Part 4

At the beginning of the second day, we contained the Turkish western army on the south, west and north. The Anzac Mounted Division, which is two-thirds Australian and the balance New Zealanders, and a light infantry force, all under Major-General Sir E. W. C. Chaytor, were moved up the Jordan Valley on the east of the Turks and so the net was completed. But the task of the Anzacs was difficult. Before they could move, the enemy guns dominating the narrow ground on either side of the river had to be silenced or shifted. This meant that the Turks had to begin their retreat on the Samarian Range before the Division could race them for the crossings. Not until the second day did this come about, and then the Anzacs, riding fast, closed the fords and the Turkish Western Army was doomed. Forty hours after the fight commenced, as the second day was closing, the enemy began to stream down the tracks leading on to the Esdraelon Plain from his forward mountain position. He had already abandoned guns and transport, a tragedy which he owed mainly to the appalling havoc wrought with bombs and machine guns by our airmen.

At dusk on the second day a large force was reported to be heading towards Jenin, on the northern edge of the Esdraelon Plain. General Chauvel, who was directing the battle from Megiddo (now Lejjun), the actual site of ancient Armageddon, at once ordered the 3rd Light Horse Brigade to move to the attack. An hour later, the Brigade had captured a mass of prisoners, who subsequently counted out at more than 7000; and we had the first evidence of the demoralization of the enemy. As the Brigade approached Jenin, with the 10th Light Horse Regiment (Western Australians) leading and the 9th (chiefly South Australians) working round to the rear of the village, the Turks ran out and surrendered in thousands. We had one officer and one man wounded. The only shots fired at us came from nine German riflemen, who fought to a finish, although two of our machine guns were laid on them at a range of sixty yards. The plan had put our troops into certain positions and the Turks, as at sham fight, recognizing the checkmate, were surrendering without bloodshed. Any resistance which followed on the long ride to Damascus came almost entirely from the Germans.

CUT OFF

An endeavour has been made in the preceding pages to show how the galloping cavalry cordon was thrown round the main enemy position on the Samarian Range. Before the close of the second day, our horsemen, stoutly armed with machine guns and automatic rifles, in addition to rifle and sword and lance, and further strengthened by many batteries of horse artillery, held all the roads and railways behind the Turks and Germans. The enemy was practically cut off from supplies and retreat. Worse than that, he was already irretrievably smashed by the attack of the British and Indian infantry on his front. Recoiling from this blow, and hastening to reach the Esdraelon Plain before the cavalry completed the net, he was caught by our airmen in narrow mountain passes, subjected to terrible bombing and harassing machine gun fire, and forced to abandon most of his guns and transport. At the same time, the 5th Australian Light Horse Brigade under Brigadier-General Macarthur Onslow, accompanied by one regiment of French cavalry, was thrown in during the first day on his right flank, about halfway between the old front line and the Esdraelon Plain. The Australians, moving very fast, scattered with their swords a force several thousand strong north of Tul Keram and took two thousand prisoners. Then, riding all night, they cut the enemy frontline railway close behind Nablus. A few hours later, the Brigade captured Nablus itself.

TERRIBLE AIR WORK

But before this the airmen had commenced their work in the passes. When our infantry broke the enemy’s line on the Plain of Sharon, many thousands of Turks, who were on the foothills eastward of the gap our cavalry had galloped through, had endeavoured to swing round and retreat to the highlands of Samaria. But the movement was at once detected by the Australian airmen. The Turks, with their transport, were seen to be heading for a narrow defile leading up from Tul Keram to Anebta. Using their wireless, the airmen called up aerodromes where dozens of British and Australian pilots were awaiting the signal. The doomed column, extending over upwards of two miles, was deep in the pass when the first flight arrived with its bombs. Beginning on the leading troops and vehicles, the airmen, flying low, had, in a few minutes, blocked the narrow track. Pilot after pilot, flying in perfect order, dropped his bombs, and then, assisted by the observers, raked the unfortunate Turks with machine guns. Their ammunition exhausted, the airmen sped back to their aerodrome for more, and returned again to the slaughter. Some pilots made four trips on that day. While the airmen attacked the column, the 5th Light Horse Brigade came up over the hills on either side of the track, and caught the Turks with their swords as they attempted to escape. Blocked in front, the battered, distracted procession closed up and telescoped, and fires broke out among the massed and broken vehicles.

