Part 9 (2/2)

[Ill.u.s.tration: BEDOUINS, KHAN YUNIS.]

We were not allowed to sleep it off but had an early reveille on the 27th and breakfasts were over soon after six. We then got orders to be ready to move at once and loaded the camels, but nothing came of it. We were now some way north of Deir el Bela, in a long valley running parallel with the coast line, whose sand dunes we could see a mile or two away to the west. In front and on our right were gra.s.s covered hills which cut off all view of what was going on towards Gaza, but we could still hear a good deal of firing. It was a very hot day with a khamsin blowing, and as we lay by our arms, kits made up ready for the order to fall in, we were soon extremely thirsty, though we dared not touch our water bottles, having no idea when they would be replenished, nor of course could we rig up any kind of sun-shelter. About 9 o'clock Colonel Morrison returned with the news that the 155th Brigade were moving into position to counter-attack an enemy force threatening the right flank of the 54th Division, and that we might be required to support the counter-attack or prolong it to the right. At ten we moved forward about a mile, and again piled arms, remaining in readiness to move. At two, half the horses were sent back to water; and we should all of us have been very glad to accompany them. Soon after some empty fanta.s.sies were sent off on camels in the hope of getting some water, but before they returned, at about six o'clock, we moved forward to take up an outpost position overlooking the Wadi Ghuzzeh, previously reconnoitred by the C.O. and Major Neilson. The country was extremely difficult, precipitous cliffs and narrow gullies, besides being completely unknown to us, and it was a really wonderful feat on the part of Colonel Morrison to indicate to each company its exact position in the dark on a wide front, seeing that he had only been once over it himself and that in a great hurry. Companies were all in position by 9 p.m. and were busy digging themselves in to very hard soil, sometimes almost rock. The Brigadier visited us and told us that the 54th Division would retire through us during the night, and that we must be prepared to stop any attempt on the part of the Turks to follow them, and must expect a good sh.e.l.ling in the morning. Meanwhile some water had arrived and everyone got a drink of tea, which put new life into us. The night was as cold as the day had been hot, but pa.s.sed quietly save for a sudden outburst of rifle-fire to our right, which we rightly put down to someone with the wind up. The retiring troops pa.s.sed through us in good order but very exhausted. As daylight gradually broke we got our first sight of Gaza and the country south of it, with which we were to become extremely familiar in the next seven months. We were a mile or so from the Wadi Ghuzzeh, with the extraordinary Hill of Tel el Jemmi away on our right, while the Red House among its fruit trees and the white dome of Sheikh Nebhan were conspicuous in the foreground. Behind them stretched Happy Valley, seeming to run right up to the tree-crowned summit of Ali el Muntar, while on its left were Kurd and Border valleys and the sand dunes, and on its right a tumbled ma.s.s of green uplands with sudden red cliffs marking nullahs and wadis. The position of the town itself was shown by the minaret of the mosque and one or two other taller buildings. The whole scene seemed utterly peaceful in the morning sunlight, not a shot was fired all day, and a big cloud of dust to the north-west made many of us think that the Turks were evacuating the place. During the morning cavalry patrols moved forward from our right flank and disappeared among the hills, apparently encountering no opposition, and some white ambulance sand carts went through in the same direction in order to attempt to pick up some of the wounded, which our men had been forced to abandon the night before. We never heard the result of their mission, but fear they had no success.

It was another very hot day, with a khamsin blowing, and the hard, shelterless hill-sides were a poor place to spend it on. About 4 p.m., however, we were relieved, and moved back to the bivouac area in Inserrat where we were able to take off our boots and enjoy a full night's sleep.

The history of the first battle of Gaza may be read elsewhere. The Division was in reserve, and had no part in it. It is said that the Turks were in two minds whether to hold the town or not, and in consequence a sudden attack might well have found them with divided counsels and have taken the place and a large number of prisoners with it. The water shortage, which brought the scheme to failure, would not have existed if we could have got possession of the town, which was well supplied with wells. As we did not do so on the 26th it is difficult to see how our Division could have been thrown into the fight on the 27th, considering that there was not enough water for the troops already engaged. Moreover, had the night march of the 26th to Inserrat been continued as far as Gaza, we should hardly have deserved the name of fresh troops by the morning of the 27th, and had our Division been used there would have been practically no infantry reserve east of the ca.n.a.l, and the risks of such a situation will be obvious to everybody.

CHAPTER X

SECOND BATTLE OF GAZA.

