BY THE BANKS OF THE JORDAN
We have seen how impregnable the defences of Jerusalem had become as
the result of the big advance northwards at the end of December.
As far as any military forecast could be made we were now in an
impenetrable position whatever force the Turk, with his poor
communications, could employ against us either from the direction of
Nablus or from the east of the Jordan. There seemed to be no risk
whatever, so long as we chose to hold the line XXth Corps had won,
of the Turks again approaching Jerusalem, but the Commander-in-Chief
determined to make the situation absolutely safe by advancing
eastwards to capture Jericho and the crossings of the Jordan. This was
not solely a measure of precaution. It certainly did provide a means
for preventing the foe from operating in the stern, forbidding,
desolate, and awe-inspiring region which has been known as the
Wilderness since Biblical days, and doubtless before. In that rough
country it would be extremely difficult to stop small bands of
enterprising troops getting through a line and creating diversions
which, while of small military consequence, would have been
troublesome, and might have had the effect of unsettling the natives.
A foothold in the Jordan valley would have the great advantage of
enabling us to threaten the Hedjaz railway, the Turks' sole means
of communication with Medina, where their garrison was holding out
staunchly against the troops of the King of the Hedjaz, and any
assistance we could give the King's army would have a far-reaching
effect on neutral Arabs. It would also stop the grain trade on the
Dead Sea, on which the enemy set store, and would divert traffic in
foodstuffs to natives in Lower Palestine, who at this time were to a
considerable extent dependent on supplies furnished by our Army. The
Quartermaster-General carried many responsibilities on his shoulders.
Time was not the important factor, and as General Allenby was anxious
to avoid an operation which might involve heavy losses, it was at
first proposed that the enemy should be forced to leave Jericho by the
gradually closing in on the town from north and south. The Turks had
got an immensely strong position about Talat ed Dumm, the 'Mound of
Blood,' where stands a ruined castle of the Crusaders, the Chastel
Rouge. One can see it with the naked eye from the Mount of Olives,
and weeks before the operation started I stood in the garden of the
Kaiserin Augusta Victoria hospice and, looking over one of the most
inhospitable regions of the world, could easily make out the Turks
walking on the road near the Khan, which has been called the Good
Samaritan Inn. The country has indeed been rightly named. Gaunt, bare
mountains of limestone with scarcely a patch of green to relieve the
nakedness of the land make a wilderness indeed, and one sees a drop
of some four thousand feet in a distance of about fifteen miles. The
hills rise in continuous succession, great ramparts of the Judean
range, and instead of valleys between them there are huge clefts in
the rock, hundreds of feet deep, which carry away the winter torrents
to the Jordan and Dead Sea. Over beyond the edge of hills are the
green wooded banks of the Sacred River, then a patch or two of stunted
trees, and finally the dark walls of the mountains of Moab shutting
out the view of the land which still holds fascinating remains of
Greek civilisation.
But there was no promise of an early peep at such historic sights, and
the problem of getting at the nearer land was hard enough for present
deliberation. It was at first proposed that the whole of the
XXth Corps and a force of cavalry should carry out operations
simultaneously on the north and east of the Corps front which should
give us possession of the roads from Mar Saba and Muntar, and also
from Taiyibeh and the old Roman road to Jericho, thus allowing two
cavalry forces supported by infantry columns to converge on Jericho
from the north and south. However, by the second week of February
there had been bad weather, and the difficulties of supplying a line
forty miles from the railway on roads which, notwithstanding a
vast amount of labour, were still far from good, were practically
insuperable, and it was apparent that a northerly and easterly advance
at the same time would involve a delay of three weeks.
New circumstances came to light after the advance was first arranged,
and these demanded that the enemy should be driven across the Jordan
as soon as possible. General Allenby decided that the operations
should be carried out in two phases. The first was an easterly advance
to thrust the enemy from his position covering Jericho, to force him
across the Jordan, and to obtain control of the country west of the
river. The northerly advance to secure the line of the wadi Aujah was
to follow. This river Aujah which flows into the Jordan must not be
confused with the Auja on the coast already described.
