With our army in Palestine

by Antony Bluett

Frequently enough when men did at last arrive at their destinations it was only to find that their battery or battalion had moved to some other part of the front, generally with an unpronounceable name of which nobody had ever heard! Few things are more wearisome than searching for a unit in such a country as Palestine, especially in that part which comprises the Judæan hills. Men coming up from the base in those winter months were often given three, four, and sometimes six days' rations, so difficult was it for a man to reach his unit.

The Turkish railway from Beit Hanun relieved the pressure to some extent, when the damage it had suffered from our shells had been made good. The only way it could be used was in conjunction with the mercantile marine, who landed stores on to the beach as they had done at Belah before the second battle of Gaza. One such landing-place was at Wadi Sukerier, a bleak, inhospitable swamp north of Ascalon, where a great dump was established in the mud, the supplies from which were transported north by camel convoys. The great obstacles in the way of landing stores from ships were the extremely dangerous coast and enemy submarines. The Mediterranean, as elsewhere, was alive with "U" boats in the summer and autumn of 1917. They levied a heavy toll on "troopers" and supply-ships coming out East, and the Navy in its work of guarding the coast of Palestine during the landing of supplies did not escape unscathed. That this was carried on successfully and the troops in the Judæan hills were fed was very largely owing to the untiring vigilance of British and Allied monitors and destroyers.

The port of Jaffa was also used, and here the conditions were even worse. Strictly speaking Jaffa is a port only in name, for all vessels have to anchor off-shore and passengers and stores have to be landed in surf-boats. In the rainy season the bar is almost impassable four days in the week and the roar of the breakers can be heard miles away. Even when the sea was calm enough for stores to be landed, the ground swell was such as to make the ordinary landsman agree with Dr. Johnson's remark "that he would rather go to gaol than to sea." It is easy to understand why the materials for Solomon's Temple were brought to Jaffa on rafts; no other craft of those days would have withstood the buffetings of the breakers.

But why Jonah ever chose this place from which to start his long journey to Tarshish passes my comprehension unless, indeed, it was Hobson's choice. He must certainly have been violently ill ere ever his flimsy boat had crossed the bar—a feat his whale could never have accomplished at all—and for a man of his temperament, soured by many trials, this must have been the last straw.

Patience, by the way, was a powerful characteristic of the sailors engaged in landing stores on the coast. A supply-ship, finding the sea at the Wadi Sukerier too high to permit of stores being landed, went on to Jaffa, found the breakers impossibly high there and returned to Sukerier. This amusing pastime went on for three days, when the waters abated somewhat and the stores were safely landed. As there was a "U" boat in the offing most of the time, however, the humour of the situation did not strike the sailors till afterwards.

Such were some of the difficulties confronting those who were responsible for supplying the army with rations; and those whose business it was to carry them to the troops holding the line could tell a similar story. Although the engineers made roads where none had previously existed, and blew the side out of a cliff in order to improve one already in use, the lot of the transport services, and more particularly of the "Camels," was not a happy one. Everything was against them, especially the weather. Rain and cold are the camels' worst enemies, and thousands perished of exposure, but the work still went on at all hours of the day and night, in all weathers, and over every imaginable kind of road but a good one.

Troops holding outlying positions in the hills were inaccessible to any form of transport but camels, and these had frequently to climb up steep, rocky paths just wide enough to take them and their burdens. On the one side was a precipice; on the other an abyss. Each camel-driver usually led a couple of camels, marching abreast, but when the narrowness of the path made it necessary for them to climb in single file, one was tied by his head-rope to the rear of the other camel's saddle. This, though it was absolutely necessary, rather added to the dangers of the climb. The incessant rains had made the paths slippery in the extreme, and the camel at the best of times is not the most adaptable of creatures; his conformation, moreover, is all against him in so far as scaling a cliff is concerned.

The merest slip on one of these treacherous paths meant destruction. The rear-most camel would stumble, oscillate violently for a moment, and over the side he would go, probably dragging his fellow with him and not infrequently the unfortunate driver as well. Sometimes a camel out of pure cussedness would "barrack" in the middle of a precipitous, narrow path, and only by crawling through the legs of the halted camels could he be reached by the exasperated officer or N.C.O. in charge of the party.

Now a camel has all the obstinacy of a mule and, in addition, is almost impervious to pain. Flogging has little effect on him and profanity none whatever; violence is necessary. Frequently the only way to shift one of these obstinate beasts was by lighting a fire under him! Then he moved, sometimes in such a hurry that he fell over the precipice and broke his neck. I am aware that this method is not mentioned in Field Service Regulations, but a great many things are done on active service which do not come within the scope of that admirable volume. Further, when men's lives were dependent on their receiving food and water at stated times, any methods were justifiable. You could not stop the War and wait till one recalcitrant camel was ready to allow six hundred of his fellows to pass on their lawful occasions.

I speak not without some small personal experience of the vagaries of the camel, though fortunately I was never driven to the extreme measures described above, for some time before the operations about Jerusalem began I retired to "another place" via a cacolet-camel and the hospital train; and when I again emerged it was in another guise and under the ægis of the "Camels."