CHAPTER 1

‘SOLDIER’S HELL’

April to July 1916

At the outbreak of the First World War, the boundary between the Egyptian Sinai and Ottoman-controlled Palestine ran from Rafa near the Mediterranean coast down to Akaba on the Red Sea. The line was about 150 kilometres east of the Suez Canal, but the British defences rested upon that vital waterway. Turkish forces had already made an attempt to interdict the canal in February 1915 but there had been no attempts since, the barren lands of the western Sinai proving a daunting obstacle. General Murray was nevertheless keen to push his troops out into the Sinai in order to protect the canal rather than wait for another attack on it.

Although the Australian Light Horse would earn fame in the battles from Sinai through Palestine and Syria, their first mounted operation would take place in Egypt’s western desert. When Brigadier General Charles Cox’s 1st Brigade¹ arrived in Egypt on 28 December 1915, it was immediately sent to the western frontier of Egypt to act as a screen against any incursion of Senussi rebels towards the Nile. Cox’s brigade replaced a scratch force of light horsemen that had been given that role a month earlier. Two of Cox’s three regiments were later sent to Minia, some 220 kilometres south of Cairo on the Nile, before moving to Kantara on the Suez Canal in May 1916 as the Senussi threat diminished and the Turkish threat grew.

The Anzac Mounted Division was formed in May 1916 under the command of an Australian, Major General Harry Chauvel. ‘An easy natural leader,’ the official historian, Henry Gullett, wrote of Chauvel, ‘Reserved and aloof in manner, gentle of speech and quiet of bearing.’² This measured approach to command would hold Chauvel in good stead throughout the war. Chauvel’s division comprised four light horse brigades: the 1st under Cox, the 2nd under Brigadier General Granville Ryrie, the 3rd under Brigadier General John ‘Bull’ Antill and the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade under Brigadier General Edward Chaytor. A battery of guns (either 13-pounder or 18-pounder types) from the Royal Horse Artillery (RHA) was attached to each brigade, namely the Leicester battery (1st Brigade), the Ayrshire battery (2nd Brigade), the Inverness battery (3rd Brigade) and the Somerset battery (New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade). The 11th and 12th Light Horse regiments acted as independent units.³

A British warship on the Suez Canal. Note the canal defence post on the far bank. Harry Mattocks collection. Courtesy of Russ Mattocks.

Map 1: Egypt and Palestine

General Harry Chauvel, on the right, inspecting the Suez Canal defences at Serapeum in 1916. He looks just as the official historian later portrayed him: ‘calm, debonair, crop on thigh’. The photograph was taken by General Chauvel’s batman, Arthur Hitchcock. Arthur Hitchcock collection. Courtesy of Kay Alliband.

The light horsemen were not cavalrymen, though they acted in a similar way while carrying out patrol and reconnaissance work. In battle they acted more in the role of mounted infantry, using their horses to bring them rapidly to the battlefield and then normally fighting dismounted. Each brigade was of three regiments plus corps units, and each regiment had three squadrons each of four troops. Ideally, each troop was made up of ten four-man sections. One man from each section remained with the four horses during battle and therefore each light horse brigade had only 800 rifles when dismounted, which was similar to the strength of an infantry battalion. A mounted machine-gun section was attached to each squadron, though these would be consolidated into separate brigade-level machine-gun squadrons in July 1916.

Supply, particularly the supply of water, was the key consideration for any light horse operation in Egypt and beyond. Each man needed 4.5 litres of water a day, though he would often get less than a litre. A horse required more than 20 litres a day; any less than that and they soon lost condition. Each man required a kilogram of rations a day but a horse required 9 kilograms of bulky feed. With Murray’s plan to establish a force of 50,000 men at Katia oasis, some 40 kilometres east of the canal, thousands of camels would be needed for supply. A railway was obviously needed, and construction soon began from the east side of the canal at Kantara towards Romani, 10 kilometres north-west of Katia.⁴

A typical light horseman. Harry Mattocks collection.

