Blunted Lance (38 page)

Deception was practised with wireless traffic, thousands of dummy horses made of canvas, and men marching during the day and counter-marching at night to give the impression of a vast mass movement. False headquarters were built and the Arabs under Lawrence spread wrong information, while Hedley Ackroyd’s bomber wing bombarded the Turks from the air with propaganda leaflets which had the effect of setting thousands of deserters on the move south.

By the beginning of September they were well on their way, hard, lean Australians and New Zealanders alongside dark-faced Indians, British Yeomanry and the picturesque French Spahis. Overhead, Bristol fighters and an occasional Handley Page dropped bombs to the north. As the artillery barrage fell on the startled Turks, the infantry rose and began to advance. Within minutes a breach had been made and a message came back to where Dabney was waiting with his brigade. As he waved his arm, the trumpets shrilled and, led by ‘Goff’s Bleeding Own’, thousands of horsemen began to thunder through the gap. In ten minutes they were well beyond the Turkish line and heading up the coast. Within an hour two divisions of mounted men had poured through the break and were thundering across the plain towards Megiddo and Caesarea. Within two days they had captured Nazareth, the roads and defiles of the mountains encumbered with guns, wagons, motor lorries and all sorts of stores all moving north. Two Turkish armies had vanished in thirty-six hours.

There was no stopping. Pressing on, Hedley Ackroyd’s bombers caught the Turks in a ravine. Truck drivers jumped out, leaving engines running so that the vehicles ran into the tail of the artillery in front, and the guns were carried on into the transport wagons, until finally an accumulation of dead horses and wreckage brought the avalanche to a stop. It took them days to extricate the guns and burn the carts.

North of the Sea of Galilee the Turks were routed again and the great column continued to stream northwards, the light armoured cars in the van, the cavalry moving at a speed that combined haste with the preservation of horseflesh – trotting twenty minutes, walking twenty and halted five. The cavalry had come into its own again and it was a paradox that a war which had seen them reduced to virtual impotence was also seeing one of the greatest cavalry campaigns in history as Allenby’s men advanced from the frontiers of Egypt towards the borders of Turkey in a movement that was classic in conception and superb in execution.

Outside Haifa, the advance came to a stop as they blundered into quicksand and Dabney came across Australians struggling on foot to drag their mounts clear, filling the air as they did so with a tremendous barrage of oaths. The Turks had to be given no chance to consolidate, however, and, galloping across the front of his Indian regiments, he led them past the cursing Australians into the city centre. Fire was coming from roofs and corners and here and there strong points had been set up. A few horses crashed to the ground but there was no stopping them.

As they galloped down the dusty street between the mud-coloured houses, a Turkish officer in a fez and waving a sabre hurtled from a side street directly in front. Dabney’s horse came to a tearing halt, ploughing up the dust, forefeet extended, muscles bunched. Before the parry was completed, Dabney’s right leg was urging, the rein caressing. The Turk came round to his offside and lunged, but the sword was still in the air as Dabney bore in with his blade and the Turk rolled over the tail of his horse to disappear among the flying hooves.

As the Turkish soldiers rose to meet them, they were knocked over by the galloping horses and speared as they tried to run. Up ahead the sky was full of brown smoke where Hedley Ackroyd’s bombers were pulverising the reserves near the Jordan.

Their next action was at Shehba when the Indians, light, spare men with an advantage of weight over their white comrades, charged at full gallop a Turkish line established behind a cactus hedge. The red swords and lances showed how many they had killed. At El Affule, they captured seventy-five Germans, two hundred Turks, ten engines, a hundred lorries and three aircraft, marching seventy miles in thirty-four hours for a loss of only twenty-six foundered horses. It was a stupendous feat, most of the march being made in the cool of the Palestinian early light. At Jenin, the Australians burst into the town and found a store of champagne which they proceeded to demolish before a guard could be put on it, while men, women and children, screaming ‘Arab, Arab’ to let them know they weren’t Turks, ran before them to fling themselves on the stores of food, clothing and equipment the Turks had left behind.