Still more appalling, because of the greater magnitude of the disaster, was the fate of a column between Balata and Fermeh on its way down the range towards Beisan, on the Jordan. Flying over Samaria, you appreciate the opportunities which this retreating army offered to the airmen. The stony hills are not so rugged as in Judea, but they are still too steep to permit masses of troops to move off the narrow roads. These roads wind along beside the wadies and are flanked nearly all the way by abrupt hillsides. The Balata column contained the bulk of the enemy’s forward transport. It stretched, slow-moving and in full view from the air, over seven or eight miles of the confined track. An Australian reconnaissance pilot sighted it soon after dawn and, an hour later, dozens of British and Australian bombers and machine gunners, flying within a few hundred feet of the ground, were smashing it to splinters. Again they began at the head, and forced the helpless drivers to pile up from the rear. For hours the bombing was continued. Here the airmen worked unaided by any other arm of the service, and they had wrecked or disabled the whole of the transport before the infantry came up from the south and took the dazed survivors. The broken material afterwards collected in the pass included 90 guns, 840 four-wheeled and 76 two-wheeled horse and cattle vehicles, 50 motor-lorries and a large number of miscellaneous transport, such as water carts and travelling kitchens. The horror of the scene during the bombardment and afterwards need not be dwelt upon. As the bombs rained down with pitiless regularity, scores of lorries and wagons were overturned and dashed to pieces as they went hurtling down into the rocky beds of the wadies. Included in the column were large formations of infantry, and these and the drivers, rushing from the track to escape the bombs, were shot down by airmen. These air attacks were repeated many times on a similar scale in the first two days.

FINE STAFF WORK

Rarely have the various services of an army worked in such perfect accord. The infantry drove the enemy from his front, the Australian and French cavalry, at the same moment, struck from the flank at his very heart at Nablus; as he attempted to retreat in good order, the airmen wrecked him from the skies, and, in a few hours, turned his army into a shell-shocked rabble, with few guns or munitions, and little food. The wretched Turks, in their tens of thousands, urged on by officers, came at last to the outlets into the Esdraelon Plain. When first the cavalry galloped down upon them, and they surrendered in hordes without the least attempt at resistance, we were astonished. It was not until we learned what had happened in the mountains that we understood the tragic state of their morale.

The air force achieved a notable victory. They had not only inflicted very heavy losses, but had incalculably lessened the task of both our infantry and cavalry. They had prevented the Turk from fighting effective rear-guard actions against the pursuing infantry, and had hammered him so soundly that he was incapable of any attempt to burst through our cordon of cavalry. Without this help from the airmen, General Allenby must still have won a great victory; but it would have been much short of the sensational one achieved. Progress must have been much slower, and our casualties heavier by many thousands.

Before the fight was two days old our aeroplanes were using aerodromes captured from the enemy. At one point on the march to Damascus, when we were a hundred miles from our starting-place, a number of airmen came up and established a flying ground abreast of our cavalry advance guard. Throughout the operations an air-post service was maintained between the leading troops and General Headquarters. An Australian Brigadier and a Colonel of the Light Horse, who were in hospital far down the line when the campaign opened, surprised their troops by alighting from aeroplanes in their midst, a hundred miles from our starting-point.

GERMANS FIGHT WELL

The few thousand Germans who were with the Turkish 7th and 8th Armies west of the Jordan met the same fate as their allies; nearly all were destroyed or captured. But one must give the Germans credit for a stout resistance. Throughout, they fought resolutely to avert the great disaster, and if all of them did not continue the struggle to the death, it must be remembered that they were in a desperate situation. They handled nearly all of the hundreds of machine guns, which were the most formidable weapons possessed by the enemy. All the way to Damascus they fought stout rear-guard actions.

Having the great body of Turks on Samaria safe, and most of them already accounted for, General Allenby decided to clear Haifa; the operation demonstrated the relative morale of the Turks and Germans. A flying reconnaissance of armoured cars and smaller cars of the Light Car Patrol was pushed into the outskirts of the town. About three miles from the town our force saw the heads of a party of Turks in a strong redoubt two hundred yards from the road. The armoured cars halted and swept the Turkish parapet with their machine guns. The white flag was at once hoisted, and about eighty Turks came out without firing a shot. Two miles further on, the British came upon an Austrian battery of light field guns, supported by German machine gunners. Our little probing expedition was at once brought to a standstill, and was not sorry to pull out. Next day the Indians and Yeomanry, supported by horse artillery, rode into the town, and again the only opposition came from the Austrians and Germans. “We tried to cover the Turks’ retreat,” said a captured German officer, “but we expected them to do something, if only keep their heads. At last we decided they were not worth fighting for.”

