The story is partly about horses, alcohol and bad behavior and a little bit about achievement, nursing and painters. Its also about allies and gratitude, how some remember their past and others forget, some great former enemies become friends whilst allies betray you and how wars don’t improve the world much – at least not in the Middle East. Its also about how Egypt paid a passive and sometimes unhelpful role in all this – as it did again more unhelpfully in WW2.
A hundred years ago on 31 October 1917 volunteer farmers and farm workers from Australia and New Zealand did the last or the nearly last cavalry and bayonet charge in history at Beersheba/Beer Sheva about 65 k’s S/SW of Jerusalem and delivered a decisive allied victory, after numerous defeats in the Middle East and the Dardanelles, against the Ottomans leading to the collapse of Damascus about a year later.
The final charge was an hour before sunset with the horses not watered for up to 60 hours.
About 1,000 horses charged several thousand entrenched Turks dug in with machine guns and cannon whilst German aircraft dropped bombs on the allies. The important thing was to take the town before sunset and to get water before the Germans blew up the wells. The Germans and Turks never believed that men and horses would charge fixed machine gun positions.
They were wrong and horses leaped 3 lines of trenches, the town was taken and by 7 pm thousands of allied men and animals were in the town and Jerusalem was next. 31 men and 70 horses died and 1,000 Turks were captured. Other cavalry charges had occurred in this campaign, and some even included UK troops, but this one was the largest and most successful and was assisted by Indian cavalry (who got little credit).
The great Australian farmer and general Chauvel had delivered in his new job after long periods when his predecessors had failed and led his Light Horse into Jerusalem about a month later.
The battle was of course more complex and the subsequent Hollywoodesque glorification of the cavalry charge full of lies but it turned the tide and led to the creation of a new Middle East of self governed Arab states. Indeed the whole campaign is often misunderstood. Rather the German’s were in control and the Turkish exploits and huge losses had the objective of reducing the supply of allied soldiers in France and increasing the chances of German victory. The Young Turk Government were always puppets – albeit vain, bloodthirsty and narcissistic ones.
What is also forgotten is that Turkey in 1916 threatened invasion of Egypt whilst Egypt continued its neutrality and zero contribution to its own defense. The Turks got as far as the Canal but still Egypt would not declare war.
Moving forward in time to the Great Ride from Jaffa (Tel Aviv) in 1918 of 12,000 Light Horse they were the first into Damascus – although they had to withdraw after a dentist/volunteer/Light Horseman accepted the city’s surrender and allow the Arab ‘heroes’, including the self-publicizing T.E. Lawrence, to make their ceremonial ‘heroic’ entry a few days later. Lawrence was driven in his Rolls Royce in the ‘triumph’ by an Australian Light Horseman. http://www.smh.com.au/national/aussies- ... -tkj3.html
The Australian General of Light Horse, Chauval, a farmer’s son, who had taken Damascus (on 1 October) wrote the following:
“Lawrence (dressed as "as the sherif of Mecca") informed me that the Emir Feisal would arrive at Damascus that afternoon (3 October) and that he wishes to have a triumphal entry, at 3 p.m., galloping in like an Arab Conqueror of old at the head of about 300 horsemen. Seeing that he, Feisal, had very little to do with the "conquest" of Damascus, the suggested triumphal entry did not appeal to me very much but, having in view the fact that the Arabs were to have the Administration of the City, I thought it would not do any harm and gave permission accordingly.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_o ... _2_October
Lawrence repaid the debt and referred to Chauvel in his 7 Pillars as a martinet (others thought him the opposite and in any case the strict discipline alleged by Lawrence was never a feature of the Australian army) and didn’t mention that ‘his’ Arabs had committed atrocities killing thousands of surrendered Ottoman troops – probably whilst he looked on. He also did not mention that the actual surrender had been given to a humble Perth dentist/volunteer soldier in the Damascus town hall on 1 October, He also failed to mention that he, Lawrence, ‘got out’ at the first opportunity and left the Middle East in an hysterical huff one day after Feisal’s theatrical entry to Damascus and just before malaria, cholera and the Spanish Flu broke out and Arab ‘managed’ law and order broke down.
