously conceived, bore an uncanny resemblance to a grave;
and a few strenuous people made shelves for their belongings in the sides
of their burrows.
Here we extended our acquaintance amongst the inhabitants of these regions.
Scorpions we knew well, tarantulas we had nodded to, but the visitor who
now invaded our narrow dwellings was the homely beetle; a monstrous fellow
this, as big as a crown piece. His correct name is, I think, the
scavenger-beetle, though we used a much more uncomplimentary term. He was
quite harmless, but he would treat blankets as a rubbish-bin. He would
seize a lump of earth or refuse much bigger than himself and push it in
front of him till he came to a convenient blanket, where he dropped his
load and went away for more. But his star turn was an attempt to crawl up
the perpendicular side of a burrow, pushing his load in front of him. The
side generally selected for this attempt was the one nearest your head as
you lay; and often the first intimation you had that the performance had
begun was the abrupt descent on to your face of beetle and load. Neither
the fall nor the subsequent profanity discouraged him in the least; on the
contrary, it spurred him to greater efforts. The next attempt would land
him an inch or two higher up, when down he would come again. I used to have
the most profound admiration for the legendary spider of the late King
Bruce of Scotland, but after a scavenger-beetle had fallen on my face for
the fifth time just when I was trying hard to go to sleep, I thought that
even perseverance had its limits. So I picked up the beetle and threw him
into the next burrow, and, in order that he could give his performance
there, sent the piece of earth after him. Judged by his remarks, however,
the occupant was no naturalist.
The outstanding feature of those days at Tel el Fara was eternal weariness;
we were always tired. "Stand-to" was at half-past two in the morning, when
we harnessed up and waited for orders. Often our cavalry would sight a
Turkish patrol and away we went across the wadi into no-man's-land playing
hounds to the Turkish hare. Rarely did we approach near enough to get a
shot at him for he departed at the gallop at first sight of us, and in
addition to his start he had the foot of us for speed. Then we trailed
back, generally after dark, scratched a hurried meal and went to earth
again till 2.30 a.m. the next day, when the whole business perhaps had to
be done once more. The Australians thoroughly enjoyed chasing old Johnny
back to his lair, and sometimes landed themselves in a tight corner through
over-keenness. They always managed to scramble out again somehow,
occasionally with the aid of our guns, most often without any help but
their own mother wit.
The Australians were rather difficult fellows to know intimately, mainly I
think, on account of their self-consciousness and an inordinate fear of
ridicule. With our brigade we had been good "cobbers" since the second show
at Gaza, where we were able to help them out of a nasty hole, and once
their confidence was gained the Australians were very stout allies. But
they were drawn more to the Scottish than to any other British troops.
Perhaps it was the Scots clannishness that attracted them. They influenced
enormously troops brigaded with them, as far as externals were concerned.
It was the habit of the Australians to cut off the sleeves of their
graybacks at the shoulder, thus making the shirt look like a loose kind of
gymnasium vest. We copied this, and it did certainly make for comfort and
freedom of movement. You would see a squadron going to water with scarcely
a shirt-sleeve between them; and some of the men also dispensed with the
shirt and rode mother-naked to the waist! The usual state of their saddlery
would have sent a British General of the "spit and polish" type into a fit
of apoplexy, for a harness-cleaning parade was a thing unheard of amongst
the Australians. They used to say that the horses needed all the care;
bits and stirrup-irons did not matter.
The popular idea, I believe, is that all Australians are born in the saddle
and that they dash about doing wonderful things with a lariat before they
are out of long clothes. This is ludicrously wide of the mark. The
percentage of Australians who can ride at all is less than that in England;
and very few even of the good horsemen are comfortable for some time on an
ordinary English trotting-horse. Their own horses have only two gaits: the
lope and the gallop.
Of course the real boundary-rider or cattleman is without equal in his own
way. There was one grizzled sportsman in our brigade at Tel el Fara who
could do extraordinary things with a horse, and nothing could dislodge him
from the saddle. His own pony had come to him in the ordinary way from
Remounts and had been a wild, half-broken creature; five months later the
same horse would follow him about like a dog. The Australian never mounted
in the ordinary way but would give a peculiar little chirrup; whereupon the
horse at once barracked, as a camel does to be loaded, and the rider had
merely to stretch his leg across the saddle and sit down. Similarly when
dismounting he would chirrup and the horse again went down on his knees.
