Shanahan’s regiment was warned by a Light Horse outpost: German planes were in the area and coming towards his HQ encampment in the Sinai twenty kilometres from the coast. He raised the alarm, causing a hundred troopers to scurry to their horses and gallop straight into the desert. Shanahan was nervous. This was the first real test for Bill. He had come through several practice runs of this kind, but how would he perform facing a real threat? If he reverted to his former capricious nature he could be trouble. What if he bolted and became a target?
Shanahan galloped off just as the other troopers spread out in all directions for several hundred metres. He could just hear the steady drone of a German biplane buzzing in the cloudless sky. Shanahan pulled Bill up close to some scrub, patted him and said: ‘Okay, we stop here for a few minutes, cobber.’
After the hectic scatter of minutes earlier, there was hardly a movement. Shanahan could see horses and riders frozen in positions near scrub and palm trees in every direction. From ground level it seemed impossible that they would not be sighted from the plane, but experience had taught the troopers that pilots and their observers could not differentiate between the Light Horse and the vegetation.
The German plane appeared, at first just a dot on the horizon. The drone grew louder. Shanahan looked up. He felt nervous and a little helpless. There was nothing to fight back with if the plane dropped its bomb. He cared not for himself but for his men, whom he had drilled well. He assured them they would not be struck if they stayed motionless, but this was a crucial moment. Would the theory be proved correct? The plane circled, which indicated the Germans had intelligence that there were troopers in the area. Then the plane wobbled low.
‘Jesus,’ Shanahan whispered. He could make out the hooded heads of the pilot and observer as they looked this way and that, trying to spot any prospective target. The plane swooped so low that it seemed it might land, which could have been a fatal move. The soft sand would make take-off difficult. But the Germans were not going to come down. They were skimming the dunes to find their hidden quarry. After about twenty minutes of circling and lowering with the incessant fearsome drone splitting the silent desert air, the Germans flew off north and back to a base just over the border in Palestine, a mission unfulfilled.
Shanahan trotted back to his tent at a small oasis. He was satisfied that he could trust his horse on an important manoeuvre. He was also relieved that none of his men had been hit.
He and his squadron still had to wait for action. There were daily grumbles but just one trooper deserted. Shanahan took this down-time to work his horses up to peak condition, using Jackie Mullagh as the top trainer. In return, Mullagh asked for special training sessions with Bill. He claimed to have been tipped off 30 times, but he would not give up. He was resilient and determined. Shanahan obliged. He walked Bill and Mullagh out to a scrubby area near their oasis HQ.
‘Horses have an instinct for rhythm and movement,’ he told Mullagh as he walked Bill around in much the same manner as he had after Paterson’s exhibition. ‘You got to work them up to it by repetitive movements. Think of him as a natural dancer.’
Shanahan asked Mullagh to mount Bill.
Mullagh got on gingerly, expecting to be bucked off at any second. But Shanahan kept walking him up and back, around and backwards. Bill eased into the rhythm, almost as if he was unaware of his rider.
Shanahan counted: ‘One, two, three. One, two, three …’
Bill was prancing to the numbers. After ten minutes of this routine, Shanahan pulled Bill up. He patted him, and told him how good he was.
‘Now dismount,’ Shanahan said.
Mullagh slid off and stood back, again expecting to see the horse’s powerful hind legs kick. But they did not. Shanahan positioned Mullagh next to him and held the reins with him. He built into a slightly different rhythm. Under his breath he said: ‘Now you hold the reins. I’m pretending to hold them.’ Shanahan inched away, leaving Mullagh in charge. When a further ten minutes elapsed, Shanahan called a halt.
‘You don’t want me to mount him again?’ Mullagh asked, surprised.
‘No. You haven’t got his respect yet. That will take time.’
They strolled Bill back to squadron HQ.
‘You have to wheedle him,’ Shanahan said.
‘Huh?’
‘Cajole him, charm him. You have to bend him to your will without the bend, if you get my drift.’
‘Bribe him?’
‘No, never.’
‘But I seen you give him them licorice sweets.’
‘If you watch closely, I never give them as a reward. I stroke and pat him, even give him a hug sometimes. That’s his reward.’
‘I think I get it.’
‘You gotta be strict but fair.’
Each day they went through a similar routine for half an hour. After ten days Shanahan surprised Mullagh by asking him to take Bill for a ride. All seemed to go well. Shanahan got on another horse and trotted after them. When he was near, Bill suddenly stopped and hurled Mullagh to the ground.
‘Why the hell did he do that?’ Mullagh asked, brushing sand from his body. He was shaken. ‘It was goin’ so smooth!’
