NILE TO ALEPPO WITH THE LIGHT-HORSE IN THE MIDDLE-EAST BY HECTOR DINNING CAPTAIN, AUSTRALIAN ARMY ILLUSTRATED BY JAMES McBEY LONDON; GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD. RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. 1 First published in 1920 TO THE LIGHT HORSEMEN OF AUSTRALIA AND TO THE HORSES WHO STOOD BY THEM THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED The Silk Bazaar at Damascus FOREWORD Someone ought to come forth from amongst the Light Horsemen of Australia and reveal them. This book will not reveal them; it is too personal. In any case the writer has not the faculty for revealing them. They scorn publicity; but someone ought to give it them—not for their sake, but for the sake of their Nation. Our Infantrymen in France have got to be known in the world. For one thing, they fought beside the British and Americans and French who acknowledged their worth and made it public. British acknowledgment of them alone has spread their fame. Most generous praise they have had from British General Headquarters. Nothing of the sort have the Light Horsemen had from a similar source in Egypt. Books have been written about our men in France. A party of British journalists was once invited to come and live with the Australian Corps there. The praise given by them was almost idealistic. Our Force in France has had Australian correspondents with it ever since it moved there; it was not until late, when the Sinai Campaign was over, that the Light-Horse got publicity through a correspondent. It is true that correspondent was appointed in time to do justice to their great dash in the last phase of the war in the Middle-East. But all the nobility of their work in that hard and breaking desert campaign went unrecognized at the time. And that was the great work - the work that alone made possible the final spectacular and triumphant sweep up to Aleppo and out to the Hauran. So the popular notion grew outside that the Palestine Campaign was a “picnic”. The legend goes that a troop-ship bearing Diggers home from France, passing through the Canal, hailed the Light Horsemen on the bank; “Ullo, you blokes! Bin ’avin’ a good picnic out ’ere?” “Aw, not too bad! Jest bin moppin’ up the --------s that cleared you orf the Perninshuler!” This rejoinder connotes the Light-Horse attitude of mind. Only thus indirectly and facetiously can they be got to own the importance of their work. With the native modesty of the true horseman, they are dumb as to the epoch-making nature of their work. They are a modest people, these men of the Bush. They are in many ways an unsophisticated people. They have no readiness to seize on the spectacular aspect of the campaign. They are plain, blunt men, lean, level-eyed, loving their horses, careless of danger, careless of the detail of discipline and of personal appearance, turning a sardonic face to monotony and hardship. They have no historical sensitiveness to the traditions of their battle-grounds. It was nothing to them that Napoleon had traversed Sinai and fought where they fought; it was of more importance that their horses should have water and food enough. They were indifferent to the traditions of Jerusalem; it was a dirty, avaricious city that gave them fruit and a respite on trek. Nazareth, Bethlehem, the Plain of Armageddon, the Dog River, they accepted as they found and not for what they had been. The history of the Crusading campaigns they did not know and did not care to know. The chariots of Sennacherib had swept over the plains they were covering ; but what was that to them ? They were a people to themselves, with a language of their own (distinguished even from the tongue of their brethren in France), with work to do and horses to care for, camps to pitch, Turks to extirpate. The history of the Jews, the tale of the Ottoman race they were combating, interested them not at all. But though thus insensitive to the historical significance of their campaign, they were deeply alive to its bearing on the World War in which they were involved. They cared nothing for its setting in time, for its place in the series of campaigns in this country; but not a trooper was ignorant of the tactics of the war in Palestine as a whole, nor was not prepared to show Allenby his next move on the map. I cannot tell the story of these lean, modest, brown, free masters-of-horses. This book may help to give a notion of the kind of country they lived in after Sinai, and of the great towns they rode into during the final advance, and of the Cairo they knew in respite from the dust and boredom of the Valley. Someone with John Masefield’s power of suggesting character ought to suggest the Light Horseman to the world. I cannot do it; but I can and do dedicate this book to him and to the horse that is a part of him. It is a great pleasure, as well as a great privilege, to use Mr. McBey’s drawings for this book. He is known to most Australian Light-Horse Regiments; very few of them have not “put him up” as he moved about Palestine and Syria doing his work as the official artist with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. Light Horsemen were in general familiar with the sight of his car, moving pretty fast, bearing a spectacled figure beside the driver, and, in the rear seat, “Tonks” in the midst of a mountain of rations, artist’s gear and cooking utensils. James MeBey dwelt amongst Australians as one of them. He studied them and drew them. Many of them will talk to you on their own initiative of his sketches and of his criticism of the brass and carpets they had squandered their substance on in Beyrouth and Damascus. Mr. McBey requires no introduction to Australians who served in Palestine - and less still to the British who served there. Before this will have been read he will be known more intimately to the Australian civilian public for his work in that counterpart to the Anzac Book, Australia in Palestine - though it would be ridiculous to suggest that Mr. MeBey’s reputation is affected by anything so accidental as this souvenir-book from the field. The fact is, of course, he was known to both soldiers and civilians in Australia, long before there was a war, by his etchings. This is a far better book because his drawings are in it. An acknowledgment is due of the courtesy of the Committee of the Imperial War Museum in granting permission to reproduce some of Mr. McBey’s sketches in their possession. Cairo, May, 1919. H. D. BOOK I - GOING EAST CHAPTER I - TARANTO From the Taranto Rest-camp (sweet euphemism !) you must get a pass to visit the town. This you must get up early for, and stand in a queue of incredible length and eagerness; for there are four hundred and fifty officers in camp and only twenty-five per diem can go. The queue forms before nine in the morning - long before. It is dealt with at nine - i.e. it is begun to be dealt with. Such is the monstrosity of life in this Rest- camp that officers will rise at most unhallowed hours to be dressed and ready to stand in queue. Many are called; but few are chosen. Hordes of them are turned away from the office, too late to be included in the happy twenty-five - who saunter about camp smiling triumphantly and brandishing the magic pass, and have no pangs of regret for the breakfast they have missed in their successful efforts to get a day’s liberation from the noisome camp - that abode of heat, dust and flies without end, number or degree. Their pass tells them that they may not visit Taranto “in shorts” nor remove their belts in restaurants; in camp they wear nothing more than shoes, socks, shorts and shirt. Few wear collars or tunics, even to meals. But the change of atmosphere which Taranto brings easily compensates for this enforced, unaccustomed harness of breeches, belt and collar. The camp provides them with transport to the town at eleven, two, and three – a converted motor-lorry, garnished with forms; a means of voyaging which blisters the seat and enshrouds one in a pale mask of dust. For the road is almost intolerably dusty. The dozing drivers of carts are clad in the grey mantle of dust which covers vines, hedges and houses along the white route. It is as dusty as the drive from Cairo to Mena. But this place is like an Egyptian suburb in many ways. Beside Egyptian dust there is the flat-roofed, sun-coloured Egyptian house with the severe outline. The carts are Egyptian in design and move at an Egyptian pace - with most of the drivers asleep, full-streteh on the floors of them. The heat is Egyptian. The denizens are dressed in the sparse Egyptian garb and approximate very closely to the Egyptian complexion. The town is separated - the old from the new - by the narrow harbour-mouth, which a single bridge spans. If you go by the morning char-a-banc, you take a walk in the old town before the horde has retired to its midday siesta. Horde seems the word; they are as thick as ants. The intricate network of alleys, skirted by tiny hovels, is much like the honeycomb of the Egyptian bazaars.