If the first battle of Gaza was a legitimate gamble--the second was foredoomed to failure from the start. Given fair warning and three weeks in which to strengthen their position--and probably no army in the world can beat the Turks at spade work--given moreover a natural stronghold, reinforcements and innumerable machine-guns, the enemy could certainly withstand a frontal a.s.sault by the same troops as he had already beaten off in a surprise attack, strengthened only by one newly formed Division, while the great prolongation of the Turkish line to the west made any turning movement out of the question. Our artillery was utterly insufficient to deal with carefully constructed trenches among cactus hedges, more terrible than barbed wire, of whose positions they were not really certain, while our two trump cards, tanks and gas sh.e.l.l, were certainly not sufficient to make up for other defects and to win us the game.

Still all this is of course mere wisdom after the event. We certainly did not believe ourselves preparing for a forlorn hope and we went into the second battle in perfect confidence that we should be bivouacked among the Gaza olive trees at its close.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TYPICAL SMALL NULLAH NEAR WADI GHUZZEH.]

There was, however, a good deal to be done first. On March 29th we rested, and a welcome s.h.i.+ft in the direction of the wind helped us to get even with our thirst. The next day a supply of gas masks arrived, of the old appalling flannel kind, which went all over the head, and their mysteries were explained to us by Lieut. Gray, a.s.sisted by private instruction from those who had served in France. On the 31st the Battalion moved to a new bivouac area closer to the wadi, screened from prying eyes at Gaza by a gentle rise in the ground. Rations were a bit thin at this time, with the railhead so far behind us and so large a force to be fed, but the situation was greatly eased by the fact that we could now employ wheeled transport with little difficulty. The men were kept well employed. We had to supply parties of 300, 500 and finally 600 for work in the wadi under R.E. direction, or to act as covering parties for such work. The former consisted either in cutting ramps to enable traffic to get down the precipitous banks or in digging wells in the wadi bottom. The work was hard and progress slow, especially with the wells. A large square hole had to be dug to a depth of some four feet, when a shelf would be left, and another four feet taken out, and so on, till the bottom man was working in the bowels of the earth, and every shovelful he took out had to be pa.s.sed up from step to step, so that four or five other men had been employed before it reached the top. Damp patches were sometimes found quite early but the hopes they raised were usually delusive and water was only struck at a considerable depth, and then not in any abundance. Fortunately wells sunk in other parts of the wadi proved more successful, but it was a little trying to read in Mr.

Belloc's few paragraphs on our campaign--”of the Wadi Guzzeh, that considerable body of water, just now in full depth, which runs down ...

to the Mediterranean which it enters by a small elevation called the calf's hill.” One sympathises with the difficulties of a man who sets out to write of the topography of any part of the world in which there may be fighting as if he was personally familiar with it--and the calf's hill (of which we, who were on the spot, had never heard) was a fine touch. But surely it might have struck Mr. Belloc that if the wadi--in point of fact bone dry--had contained a considerable depth of water, the first battle of Gaza would not have failed through drought.

Covering party work was more attractive, for the Turks kept well to their own side of the valley, where they were doubtless equally fully occupied with pick and shovel, and there was nothing to do except lie in the gra.s.s and admire the really beautiful flowers. But as under such circ.u.mstances very few men protect very many, it was the digging that most often came our way. The work went on without intermission from six in the morning to ten at night, each man doing a five or six hours'

s.h.i.+ft, and so hard pressed were we to find the numbers required that some men had sometimes to be put into two s.h.i.+fts on the same day, which, with the marches to and from camp, made as hard a day's work as one could wish to avoid.

On Sunday, April the 3rd, a heavy battery on our side made an unprovoked a.s.sault on the Turkish lines, to which they were not slow to respond and several sh.e.l.ls fell within the confines of our camp. Most of the men were away however on fatigue, and no one was hurt. On the 7th the Battalion took over a section of the outpost line and the fatigues slackened off, but most men were still employed for a s.h.i.+ft by day in addition to their outpost duties. The covering parties were now pushed further out to protect reconnaissances by senior officers, while in the darkness long camel convoys went out to fill with water the old cisterns which dotted the hills beyond the wadi. The enemy outposts moved forwards at night, and going out at dawn one often saw them withdrawing or watched the distant figures of Turkish cavalry on the sky line towards Mansura. There is a romance about the fighting Turk that one could never feel about the Bosche. One knew all about the latter, the names of the towns in which he lived, and what he did and thought and how he was educated. There was no mystery about him. But the Turk was different. He hailed from strange provinces about whose positions and whose very names we were more than hazy. He spoke a strange language, lived in strange ways on impossible food and uttered strange cries or sudden invocations to Allah in the silence of the night. He was unknown and mysterious and when we went patrolling against him in the dark there was a creepy feeling which was quite distinct from one's natural misgivings about his bayonet or bullet. But as yet we more than kept our distance. Sometimes a patrol working its way along the rough ridges towards Gaza would be met with a shower of long range bullets, but for the most part we did our work undisturbed--and so did he. In fact the real problem of an O.C. covering party was to find out who else on our side was covering too and where they were. On one occasion an officer of the 5th, having posted his own men in the valley, went up the southern ridge, where he discovered some compatriots lying out in the dew with a keen eye on Burjaliye and Apsley House, which they believed to be full of Turkish snipers. On his way back he was nearly shot by some indignant Londoners cautiously feeling their way out on a similar mission, and had the pleasure of informing them that their beautiful patrol work was rather a waste of labour.

