W. T. Massey

“ In advancing over the plain the troops had suffered from the abnormal heat, and many of the wells had been destroyed or damaged by the retreating enemy. In the hills the troops had to endure heavy rains and piercingly cold winds, with mud a foot deep on the roads and the earth so slippery on the hills that only donkey transport was serviceable. Yet despite all adverse circumstances the infantry and yeomanry pressed on, and if they did not secure all objectives, their dash, resource, and magnificent determination at least paved the way for ultimate triumph. ”

“ If Bagdad was not actually saved in Palestine, an expedition against it was certainly stopped by our Army operating on the old battlegrounds in Palestine. We lost many lives, and it cost us a vast amount of money, but the sacrifices of brave men contributed to the saving of the world from German domination; and high as the British name stood in the East as the upholder of the freedom of peoples, the fame of Britain for justice, fair dealing, and honesty is wider and more firmly established to-day because the people have seen it emerge triumphantly from a supreme test. ”

“ Men whose blood had been thinned by summer heat in the desert were now called upon to endure long hours of piercing cold, with their clothes wet through and water oozing out of their boots as they stood, with equipment made doubly heavy by rain, caked with mud from steel helmet to heel, and the toughened skin of old campaigners rendered sore by rain driven against it with the force of a gale. ”

“ Looking across No Man's Land one could easily pick out a line of trenches by a red, a vivid blue, or a saffron sandbag. The Turkish dug-outs were most elaborate places of security. The excavators had gone down into the hard earth well beneath the deep strata of sand, and they roofed these holes with six, eight, and sometimes ten layers of palm logs. We had seen these beautiful trees disappearing and had guessed the reason. But an even greater protection than the devices of military engineers had been provided for the Turks by Dame Nature. ”

“ Simple as was the surrender of Jerusalem, there were scenes in the streets during the short half-hour of General Shea's visit which reflected the feeling of half the civilised world on receiving the news. It was a world event. This deliverance of Jerusalem from Turkish misgovernment was bound to stir the emotions of Christian, Jewish, and Moslem communities in the two hemispheres. ”

“ Germany's dream of Eastern Empires and world domination, the lust of conquest of the Kaiser party, required that the tide of war should once more surge across the land, and if the conquering hosts left fewer traces of war wreckage than were to be expected in their victorious march, it was due not to any anxiety of our foes to avoid conflict about, and damage to, places with hallowed associations, but to the masterly strategy of the British Commander-in-Chief who manoeuvred the Turkish Armies out of positions defending the sacred sites. ”

“ If a general has reason to think that a tower or minaret is being used as an observation post, or that a church or mosque is sheltering a body of troops, there are those who hold that he is justified in deliberately planning its destruction, but here was a sacred building with associations held in reverence by all classes and creeds in a land where these things are counted high, and to have set about wrecking it was a crime. The German influence over the Turk asserted itself, as it did in the heavy fighting after we had taken Jerusalem. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The communion of the representatives of the Mother and Daughter nations on the stern field of war brought together people with the same ideals, and if there are any minor jealousies between them the brotherhood of arms will make the soldiers returning to their homes in all quarters of the globe the best of missionaries to spread the Imperial idea. Instead of wrecking the British Empire the German-made war should rebuild it on the soundest of foundations, affection, mutual trust, and common interest. ”

“ In this strong country men fought of old, and the defenders not infrequently held their own against odds. It is pre-eminently suitable for defence, and if the warriors of the past found that flint-tipped shafts of wood would keep the invader at bay, how much more easily could a modern army equipped with rifles of precision and machine guns adapt Nature to its advantage? It will always be a marvel to me how in a country where one machine gun in defence could hold up a battalion, we made such rapid progress, and how having got so deep into the range it was possible for us to feed our front. ”

“ Under a white officer you would see a chain of some two hundred donkeys, each roped in file of four, led by an Egyptian who knew all that was worth knowing about the ways of the ass, winding their way up and down hills, getting a foothold on rocks where no other animal but a goat could stand, and surmounting all obstacles with a patient endurance which every soldier admired. They did not like the cold, and the rain made them look deplorably wretched, but they got rations and drinking-water right up to the crags where our infantry were practising mountaineering. ”

“ General Maclean's brigade advanced from Biddu along the side of a ridge and up the exposed steep slope of Nebi Samwil, not all of which, in the only direction he could select for an advance, was terraced, as it was on the Turks' side. He was all the time confronted by heavy artillery and rifle fire, and, though supported by guns firing at long range from the neighbourhood of Enab, he could not make Nebi Samwil in daylight. Round the top of the hill the Turk had dug deeply into the stony earth. ”

“ It was next to impossible to haul field guns anywhere off the road, and as the Turks had paid no attention to the highway for some time—or where they had done something it was merely to dump down large stones to fill a particularly bad hole—it had become deeply rutted and covered with a mass of adhesive mud. The guns had to pass down from Kustul by a series of zigzags with hairpin bends in full view of enemy observers, and it was only by the greatest exertion and devotion to duty that the gunners got their teams into the neighbourhood of the wadi. ”

“ Women threw flowers into the car and spread palm leaves on the road. Scarcely had the Turks left, probably before they had all gone and while the guns were still banging outside the entrances to Jerusalem, stray pieces of bunting which had done duty on many another day were hung out to signify the popular pleasure at the end of an old, hard, extortionate regime and the beginning of an era of happiness and freedom. ”

“ All that occurred in the fighting on the Gaza-Beersheba line was part and parcel of the taking of Jerusalem, the freeing of which from four centuries of Turkish domination was the object of the first part of the campaign. The Holy City was the goal sought by every officer and man in the Army; and though from the moment that goal had been attained all energies were concentrated upon driving the Turk out of the war, there was not a member of the Force, from the highest on the Staff to the humblest private in the ranks, who did not feel that Jerusalem was the greatest prize of the campaign. ”

