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
Judæan 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 Judæan
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 Judæan 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 ægis 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.
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.