On the 9th the 7th H.L.I, began the practice of turning the Turks out of Burjaliye, a little cactus walled orchard perched on the top of the southern ridge that bounded Kurd Valley. The Turks probably never had more than a small post in the enclosure, but they were able to keep up a good fire from their positions behind it and its daily capture caused an enormous amount of noise, if little else. On the 12th ”A” Company took their turn in sending in the patrol amid a tremendous waste of ammunition on both sides, our casualty being Lieut. J.S. Agnew, who was. .h.i.t in the arm and whose services we thus lost for several months. It must be confessed that this daily repeated manoeuvre was generally considered to be a sign that the Staff had finally and definitely lost their wits, but it was really a scheme of deep cunning, as we afterwards discovered. The Burjaliye ridge and the El Sire-Kurd Hill ridge on its left, together with Happy Valley in between was the tract of country with which we were most familiar. At the bottom of the valley ran a large wadi, broadening out till it reached the Wadi Ghuzzeh a mile south of the Red House. On its way it was joined by innumerable tributary nullahs running down the sides of the two ridges and cutting them into a range of minor peaks. The sides of these nullahs were sheer cliffs often fifteen feet or more in depth so that they became really formidable obstacles to progress, though excellent places for shelter from artillery fire. They were the result, we supposed, of the sudden heavy winter rainstorms rus.h.i.+ng down the hill sides, but for 350 days out of the 365 they were completely dry. During this time the Staff were not idle. Pamphlets on the attack, written for trench warfare in France, were liberally issued, and preliminary instructions to lessen the contents of the final orders kept arriving daily. One's brain became confused.

[Ill.u.s.tration: NATIVE GIRLS, BELAH.]

On April 16th all was ready and we left our outpost line and moved forward for the ill-fated second battle. The ball was opened by ”A”

Company, which in the afternoon of that day sent the usual daily patrol into Burjaliye, covering it with Lewis guns and flank patrols and suffering no casualties, but getting the recognised rise out of the Turks, whose enthusiastic rifle-fire gave life to the proceedings. On withdrawing from the enclosure, however, the company, instead of returning to camp, halted as soon as they were out of sight of the Turks, and lay up in a convenient hollow till dusk. The true cunning of this daily manoeuvre was now revealed. Had Burjaliye been visited for the first time on the 16th, the Turks would certainly have had their suspicions roused and would have been specially on their guard, probably patrolling the place during the night. But the daily repet.i.tion of the little comedy had led them to suppose that it was a mere instance of the madness sent by Allah upon all unbelievers, and in consequence, when the same patrol issued from cover at nightfall and cautiously reoccupied the enclosure, they found it untenanted, and after sticking their bayonets into the tiny hut and nearly falling down the well, sent back a cheerful message that all was clear. They subsequently confessed to certain qualms when, themselves about 100 yards from the hedge, they perceived, through a gap, the glowing end of a cigarette, slowly waxing and waning as an undisciplined Turk, disobeying all the rules of war, solaced his vigil with tobacco. The escape of a single infidel from the garden, or even his noisy decease, would have given away the whole business, and they were much relieved when some careful stalking revealed nothing more alarming than an inconsiderate fire-fly slowly moving its wings across its luminous body.