‘Maybe he got bored. Who knows with Bill? But you both did okay. You were up there for more than two minutes.’
The days dragged by. The sun was strong. Some Anzacs had sunstroke during blistering days. Many of the troopers had come from hot, semi-arid regions of the north and west, but they had never encountered regular temperatures of 45 to 50 degrees Centigrade. Rifle bolts scalded hands and boots shrank. The heat had a constant companion of swirling winds which sometimes created sandstorms that bit and burned exposed skin. The sand itself became an enemy cursed more than the Turks. The winds carried uncomfortable whiffs of the desert, where the stench of decaying bodies—humans, horses and camels—lingered in the scattered and sporadic desert war. Birds of prey circled and caught the attention of troopers but not nearly as much as the flies, which irritated them as they had at Gallipoli.
The impatient troopers were finding plenty to complain about as they waited for action. The sustained diet of bully beef and rock-hard biscuits was not helping although there were promises from the High Command that it would be improved. Water was restricted to one bottle of a few litres every twenty-four hours. It was not enough, and troopers were often caught using water from the horse troughs to refill their containers. Their ration was often brackish and not made more palatable by chlorine tablets, which the army doctors made compulsory. The dissolved chlorine was supposed to kill bacteria. The troopers used it for cleaning the rust off stirrup irons.
There was the odd skirmish or distant encounter with Turkish patrols drifting down from Palestine to test the Light Horse and cavalry strength and resolve, but apart from these adrenalin rushes, there had been nearly four months of relative inaction in 1916. More troopers considered deserting and catching a boat to Europe to join the Allied forces fighting the Germans.
On the night of 23 April 1916, two days short of a year after the first Anzac landing at Gallipoli, Shanahan received an urgent call from Harry Chauvel to ride with a squadron of 128 troopers to Oghratina, a village forty kilometres from the Suez Canal in the Sinai. The British 5th Mounted (Cavalry) Brigade was in trouble. They had been attacked by the Turks.
Shanahan had to wake Bill, which was no easy task for he loved his beauty sleep. This time the lieutenant exercised his right to ‘bribe’ his animal with a handful of sweets and a big drink. The sugar helped wake him. It was going to be a long ride through the night over terrain they had never travelled before. Twenty minutes after the call the squadron was lined up in seventy rows of two, including the eight packhorses and mules and two camels at the rear. Shanahan was out front with Bill prancing a little to start with and still smarting from his rude awakening, but after several weeks he had not attempted to buck his new master/ friend once, not even in a frisky, unthreatening moment. He was the horse to have at the head of the column. He was the biggest animal in this outfit by a hand (4 inches or 10–16 centimetres), and easily the heaviest and most powerful. Shanahan, at 180 centimetres, seemed to grow much taller in the saddle, and everyone in his regiment recognised him as the best horseman among them. Most had accepted this even before he’d ‘tamed’ Bill the Bastard, but after he’d taken on and made that exceptional mount an addition to the Anzac force, everyone acknowledged Shanahan’s superiority as a horseman.
The two camels laden with stores and weaponry each carried a little more than the horses. Shanahan had tossed up whether or not to bring them. He expected them to be slower than the horses, but it remained to be seen if they could keep within reasonable distance of the column. He planned a nine-hour ride, with ten-minute breaks for both man and animal every hour. A full moon augmented the light from untold numbers of brilliant stars as they began the steady negotiation of the waves of sand. Talking was forbidden. Voices travelled far in the desert night. The only noise was the light, jangling sound of water bottles hitting metal buckles or belts. One cigarette an hour was allowed but only in the first two hours. A pretty sprinkling of a hundred lights moving at ground level could give away the unit’s size and direction. Smoking would be allowed in the breaks but only under cover of coats or blankets.
After forty minutes, Shanahan called a halt. The cameleers were told to return with their animals to base. The camels had lagged behind, groaning when whipped to make them move more quickly. Their stores were spread over eight packhorses and mules. It settled in Shanahan’s mind that the Walers were superior in all forms of desert warfare, whether moving to a potential encounter or in the actual battle itself. Troopers had reported that the camel’s capacity to go long distances without water was more myth than reality. They may well have had the ‘tanks’ to hold more water and last longer without a drink, but Walers were consistently going further without complaint—they were much quicker. The troopers would use them in any proposed charge, whereas they would never use camels this way. The men also found them far more accommodating animals. Cameleers were known to build a rapport with their animals, but none ever reported the strong relationships that most troopers had with their horses.
‘They [the horses] also smelt a hell of a lot better,’ Shanahan wrote to a relative, ‘their breaths had a certain familiar fragrance. But the camels were best avoided, at either end.’