There was charge after charge as they moved north. In one, owing to the number of lamed horses that had dropped out after climbing a steep ridge, there were only fifteen mounted men, yet they routed the defence. The fleeing Turks were butchered in the desert by the Arabs and the following horsemen heard shrieks in the night and saw the vultures that were always in the air, gathering ahead of them where they’d been caught.

Acre fell, then Amman. At Nahr Barbar, the charge was delivered by Australians, Spahis and Chasseurs d’Afrique. At Irbid, there was a disaster as bad as Balaclava when the Indians, facing five thousand Turks, failed to pull off their charge. Deraa was in flames when they arrived, with Turks, stripped of every scrap of clothing they possessed, lying dead in the streets among the litter of smashed equipment, burned documents and ruined machinery.

Damascus was next. Lawrence’s men were the first to reach the city and, as Dabney led his men in, the place was in a state of anarchy, with the Arabs arguing and squabbling among themselves, the place mismanaged and containing a ghastly hospital with every disease known to man within its walls and not a scrap of bandage, drug or disinfectant.

There were Turkish troops to the north, however, still capable of fighting, and the farther they retreated, the worse became the difficulties for their pursuers. There was an increase in malaria, to which was added the deadly Spanish influenza which was sweeping a world undernourished and tired after a long war. Aleppo was now the target and then the Turkish border. Tyre, Sidon and Beirut were occupied and the cavalry moved north yet again.

The shock actions continued, the losses in horses always higher than the losses in men, because they were sacrificed to stop the Turks escaping. Almost every charge was delivered in extended formation and forced home at a gallop.

His command reduced by a worrying sick list, Dabney pushed on in hot, turgid weather. Though ordered to halt, he pressed forward until they heard Aleppo had fallen. The war seemed to be virtually over in the Middle East but even as he prepared to halt, instructions came to press on again.

By this time one of his brigadiers was sick and the weary horses were staggering, the tired troopers gaunt, their faces burnt almost black by the sun. Half the time they slept in the saddle, snatching food when they could. When they halted they were almost too weary to pull themselves back on to their stumbling mounts and often fell asleep standing alongside them.

Called back to a staff conference, Dabney found himself sitting next to Hedley Ackroyd.

‘An attempt’s being made to stand at Ain ’Aalab,’ the corps commander informed them. ‘It’s up to you people to see they don’t. Their right flank rests on the river and their left on the hills. The only way past them’s through the middle, and the wells in the area have been destroyed.’

With the surviving wells beyond the Ain ’Aalab line, the cavalry was in trouble. The area was surrounded by a tangled mass of rocky hills, steep, seamed with deep wadis, often impenetrable and entirely without water. Not a tree broke the skyline and the sun was beating down like a brass gong on a plain devoid of shade. Two lines of defences had been constructed to add to the obstacles provided by nature, and Ain ’Aalab was surrounded by freshly-dug trenches.

The town itself was a drab little settlement that hardly seemed worth attacking, but it owed its importance to the wells to the north and to the fact that it lay on the railway line that ran into the heart of Turkey. As the infantry began to arrive, the cavalry were deployed to the west to keep the Turks busy. Once the Turks were forced to withdraw, it would be the turn once more of the horsemen.

Waiting as Hedley Ackroyd’s bombers roared overhead, Dabney made his plans carefully. The Turks were expecting the attack to come from the south because a small squadron of Goff’s Bleeding Own had been fired on, leaving one of their horses dead as they fled, its saddlebags containing the information that the Turks sought as to the direction of the attack. Unknown to the Turks, however, the documents they had captured had been specially prepared, and as the bombardment started, Dabney was standing on top of a ridge watching them face the wrong way.

His men were feeding their horses just behind. The heat, the flies and thirst were driving everybody crazy and they were all dreaming in the stony wadis of long cool beers. As the message to move forward arrived, they spent a back-breaking two hours pushing from one boulder-strewn slope to the next, until they could see Ain ’Aalab, with its shelter and precious water, three miles away across the plain in front. Though the infantry had made progress, the inner line of defences still held and it would soon be dark enough to cheat them of their prize.

As Dabney watched the dismounted troopers working their way forward over the broken terrain the corps commander appeared behind him, scrambling up to the ridge. He grinned as Dabney turned.