As soon as the all clear came through the rest of the company moved up and placed a series of sentry groups along the far side of Burjaliye and down the valley to the west of it. There followed a dreary vigil in momentary expectation of the arrival of a Turkish patrol, which would have to be ”sunk without a trace”--as the German diplomat said of the s.h.i.+pping. It was bitterly cold for bare knees and drill shorts. Several times the curious high-pitched cries with which the Turkish outpost keeps up his courage or reports his whereabouts issued from the darkness in front, but there were no developments, and about 11.30 p.m.

unmistakable sounds from the rear announced the fact that the Brigade had arrived. How it was that the Turk did not also hear the inevitable disturbance caused by the arrival of some thousands of men, tool limbers, mules and camels, in utter darkness over unfamiliar and very rough country, will always be a mystery. But the fact remains that they appear to have been in complete ignorance of our proximity until made painfully aware of it the next morning. The Battalion had left camp at 8 p.m. on the 16th, and pa.s.sed the Wadi Ghuzzeh by crossing 23. It then found the rest of the Brigade and formed up in two columns of companies and thirty-two camels (fourteen with S.A.A., sixteen with water and one each with medical and signalling stores), together with the limbers with tools in rear. About nine the Brigade moved off. After a mile, battalions were instructed to proceed independently. The a.s.sembly at the Brigade rendezvous and the advance to Burjaliye was an exceedingly difficult manoeuvre. Each battalion had to form up on a given frontage marked with stakes in a field of standing barley, and as the stakes were not visible in the darkness to locate them was not easy. The forward movement was directed by the Brigade Major marching on a compa.s.s bearing in front of the left flank of the left battalion and direction was maintained by frequent halts and accurate dressing. To add to the difficulties of darkness and unknown ground, the line of advance ran diagonally across a ridge running from the Turkish position to the Wadi Ghuzzeh. That the Brigade arrived at its destination without a hitch reflects great credit on the Staff work and is evidence of the benefit we had obtained from night training at el Arish. Soon after ten there was a halt, during which the men were given a drink from the water the camels carried, in order to ensure that their bottles should be full on the morrow. On arrival behind Burjaliye, companies changed their formation so as to be ready to move forward at dawn, ”B” and ”D”

Companies taking the front line, and the men lay down to try and get a few hours' sleep--no easy task considering the cold and the heavy dew.

The 6th H.L.I. prolonged the outpost line to the right of ”A” Company, who were now pleasantly conscious of the near presence of their friends, but considered them a very noisy crowd. In point of fact the whole operation was carried out with surprising quietness considering its difficulties, but ears strained to catch the faintest sound from the front naturally magnified the disturbance from the rear.

Stand-to was at 3.45 a.m., and there followed one of those ”dreary, doubtful, waiting hours”--which to some temperaments seem more unbearable than anything that follows zero hour. There was no rum and of course no possibility of making tea, while even the nerve soothing cigarette was out of the question.

At 4.45 a.m. the Brigade advanced--the 7th on our right, and the 6th on their right again, while the Argylls were in reserve. ”B” and ”D”

Companies moved through ”A” Company's picket line and extended by platoons in succession as they got clear--”B” Company being on the left.

”A” Company closed immediately the leading line was through and followed on in support to ”D” Company, while ”C” supported ”B.” It was beginning to get light and the indignant Turks suddenly perceiving lines of rough looking men advancing upon them, opened a brisk fire, to which was soon added the obscene stuttering of machine guns. They could, however, do little execution in the half light and, completely taken by surprise, they did not wait to try conclusions with us, but decamped, so that we were on our first objective, the line hill 230--Tel el Ahmar--in a very short time. Meanwhile our artillery had begun to join in and were registering Mansura Ridge. Four patrols were pushed forward and found the ground clear to the bottom of the ridge, and as soon as the artillery had finished they scaled the cliffs and looked over the top into open country stretching away to Ali el Muntar. The patrols under Lieut. A.R. MacEwen, who subsequently received the M.C., and Lieut.

T.B. Clark pushed on, met by a good deal of sniping, and had the pleasure of sending a Turkish cavalry vedette off at a hasty gallop. The enemy artillery were now beginning to take a hand in the game and having an intimate knowledge of the ground, as well as good observation as the light grew, were able to plaster the nullahs, in which we had mostly taken shelter, most a.s.siduously. One sh.e.l.l fell within a few paces of the C.O. who was calmly moving forward in the open, but he did not so much as turn his head--no bad example for the men of the support companies, who witnessed the incident, and many of whom were under sh.e.l.l-fire for the first time. At 6.30 the two leading companies continued the advance and topped the Mansura Ridge. They were met by sh.e.l.l fire and a good deal of machine-gun fire from the right flank, the direction of Lees Hill and Outpost Hill, but the Turkish infantry had evidently determined to take no further share in the matter and had vanished from the scene.

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