The endless hillocks, interspersed with the odd mountain, were heavy, slow going. There was no actual track, except for paths through scrubby sections and the occasional oasis inhabited by Bedouins, where the ground was flatter and firmer underfoot. At other less urgent times they might have rounded up these Arabs to stop them warning the Turks of their advance, but there was no time to spare.
Along with the light, this ride seemed blessed with no wind, but as they moved deeper into the desert, they ran into mist. The troopers all wore their coats to fend off the freezing night air which at dawn would give way quickly to burning sun. Shanahan lifted the pace a fraction in the second hour. Bill was pounding steadily up a minor gradient when he stopped dead about eight paces from the top of a rise. He was agitated, whinnying and pawing the ground. Shanahan nudged Bill with his heels but the horse refused to budge. He reared up. He was not going on. Shanahan called a halt to the column as it bunched untidily behind him. At first he wondered if Bill was playing a stubborn game. He dismounted with Mulherin and walked to the top of the rise. Both men peered over the edge and received a shock.
‘Christ!’ Mulherin gasped.
Below them, visible in the moonlight, was a sheer drop into a ravine. Mist did not allow them to make out how deep it was. Looking across at other massive dunes which were just visible in a grey shroud here and there, Shanahan estimated the drop to be at least eighty metres. He remounted Bill, patted his neck with more affection than normal and slipped him a sweet, whispering in his ear that it was a ‘real thank you and a reward’.
Shanahan leant across to Mulherin. ‘We never ride again without a black tracker to scout ahead for drops like that,’ he said. ‘Jackie Mullagh has to join the squadron proper, not just be a trainer.’
Given the pace at which they were travelling, Bill had just saved the lives of at least a dozen men and horses. This was the first time anyone in the squadron had experienced such a prescient action from one of the mounts. They had all heard stories about horses refusing to go on when the troopers were ‘blind’ to dangers ahead in the desert. Now they believed them. Troopers half-asleep were now wide awake.
Shanahan motioned for the column to turn around.
‘I’m very, very pleased you went to so much trouble to acquire your bastard mate,’ Mulherin said to Shanahan, who just smiled ruefully. Both men were shaken by the experience. They found a route down the side of the ravine and then resumed travelling in their original direction.
After a five-hour gallop through the desert, the regiment came across several wounded members of the British Cavalry Brigade in the half-light of dawn. They were on foot and had escaped in the night after a battle. The cavalrymen spoke of a one-sided encounter. The Turks had left some 300 British prisoners with a band of Bedouin ‘guards’. Shanahan and his squadron, rifles at the ready, galloped on to Oghratina to the worst sight any of the troopers—even veterans of the Boer War and other conflicts—had ever seen. More than 250 British cavalrymen, in various states of dismemberment, were strewn about the town. The camp had been looted, their horses stolen. The Arabs had fled by camel hours earlier and would have melted into the yellow landscape. There was no point in pursuing phantoms in the desert.
Shanahan and his men scrutinised the identity tags on some of the yeomanry.
‘Hey, Lieutenant,’ Mulherin called, ‘have a look at this one. He’s a captain.’
Shanahan held a handkerchief over his face to avoid the stench of rotting human and animal remains. Half a day’s exposure to the elements and some birds of prey had worsened an already appalling mess. The officer opened the cavalryman’s shirt to reveal his bloodstained torso. His shoulder was strapped.
‘I think this is the bloke that Bill bucked off on the Gallipoli despatch run,’ Mulherin said.
‘Captain Bickworth,’ Shanahan murmured, ‘I think you’re right.’
Shanahan and his troopers were sickened and sobered. He ordered a burial detail for the cavalrymen. A short religious ceremony was held.
It was clear to Shanahan and his men that the Arabs, who were being billed by the High Command as ‘friends’ of the British forces, were never again to be trusted. Some tribes in Arabia may have been in negotiations with the British to fight the Turks on the Hejaz railway, but the Bedouins wandering Palestine and the Sinai were under Turkish control and in their pay. This horrific, inhumane incident drove home the reality of the horrors of war. The troopers had been through the hell of Gallipoli where some of their squadrons had been decimated. So far in the desert they had experienced the odd firefight and skirmish. Some had been killed. A few had been murdered by Bedouins creeping into their camps at night and slitting throats. All that was frightening enough, but the experience at Oghratina placed the war in a new perspective. The concept of dismembering bodies was totally foreign to them. Until now the level of brutality administered by the Arabs to at least 250 men—the rest having escaped—had been unthinkable. From this terrible moment, the Anzacs believed they had two major enemies in the region.