For three days the Battalion remained at Esdud and on the 12th moved out against Yebnah. On the march signs were multiplying to assure us that the enemy was not standing upon the order of his going, but this day we expected to get into touch again. There is a long, low line of hills running north and south through Katrah and Mughair to Zernukah, and here the enemy stood to guard the road to Ramleh and his lateral communications to Jerusalem. The Battalion was fortunate for Yebnah fell without a shot. Not so fortunate the 155th Brigade, for they had a very stiff day's fighting at Katrah, and only the arrival of the Yeomanry Division enabled them to carry the position. However by 16.00 the Turks were again in flight on the road to Jaffa. At Yebnah the Battalion remained for five days, holding an outpost line. From the roof of a house, which was our observation post, we could see the gleaming white tower of the monastery of Ramleh, and could hear the sound of its bells. The natives of Yebnah had oranges and figs for sale but they did not appreciate the fixation of prices, and their admiration for Colonel Morrison, their first Christian governor for six centuries, was tempered by their love of profiteering, now impossible of fulfilment. It was in this town that the Colonel gave orders to the omdeh or provost for the production of all arms held by the inhabitants. In about an hour some forty of the male population paraded at Battalion Headquarters in proud possession of the most suicidal collection of converted gas-pipes that the eye of man ever beheld. Abraham might have used them on the plains of Mamre. There were guns seven feet long, there were guns which might have been fired in the days of the owner's grandfather, but there was no gun which would not have been infinitely more dangerous to the firer than to the target. Of modern rifles, Turkish or British, there was none. They were probably too deeply buried to be dug up at half an hour's notice.
ORANGE SELLERS, MEJDEL.
At 10.30 on the morning of the 18th the Brigade moved northwards along a road strewed with the jetsam of a retreating army, until Ramleh was reached. Here a bivouac area was taken up in an olive grove but after three hours' halt, orders were received for an advance on Ludd, the ancient Lydda. We arrived at 19.00 and bivouacked beside the road about half a mile south-west of the town.
Next morning the Battalion passed their starting-point, the railway-crossing of the Ramleh-Ludd road, at 09.30 and struck eastwards for Jimzu and Jerusalem. By this time our cavalry had entered Jaffa and the right wing of the Turkish army was far to the north. The left of their Gaza force were retreating on or through Jerusalem, and the intention of our G.H.Q. now was to throw the 52nd and 75th Divisions across country to try and cut the road running north out of the Holy City. The 75th had been coming up on our right but some miles away and slightly in rear, so that while we were crossing the Judean Hills they were skirting the foothills and advancing through Enab to Biddu. The 155th Brigade was pushed up to Berfilyah and the 156th to Beit Likkia to protect the left flank of our march across the face of the enemy. The only road across the hills appeared on the map as an ancient Roman Road, but it was no better than a goat-track, and in places impossible of identification. Limbers had to be left midway between Berfilyah and Beit Likkia. Darkness came down and with it heavy rain, with a strong, driving south-west wind. The distance as the crow flies is twelve miles but the actual distance covered must have been nearer twenty. At 22.00 the Battalion reached Likkia, just occupied by the 156th Brigade, and bivouacked beside the road. The ground was sodden. The men were in light tropical uniform and drenched to the skin. No fires could be lit and so the hours passed until the Battalion got orders at dawn to move. Our objective was Beit Dukka and the establishment of defensive positions to the south and south-east of it. If ever a road disgraced its name it was this Roman Road of the maps. Here was no purposeful track, broad, smooth and white, keeping its way straight through every obstacle. It bent and twisted and turned. Often it crept underneath a great rock and lost itself. Fifty yards farther on one would find it, shy and retiring, slipping down the face of a slab of rock, always with the deceitful promise that over the next hill it would be better behaved. Instead it grew worse, until the column was walking in Indian file up steep hill sides and across the necks of the valleys. At 08.00 the 7th H.L.I. branched off to strike the town from the north, while the rest of the Brigade kept on, trying to identify their objective among the numerous villages which clung under the crests of the hills. The maps were not exact and the information from G.H.Q. was that Dukka was a village on a hill commanding considerable country. The village did sit on a hill, but, unfortunately, the hill was commanded on every side by much higher hills and Dukka was of no tactical value. So the Brigadier decided to move on Beit Anan, a similar village situated on the hill commanding Dukka from the south, and on the road to Kubeibeh, the ancient Emmaus. Scouts were pushing forward to search Beit Anan, and the head of the column had just appeared over a crest about 1500 yards from the village, when a brisk rifle-fire threw the leading companies into some confusion, and the second in command and scout officer had an experience they will not quickly forget, lying flat in the open being sniped at by a machine-gun. The enemy were not in any strength, but it was ten o'clock before the village was secured. Losses were not slight for they included Captain W.L. Buchanan, commanding No. 1 company, who was mortally wounded and died next day.
On being driven out of Beit Anan, the enemy retired up the neck of the hill to a walled garden situated on its very point and commanding Beit Anan, as well as the ridges running down from the garden itself. Later in the day the Turks occupied also the crest to the north-east of Dukka, from which a dropping machine-gun fire was kept up on the left of our position. No. 1 company, now commanded by Lieut. M'Lellan, was sent forward to the ridge, about 800 yards west of the enemy's position, where they remained that day and next night. No. 2 company held the front and left of the village. All day we could hear the thunder of the artillery of the 75th Division far to the south-west of us, beyond the hills, as they drove the Turks back on Jerusalem. Night fell with a bitter wind blowing and a chill rain which penetrated to the bone and tried No. 1 company to the limit of endurance. Tea and blankets were got out to No. 2 company but, though several attempts were made, it was impossible to get them to No. 1 company. For twenty hours those men, in their tropical kit, endured the enemy's sniping and machine-gun firing, and the bitter cold and hunger and misery, hearing in the early morning the wind-borne chimes of the chapel bell in Kubeibeh calling the brothers to matins, until dawn found many of them unable to speak. During the night a squadron patrol of Hyderabad Lancers rode across the hills from the 75th Division into our lines, a truly wonderful feat across unknown country held by the enemy. At dawn the problem was, had the enemy evacuated the garden. Lieut. Agnew, the scout officer, set out to find out and C.Q.M.S. Kelly and Sergt. Black volunteered to accompany him. This is one of the nastiest jobs one can be asked to do. If the place is held the chances are against the first of the patrol returning alive. No observation from without was possible as a high wall surrounded the garden, which belonged to the Summer House of the Latin Hospice of Emmaus. The wall was approached with some difficulty, climbed, and only then was it certain that the Turk had gone and had evacuated his stronghold. The Battalion then moved into the garden and occupied Kubeibeh.
This village was mainly a colony of Franciscan brothers, Italian and Spanish, who had a magnificent church and hospice and under whose shadow the native houses were built. They welcomed us effusively and State calls were exchanged by Colonel Morrison and the Brother Superior. The latter esteemed us highly and, although the 75th Divisional Staff afterwards occupied his hospice, even the glamour of Staff scarlet failed to dim his eyes to the worth of the plain Scots battalion who first entered Emmaus. The monastery kept a pig but it was sacrificed on the altar of friendship and Battalion Headquarters blessed the hand of S. Francis. In the monastery garden on the hill-top the Battalion rested for three days, that is, rested from fighting and marching, but the time was not wasted. The Division set to work on the Roman Road with pick and shovel and gunpowder and in the three days made it passable for 60-pounder guns from Berfilyah to Biddu.