The Turks had three possible avenues of advance across the Sinai to the Suez Canal: the southern, central and northern routes. Water for the northern route could be obtained at the Katia oasis, while the central and southern routes would require wells to be sunk. The Turks had used the central route in the raid on the canal in February 1915 and had already extended the railway south from Beersheba to Asluj, where wells were sunk and water cisterns filled. A light horse raid on Jifjafa on 11 April 1916, however, destroyed a water-drilling plant, while a follow-up patrol a few months later emptied and sealed the nearby water cisterns. The Turkish force would therefore have to use the northern route via Katia for any future advance on the Suez Canal.

The British 5th Mounted Brigade under Brigadier General Edgar Wiggin reached Romani first. The brigade was a yeomanry unit made up of English farmers, with the landed gentry as their officers. Wiggin set up his headquarters at Romani with outposts out to the east at Katia, Oghratina and Hamisah (see Map 2). Ill-informed and over­confident, Wiggin took three of his mounted squadrons, one-third of his total force, out to Mageibra to chase a reported 200-strong Turkish force. Meanwhile, at dawn on 23 April, a large Turkish force struck under the cover of a heavy morning mist at Oghratina, overrunning the startled Worcester Yeomanry encamped there. Katia, held by only a squadron of Gloucester Yeomanry, was next.⁵

Guided by Bedouin scouts, the Turks were able to set up their machine guns on the sand hills surrounding the oasis where the yeomanry had set up camp under the date palms. Small mountain guns were also positioned close by. When the fog finally lifted, the 100 defenders at Katia under Captain Michael Lloyd-Baker were faced with some 600 attackers. Well-directed Turkish artillery soon opened up on the horse lines, preventing any escape.⁶ Outgunned, outnumbered and unable to manoeuvre, the yeomanry fought it out from their meagre shell scrapes in the sand, holding out long enough to enable an unmounted cavalry squadron from Hamisah to join them. But two squadrons from Romani and two others under Wiggin failed to reach Katia oasis in time, and the position fell to the Turks after a bitter fight. Only nine of the defenders regained the British lines, while the wounded were left to the merciless Bedouin. A shaken Wiggin ordered his remaining men back to the canal, abandoning the Romani base. At an outpost at Dueidar, 20 kilometres east of the canal, a resolute company of some 100 Royal Scots Fusiliers from the 52nd Division, warned by an alert fox terrier as the Turks crept up to the outpost under the cover of mist, halted the Turkish advance.⁷

On the evening of 23 April, General Ryrie’s 2nd Light Horse Brigade crossed the canal at Kantara and moved east into the Sinai, passing the retiring yeomanry in the night and reaching Hill 70, 11 kilometres east of the canal, around midnight. It soon became clear that the Turkish attack was only a raid, which meant that Ryrie was able to move his brigade forward and reoccupy Romani on 25 April, the first anniversary of the Anzac landings.

Scottish troops at Dueidar, June 1916. Edwin Mulford collection. Courtesy of Kerrie Ferguson.

The Turks had withdrawn to Bir el Abd, 25 kilometres east of Katia. Unlike Wiggin, the canny Ryrie would keep his force concentrated and only send mobile patrols out to Katia, Oghratina and Hamisah. The first job of his brigade was to bury about 70 dead yeoman at Katia. ‘We saw a lot of dead Tommies and Turks,’ Joe Burgess wrote. ‘They were stripped of most of their clothes and look a horrible sight . . . the horses were all lying dead, tied up to the lines.’⁸ Gordon Macrae noted that ‘most of the dead were stripped of their clothes and the stench was horrible. The burial party was taken from my troop and they had to wear respirators.’⁹ When a party from the Worcestershire Yeomanry later went out to rebury their dead, the officer in charge found his brother, whom he recognised only by a distinctive scarf around his neck.¹⁰

These were dim days for British armed forces in the Middle East. In Mesopotamia (part of modern-day Iraq) the British force at Kut-el-Amara had finally surrendered to Turkish forces on 29 April after a siege that had lasted nearly five months. Meanwhile, British troop strength in Egypt was successively weakened as more and more divisions headed to France, leaving General Murray with the equivalent of three infantry divisions plus the Anzac Mounted Division and the yeomanry. The Turks had three divisions in the northern Sinai plus some 4000 Bedouin irregulars and a superior air arm, with German aircraft and pilots.

The railhead at Romani. George Francis collection.

