I’d never heard of the charge of the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba.
It was three decades ago. I was a novice reporter at a throwaway newspaper in the outer western Melbourne suburbs. The editor – a cranky old bastard who I nonetheless respected, not least because he’d worked at the long dead Argus newspaper with the great journalist cum novelist George Johnston – ordered me to nearby Bacchus Marsh to interview another old bloke about his part in the “last great successful cavalry charge”.
Beersheba, Light Horse, charge?
I knew about the Australian involvement in the invasion and retreat at Gallipoli of course; most of my generation studied it in secondary school history and Peter Weir’s movie of the same name had just seared it into my consciousness. I also knew something of Australia’s experience of tragedy, mud and slaughter on the European western front.
But the charge by the Australians of the 4th Brigade of the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba on 31 October 1917, while part of the same war, remained to me a mystery.
The old bloke in “the Marsh”, Lionel Simpson, filled me in. Aged in his late 90s, he talked for hours. He described vividly his participation in the charge, evoking the luminous sunset, the miasma of dust, the wild panting of the horses and screamed obscenities of their riders, the sounds of whizzing rifle rounds, hacking machine guns and thousands of hooves as the 4th Brigade charged the Turkish trenches. I could almost smell the cordite.
The charge was the defining moment in the day-long battle for the Turkish stronghold of Beersheba in what was then Ottoman Palestine. Since early 1916 the allied troops of the British empire had been advancing across the Sinai and Negev deserts in pitched battles and skirmishes with the Ottoman and German troops. Their main Ottoman defensive line stretched in a series of deep redoubts from Beersheba – today’s modern Israeli city of Be’er Sheva – to Gaza.
The British – including mounted infantry of the 1st Australian Imperial Force – had twice failed, in the bloodiest of circumstances, to take Gaza in early 1917. Now under the ultimate command of British General Edmund Allenby (who’d been ordered to deliver Jerusalem to his prime minister, David Lloyd George, by Christmas 1917) the British imperial troops – including New Zealanders, Australians, English and Scots – were sent in to break the line at Beersheba rather than Gaza.
Beersheba held the key to Jerusalem and all that lay beyond – Gaza, Bethlehem, Jericho Nazareth, the Jordan, the Plains of Megiddo (biblical Armageddon), Damascus, Homs and Aleppo in Syria – which would, within a year, be taken by the largest column of mounted troops to traverse these lands since Alexander the Great, this time under the command of Australia’s General Harry Chauvel.
So, the stakes were high on that 31 October 1917. The infantry, having marched overnight with little water, fought all morning to take the craggy hills to the north of Beersheba. Evidence of the British infantry’s fortitude and the Turks’ fierce resistance is everywhere in those hills; in my many days spent walking these remarkably intact first world war trenches, the archaeology of that contact – a surface pock-marked with rusting shrapnel and jagged with human bone – is abundantly evident.
Months had been spent surreptitiously excavating wells in remote desert south of Beersheba so that thousands of horses and men could have water before the planned surprise assault on the town.
Come the late afternoon, the Turks were still well entrenched on the southern flank of the town. For many of the British imperial troops – the Australian and New Zealander horsemen and the British cavalry - it had been last drinks at these wells at least 24 hours before the final attack.
The town had to be taken by nightfall or thirst would potentially kill men and animals.
What happened next has become, in not quite equal measure, legend and myth as the horsemen of the 4th Brigade’s 4th and 12th regiments charged over 6,000 metres of open ground to breach the Turkish trenches. The horses were, according to the recollections of their riders, frenzied with the smell of the water. Some were impossible to stop and careered straight into town for water.
The light horsemen were akin to the precursors of the modern Australian special forces: customarily they worked in small, largely independent units known as sections (three would fight, one care for horses) and rode quickly close in to battle before dismounting for final, often covert, strike upon the enemy by foot. But at Beersheba they rode as if traditional cavalrymen, waving their bayonets overhead to clash hand to hand once they met the Turks at the banks of trenches.
Guided by the reflection of the dying sun on the minaret in the town, the horsemen attacked the Turks who, anticipating they would customarily dismount to run at the trenches, fired over their heads.
Hundreds of Turks died in some of the nastiest, most visceral hand-to-hand fighting of the first world war. Just 31 Australian troops (and 70 or more horses) died in the charge, including a boy of 15 and Australian test cricketer Albert “Tibby” Cotter.
When you stand atop a mound due south of Beersheba and look through the mire of dust and pollution, you’ll see the 6km expanse over which the horsemen of Brigadier General William Grant’s 4th charged.
It is where Chauvel, a remarkable career soldier and military leader who took his inspiration from the great cavalry moves of the American civil war, is, according to official Australian military history, said to have supposedly made a split-second “neck-or-nothing” decision to “put Grant straight at it” instead of deploying the traditional British yeomanry, more readily equipped, with their sabres, who were waiting for the order to go on.
Eight years ago, after the publication of my book Beersheba (which contemplates the appropriation of the Beersheba story by Zionists and Christians, and some of the less noble acts committed by the light horsemen in Palestine) a relative of Grant’s contacted me.
