Australasia Triumphant!: With the Australians and New Zealanders in the Great War on Land and Sea

by Arthur St. John Adcock

Most of these attacks seem to have been in the nature of feints to discover whether there were any weak joints in the armour of the defence, or to distract the attention of the defenders from the main assault which was rapidly developing against the narrowest section of the Canal, between Toussoum and Serapeum. Even here, however, the Canal is over 200 ft. wide, and the problem for the invaders was how to span that space, in face of gun and maxim and rifle fire, effect a landing on the other side, dash up an embankment that rose to a height of 40 ft., and drive out of their trenches at the point of the bayonet thousands of the hardiest and most coolly determined troops in the British Army. More impossible-looking attempts have succeeded before now, but the Turks, after sticking to it heroically for forty-eight hours, found that it could not be done.

The nearest of the enemy forces were still several miles from the farther shore of the Canal, and more and more of them could be seen pouring over and down the hills in support of the advance-guard, when the twilight gathered round them and then "at one stride came the dark," and unseen in the cloudy, almost moonless night they made their dispositions, and before dawn the covering troops to be held in reserve had dug themselves into the sand and were formidably entrenched. All through the night teams of bullocks were dragging forward the steel pontoons that were to bridge the Canal; gangs of toiling men carried the pontoons on their shoulders through a gap in the bank down to the edge of the water, where the engineers got to work with them, swung them round into position one beyond the other, and by three in the morning had pushed out nearly as far as mid-stream. The defenders might all have been asleep for any sign of life that came from them; but keen eyes were unceasingly searching the gloom and were quick to notice the growing black line that was creeping stealthily out towards them on the dull gleam of the water. They waited patiently and silently till they considered it had been allowed to come far enough, then the word was passed along the line, the company officers' whistles shrilled startlingly, and the next moment a blaze of fire from machine guns and rifles swept the doomed beginning of the pontoon bridge and left it strewn with dead and wounded, and kept such a hail of lead pelting over it as to render it untenantable.

Already the Turks had launched five boats and loaded them with picked men, and as soon as they realised that they were discovered they flung precautions to the wind, and made a rush across with these, purposing to land and entrench them so as to establish a bridge-end in readiness for the completed pontoon. Three of the boats were riddled and sunk, and of the struggling, shouting mob that was flung into the water some swam back and some swam pluckily on at the tail of the other two boats, which dodged across desperately in the baffling darkness and were successfully beached. As the first boat touched land, its occupants sprang out and charged impetuously up the high embankment, but were shot down to a man before they could reach the top. The second boatload, profiting by the failure of their comrades, hastily dug themselves into the mud and sand with hands and bayonets, and lay close in holes that sloped into the ground and gave shelter against the relentless fire from the British trenches. But the coming of daylight exposed their exact location and made it so untenable that the few who had not been shot threw down their arms and came out and were taken prisoners.

Though the Turks had thus failed at the first onset, they were a long way from beaten–there was plenty of fight in them yet. Boat after boat was launched in forlorn attempts to scutter over and land a small force that should cover the landing of others, and the completion of the bridge; but what had been impracticable in the dark was hopelessly impossible after the sun was up. Every boat that put forth on this mission was deluged with shot and shell and sent to the bottom. There was a wild attempt made to manufacture and push across a bridge of planks on empty kerosine tins, but this promptly went the same way of destruction as soon as it began to get afloat.

All day the fighting continued along the whole front from Ismalia to Suez. The Turks by now had brought their big guns into action and were shelling the British posts and trenches; but one after the other these guns were silenced by the accuracy of our gunfire, and when two or three destroyers and a British cruiser steamed up the Canal from their anchorage in Lake Timsah and, having casually shattered the remnants of the pontoons, turned their guns on to the harassed lines of the enemy, scattering and levelling the sandy hummocks and searching the holes and trenches that were giving him shelter, he began to feel it was time to go, and only waited for the dark to come and hide his doings before he hastened to something of a rout the retreating movement he had cautiously commenced by daylight.

Sniping was kept up all through the night of the 3rd February on both sides, whilst this confused and headlong retirement was in progress; and when the morning of the 4th dawned all the Turks had departed, except a strong detaining force that was left behind in the trenches to cover the retreat. A detachment of Britishers was dispatched across the Canal to clear them out, and after a fierce resistance, surrounded and almost annihilated them, the firing only ceasing when the exhausted survivors, after futile attempts to make a run for it, dropped their rifles and surrendered at discretion.

From the shore of the Canal to the distant hills, discarded stores and baggage, broken carts and abandoned guns marked the tracks by which the beaten army had fled. And all about the sands lay the Turkish dead. They carried hundreds of wounded away with them, left hundreds of prisoners in our hands, and had lost over a thousand slain, including their German commander, Major von den Hagen.

The shipping on the Canal had not been delayed for much more than twenty-four hours; in forty-eight from the firing of the first shot the Turks were in flight, and by the morning of the 5th February there were none of them, but the prisoners, within twenty miles of the British chain of defences. The Australian Light Horse and the New Zealanders, with English and Indian troops, crossed and went in pursuit, and there were rear-guard actions fought around the sand-hills, and here and there straggling parties of the enemy rounded up and captured. The elaborately appointed, German-officered army of Turks that had marched out into the desert prepared for a mighty struggle, but confident of victory, escaped from its pursuers and got back with difficulty to Beersheba, a disheartened and disorganised rabble.

For over a month they lay there inactive, and it was thought they had abandoned their Egyptian enterprise for good; but about the 10th March a flying column of 1,000 men made a twelve days' dash through the desert again and put up a vigorous attempt to break the Canal defences at Kubri. The bombardment of the Dardanelles had given rise to a notion that troops had been sent from Egypt for the invasion of Gallipoli, and that therefore the Canal defences had been weakened, but all the Turks who were not shot or taken prisoners went back as hurriedly as they had come, and must have been able to assure their German masters that the Canal defences were as impregnable as ever. "Our officers told us," said one of the prisoners (and their officers were mostly German), "that the enemy here were not soldiers, but farmers and peace men from the British Colonies, who had never been in battle and could not fight, but," he looked his stalwart New Zealand interlocutor up and down, "they did not know. Bismillah! if you are not fighting men, I do not want to meet the others."

From that day to this, the Suez Canal has seen no more of war. The warships swing watchfully at anchor in the bitter lakes through which it flows, and the hundred miles of posts and trenches on the western bank are still peopled with vigilant men in khaki who have held their own there triumphantly and may be trusted to go on holding it till the war-drums throb no longer and the German menace is a tale of yesterday.