The Romani base was surrounded by sand dunes, some of them large enough to dominate the battlefield. It was upon these positions that the defence of Romani would now be based rather than on far-flung outposts. With the railway rapidly approaching Romani, it was the ideal site from which to defend the canal, as any Turkish move against it using the central or southern routes through the Sinai would leave them exposed on the right flank. But the decision to defend Katia oasis only by intermittent patrols left it open to Turkish occupation.

The pre-war telegraph line that ran back to Kantara could readily be tapped. On one occasion a foreign conversation was heard by the light horse signallers and a Turkish interpreter was called for. He was also puzzled, until it was realised a Scottish unit (speaking English) was in the area. Further out, heliographs (which signalled in Morse code using flashes of sunlight) were used, the mirror having to be continuously adjusted to allow for the changing angle of the sun. A signal station on a hilltop at Romani could receive Morse signals directed its way from heliographs as far away as 50 kilometres.¹¹

By mid-May the heat of summer had arrived, curtailing mobile operations. As early as 25 April, Maurie Evans, serving with the 1st Light Horse Field Ambulance at Sohag, more than 500 kilometres south of Cairo on the upper Nile, wrote that ‘the heat is getting beyond all reason’. It had reached 46 degrees Celsius by then and would only get worse. On 19 May, Evans was experiencing 50 degrees Celsius in the shade, with a hot wind ‘that feels like a blast from the biggest furnace God ever made’.¹² As Bill Peterson, a signaller with the 2nd Light Horse, noted, heat was not the only concern at Sohag. ‘It is almost impossible to lay and doze during the day for the flies,’ he wrote. Peterson also noted the death of Sergeant Vernon Ware, the brigade police sergeant, who had died of pneumonia on 3 April. ‘They planted him this afternoon,’ he wrote. ‘It seems hard to go through that Gallipoli hell of many months without a scratch and then to die . . . in some lonely spot like this.’¹³

Four light horsemen at the Ramesseum, near the Valley of the Kings at Luxor. Of the fallen Ramses II statue, the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in ‘Ozymandias’, ‘Half sunk, a shattered visage lies.’ Wilfred Baker collection. Courtesy of Joan Cupit.

‘Work, heat, dust, sand and more work,’ Robert Fell wrote in April. ‘An absolute nightmare.’¹⁴ Verner Knuckey lived in a tent where ‘millions of flies came home to roost’.¹⁵ On 6 May, Joe Burgess wrote ‘it was thundering hot yesterday’. Next day he was off to Katia, where ‘the sand flies nearly ate me and my horse’. By 19 May, it was 52 degrees Celsius in the ambulance tent at Romani.¹⁶ Captain Harold Mulder wrote that ‘the heat is bad enough but these flies make it nearly unbearable’. On 4 June he added, ‘A beast of a day with a hot wind blowing . . . “Arab’s Heaven” and soldier’s hell.’¹⁷

Even in summer, however, the nights could be freezing, particularly if a wind came off the sea from the north. ‘As cold as chastity,’ Maurie Evans wrote on 31 May.¹⁸ The two light horse brigades at Romani suffered from the heat, the blinding sun and the flies, but it was the sandstorms, the feared khamsin that was said to blow for 50 days from late April, that tested them to the limit. Henry Sullivan was out in the desert with the 5th Light Horse on 13 April when a sandstorm blew up. ‘Saddles, rifles etc and ourselves almost buried in sand,’ he wrote. ‘Sand and desert awful.’¹⁹ Verner Knuckey experienced how ‘the fine sand strikes the face and hands and it feels like red hot needles’.²⁰

‘The country here is composed of nothing but loose sand hills,’ Fred Tomlins observed, ‘and most of the hills so steep that the rider has to dismount and lead his horse up and down them, and both horse and rider up to their knees going down them and is very heavy work on both.’²¹ Maurie Evans wrote of the ride into Romani: ‘Our last stage was across pure sand, heaped into every shape and position, terrible going for the horses. The long column of horsemen climbing up and down in and out among the enormous orange coloured sand dunes set off by the deep blue of the sky.’²²

To aid the search for water, Lieutenant Colonel Lachlan Wilson of the 5th Light Horse introduced the spear point pump, purchased from regimental funds in defiance of headquarters. It consisted of a hollow pipe perforated above the spear-like point that could be pushed through the sand in low-lying areas to provide water for the horses quickly, without the need to dig and reinforce wells. A single spear point could raise 3500 litres per hour.²³ The horses drank the brackish well water, but water for the men came up on camels from the canal or railhead.

