CHAPTER XIII. In the Wadi

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 reveille, 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.

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.