EAST OF JORDAN

Before Haifa fell our troops were moving swiftly east of Jordan. A Division of Indian and Yeomanry cavalry crossed the Jordan about Beisan and rode eastward. Simultaneously, the Anzac Mounted Division forded and swam the river further to the south, and moved on Es Salt and Amman. The Australians and New Zealanders were familiar with the country. This was their third expedition to the Plateau of Moab and the heights of Gilead. They knew every goat-walk on the steep mountain side. This time they had come to stay; the Fourth Turkish Army on the East was to share the fate of the 7th and 8th Armies on Samaria. The tactics employed on both sides of the river were broadly similar. General Allenby depended for success upon the speed and stamina of his horses. Before the operations commenced, the Turk held a defensive position which was roughly an extension of his line west of the Jordan. He was strong in the foothills of Gilead; on the mountain he had his base at Es Salt, and at Amman he had a substantial force guarding a vital series of tunnels and viaducts on his Hedjaz railway. Beyond the railway the Eastern Palestine Range flattens out on the wide desert, which extends right across to the Euphrates. On the fringe of the desert was the Army of the Sherif of Mecca, a picturesque, galloping, thrusting, well-armed force. The Arabs harassed the Turk by day and night, repeatedly dashing in and cutting his railway and telegraph communications with Damascus. When attacked, they would fade away into the wide desert and leave the slow-footed Turk in the air. While the Anzacs marched upon Es Salt and Amman, the Arabs made a detour in the desert, appeared on the flank of the enemy north of Deraa, and cut the railway where the Hedjaz line junctions with the line which supplied the Turks west of the Jordan.

THE RACE FOR DAMASCUS

Meanwhile the Indian and Yeomanry Division had crossed Eastern Palestine and reached Deraa, where it joined hands with the Arab army. Then the Arabs, the Indians and the Yeomanry sped on towards Damascus. There was still a chance of escape for some 20,000 Turks, who had moved northwards of Deraa before the arrival of our forces. These struggled gamely towards Damascus, hoping either to make a stand at that great base or to escape by rail to the north. But General Chauvel still had in hand the Australian Mounted Division and a strong force of Indians and Yeomanry, which had returned to the Jordan after the capture of Haifa. With the Australians leading, he marched from Esdraelon Plain north-east across Jordan for Damascus. Then ensued one of the grand races of the war. Our tired horses were called upon for the heaviest work of the lightning campaign. Marching by Beisan, the 4th Light Horse Brigade, after a stiff fight—the most expensive cavalry fight in the campaign—took Semakh, and then, co-operating with the 3rd Brigade, which had come down from Nazareth, occupied Tiberias. After a day’s partial rest, during which our men swam and fished in the blue waters of Galilee, the Australian Division marched swiftly for the Jordan crossing, a few miles south of Lake Huleh. But the enemy was now seized of our intention, and the German machine gunners put up a fine resistance. Their stand at Semakh aimed at preventing us reaching Damascus before the 20,000 Turks, who were retreating from the direction of Deraa, and to give time for the removal of as many military stores as possible from the city. South of Lake Huleh, also, the Germans fought well and delayed us for a few hours. We then ran through as far as Kunneitra, but, a few miles further on, were again held up by machine guns and a field battery.

GREAT-HEARTED HORSES

Our horses had covered, with marching and fighting, an average of thirty and forty miles a day. Thousands of Australian-bred animals must have covered some 400 miles in twelve days, a very fine performance when it is remembered that they carried a load exceeding an average of 250lbs. and had been on short rations. On our ride to Damascus, the excellent work of the staff was demonstrated again. As the advance guard of the 4th Light Horse Regiment (Victorian), travelling north-east, came within view of the green and generous plain of Damascus, we saw, some eight miles away on our right, and moving north-west, a great converging column of the fugitive Turks from Deraa. Nearly all of these were captured, the Germans once more fighting well with their machine guns. But even the Germans had now almost given up hope, and on this last day before Damascus, and in the two days which followed, they abandoned their machine guns, and fled at the galloping approach of the Australians. That evening many thousands of prisoners were captured by the 3rd and 5th Australian Light Horse Brigades, and the city was enveloped.

ABANA GORGE

At dusk, in the Abana Pass, which leads out from Damascus towards Beirut, another disaster befell the enemy. Here, a column many miles in length was committed in a deep and narrow and singularly beautiful gorge. The floor of the gorge is less than a hundred yards across, and it is crowded with the Abana River—a rushing, mountain torrent,—a railway and a road. The river banks are overgrown with trees and bushes; the railway and road cross and re-cross the tumbling stream. On either side rise the gaunt cliffs of the desert. In this brief survey it is impossible to describe the fight between the long enemy column and the handful of dismounted Light Horsemen of the 3rd and 5th Brigades, who were perched in pockets of the cliffs on either side. The Germans, working their machine guns from the tops of motor wagons and lorries, fought to the death. Three hundred and seventy officers and men were killed, and fell among the dead and dying horses in the wild tumult of the chaotic column. We had scarcely a man hit. That ended the attempt to leave Damascus by the west; but the enemy was streaming out by the north along the road to Aleppo. Their run, however, was brief. Early next morning the 3rd Light Horse Brigade—the first force to enter Damascus—was in hot pursuit. The German machine gunners again attempted a rear-guard, but they could not withstand the charges of the elated Light Horsemen. Thousands of prisoners and hundreds of machine guns were taken by the Brigade.