A 6th Light Horse reconnaissance to Bir el Bayud, some 10 kilometres south of Bir el Abd, at the height of summer on 16 May, resulted in men being hospitalised with sunstroke and heat exhaustion, and left many of the horses in a distressed condition.²⁴ Gordon Macrae, who was on the patrol, noted that by 11 a.m. the water the men carried with them was so hot it was undrinkable. ‘Our throats were already parched and the sun being on the backs of our heads made us feel giddy,’ he wrote. The patrol reached a well but the water was undrinkable. By now, some of the men were staggering and frothing at the mouth while a few had fainted. ‘It seemed as though the wind was blowing off the furnaces of hell,’ Macrae wrote. On returning to Romani, 28 men went straight into hospital and 500 horses needed an extended spell.²⁵ Joe Burgess had ridden one of them. ‘My mare was wobbly and panting but the plucky little beggar kept going,’ he wrote.²⁶ The brigade commander, Granville Ryrie, observed, ‘I don’t think I can stand the heat here if it gets any worse as it is sure to do . . . I hate this infernal desert, it makes me tired to look at the sand & it is everywhere.’²⁷

In late May, Cox’s 1st Brigade relieved Ryrie’s 2nd. Bill Peterson reached Romani on 26 May. ‘Great sand dunes are on all sides of the camp,’ he wrote, ‘and we are camped down in a hollow close to a clump of palm trees.’ These clumps of palms among the dunes were known as hods, and water could usually be found below the surface there.²⁸ ‘We have been living very poorly here on bully beef, bread and jam,’ Fred Tomlins wrote, ‘but we could not even get enough bully and at times had to make a meal of dried bread and half a pint of tea.’²⁹ As Bill Peterson later observed, bully beef and hard biscuits ‘will soon wear the strongest constitution down’. In comparison, the Turkish rations looked like ‘rolls of thin brown cardboard’ containing ‘dried apricots and dates reduced to suet and rolled into wide thin sheets’, which were ‘far in advance of our own iron rations’.³⁰ With the arrival of the railway at the end of May, the Lowland Scots of the 52nd Infantry Division also arrived at Romani, as did the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade.

A light horse camp in the desert. The horses are tethered to rope lines that have been anchored to buried sandbags. Harry Mattocks collection.

Late on 30 May, the light horse regiments moved out in columns lit only by the stars of the desert night, heading towards Hod Salmana, some 7 kilometres east of Bir el Abd. Bill Peterson wrote of how ‘the whole brigade turned out at 10 o’clock last night and we took part in one of the longest and most tedious night marches I have ever participated in’.³¹ Maurie Evans considered the prospects for any wounded: ‘It will be hell for anyone who gets wounded badly as they have to travel by camel for over 30 miles.’ On his return to Romani, Evans noted ‘an overwhelming sense of irritable sleepiness unable to be appeased’.³² At Oghratina, Fred Tomlins wrote how ‘Scores of Tommies are still lying on top of the ground where they were killed.’ The desert wind had blown the sand cover from their shallow graves.³³

Four Turkish privates prepare their meal. One rolls the flatbread while another cooks it. Note the clever use of rocks to help seal the tents. Ralph Kellett collection.

Romani camp. Arthur Reynolds collection. Courtesy of Kay Stacy.

Death also came from the air. The German air detachment flew Rumpler Taube and Albatros Scout aircraft over the Sinai. The Taube, or dove, was so named for its distinctive and gracefully swept-back, dove-like wings. Bill Peterson wrote that ‘she resembles a huge white transparent butterfly’.³⁴ At dawn on 1 June, Fred Tomlins watched as ‘the burr of an aeroplane was heard coming from the south very high up . . . one glance at her dove tail convinced me she was a Taube and was out for revenge’.³⁵ The aircraft was high, ‘so high we did not worry,’ Bert Billings wrote, ‘however his aim was good’. The plane dropped two bombs, then three and then another three. The third of the middle three exploded in the horse lines of the 3rd Light Horse. ‘The horse lines broke under the strain and/or all horses were released to give them a chance,’ Billings wrote. ‘They just galloped until they dropped and were found miles away at our outposts, but many were never found.’³⁶ ‘Every bomb exploded but they sank well into the soft sand before exploding which affected their destructive power a lot as there were hardly any splinters flying,’ Fred Tomlins observed.³⁷ Ten men, seven from the 3rd Light Horse, were killed. ‘Most of us got abroad our hacks and hit out for the open desert, where we stayed until the Taube left,’ Lieutenant Stuart Macfarlane wrote. ‘We all rode bare-back with only a halter, so there were several spills.’³⁸ The raid resulted in the death of 47 horses. A team of four camels was needed to drag each one to its grave.³⁹

