In the gully our brigade canteen had set up a shop, and somehow or other had picked a very unhealthy spot. I believe a shell lobbed in it the day before the hop-over, and on the morning on which we arrived I saw a man lying alongside it with a coat thrown over his head. At dusk on 11 April our battalion commenced to move out along the gully, and, for safety’s sake, some of us took a new path on the lefthand side. Just before this it had begun to sleet again, and it did not stop for hours. The tramp out that night was a heartbreaker. For a start we were robbed of almost every ounce of energy by the thick mud that we had to get over before reaching the road near Vaulx. Just outside Vaulx we came across a horse ambulance with its four horses laid out on the ground beside it. How many men were killed or wounded, we could not see, as they had been taken away, but it was a good haul for one shell. Once on the road we settled down to a steady tramp, but we fairly flew through Vaulx village – its reputation for shell-fire had us bluffed.
As we went along we overtook stragglers, some of them carrying about as much rum as they could hold. How they ever reached our camp I don’t know, for the strongest of us had to struggle to get there. These drunks could obtain no shelter anywhere on the way, for the Hun had destroyed everything in the way of a bivouac or billet; and it was almost as much as your life was worth to lie down exposed to the weather. It seemed ages before the battalion came up to a man standing by the roadside, who directed us to the transport lines. Here we found Lieutenant Anderson, who was acting quartermaster; he had a lot of sandwiches and hot tea ready for us laid out on boxes. For those who wanted rum, there was plenty – in the A.I.F. the rule was no rum before a fight; the rum was given afterwards when the boys were dead beat. This feast looms up as one of the best I ever had. Standing out in the open (there was hardly a place where one could sit down), and with a couple of old lanterns to drive away a little of the blackness of the night, we fairly gorged ourselves like beasts. It was just on 24 hours since anyone had had a hot meal.
After this we were told to go out along the road for half a mile and there we would find a camp all ready for us. Off we went again, and, if the previous march had been hard, this was dreadful. What with the buckshee stunt and the real one, no-one had had a night’s rest for three nights, and it was beginning to tell. When at last we stumbled onto our camp, we thought our troubles over – but not yet! On hunting round we found canvas shelters had been propped up big enough to hold about six men, and underneath the shelters were little puddles of water. This was where the boys were to rest their tired bodies, after all they had gone through. Disgust, anger and laughter followed each other at intervals of about five minutes. Our boys’ sense of humour often comes to their aid in cases like this, and all hands made the best of it. Some went away to try and find a drier place; others threw their things down and lay on top of their waterproof with a couple of blankets round them. Three mates of mine and myself got together, spread out our waterproofs and blankets (some were very damp), and all huddled close to one another. Anyway, we were all too weary to be fussy, and we slept like logs until well on into the day. I’ve often wondered how those poor boys who were wounded and lying out around the Hun line managed to live through that awful night. I feel sure most of them must have died before morning, for it was a night on which noone would turn a dog out of doors. In the afternoon we were formed up and marched into Bapaume. All that was left of our battalion was here now, and, as the little handful marched by, Brigadier-General Brand and our C.O., Colonel Peck, were sobbing like little schoolgirls, the tears running down their faces. The pick of our battalion had gone, and it was a long time before our unit recovered from this blow. In Bapaume we were entrained, and handled like the prodigal son. Our chiefs could not do enough for us. Late in the afternoon we detrained in Albert, and marched out of the town about a couple of miles to some huts, where we were at home. That night in the Y.M.C.A. hut our old Brig. came in, bought everything in the place, and he and Colonel Brockman and our C.O. pelted everything all over the hut. The Diggers came home that night with stuff to burn.
