Across these valleys and into these hills climbed the British cavalry, for though Jaffa, the most considerable port in Palestine, had been captured and held, a greater objective was in view.
All roads now led to Jerusalem. This expression, let me hasten to add, is merely figurative. The exasperating fact was, that all roads did not lead to Jerusalem; most of them led nowhere except over a precipice; and they were but glorified goat-tracks at best. You needed the agility of a monkey, the leaping powers of a "big-horn" and the lungs of a Marathon runner successfully to negotiate them. Moreover, by some oversight, the authorities had neglected to provide the troops with alpenstocks. Without these adventitious aids the cavalry penetrated the northern defiles of the hills, following substantially the route taken by all the ancient invaders from the north. Before the disorganised Turks were fully alive to their advance they had reached the historic pass of Beth-Horon.
Through here that picturesque Assyrian warrior Sennacherib must have passed when he "came down like a wolf on the fold; and his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold." It is to be hoped that the invasion did not take place in the rainy season or the cohorts would have been sadly bedraggled before they had reached Michmash. It will be remembered by most as the scene of Joshua's passionate exhortation: "Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and Thou, Moon, in the Valley of Ajalon," on that day when, having defeated the Amorites with great slaughter, he was fearful lest night should fall before he could turn the defeat into a rout. It must have been a wonderful and uplifting day for the Israelites, after so many years of oppression. Through Beth-Horon, twenty-five centuries later, passed our own Richard Cœur de Lion on his last crusade; when, finding to his bitter mortification that his forces were so depleted by disease and death that he could not go on, he turned his back and refused even to look upon the City he could not save.
After which brief incursion into the past let us return to history in the making, not that the cavalry as a whole troubled themselves greatly about anything so high-falutin'. Their immediate concern was to maintain their precarious foothold in these melancholy hills; and if they worried at all it was over the important question as to whether rations in satisfactory quantities could be brought to them. With complete unanimity they cursed the mist-like rain that shut out the surrounding hills from view; for they, together with the whole army, had bitter reason for mistrusting fog, after Katia and the first battle of Gaza.
Despite increasing pressure from the Turks, now awake to the seriousness of their position, the cavalry held on to their positions and even advanced a little, so affording the necessary protection for the advance of the infantry farther to the south. These were marching on Jerusalem from the British positions at Ludd and Ramleh, which latter place had been Turkish G.H.Q.
From the west to Jerusalem there is but one road which can properly be described as such, but it is one of the most travelled roads in the world, and certainly amongst the most famous. In every age and from all countries thousands of pilgrims landing at Jaffa have trodden this ancient road to the Holy City. The first part of it is indescribably beautiful, leading as it does through some of the orange groves which surround Jaffa. In the springtime, if you turn your horse a mile or two away from the town an incomparable view is spread before your eyes. On every hand stretch the orange groves, great splashes of white and green, the scent from which is almost overpoweringly sweet. Here and there you see the darker green of the olive and the blazing scarlet of the pomegranate blossom, divided into patches by hedges of prickly pear; and scattered about promiscuously are oleanders, cypresses, and the stately sycamores. In the midst of it all lies Jaffa the Beautiful, almost virginal in its whiteness, and beyond, in almost incredible harmony of colour, the purple waters of the Mediterranean.
Across the southern end of the Plain of Sharon the road leads through cultivated fields, past vineyards and orchards, as far as Ramleh, where the somewhat monotonous beauty of the plain ends abruptly. Some miles beyond, the road, at the time the infantry advance was made, had degenerated into a cart-track from the battering it had received from Turkish traffic.
About ten miles from Ramleh was Latron, a malaria-haunted swamp in the rainy season and a plague-spot of flies in summer, and from here onwards the road became increasingly difficult and dismal. You could see the imprint of the oppressor in the very land itself, for though there are a few patches of cultivation, the greater part of the countryside is abandoned to a stony barrenness. The first check to the infantry came at Bab el Wad, a rocky, desolate pass, which, had the Turks been allowed time properly to fortify it, would have held up the advance and delayed the fall of Jerusalem probably for months. As it was they fought desperately hard to retain it, but having come so far in their pilgrimage, the infantry did not allow this obstacle to stand in their way and carried the pass at the point of the bayonet. After which spirited effort they proceeded onwards as far as Enab, the "Hill of Grapes," a beautiful little place some six miles from Jerusalem where later a Desert Corps Rest Camp was established. Here the advance for the moment ended.
In the midst of the hills and valleys between the position of the infantry and that of the cavalry near Beth-Horon towered the hill called Nebi Samwil, the highest point in Palestine. This was a great serried mass of rock rising by sharp degrees to a height of nearly 3000 feet, where the infantry in some places had to sling their rifles and pull themselves up by their hands, during their successful attack on the ridge. This kind of alpine-climbing-cum-fighting was as different from the fighting on the desert as it could well be, and only the infantryman, who did most of it, could tell you which he detested the more. As one of them said, in the Judæan hills you were mountaineer, pack-mule, and soldier all in one; and it is not for a mere helpless artilleryman to paint the lily.
When Nebi Samwil had been captured and consolidated the whole line took root, as it were, and prepared to beat off the increasingly violent attacks of the Turks, while the engineers started to improve the roads and other means of communication. The railway had to be brought up from Belah, no easy task in the rainy season; for if laying the line across the desert had been difficult, it was infinitely worse building it from Belah across the Shephaleh to the British line. The Wadi Ghuzzee was a raging torrent by now, and even a few miles from its mouth the turbulent waters were a constant source of worry and anxiety to the engineers. I believe I am right in saying that three times in the winter months was the bridge over the wadi washed away by the floods, and each time the engineers had incredible difficulty in building it up again. While it was down all traffic beyond Belah was necessarily suspended and troops coming up the line from Kantara were often three weeks on the journey to their respective units.