Lawrence confessed that "little of his book was strict truth though most of it was based on fact” - a paradox that makes little sense but he admits he made things up. Hill, Alec (1978), Chauvel of the Light Horse: A Biography of General Sir Harry Chauvel, G.C.M.G., K.C.B., p181. His 7 Pillars claimed he was first into Damascus. This is untrue.
It came as no surprise that the indolent and feckless Feisal lost Syria 1920 after being handed it on a plate in 1918. His family also lost Iraq in 1958 after they had been given it in 1920 and lost the gifted Saudi Arabia in 1925 to the Ibn Saud family. They were a useless lot of politicians although Lawrence thought them glamorous, romantic and attractive ‘heroes’. They did keep Jordan but even the Jordanian relatives, the Egyptian royal family and the Egyptian Wafd party wouldn’t support the family descended from The Prophet against the nobody Sauds in the 1920’s.
Egypt, which had gained its independence from Turkey as a result of the war, never fought in the war and never assisted in the establishment of an independent Tunisia, Lebanon, Saudi, Jordan, Syria, Yemen and Iraq. It remained neutral for the entire war.
The support for the allies in the region was weak. At the beginning of the war the British deposed Abbas II and replaced him with his uncle. Abbas had supported the Turks and went on to lead an attack on the allies at Suez. When the issue of succession arose again in 1917, the heir, Prince Kamal el Dine Hussein, refused the throne whilst the British stayed in Egypt – although this is not fully clear. Complicating things were the five fatwas issued by the Sultan/Caliph in 1914 proclaiming a jihad against the allies and promising all Muslims the status of martyr if they fell in battle. Some benefited in Egypt and the wealthy did well from war spending but inflation affected the poor and ‘conscription’ of poor civilians into supply work was brutally handled by Egyptian officials.
At around the same time the Melbourne blacksmith, Sunday-school teacher and Light Horseman, Stanley Savige, was leading 8 Australians Light Horse protecting tens of thousands (some say 60,000) of fleeing Assyrian Christian civilians from Kurds and Turks (about 300k’s north of Bagdad on the Iran border) who wanted to kill them and enslave their virgins. At times the Assyrians were fighting each other but Savige’s ingenious rear-guard deception, including horse-wheeling dust storms, created the impression they were a large force and saved the civilians from the 800 or more genocidal Turks.
It is only recently that there has been an attempt to study the ‘Assyrian Genocide’. After an inter-war civilian and community service life he later returned to the region as a volunteer general to lead troops against the Nazis in North Africa and also against the Japs in New Guinea in WW2. He was successful in both deserts and mountainous rain forests and on horse and foot - not bad for a civilian.
The Assyrians repaid the protection and stayed loyal to the British in the 1930’s and 1940’s whilst many Muslim locals went all Nazi: http://assyrianlevies.info/lt-col-rs-stafford.html but in recent decades have been subject to atrocities from just about everyone. They may have worn Australian style slouch hat first uses by the Light Horse together with a feather as part of their Assyrian Levy Uniform. Here they are in London in 1946:
Apparently they were hard to manage and ill disciplined – maybe there was a contagious disease in that hat.
Many (maybe most) of the Australian officers in WW1 were civilians and a number of Australian officers who served in the Middle East and helped to defend Egypt and create the new Arab states were Jewish.
I had not realized, and few historians have made mention of it, that the Australian Light Horse adapted to local conditions and rode camels as well as horses.
Here is a photograph of the 4th Australian Light Horse which was merged into the Imperial Camel Corps and was given the new name of the 3rd Camel Regiment
Here is the more usual photograph which illustrates the practical problems of horses in Middle Eastern sandy deserts – possibly Sinai.
And another at Megiddo which shows that horses work OK, but with a lot of dust, when not on sand – but they were capable of surviving without water for up to 70 hours:
Almost all of the thousands in the Australian Light Horse were farmers or farm workers and skilled riders (but probably not of camels) whose close attachment to their horses was broken after the war when the Australian horses were left in Egypt or sent to India. http://www.lighthorse.org.au/resources/ ... -australia (a site more about romance than reality). The horses left in Egypt were so badly treated that Europeans established the Brooke Trust in Cairo in the 1920’s which is the basis of the Brooke Hospital for Animals in Luxor and the beginning of their many achievements and good works elsewhere in Egypt and the world.