Several days after this General Birdwood came and held an inspection, and it was then that I heard him apologise to our boys for the disaster that had overtaken them. He first made his usual ‘bloodthirsty’ speech, clearly intended to be invigorating, and then gathered the remnants of a proud and gallant brigade around him and spoke to them as man to man. Why he ever made these ‘invigorating’ speeches was a mystery to me. Birdwood the soldier invariably commenced these talks with, ‘Now, boys, I know you are all anxious to get back into the line and give the Huns another thrashing.’ Birdwood the man usually finished with, ‘Well boys, I sincerely hope that you are all writing home to your mothers.’ From every point of view, his efforts to arouse blood-lust by mental suggestions were futile; as an intelligent man he must surely have had some notion of the fact. On this occasion his sympathetic nature almost got the better of him; he appeared to be struggling with a desire to take into his confidence, and parts of his conversation were impressed on my memory. ‘Boys, I can assure you that no-one regrets this disaster that has befallen your brigade more than I do,’ and again, ‘I can assure you that none of your own officers had anything to do with the arrangements for the stunt,’ and lastly, ‘We did our utmost to have the stunt put off until more suitable arrangements could be made.’ Not a word did he utter in condemnation of those in higher authority, but it was plain to me that he shrank from being contaminated by the bloody fiasco.
To me this was an extraordinary incident, and it set my line of thought upon a new tangent. Never before had I questioned the infallibility of those who held our lives in their hands, and at whose bidding we waded ‘through blood and guts’, as the men said. Now one recognised that, in spite of all the pomp and splendour of their rank, they were fallible flesh and blood; the same as we. My complacency had received a rude awakening.
The 5th Light Horse in Palestine
Ion Idriess
Ion Idriess is the kind of rugged romantic nationalist writer that we don’t see around much anymore. His heyday was in the 1930s and 1940s when, mostly working from the offices of Angus & Robertson in Sydney, he wrote such now-forgotten classics as Flynn of the Inland and Lasseter’s Last Ride. He wrote a book a year from 1931 to 1964 – fiction, non-fiction. He is a great example to his modern writing descendants.
Idriess was born in 1889 in Sydney but grew up in the bush and attended the Broken Hill School of Mines. The Desert Column, published in 1932, is based on the diary Trooper Idriess of the 5th Light Horse kept during the campaign against the Turks in Palestine which culminated in the capture of Damascus (by Australians, not by Lawrence of Arabia) in 1918. Idriess was present at Beersheba – the last cavalry charge in military history.
He says that ‘all that has been written in this diary records my thoughts and feelings at that very moment.’ He says the diaries were forwarded by his sister to A&R with the ultimatum that they must be published. Sceptical commentators have found evidence of literary skill by comparison of the published version with the originals – but that is neither here nor there. The landscape, yarns and events are authentic, and no more romantic than a reader will find in The Anzac Book. Idriess died in 1979.
*
May 4th. It is such a nice morning. Fokkers are droning across a deep blue sky. A lark has shot straight up singing as if its heart would burst in vying with the steely whirr-rrr of the Albatross Scout above. Now the scout is signalling the Fokkers that our planes are on the wing. Towards Gaza, guns are muttering where our infantry and the Turkish battalions take a few yards of trench day by day to lose it night by night and take it back next day, only to lose it again. And so the war drags on. The Turks have over thirty miles of front now. Both sides are breathing, both are hurrying up reinforcements for another and mightier ‘push’. And the Light Horse cannot but remember that – how long ago? – two little brigades galloped right into the back streets of Gaza.
May 6th. The nights are
moonlight in a soft white light. We awake to the racing drone – we lie with tautened nerves while the wings of death roar by bringing whoo-whoo-whoo-whoo, crash! crash! crash! crash! and whizzing fragments of aerial torpedoes, stench of fumes, screams of men and horses mingled together. We try to sleep again, and the curse of the night comes again …
Last night, the sky was brilliant with rockets all crimsoned with lightning balls of shrapnel as the Turks sought our planes and we sought theirs.
About May 9th. The taubes are playing hell of nights, dropping bombs all among the big camps. Our hospitals should be completely isolated from the fighting camps. Forty bombs were dropped on a big hospital in Belah. Two Tommy doctors were operating on a man for appendicitis; the bombs were crashing all around them, the concussions rattling their instruments; they worked steadily on and finished the operation successfully.
… There have been some changes in our Higher Command; General Chetwode commands the Eastern Force, General Chauvel the Desert Column, and General Chaytor, the New Zealander, the Anzac Mounted Division. We are jolly glad Chauvel is in sole command of us crowd, anyway. We would be more glad still though, if Chetwode wasn’t overruled by the Big Command a hundred miles away back on the Canal.
… We have been issued with a Hotchkiss gun per troop. It doubles our strength. A troop of Light Horse are a very deadly little crowd now.