On the morning of 1st October a squadron of the 4th Light Horse Regiment received orders to patrol into the city. Winding along the crooked lanes between the irrigated orchards and gardens, it came upon the great Turkish barracks, swarming with troops. The Turks did not at once surrender, and the squadron leader, before attacking, awaited the arrival of the remainder of the Regiment. Then followed a fitting termination to the wonderful, and practically bloodless, British ride. A few hundred of the 4th Light Horse took nearly 12,000 prisoners in Damascus before noon, together with dozens of field pieces and scores of machine guns. Scarcely a shot was fired. There was no formal surrender; each body of men laid down its arms as the Australians rode up.

EXULTANT ARABS

The Victorians entered the city and joined up with the exulting Arabs. These two forces, which had started hundreds of miles apart with two mountain systems intervening, were mingled together in the midst of the swirling, madly-excited populace. To the Arab, Damascus was the dazzling prize, the promised reward. Here he was to proclaim and set up his government. Riding forth from his tent on the desert, or his little mud village, he was, in Damascus, the lord of a city of 250,000 souls—the oldest city in the world, and distinguished by the richness and strange character and beauty of its surroundings. Fired with pride, his long robes touched with brilliant patches of silk, he rode the streets on his sprightly desert horse, caparisoned with richly woven Persian saddle-bags. His scabbard of gold and silver flashed in the sunlight, and he fired his rifle freely at the skies. Ameer Feisal, the third son of the Sherif of Mecca, who was soon to be proclaimed the new ruler, rode into the city. The Arabs of the city gave an almost fanatical greeting to the Prince.

THE GALLOP INTO DAMASCUS

Although the Victorians secured the great haul of prisoners, the first troops to enter Damascus were the Light Horsemen from Western Australia, who, also, had had the distinction of being the first mounted men to enter Jerusalem, in December. The Western Australians found their way into Damascus by accident, and their ride was one of the most dramatic and picturesque incidents of the campaign.

The 3rd Light Horse Brigade, to which the Western Australians belong, spent the night in the Abana Gorge, a few miles from Damascus, to the west along the Beirut Road. Brigadier-General Wilson was under orders to move at dawn and seize the road leading from the city northward towards Aleppo. It was hoped that a track would be found around the outskirts of the town, but this proved impracticable. The Brigade, therefore, with a troop of scouts leading, and the Western Australians following, came down the Abana Gorge, clearing a track through the shambles of dead Turks and Germans and hundreds of camels and horses, heaped on the road in the fighting of the evening before. It soon became plain to the officer second in command of the Western Australians, who was riding ahead with the scouts, that the only way to the Aleppo road lay through the heart of Damascus. The city had not surrendered, and he did not know how many of the enemy it contained. But he decided on the bold course, and pressed on. As the scouts passed the outskirts of the city, riding a narrow road with the river on one side and a prolonged, mud-built garden wall on the other, there was a sudden burst of Turkish rifle fire. No one was hit, and the officer in command, checking the scouts until the advanced squadron of Western Australians came up, ordered drawn swords, and dashed on at a gallop. Across the river, two or three hundred yards away, were thousands of Turks at the barracks. For a moment, the enemy decision was in the balance. But the sight of the great Australian horses coming at a gallop (the Turks and natives never ceased to marvel at the size of our horses), the flashing swords, and the ring of shoes upon the metal, turned the scale. “The shooting by the Turks,” said one of our officers, “gave way, in a second, to the clapping of hands by the citizens.”

The Australians rode hard, scattering the excited people from their track. The firing increased, but its character had changed. The shots were now coming from native Arabs, who were expressing their feelings, in the popular Arab way, by blazing at the heavens. Across the river ahead, in front of the large new Town Hall, a huge crowd was assembled, and clattering over a bridge, the cavalry pulled up at the steps of the building. Instantly, there were hundreds of eager horse-holders, and an intense demonstration of goodwill. The East was greeting the victors of the day. Three officers, all carrying their revolvers, entered the building, and demanded the civil governor. They were at once taken upstairs to that personage, a trim, little middle-aged Turk, who greeted them with complete calm and much dignity, and begged to know their wishes. He was told that a great British force of cavalry was entering the town, and that he would be held responsible for good order and the protection of property; the shooting in the streets must instantly cease. The Governor replied that there was nothing to fear from the civil population, that the shooting was merely the expression of an excess of feeling, and that the British wishes would be respected in every way. He then begged the Australian officers to accept his hospitality.