The period of wet weather was prolonged, and the accumulation of
supplies of rations and ammunition did not permit of operations
commencing before February 19. That they started so early is an
eloquent tribute to the hard work of the Army, for the weather by the
date of the attack had improved but little, and the task of getting
up stores could only be completed by extraordinary exertions. General
Chetwode ordered a brigade of the 60th Division to capture Mukhmas
as a preliminary to a concentration at that place. On the 19th the
Division occupied a front of about fourteen miles from near Muntar,
close to which the ancient road from Bethlehem to Jericho passes,
through Ras Umm Deisis, across the Jerusalem-Jericho road to Arak
Ibrahim, over the great chasm of the wadi Farah which has cliff-like
sides hundreds of feet deep, to the brown knob of Ras et Tawil. The
line was not gained without fighting. The Turks did not oppose us at
Muntar--the spot where the Jews released the Scapegoat--but there
was a short contest for Ibrahim, and a longer fight lasting till the
afternoon for an entrenched position a mile north of it; Ras et Tawil
was ours by nine in the morning. Tawil overlooks a track which has
been trodden from time immemorial. It leads from the Jordan valley
north-west of Jericho, and passes beneath the frowning height of Jebel
Kuruntul with its bare face relieved by a monastery built into the
rock about half-way up, and a walled garden on top to mark the Mount
of Temptation, as the pious monks believe it to be. The track then
proceeds westwards, winding in and out of the tremendous slits in
rock, to Mukhmas, and it was probably along this rough line that
the Israelites marched from their camp at Gilgal to overthrow the
Philistines. On the right of the Londoners were two brigades of the
Anzac Mounted Division, working through the most desolate hills and
wadis down to the Dead Sea with a view to pushing up by Nebi Musa,
which tradition has ascribed as the burial place of Moses, and thence
into the Jordan valley. Northward of the 60th Division the 53rd was
extending its flank eastwards to command the Taiyibeh-Jericho road,
and the Welsh troops occupied Rummon, a huge mount of chalk giving a
good view of the Wilderness. This was the position on the night of
19th February.
At dawn on the 20th the Londoners were to attack the Turks in three
columns. The right column was to march from El Muntar to Ekteif, the
centre column to proceed along the Jerusalem-Jericho road between the
highway and the wadi Farah, and the left column was to go forward by
the Tawil-Jebel Kuruntul track. The 1st Australian Light Horse Brigade
and the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade were, if possible, to make
Nebi Musa.
The infantry attack was as fine as anything done in the campaign. I
had the advantage of witnessing the centre column carry out the whole
of its task and of seeing the right column complete as gallant an
effort as any troops could make, and as one saw them scale frowning
heights and clamber up and down the roughest of torrent beds, one
realised that more than three months' fighting had not removed the
'bloom' from these Cockney warriors, and that their physique and
courage were proof against long and heavy trials of campaigning. The
chief objective of the centre column was Talat ed Dumm which, lying on
the Jericho road just before the junction of the old and the new road
to the Jordan valley, was the key to Jericho. It is hard to imagine a
better defensive position. To the north of the road is the wadi Farah,
a great crack in the rocks which can only be crossed in a few places,
and which a few riflemen could cover. Likewise a platoon distributed
behind rocks on the many hills could command the approaches from all
directions, while the hill of Talat ed Dumm, by the Good Samaritan
Inn, and the height whereon the Crusader ruins stand, dominated a
broad flat across which our troops must move. This position the 180th
Brigade attacked at dawn. The guns opened before the sun appeared
above the black crest line of the mountains of Moab, and well before
long shadows were cast across the Jordan valley the batteries were
tearing to pieces the stone walls and rocky eyries sheltering
machine-gunners and infantry. This preliminary bombardment, if short,
was wonderfully effective. From where I stood I saw the heavies
pouring an unerring fire on to the Crusader Castle, huge spurts of
black smoke, and the dislocation of big stones which had withstood
the disintegrating effect of many centuries of sun power, telling the
Forward Observing Officer that his gunners were well on the target and
that to live in that havoc the Turks must seek the shelter of vaults
cut deep down in the rock by masons of old. No enemy could delay
our progress from that shell-torn spot. Lighter guns searched other
positions and whiffs of shrapnel kept Turks from their business. There
are green patches on the western side of Talat ed Dumm in the early
months of the year before the sun has burned up the country. Over
these the infantry advanced as laid down in the book. The whirring
rap-rap of machine guns at present unlocated did not stop them, and
as our machine-gun sections, ever on the alert to keep down rival
automatic guns, found out and sprayed the nests, the enemy was seen
to be anxious about his line of retreat. One large party, harried by
shrapnel and machine-gun fire, left its positions and rushed towards
a defile, but rallied and came back, though when it reoccupied its
former line the Londoners had reached a point to enfilade it, and it
suffered heavily. We soon got this position, and then our troops,
ascending some spurs, poured a destructive fire into the defile and so
harassed the Turks re-forming for a counterattack as to render feeble
their efforts to regain what they had lost.