The base at Romani was close to the ocean and, as Bert Billings noted, ‘swims were one of the bright spots in our life . . . after the swim the horses would keep on rolling in the sand’.⁴⁰ ‘The surf makes a chap as love sick for the sea as a soldier leaving his girl at the old “loo” [Woolloomooloo] wharf,’ Joe Burgess wrote.⁴¹ Though involved in a world war, the men were in their own world. On 8 June, Fred Tomlins heard the news that HMS Hampshire had been sunk off the Orkney Islands with almost all hands lost, including Lord Kitchener, the British Secretary of State for War. ‘Stiff luck for K but nobody here thinks it will affect the war much,’ he wrote.⁴²

‘Swimming our horses.’ Joseph Bradshaw collection. Courtesy of Bob Smith.

On the afternoon of 10 June, the Muksheib Column, comprising the 10th Light Horse plus two squadrons of the 9th supported by some 800 camels, all under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Todd, moved out from the railhead to drain out the water in the cisterns and pools in the Wadi Um Muksheib, south of Jifjafa, 75 kilometres to the east. As General Antill observed, it ‘turned out to be a bigger job than expected’, taking four days to drain some 36,000,000 litres of water.⁴³

Bill Peterson was on a patrol to Oghratina around the same time. ‘It was a beautiful moonlight night,’ he wrote, ‘and the long column stretched far out upon the desert like some gigantic confusing thing [as] we wound in and out among the sand dunes.’ Upon reaching the wells, the horses ‘were so eager for water that they plunged their muzzles into the canvas bucket upsetting most of the contents in their eagerness,’ Peterson wrote. ‘My fellow drank six buckets before he cried enough.’⁴⁴

Water containers, known as fantasses, at Oghratina in July 1916. These held drinking water for the men; the horses and camels had to make do with the brackish well water. Arthur Reynolds collection.

On 22 June, a 1st Light Horse patrol got lost in the desert near Oghratina. ‘The night was hot and our bottles dry and a good many lads’ mouths were parched for the want of water and they were dropping off to sleep as they rode,’ Fred Tomlins wrote.⁴⁵ ‘It’s red hot,’ Burgess added. ‘The wind must be blowing right direct off Hades itself.’⁴⁶ Such occurrences could prove fatal. On 9 July, two men from the Wellington Mounted Rifles died of exhaustion during a patrol to Salmana.⁴⁷ On 16 July, Maurie Pearce wrote that ‘These long “stunts” combined with the great amount of night work we are getting, the excessive heat and bad food etc are the cause of such a great deal of sickness. We have been out of bed every morning at 3.30 a.m. ever since our arrival here.’⁴⁸ Meanwhile, the men of the 3rd Brigade had been issued with emu plumes for their hats. When the Tommies asked what bird they were from, the men would tell them they were kangaroo feathers.⁴⁹

In July, the heavy machine guns were reorganised from a two-gun section per regiment to twelve per brigade, deployed as a separate squadron. Three Lewis light machine guns were also allocated to each regiment. One of the machine-gunners, Gordon Cooper, wrote, ‘expecting some fun: Turks advancing from Oghratina’.⁵⁰

A Vickers gun barrel stowed for travel. Colin Wells, a former boundary rider, is alongside. ‘Men became extraordinarily quick at unpacking and going into action,’ Henry Gullett noted. George Francis collection.

Lieutenant Frank ‘Towser’ Nivison, 12th Light Horse machine-gun section, behind a Vickers gun that has been set up with the tripod reversed for anti-aircraft purposes. Such use caused problems for both the gunner, upon whom the hot cartridge shells would fall, and the loader, who had to ensure he kept the ammunition belt at the correct angle of entry to prevent stoppages. George Francis collection.