The UK official history of the Middle East campaign states “there is no doubt that these hardy Australian horses make the finest cavalry mounts in the world”. Well-bred English Hunter horses generally failed but met the aesthetic and pure breeding standards required by the upper class British cavalry regiments.
The whole official history of the Middle East campaign suffers from romantic biases and undervalues the major contributions from the Indian ‘native’ military and the huge physical effort, by up to a million Egyptian civilians involved in supply work, by others. Jewish volunteers, including a mounted Jewish Legion (which included David Ben Gurion), also fought with the Light Horse – as they had at Gallipoli. Our greatest civilian General, and greatest soldier, was a Jew engineer, lawyer and artist who fought in the Middle East. His minor achievement was to be the first non-American in US history to command US troops – something the Americans fully supported. On the dark side the anti-Semitic George V had to be forced to knight him. Churchill thought him an outstanding general.
The contributions of nurses gets little and only recent attention. The French military contributions were minimal (probably close to zero) although they demanded and got large post war spoils of a Mandate over Syria and Lebanon but still thought they were promised more – including big slabs of what is now modern Turkey. (an essay which ‘deals with’ a small number of the burgeoning Australian war myths https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/201 ... anzac-myth and mentions appalling modern Australian tourist behavior at overseas war cemeteries)
On the dark side its true that Australian soldiers ran wild in WW1, particularly in Cairo. Also, and the motives for this are unclear, they did burn down the prostitutes quarter in Cairo (probably Haret el Wasser/Wazzir/Wasa’a near the old Sheapheard’s Hotel) on Good Friday 1915 and again on 31 July 1915. VD rates appear to have been high – a problem which Montgomery later faced in WW2 leading to the urgent delivery to him in Cairo of the first new mass-produced Penicillin doses in the world – and this may have fuelled the soldier anger in 1915. At least seven VC recipients had VD. Interestingly brothels had been licensed by Egypt for some time. http://alh-research.tripod.com/Light_Ho ... id=1113753 and http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/ -wwi-history-of-australian-soldiers-with-venereal-disease-20141022-119wan.html
Russell Pasha’s memoirs state large numbers of European prostitutes in this area at the time. http://ogbcommunity.blogspot.com.au/201 ... first.html. He should have known because he was head of the Cairo police.
The subsequent Army investigation in 1915 and compensation for damage was poorly handled and the official war history was less than frank. To their credit the Australian War Memorial and its archive are now frank and honest about this shameful matter.
Local views of Australian troops in WW1 weren’t positive and Mahfouz in Palace Walk describes a mixed, but generally negative, view of their impacts on locals.
The memories of locals in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon, with the obvious exception of T.E. Lawrence, seem to have been positive with Jews, Assyrians and Christians hugely positive.
The other side of the coin is mixed but positive, and Australian civilian-soldiers who served in the campaign went on to become statesmen, diplomats, media magnates (Rupert Murdoch’s father), scores of parliamentarians, bankers, doctors, lawyers, judges, a Governor-General and a Prime Minister. Most returned to ordinary life and as with WW2 the memories of the Middle East were widely distributed through the population. An academic study of Australians in Egypt in WW1 published in 1980 however states that the specific view of Egypt was not positive:
“Asked what he thinks of Egyptians, the Australian of today is still quite likely to refer to some anecdote handed down by a father, grandfather, uncle or grand-uncle. James Aldridge's `mischievous, tricky, night-shirted Egyptian' of the bazaars appears time and time again, stealing boots, hawking filthy postcards and demanding `baksheesh'. Whether his image continues to affect the way in which Australians respond to Egyptians today is a matter for speculation; that it survives undiminished in Australian folklore seems certain".
On a positive note in at least one subsequent case an Australian leader took international action to specifically benefit, in a major way, Turkish interests and to disadvantage UK Imperial interests. In another case a former ME soldier defended Egyptian interests in 1956 but lost a cabinet vote and also defended Palestinian interests. However it should be admitted that in WW1, and after, our policy position on the region was largely determined by Imperial and not Australian interests and we showed slavish behavior in agreeing to this.