We soon tried the new toy out: crossed the wadi and rode towards Abu Sheria on troop patrol. A mountain-battery banged viciously from brown hills to our right. We spread out and jogged along towards a hummocky ridge from which we could see what was doing, but as two Turkish troops made a dash for that same ridge our troop lieutenant spurred his horse and whistled – we broke into a gallop, laughing as the Jackos livened up their ponies. It was a hilarious race, but our horses easily beat the grey ponies. We jumped off, slung our reins to the horse-holders, and ran up the ridge – the Jackos had wheeled in a scurry of dust, galloping for a sheltering ridge. It was snap-shot shooting: crack-crack-crack-crack-crack-crack! at the flying target – their lance-points gleaming. As they wheeled around the ridge our Hotchkiss gun opened out. The Jackos’ heads lined their ridge and we blazed into one another quite snappily. Just a little private affair of outposts. The Jackos were two to one but our Hotchkiss gun equalised that, though the Jackos in the hills were not sports for they butted in and peppered us with their mountain guns.
We are deadly shots at half a mile. Our corporal was ‘spotting’ through the glasses – he called out and laughed each time we got a man through the head. The Jackos stood it for a while – their bullets flipped up the gravel and ricocheted away screeching. Our Hotchkiss stuttered like a house afire, her bullets ripping lines of red dust right under the Turks’ noses. It was a willing go while it lasted – we enjoyed it immensely. I was not exhilarated because I felt gamer – I was just as scared of those bullets as I am in a big battle. Jacko retired at the gallop when he had had enough, leaving seven dead men, all in their big cavalry boots, lying face down among the poppies. And it was such a lovely morning!
May 10th. Patrol-fighting is universal for miles. All the mounted men are scrapping; it makes the days quite lively. The 5th do a lot of their patrol work to Hill 410. A patrol may be anything from a section of four men up to a regiment – 500. Sometimes we patrol in brigades and then it is called a reconnaissance. Sometimes a squadron, about 120 men, patrol out and meet a squadron or a regiment of Turks. There is generally a fight and so far the Turks have lost. Any one of our squadrons will tackle a Turkish regiment any old day, even though the Turks are supported by their guns from the fortifications behind. A squadron seeks patrol-fights as a butcher’s pup seeks meat. B Squadron had a ding-dong set-to a few days ago; chased a Turkish regiment right to Hill 410 under the mouths of the Turkish batteries. C Squadron went galloping up in support and the Turks had the cheek to send out a brigade to chase them away. C Squadron gets most of its more exciting fights from Sausage Ridge and Sihan. All the other Light Horse and En Zeds have their daily patrol-fights and nightly raids and outpost scraps. A 7th Regiment squadron trapped a Turkish squadron in full view of our outpost line a while back. The squadron galloped the Turks down, the Turkish cavalry in a galloping fight using their sabres and revolvers but the 7th men just clubbed them from their horses. The Turks are terrified of the very name ‘Anzac’! And to think of all the preparations we made, all our grim anticipations on meeting these renowned Turkish cavalry!
However, old diary, you have quite enough to do in watching the affairs of a section, let alone the brigade.
So it goes on, while the infantry are at one another’s throats across the bloody Gaza redoubts. Occasionally we hear the deep-throated navy guns shelling the ancient city while across this great plain we keep the Turk back into his hills, pinning him against his infantry redoubts while his infantry and cavalry have as much hope of driving us back upon our infantry as they have of hopping to Mecca.
… Chaplain Maitland-Woods is a decent old sort. He is quite mad, though; mad on old buried cities, and ancient peoples. Whenever the padre gets a chance, he climbs one of these big old mounds and a crowd congregates, Aussies and En Zeds, Tommies and Cameleers and Artillerists and heaven knows what not, while he holds forth and tells us that the Bedouins were the cut-throat Amalakites who harried David and were just as dirty a crowd thousands of years ago as they are today. Then the padre points up this very wadi and tells us of the queer old armies that struggled along it, tough old chaps who tended their flocks and annexed those of their neighbours; who skinned one another alive at times; who built cities that other people razed to the ground. Quaint people who lived and loved and fought and died and vanished within the very dust upon which we lie night after night. So, old diary, if I slug some pages from the past into you, don’t be put out, for daily I am breathing these old chaps’ dust into me.
