| Preparing for the swoop—Casualties in flying force—Issue of tin hats—How one man makes an army—The Turk as a linotype operator—The Tommies stuff the Turks with food. |
“We’re a bit too far from our work here,” said the big man. “I’d like to get up closer where I can have a look at the enemy occasionally.”
Then began the weeding-out process. He tried general after general as a man would try hat after hat in a hat shop before he bought one. He tried out his personnel in little expeditions and raids giving every commander a chance, but only one chance. He was getting his team together. After all, an army commander cannot be bowler and wicket-keeper too; he must leave details to other people. And Allenby’s job was to get the right people.
We of the Remounts were moved up to an advanced depot near the front. We had no fear of getting our heads knocked off, for we were not tall poppies; but to our depot there came staff officers galore, discussing in hushed voices the imminent issue of a tin hat to some general whose headgear had been mostly brass. This expression “tin hat” arose from the tin extinguisher that was used in the old days to put out a candle. When Allenby issued a tin hat to a man that man was forthwith extinguished.
Nobody dared to discuss the big man’s plans lest a bird of the air should carry the matter; but it was felt that the most important command in the whole show was that of the Mounted division. This division would be the spearhead of the attack; and the chances of the command going to the Australian Chauvel were much discussed, up and down, disputin’ and contendin’.
“They’ll never give it to Chauvel,” said one brass-bound brigadier. “Fancy giving the command of the biggest mounted force in the world’s history to an Australian. Chauvel’s sound, but he’s such a sticky old frog.”
Chauvel was given a try-out on a side-show and, if the brass hats were to be believed, he did not cover himself with glory.
“There’s an extra big tin hat being got ready,” was the only crumb of information that dropped from the staff table, and apparently there was something in it. Another general was given the next try-out but he did so much worse than Chauvel that the order for the tin hat was cancelled. Allenby did not care whether a man were an Australian or a Kick-a-poo Indian; he wanted to win the war.
So definite was the idea of Chauvel’s impending crash that one general—himself an Australian— went up with an orderly to the fight at Beersheba where Chauvel was in command. I happened to go up in the train with this general, who had married into the English aristocracy and thought himself next in order for the cavalry command.
“This chap Chauvel,” he said, “he’s too damn slow. I’ve just come along to see how things turn out.” They turned out all wrong for this general. The New Zealanders whose horses had not had a drink for seventy hours and the Australians who were in much the same fix, rode right over the Turkish trenches at full gallop—against the principles of war you understand—but still it came off. And that, after all, is the great test of any operation—Does it come off?
Chauvel rode into Beersheba where the Turks (or was it the Germans) had left bombs buried in the sand and under the doorsteps, so arranged that any man who put his foot on the doorstep would be blown up. I saw a nigger catch his foot in a bit of wire sticking up out of the ground, and in the next instant the nigger was blown to pieces. Chauvel, belying his reputation of being a sticky old frog had hustled on after the enemy as soon as his horses were watered; and towards the end of the day I came upon his rival, still accompanied by an orderly, walking disconsolately through the empty streets of Beersheba. Marius among the ruins of Carthage was nothing to it.
Allenby tried out his engineers and his flying men in the same way, and never was man better served. Among his engineers was the Canadian Girouard who successfully disguised his great ability under a vacant stare and a single eyeglass. I remembered this Girouard from the South African days when he was mainly distinguished by his laissez-faire attitude and his habit of singing a little song about Alouette, je te plumerai le bec, etc. I had to go somewhere in a hurry and the line was blown up. Without much hope I approached this dilettante and asked what chance there was of getting across. Fixing me with his single eyeglass he drawled:
“If you go four miles on your flat feet I’ll carry you the other four hundred.”
On the Palestine front this man and others with him repaired bridges as soon as they were blown up; they kept the water-supply (pumped all the way from Egypt) abreast of the troops on their advance; and they successfully laid a wire-netting road on the desert sand so that the infantry could march along it. I have no doubt that some of the engineers got tin hats, but the others deserved haloes.
April 1916—Everything is being hurried up. The big English flying school near our camp has been ordered to turn out as many pilots as quickly as possible and there is an average of eighteen planes in the air all day long, just over our heads. The din is indescribable, but the horses never look up, or otherwise take the slightest notice of the planes. The life of a pilot, computed in flying hours, is pitifully short; many of them are killed while learning. My wife is working as voluntary aid at a hospital in Ismailia, and she and her associates are constantly making shrouds for these boys that have perhaps made one little mistake in their first solo flight, and have paid for it with their lives. The army will do anything in reason for these youngsters. We are ordered to let them have riding-horses and we occasionally turn out quite a creditable hunt with Saluki hounds after jackals. Part of the training is to fly close to fixed objects. One boy who had the natural gift for flying swooped down on an Egyptian fisherman in the canal and went so close that he hit him with the undercarriage and killed him.
Then the boy lost his head and after landing his plane by the side of the canal he set off to walk blindly across the desert. The flying people had a nice problem on their hands—an abandoned plane by the side of the canal, a fisherman with his head smashed to pieces in a boat, and beyond that, nothing. Sherlock Holmes would have been puzzled.
Later, the boy, hardly knowing what he was doing, walked into a camp some miles up the line and the whole thing was explained. The Royal Air Force had their own system of courts martial: this youngster was sentenced to confinement to a camp where he could go on with his flying. One life doesn’t matter much in a war, and the army couldn’t afford to lose the services of a pilot with the big move just ahead.
Possibly by way of throwing the enemy off the scent, the Commander-in-Chief arranged for an inspectional tour of the canal camps, just so that no one would think that he had anything important on his mind. He arrived at our camp and rode through the depot inspecting the horses “as affable as be damned” to quote a rough-rider sergeant who had expected the great man to blow fire out of his nostrils. Everyone sat back and wondered when, if ever, the big attack would come off.