“ One brigade's movements synchronised with those of another, and the river was crossed, commanding positions were seized, and bridges were built with an astoundingly small loss to ourselves. The Lowland Scots worked as if at sport, and they could not have worked longer or stronger if the whole honour of Scotland had depended upon their efforts. At a later date, when digging at Arsuf, these Scots came across some marble columns which had graced a hall when Apollonia was in its heyday. ”

“ North and east of Latron (which was not yet ours) frown the hills which constitute this important section of the Judean range, the backbone of Palestine. The hills are steep and high, separated one from another by narrow valleys, clothed here and there with fir and olive trees, but elsewhere a mass of rocks and boulders, bare and inhospitable. Practically every hill commands another. There is only one road—the main one—and this about three miles east of Latron passes up a narrow defile with rugged mountains on either side. ”

“ A dozen villages clinging like limpets to steep hillsides are before you, and away on your right front the tall spires of Christian churches at Ain Karim tell you you are approaching the Holy Sites. Looking east the road falls, with many short zigzags in its length, to Kulonieh, crosses the wadi Surar by a substantial bridge (which the Turks blew up) , and then creeps up the hills in heavy gradients till it is lost to view about Lifta. ”

“ One of the biggest blots upon the Turkish government of the City was the total failure to provide an adequate water supply. What they could not, or would not, do in their rule of four hundred years His Majesty's Royal Engineers accomplished in a little more than two months, and now for the first time in history every civilian in Jerusalem can obtain as much pure mountain spring water as he wishes, and for this water, as fresh and bright as any bubbling out of Welsh hills, not a penny is charged. ”

“ When Jerusalem was won and small parties of our soldiers were allowed to see the Holy City, their politeness to the inhabitants, patriarch or priest, trader or beggar, man or woman, rebuked the thought that the age of chivalry was past, while the reverent attitude involuntarily adopted by every man when seeing the Sacred Places suggested that no Crusader Army or band of pilgrims ever came to the Holy Land under a more pious influence. Many times have I watched the troops of General Allenby in the streets of Jerusalem. ”

“ The men of the bold 75th went beyond Enab in the dark, and also out along the old Roman road towards Biddu to deny the Turks a point from which they could see the road as it fell away from the Enab ridge towards the wadi Ikbala. That night many men sought the doubtful shelter of olive groves, and built stone sangars to break the force of a biting wind. ”

“ In a war in which the moral effect of victories was only slightly less important than a big strategical triumph, Jerusalem was one of the strongest possible positions for the Allies to win, and it is not making too great a claim to say that the capture of the Holy City by British arms gave more satisfaction to countless millions of people than did the winning back for France of any big town on the Western Front. ”

“ CHAPTER III DIFFICULTIES OF THE ATTACK General Allenby's first problem was of vital consequence. He had to pierce the Gaza line. Before his arrival there had been, as already stated, two attempts which failed. A third failure, or even a check, might have spelt disaster for us in the East. The Turks held commanding positions, which they strengthened and fortified under the direction of German engineers until their country, between the sea and Beersheba, became a chain of land works of high military value, well adapted for defence, and covering almost every line of approach. ”

“ Britons who value the good name of their country will appreciate what this means to those who shall come after us—that the record of a great campaign carried out exclusively by British Imperial troops was unsullied by a single act to disturb the sacred monuments, and left the land in the full possession of those rich treasures which stand for the principles that guided our actions and which, if posterity observes them, will make a better and happier world. ”

“ Some people imagine that the hard brutalities of war erase the softer elements of men's natures; that killing and the rough life of campaigning, where one is familiarised with the tragedies of life every hour of every day, where ease and comfort are forgotten things, remove from the mind those earlier lessons of peace on earth and goodwill toward men. That is a fallacy. Every man or officer I spoke to declared that he was seized with emotion when, looking from the shell-torn summit of Nebi Samwil, he saw the spires on the Mount of Olives ”

“ No one could doubt that the Turks intended to defend Jerusalem to the last, not only because of the moral effect its capture would have on the peoples of the world, but because its possession by us would threaten their enterprise in the Hedjaz, and the enormous amount of work we afterwards found they had done on the Judean hills proved that they were determined to do all in their power to prevent our driving them from the Holy City. The enemy, too, imagined that our progress could not exceed the rate at which our standard gauge railway could be built. ”

“ People whom the Turks had turned out of Gaza and the surrounding country were trekking back to the spots where they and their forefathers had lived for countless generations. All their worldly goods and chattels were packed on overloaded camels and donkeys. The women bore astonishingly heavy loads on their heads, the men rode or walked carrying nothing, while patriarchs of families were either held in donkey saddles or were borne on the shoulders of younger men. ”

“ So small a cost of life was a wonderful tribute to good and dashing leading, and furnished another example of cavalry's power when moving rapidly in extended formation. To the infinite regret of the brigade, indeed of the whole of General Allenby's Army, one of the officers killed that day was the Hon. Neil Primrose, an intrepid leader who, leaving the comfort and safety of a Ministerial appointment, answered the call of duty to be with his squadron of the Bucks Hussars. ”

“ In a single-seater the pilot engaged two two-seater aeroplanes of a late type, driving down one machine within our line, the pilot killed by eleven bullets and the observer wounded. He then chased the other plane, whose pilot soon lost his taste for fighting, dropped into a heavy cloud bank, and got away. No odds were too great for our airmen. I have seen one aeroplane swoop down out of the blue to attack a formation of six enemy machines, sending one crashing to earth and dispersing the remainder. In one brief fight another pilot drove down three German planes. ”