Australian bad behavior was long remembered and in WW2 the allies were under new local pressure to control Australian troop ‘behavior’- based on the memories of WW1. http://www.mq.edu.au/research/centres_a ... chapter_3/ an Australian Ambassador’s frank reminiscences of his time in Cairo which surprises me in disclosing the extent of private sector corruption in Sadat times.
There was worse by the Light Horse in Palestine, although the New Zealanders were probably mainly to blame, particularly the Surafend (near Ramla) atrocity of 40-120 civilians killed in 1918.
The Light Horse also fought the Sanussi who invaded Egypt from Libya in support of the Turks/Germans and following the Sultan’s jihad/martyr promises. Probably this was done on camels.
Australian nurses operated a 1,500 bed hospital at the Heliopolis Palace Hotel (now a Presidential Palace), the Mena House Hotel and converted the Cairo skating rink into a hospital, ran hospitals in Alex and Lemnos and on ships off Gallipoli.
The skating rink hospital:
And their first tented hospital in 1915 (notice that then there were a large number of large trees around the pyramids - wonder what happened to them - they look rather good and may have softened and humanized the current stark and inhuman aesthetics of this area):
The memorial at Suez to the Light Horse, their liberation of the Middle East from Turkish domination in the First World War and the creation of new Arab states was rewarded by a mob attack by Egyptian civilians in 1956 when the bronze horses were largely destroyed whilst the Egyptian police looked on. http://monumentaustralia.org.au/themes/ ... s-memorial. The remains of the memorial were repatriated and reconstructed in Albany, Western Australia. Egypt is the only country in the Middle East where an allied war memorial has been attacked.
This is the restored memorial in Albany:
Oddly our former enemies Turkey, and Ataturk in particular, had respect and this is a statue at Gallipoli erected by the Turks showing a Turkish soldier saving a wounded Australian. Its unique in military statues:
The Australian government continues to fund the maintenance of over 10 WW1 and 2 cemeteries in the region including 4 in Egypt. Oddly the Australian relationship with the army and people of the former WW1 enemy, Turkey, has always been close and positive and the Turks have been very generous in granting access to its territory for splendid war memorials and Ataturk who fought Australians showed grace and generosity in his opinion of his former enemies. Relations with Saudi are very positive and thousands study at Australian universities. In the case of Egypt, Syria and Lebanon relationships are generally fractured and rarely positive – yet these were the countries which were the free beneficiaries in one way or another from our efforts.
It’s a bit off point but of potential interest to some. Nile steamers, presumably including tourist boats, were converted into WW1 hospital boats – here is a painting of one of them:
Some paintings of the WW1 Palestine campaign by the official Australian War Artist, George W Lambert. Its significant that these painters were obliged to serve close to the front line and generally rewarded for frank and un-heroic images:
A modern style portrait of a Light Horseman with his distinctive Emu feather cap:
The Beersheeba Light Horse charge (confused and maybe too heroic):
and the ugly bits, in this case at Romani in Sinai:
and Septimus Power another Australian official war artist:
They were both skilled painters of horses – as was the great Leonardo.
A surprising number of Australian troops who had fought in the Middle East in WW1 returned as older volunteer officers in WW2 this time to fight and defeat the Nazi French in Lebanon and Syria and take Damascus a second time. Horses were not needed the second time around and the allied campaign against the French has been under-examined but this maintains French prestige. Of course many returnees in WW2 also destroyed the hopeless and hapless Italians in Somalia, Ethiopia and North Africa and met their match with the Germans.
The refusal of Egypt to participate in the war (repeated in WW2) was in stark contrast to the troop contributions to the allies from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Libya then, later and now was full of lunatics and spent most of both wars fighting amongst themselves. Therefore the standard argument that Egypt neutrality was based on necessary Muslim reluctance to fight Turkey is unconvincing and one suspects that in WW1 (and WW2) the Egyptian army was not up to the job and the allies did not press for their assistance. This needs further research in the context of the systematic collapse of Egyptian military power in the last 200 years, their poor military performance and the loss of the Sudan, Eretria, Crete, much of Saudi and large portions of Palestine, Libya and Syria. Their recent history is of invariable defeat – particularly after they got rid of their western officers.
It made a nonsense of me saying it was a re-mount from New South Wales. 