‘I think we’re going to have to make an all-out assault,’ he said. ‘I’m going to use your people to take the town before dark.’

As he left, he made it clear he was expecting a dismounted action, but it occurred to Dabney that, with darkness almost upon them and little more than an hour of daylight left, there was barely time.

‘Saddle up,’ he ordered. ‘Have the Jawarlis and the Baratpore Lancers brought forward and assembled south of the track.’

As the men scrambled to the saddles, he galloped forward with the two commanding officers, his staff, trumpeter and orderlies to look for an assembly area that couldn’t be overlooked and shelled from Ain ’Aalab. His horses were already in poor condition and it was essential that they shouldn’t be panicked by enemy shelling. His mind was full of questions. He knew they had to move quickly but what if the Turkish trenches were protected by wire? Would it result in the same chaos that had befallen the 19th Lancers on the Somme? Would it end in a welter of blood and struggling horses and men? In front of them, he knew, there was a wadi and they had no idea whether its banks were steep or the wadi as deep as some of those they had crossed on their night march. He’d read of Waterloo, had even seen his own grandfather’s letters written from Paris after that campaign, telling of the disaster that had befallen the French cavalry at the sunken road of Ohain. Could he expect the same disaster, with his wave of horsemen crashing to ruin in a wild tangle of broken legs, screaming horses and shattered bodies? His first experience of war had been at Omdurman and that, too, had come close to disaster in a ditch.

There was no time for a detailed reconnaissance or to bring up machine guns or artillery so he ordered the nearest batteries of horse artillery to do what they could to help. The artillerymen limbered up and galloped forward and, with their guns gouging great scars in the dusty earth, swung round to face the enemy. Within a minute the first round crashed out.

‘Right,’ Dabney said to the commanding officers of the two waiting regiments. ‘Now’s your chance! Off you go!’

As the Indian brigade, under the command of the senior colonel, trotted forward in column of squadrons, they looked a splendid sight, sitting bolt upright with their lances and swords, the dark faces tense and expectant. But their reputation was founded mainly on ceremonial duties and they were by no means as good as they looked. As they swept out of their assembly area, they were spotted at once by the machine guns on the hills and, as the enemy artillery joined in, shells began to explode among the moving horsemen.

As the advance slowed and halted and the groups of dark-faced horsemen began to scatter across the plains, the Turkish guns lifted and shells began to fall among the Australians in the rear. Spurring his horse, Dabney was just moving down from the ridge when the Australian brigade major appeared. He had blood on his uniform and was bare-headed.

‘The brigadier’s down, sir,’ he said.

Glancing across the plain, Dabney saw that evening was already on them and that any hesitation would allow the Turks to retreat through the wells, destroying them as they went. Making up his mind, he galloped to where the Australians were waiting, sending the brigade major ahead.

‘Bring ’em on,’ he said.

As the Australians halted again, a column of orderly confusion with tossing heads, he took up his position in front of them.

‘Troops into line!’

The evolution was mechanical, carried out in silence and without undue haste. There was a thudding of hooves on the flank as a horse plunged, and a few curses. Each troop, as though on a ceremonial parade, swung round on a pivot to front the enemy.

Calling the colonels to him, Dabney told them his plans. ‘We go straight in,’ he said. ‘No waiting. No hesitating. Understand?’

The Australians nodded. One regiment was armed with swords, the other only with bayonets, their rifles still in the leather buckets.

Placing himself at the head of Goff’s Bleeding Own, Dabney waited for the order to draw swords, then waved his arm and kicked at his horse’s flanks. The whole line immediately swept into a gallop behind him. As they appeared, the Turkish artillery switched to the new target, but the Australians were moving too fast and the shells exploded behind them. As the machine guns opened up, a few horses fell, but the horse artillery had swung round on the flank and begun to hammer the strong points on the hills. In a cheering mass, the Australians thundered forward, scooping up the hesitant Indians as they passed, to surge on towards the Turkish trenches. The short Eastern twilight had almost ended and the flash of rifles and artillery and exploding shrapnel filled the dusk. Above the charging mass of cheering horsemen there was an enormous cloud of yellow dust that reduced visibility and hid what lay ahead.