Flying school inspection. Some big move is on foot. Allenby is inspecting this flying school where an officer known as the “Mad Major” has killed more pupils and turned out more pilots than anyone has ever done in the world before. Everybody is keyed up. Even the flying Colonel Grant Dalton, who lost a leg in a flying crash, still keeps at it; he flies down to Port Said for fish for the mess just to keep his hand in. One day one of his wheels dropped from the plane as he took off and a pupil with a fast machine went after him holding up a board inscribed “your wheel is off.” Grant Dalton pancaked her down in a swamp at Port Said and the pupil, thinking to be a boy scout and do his good deed for the day, went down alongside him to see if he could be of any help. Result—both planes hopelessly bogged, and a lot of lively language from Grant Dalton towards the pupil. But all these little affairs are only just the chips that are thrown off while Allenby whittles the force into shape.
We are very near the climax now. I am taking a hundred horses up by road as there is not room for them on the trains; and ahead of me and behind me there are similar consignments of horses all headed for the front. I pass a flying depot where the boys are leaving at daylight, each with his load of bombs to smash up the Turks. Eight of them start off, but one boy’s machine fails to make altitude and he comes back for adjustments. As he lands, he rushes over to us and says:
“Come on, let us have a drink. I want a drink badly.”
I say that it seems to me a bit early to have a drink.
“When a man has just landed a machine,” he says, “with a dozen perfectly good live bombs under it, believe me, he wants a drink.” So we go and have a drink, and I speculate on what might have happened if he had landed the machine roughly and started those bombs off. These flying boys are being tested, and they are coming through it in great shape.
I arrive at the front with my horses just in time to hand them over and to see the start of the expedition after all Allenby’s months of preparation. Brigadier-General George Onslow, who has made quite a name for himself, is in charge of a brigade of Australian light horse. He comes over for a chat before they leave.
“It’s all or nothing with us,” he says. “We have to smash right through the Turks and come out on the other side. I think Julius Caesar would have funked trying it. If we get held up we’ll be out of provisions and horse-feed in a couple of days, and then you can write to me at Constantinople. But don’t worry, we’ll get through all right. We’re more frightened of Allenby behind us than we are of the Turks in front. We’ll go through Palestine looking over our shoulders, and the first thing you’ll know we’ll be in Damascus.”
This is not a history of the war—only a diffident onlooker’s view of some of the principal characters. So there is no need to say anything about Allenby’s great rush, which has been described in a hundred books already. But when the tumult and the shouting had passed by, I happened to be with a force that gathered up a battalion of demoralized Turks in the Jordan Valley. Up to that time, I had always looked upon a Turk as a paunchy person who lounged under a tree, while his wives fanned him and filled him with sherbet. These Turks, however, were not up to sample. They had been drifting about for days without any supplies and without any communication with their headquarters.
They were poor ragged men with cheap shoddy uniforms and worn-out boots—but they were soldiers. Battalions that had had no food for three days came in in military formation, not a man out of the ranks, and sat silently down to take whatever fate had in store for them. Neither English nor Australian troops had any grudge against the Turks, and the captured “Jackos” were given more food and more cigarettes than they had ever enjoyed during the whole war.
The Turkish colonel in command broke all traditions for he did not say: “It is the will of Allah.” He said just exactly nothing, except to refuse food until his troops were fed. Even in his worn and shabby uniform he could have walked into any officer’s mess in the world, and they would have stood up to make room for him. Half the world is always anxious to know how the other half live, and I was very anxious to find out something about these Turks. Selecting one man at random I tried him in English. I said, “What do you do for a living in Turkey?”
In perfect English he replied, “I’m a linotype operator.”
A linotype operator! Here was I in the newspaper business myself, and the only Turk that I ever captured was a linotype operator. Evidently, we knew no more about the Turks than we did about the Boers when we first went to South Africa.
Here is just a final glimpse of Allenby before dropping the curtain. After his victory, when his troops were encamped in Palestine, a New Zealand trooper was fatally knifed by an Arab thief who was robbing his tent; and the New Zealanders and their blood brothers, the Highlanders, organized a revenge party. They were sick and tired of being robbed and murdered by an allegedly friendly population, and they knew that nothing would be done unless they did it themselves. A few Australians went along with them—there couldn’t be any trouble on any front without an Australian being in it—and the revenge party followed the thief to his village, recovered the stolen goods, and killed every able-bodied man in the village. Then they threw the bodies down a well; filled the well up; burnt the village, and retired in good order to their camp which was within half a mile of Allenby’s headquarters. That hot-headed potentate was informed that the Australians had done it. He fell them in and harangued them:
“I was proud to command you,” he said. “But now I’ll have no more to do with you. You are cowards and murderers.”
Did the Australians rise up to a man and protest? Not a bit of it! All they said was:
“The old Bull has got things wrong somehow.” And an Australian mule-driver, when his mules jibbed, got off his wagon, lit a cigarette and said:
“I was proud to command you. But now I’m done with you. You are cowards and murderers.”
Also it may be mentioned that every Australian, down to hospital patients, turned out and wildly cheered Allenby when he made his triumphal return to Cairo after smashing up the Turks in Palestine.
Hospital cases were carried out on stretchers and wounded men limped out on the arms of orderlies to wait by the line till his train went by. As soon as the train was sighted a roar of cheering broke out and was kept up till the train with its solitary figure on the car platform swept out of sight.
One trooper, filling his pipe and looking after the smoke of the departing train, pronounced the Australian farewell:
“Good-bye, Bull,” he said. “That was a hard thing you said about us. But a man must make mistakes sometimes. I’ve made mistakes meself. And you didn’t say anything about our socks, anyhow.”