By eight o'clock we had taken the whole of the Talat ed Dumm position,
and long-range sniping throughout the day did not disturb our secure
possession of it. Immediately the heights were occupied the guns went
ahead to new points, and armoured cars left the road to try to find a
way to the south-east to protect the flank of the right column. They
had a troublesome journey. Some of the crews walked well ahead of the
cars to reconnoitre the tracks, and it speaks well for the efficiency
of the cars as well as for the pluck and cleverness of the drivers
that in crossing a mile or two of that terribly broken mountainous
country no car was overturned and all got back to the road without
mishap.
Throughout the night and during the greater part of the day of
February 20 the right column were fighting under many difficulties. In
their march from the hill of Muntar they had to travel over ground so
cracked and strewn with boulders that in many parts the brigade could
only proceed in single file. In some places the track chosen had a
huge cleft in the mountain on one side and a cliff face on the other.
It was a continual succession of watercourses and mountains, of uphill
and downhill travel over the most uneven surface in the blackness of
night, and it took nearly eight hours to march three miles. The nature
of the country was a very serious obstacle and the column was late in
deploying for attack. But bad as was the route the men had followed
during the night, it was easy as compared with the position they had
set out to carry. This was Jebel Ekteif, the southern end of the range
of hills of which Talat ed Dumm was the northern. Ekteif presented to
this column a face as precipitous as Gibraltar and perhaps half as
high. There was a ledge running round it about three-quarters of the
way from the top, and for hours one could see the Turks lying flat on
this rude path trying to pick off the intrepid climbers attempting a
precarious ascent. Some mountain guns suddenly ranged on the enemy on
this ledge, and, picking up the range with remarkable rapidity, forced
the Turks into more comfortable positions. The enemy, too, had some
well-served guns, and they plastered the spurs leading to the crest
from the west, but our infantry's audacity never faltered, and
after we had got into the first lines on the hill our men proceeded
methodically to rout out the machine guns from their nooks and
crannies. This was a somewhat lengthy process, but small parties
working in support of each other gradually crushed opposition, and
the huge rocky rampart was ours by three o'clock in the afternoon.
Meanwhile two brigades of the Anzac Mounted Division were moving
eastwards from Muntar over the hills and wadis down to the Dead Sea,
whence turning northwards they marched towards Nebi Musa to try to
get on to the Jordan valley flats to threaten the Turks in rear. The
terrain was appallingly bad and horses had to be led, the troops
frequently proceeding in Indian file. No guns could be got over the
hills to support the Anzacs, and when they tried to pass through a
narrow defile south of Nebi Musa it was found that the enemy covered
the approach with machine guns, and progress was stopped dead
until, during the early hours of the following morning, some of the
Londoners' artillery managed by a superhuman effort to get a few guns
over the mountains to support the cavalry. By this time the Turks
had had enough of it, and while it was dark they were busy trekking
through Jericho towards the Ghoraniyeh bridge over the river, covered
by a force on the Jebel Kuruntul track which prevented the left column
from reaching the cliffs overlooking the Jordan valley. By dawn on the
21st Nebi Musa was made good, the 1st Australian Light Horse Brigade
and the New Zealand Brigade were in Jericho by eight o'clock and
had cleared the Jordan valley as far north as the river Aujah, the
Londoners holding the line of cliffs which absolutely prevented any
possibility of the enemy ever again threatening Jerusalem or Bethlehem
from the east. This successful operation also put an end to the Turks'
Dead Sea grain traffic. They had given up hope of keeping their
landing place on the northern shores of the Dead Sea when we took
Talat ed Dumm, and one hour after our infantry had planted themselves
on the Hill of Blood we saw the enemy burning his boats, wharves, and
storehouses at Rujm el Bahr, where he had expended a good deal of
labour to put up buildings to store grain wanted for his army.
Subsequently we had some naval men operating motor boats from this
point, and these sailors achieved a record on that melancholy waterway
at a level far below that at which any submarine, British or German,
ever rested.