The padre has got numbers of the boys archaeology mad. In their precious spare time they are digging all along the wadi and finding queer old stone houses, and buried tombs and things so musty with centuries that even the padre does not know what they are. The boys disdain anything Roman for that is too modern.
The Wadi Ghuzze is a huge, dry old riverbed cutting right across this Gaza-Beersheba plain. Mighty waters rolled down this dead river in ages past; its precipitous banks are from 50 to 70 feet deep, all cut into by sheer ravines and saw-edged washaways. Sombre, weird banks, all grottoed and twisted like a madman’s dream. Someone has told us that the man who illustrated Dante’s Inferno got his inspiration from these sinister banks.
We had terrible difficulty in crossing that wadi. There were only two crossing-places and the Turkish guns from the hills fronting us concentrated on those two crossings. But now, of course, we have crossings everywhere.
Fronting us over the wadi is the no-man’s-land of the plain, which we are fast making ‘our land’ against the Turkish cavalry. Beyond the Gaza to Beersheba line of hills rises, like a great blue wall, the Plateau of Judea, which runs far back behind Beersheba on through invisible Hebron to the great Plain of Armageddon near Mt Carmel. But that is far away.
From the Plain of the Philistines which we galloped over that day behind Gaza, the hazy blue Plateau of Judea looked very beautiful. It was from there the Israelites gazed down on the land flowing with milk and honey. So the padre says, anyway.
But here comes the sergeant. Bye-bye.
May 12th. Yesterday, the whole brigade crossed the Wadi Ghuzze to deploy as regiments: the screen then rode straight across the plain towards the Turkish hills. Some sixty-pounders lumbered behind the main body. Arriving at the first low hills we took possession and formed a line of outposts. C Troop and D Troop were on the farthest hill 630. The ground fronting us sloped in gentle rises and flats to a deep wadi. The country between us and the wadi was dotted with browsing horses and camels, Turks and Bedouins shepherding them. Close by us was a big stone house with graceful trees. Turkish cavalry hid in the house waiting fo
r us to be silly enough to ride up and be shot. On the farther side of the wadi was cultivated country heavily stocked with camels and horses with their attendant Bedouin and Turkish snipers, while riding along the wadi bank, coming and going, ambled the grey ponies of the Turkish patrols. On the low hills behind were their infantry redoubts with, behind them, the Gaza-Beersheba railway and the big Turkish camp of Wadi Sheria. Away to the southeast, we could just catch the sunshine on the white roofs of Beersheba. Behind all were the big blue hills of Judea.
Our troop leader detailed two sections to form each a separate outpost closer still to the Turks. The lads cantered out, then galloped to left and right, each post choosing a ridge. Several Turkish patrols accepted the challenge in a whirl of dust, only to lose.
The day wore on. We of C Troop hoped some Turkish squadron would come and tackle us. In the afternoon there was a damned earthquake behind us and an express engine roared overhead. It burst with a crumpling crash in the camp of Wadi Sheria, completely obliterating a line of tents under a cloud of heavy black smoke. As more ironmongery roared overhead we laughed at the Turkish infantry running from the camp to their deep trench shelters. Presently the guns knocked off business and were hauled laboriously back. The brigade, of course, had to wait until they got into safety lest the Turks swarm out and attempt a capture. Then C Troop and D Troop had to wait while the brigade got a move on for home and bully-beef. It was late then. The Turks were working around us; the firing from our small outposts was quite snappy. We ourselves were blazing at the grey ponies as the patrols dashed cunningly closer from ridge to ridge. Other outposts away to the right and left were crack, crack, cracking, until at sundown was signalled the distant order ‘Retire with all haste!’ Our two sections mounted and were away, both troops galloping straight for the setting sun. A light breeze was blowing, the ground was hard, the horses wild for a run; bullets whistled past; it was a glorious ride. We glanced behind at yells of ‘Allah! Allah! Allah!’ ‘Finish Australia!’ We laughed at sight of the little grey ponies coming hell for leather, some riders firing from the saddle, others waving sabres – the rays of the sun leaping from their lance-points. We waved our rifles in laughing defiance, and our neddies stretched their necks in an attempt to fly for the vanishing brigade.
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