Any one else trying the same trick with the horse would be received with a
stare of blank indifference; and woe betide the one who tried to mount!
The highest percentage of good riders was to be found in the men from
Queensland; even the men from the other states said that, though they would
die rather than admit that any other good thing could possibly come from a
rival state.
[Illustration: SUMMER IN THE WADI GHUZZEE. [_To face p. 176._]
As fighting men there was nothing to choose between them; and the Turks
hated and feared them all impartially. In this connection a good story went
the rounds. The Turks holding a certain advanced section of the line sent a
messenger under the white flag across no-man's-land to our trenches to ask
the nationality of the troops holding them. If it was English, the
messenger said, his comrades were prepared to surrender. As it chanced, a
battalion of men from the Home Counties was in possession of the trenches,
and the messenger returned with information to that effect. Within ten
minutes the whole party of Turks were in our lines! Later, they were asked
why they had been so anxious for their captors to be English; the reply was
that they had been told, with much circumstantiality of detail, that the
Australians were cannibals and habitually ate their prisoners; and that the
Scottish and Welsh troops went one better than this, for they never took
prisoners--alive! A tall story, of course, but it is reasonably certain
that some such rubbishy propaganda was from time to time circulated
amongst those simple Anatolian peasants, whose sole desire was to return to
the meagre farms from which they had been dragged by the heavy hand of war.
In the wadi the engineers were incessantly trying to improve the
conditions. When the horses had been catered for, they constructed a small
dam across a portion of the watering-place and made a bathing-pool where
you could stand up to your middle in clear, cold water. As we were not
supposed to remove even our putties except for bathing, or washing clothes,
the pool was soon working overtime. On a broad, flat ledge jutting out into
the wadi the engineers made a place where you could wash your clothes, with
gutters and channels for carrying away the soapy water cut in the face of
the cliff. When this was done a powerful clothes-washing offensive was
begun, for few of us had more than one shirt and that, of course, was on
our backs. Of our socks it could be said that the welts were good; the toes
and heels had perished of overwork.
One of the few charitable things men ever said about the sun was that it
dried your clothes quickly; you could take your shirt off your back, wash
it, and in an hour or so put it on again, bone-dry. This was a
consideration in a place where, while your shirt was drying, you wore your
tunic over the bare skin and prayed that there would not be an alarm
turn-out for, at any rate, an hour. When supplies are scarce you cannot
afford to lose many articles of kit, nor can you call for an armistice
while you wait for your shirt to dry.
Elsewhere I have mentioned, perhaps too frequently, the remarkable speed
with which the railway followed the troops. On the fourth day after our
arrival, it reached Tel el Fara. This was the branch line running eastwards
across our flank from Khan Yunus to Shellal, on the extreme right. Just
below the Crusaders' hill the sides of the wadi sloped gently down and it
was possible to cross in comparative comfort. Here a group of engineers and
E.L.C. were working in a casual, aimless sort of way, apparently building a
bridge for the branch line. Turkish aircraft very soon found this party,
who, indeed, seemed anxious to advertise their efforts, and bombed it
incessantly with considerable success.
Every day joists and beams and stones went up in the air and every day,
when the strafe was ended, the E.L.C. put them back again and added a few
more. But the Turks were very persevering and literally gave the workers no
rest. The bridge made little progress, but nobody worried very much. The
men appeared to be content to advance three yards, as it were, and slip
back two; there was no hurry over the business. Indeed, it looked like a
lapse on the part of the engineers to choose such an unsheltered and
unsuitable spot for a bridge; it would almost certainly be swept away by
the floods of the rainy season.
Curiously enough, moreover, their comrades a mile away laying the line
parallel with the wadi were working at a snail's pace now, compared with
their previous efforts, and were not making the slightest attempt to swing
the line in toward the crossing. This was unpardonable, but the Turks
noticed nothing out of the ordinary, and unerringly bombed the
working-party in the wadi, quite content at finding so obvious a target.
But the whole business seemed a gross waste of time and labour--unless you
followed the wadi for about a mile farther along. This very unusual
negligence on the part of the engineers was then fully explained.