He made it plain that Chauvel (a laborious strategist never known to act on whim) had made no such impulsive decision to launch the 4th at the town. In fact, the decision had been made by mid-afternoon and the events on “Chauvel’s Hill” might have been a charade for the benefit of British high command.
Grant’s descendant even produced an article, penned by the brigadier, for the January 1936 edition of the Cavalry Journal (apparently overlooked by many historians of the war). Grant recalled how he’d been watching the battle from a rise when Major General Henry Hodgson, his immediate superior, summoned him to Chauvel’s Hill.
Hodgson, according to William Grant, said: “It is your turn to go in Grant. Come and see the Corps Commander.”
Sounds all pretty pre-determined.
But Henry Gullett, official historian of Australians in the Palestine campaign, described a “tense” meeting between Chauvel, Grant and the English yeomanry commander, Brigadier General Percy FitzGerald, in which Grant “pleaded for the honour” of the galloping attack.
For decade after decade the critical Australian role in the Beersheba victory was little more than a footnote in military history and official memory. But such is the politics of remembrance that the centenary of the battle of Beersheba, which falls at the end of the third year of Australia’s $600 million-plus world war one commemoration extravaganza, will finally have its moment.
Politicians, of course, are wont to commemorate significant moments in military history for many reasons, not least to justify participation in contemporary conflicts.
Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull (domestic political chaos notwithstanding) and Labor leader Bill Shorten are due to attend Beersheba commemorations in Israel this week where the battle – and especially the charge – will be invoked as defining a special relationship between Australia and Israel. The events will be marked with Australian flags and those of Israel, the modern Jewish state that did not actually exist until 1948.
The charge, coincidentally, narrowly preceded the British war cabinet’s proclamation of the Balfour declaration in support of a Jewish state in Palestine. Such was the alignment of these pivotal moments in Middle East – and global – history that some evangelists and Christian Zionists have claimed that the light horsemen were somehow doing “God’s work” in re-establishing a Jewish homeland, as biblically prophesied.
This has always seemed utterly fanciful to me. While some horsemen certainly knew of the places they were traversing (Nazareth, Jerusalem, Bethlehem) from the Bible, there was nothing to suggest in the hundreds of letters and diaries I’ve read that any saw themselves as actively doing God’s work.
Some, I reckon, would’ve taken exception to the suggestion.
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It is part of the mythology that has attached to Beersheba. Like the conjecture over the famous purported photograph of the charge. I’ve walked that charge site for days at a time, including with my photographer mate Mike Bowers, who compared the contested photo with a landscape panorama of the site taken soon afterwards and one of his own contemporary panoramas. He concluded that given (aside from other factors of photographic technicality) the striking similarity in terrain across the pictures, it it was impossible to dismiss – as some academics have – the “original” as faked. I’m happy to defer to him on this one. And then there is the apocryphal water story; once taken, Beersheba did not actually have enough water for all men and horses – some actually had to ride back at least a day south to Khalasa and Asluj to replenish.
While the horsemen certainly enjoyed close relations with the inhabitants of some Jewish villages in Palestine, it was the Palestinian and Bedouin they had more to do with.
Relations between the Australian Imperial Force and the Palestinians, the nomadic Bedouin and the Arabians were more nuanced, complex and often difficult. While TE Lawrence’s Arabian force was disrupting the Hejaz railway, constantly attacking the Turks and fomenting anti-Ottoman dissent in Palestine to cultivate support for Britain, the Australians – as part of an invading imperial force – repeatedly clashed with some Palestinians and the Bedouin. The tensions boiled over at Surafend after war’s end in December 1918, where Australian light horsemen, some of whom had been in the battle of Beersheba, participated in the orchestrated revenge massacre of, by some accounts, at least a hundred male Palestinian villagers and Bedouin camped nearby.
That has been part of neither the Beersheba myth nor legend.
History, of course, is always there for interpretation – not least by politicians.
Which brings me back to Lionel Simpson and my interview with him in the Marsh 30 years ago.
“We had to charge two miles over open ground to get to the Turks. It was an exhilarating feeling . . . the big charge happened at seven in the morning on a bright sunny spring morning,” I quoted him in the newspaper as saying back then.
In 2008 the seed that Lionel had planted all those years earlier bloomed into the research for my book.
And as I researched I discovered that the charge happened at dusk in autumn. And also that Lionel was in the 8th Light Horse Regiment. Only the 4th and 12th regiments of the 4th Brigade participated in the actual charge.
Wounded at Gallipoli during the terrible Battle of the Nek and elsewhere during the war, Lionel Simpson was a remarkable man and a courageous soldier. He was certainly present at the battle of Beersheba. But he wasn’t in its defining moment – the charge.
He was an old, old man. I think he had told the story so many times, his own memory had made him a bigger part of it.
I recount this to illustrate how easy it is to accept the stories that we – and, in this case, I mean I – might wish to believe.
Story is not the same as history.
It might pay to remember that during this centenary commemoration of the charge of Beersheba.
- Paul Daley is a Guardian columnist and the author of Beersheba – travels through a forgotten Australian victory (MUP)
- This article was amended on 31 October 2017 to refer to a special relationship between Australia and Israel, rather than Canberra and Tel Aviv.
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