At this point the wadi narrowed appreciably, though there was little else
to the uninitiated eye to recommend it as a crossing. The engineers,
however, were well satisfied, for here, out of sight of inquisitive
aeroplanes, men were toiling as if for their lives; there was nothing
casual or lackadaisical about this effort. While the Turks were assiduously
bombing the dummy, the real bridge was being built at a great pace and
without interference.
The shaped stones for the foundations were brought by the railway as far as
it had then reached and transported thence by night into the wadi. The
rough stones for the approaches and embankments came from higher up, where
the Turks by their bombing activities had kindly saved the engineers the
trouble of blasting. At the appointed place and time the line curved in
towards the bridge, crossed it, and having reached Shellal proceeded along
the wadi to Gamli, thence to Karm, some ten miles from Beersheba. This last
stretch of line was not completed till later, for the Turks, doubtless
becoming uneasy, made serious efforts to hamper the work of construction.
For three months they made repeated attacks on the Yeomanry and Australians
screening the engineers but met with no success, and the line was carried
on inexorably, if slowly, towards the appointed goal.
It was fairly obvious now from which direction our third attempt on Gaza
was to be made: everything pointed to the eastern flank, though it should
be said that the Turks right up to the last moment were in ignorance as to
where the main blow would fall.
A frontal attack was out of the question. If, during the summer months, we
had been stealthily and laboriously preparing for the assault the Turks had
been no less active in strengthening their defences. Gaza itself was almost
impregnable; and from the sea to Beersheba they had constructed a series of
enormously strong works, of which those at Atawina Ridge and between Sheria
and Hereira were the chief. These defences were absolutely up-to-date in
every respect. They were connected by telegraph and telephone, and it could
with truth be said that as far as Sheria the Turkish front was one
continuous tangle of wire. Beersheba itself was in a measure isolated from
the rest of the line. Indeed the only real opening in the whole chain of
defences was between that place and Sheria, the Turks no doubt trusting to
the exceptionally difficult country, which hereabouts was a maze of small
wadis and nullahs, to prevent any attempt at a break through. Similarly
they relied on the desert south-east of Beersheba to make an outflanking
movement impossible in that direction. In both these beliefs they were
sadly deceived, as will be seen later.
In addition to these defences the Turks were well served by their railways
on both flanks and in the centre. Beersheba was in direct connection with
the north, _via_ Sheria, and Gaza, although not actually on the railway,
was only about four miles from the railhead--Beit Hanun--of the other
branch of the northern line. Their roads both laterally and longitudinally
were in the main excellent, and they were in the midst of a country where
water was plentiful and the land fertile. Finally, their immediate reserves
and supplies were at such places as Hebron and Huj, both of which were
within easy reach of the front.
From about the middle of June our "nibbles" at the Turkish line became more
frequent and more ambitious.
The Scots made a characteristic raid on Umbrella Hill, one of the ridges
south-east of Gaza, and found out all they wanted to know without firing a
shot and with, I believe, only four casualties. The Turk at night-time was
very susceptible to the bayonet. This raid was typical of many, and the
combined result was that our line in the neighbourhood of Gaza was
materially advanced and the positions taken consolidated.
At the end of June General Allenby arrived in Palestine to take over the
duties of commander-in-chief. Shortly after his arrival there was a notable
increase in the quantity and quality of our rations, and beer in
barrels--yea, barrels--came up the line for the troops.
I am not going to suggest that the two events were in point of fact
connected, but I do know that the sudden and welcome change was universally
attributed to General Allenby, and that thenceforward the E.E.F. was "on
him," as the phrase goes, to a man.
I wonder if many of our big commanders realised as fully as did General
Allenby the enormous influence the "personal touch" had on the troops they
commanded? Just to see your chief wandering about more or less informally,
finding things out for himself, watching you--not on parade, but at your
ordinary daily jobs; to know that he was not above getting out of his car
to ask a question personally, or, during operations, to sit on a gun-limber
digging his bully-beef out of a tin with a jack-knife, like any other man.
These things went a mighty long way.
You get more willing and selfless service out of men if you are seen of
them, known of them, and if, perhaps, you suffer with them for a space.