The Desert Mounted Corps / An Account of the Cavalry Operations in Palestine and Syria 1917-1918

by R. M. P. Preston

The enemy then directed an intense shell fire on the New Zealanders, and attacked the Camel Corps battalion on their right, with the evident intention of outflanking our troops on the hill. This attack was also beaten off, and, for the rest of the day, the Turks contented themselves with shelling the hill heavily, but did not succeed in dislodging the New Zealand Brigade.

Early in the afternoon the persistent enemy attacks against the left flank of our infantry ceased, probably as a result of a push forward made by the 2nd A.L.H. Brigade farther north. The infantry took advantage of this respite to resume their dogged advance on the Amman town position. They pressed forward till they were held up by the deep fosse on the west side of the citadel. Here they came under a murderous machine-gun fire from both flanks. The few mountain guns with our force were quite inadequate to the task of keeping down this hostile fire, and could make no impression on the thick stone walls of the old citadel. Our infantry had to withdraw to shelter.

Fresh enemy troops continued to arrive from the north, and General Chaytor now reluctantly reported that he saw no hope of taking Amman with the force at his disposal, and that any further attempt would only entail useless loss of life. No reinforcements were available; indeed, during the day, a battalion of infantry had been ordered back from Amman to El Salt. This battalion was the only one that had not been engaged, and constituted the last of our reserves.

El Salt itself had been heavily attacked all day long. The enemy column that had crossed the Jordan, and advanced up the Jisr el Damieh track, drove in our advanced post on that side during the morning. The Turks continued to press their attack with the greatest determination from the west, north-west and north, and soon all our scanty reserves were involved. One battalion of infantry had been spared from the brigade that was covering the country from the Jordan to Shunet Nimrin, and one had been sent back from Amman, as already stated.

At four o'clock in the afternoon, our troops at Amman and El Salt were only just holding their own, and it was doubtful if they could do so much longer, in face of the constantly increasing strength of the enemy. General Shea,[18] who was in command of the whole force, decided to withdraw. The troops at Amman were to move first, breaking off the action as soon as it was dark, and retiring along the Ain el Sir tracks.

As soon as darkness fell the New Zealand Brigade and the detached battalion of the Camel Corps disengaged, and fell back to the west bank of the Wadi Amman, where they held a line of posts to cover the withdrawal of the infantry and the Camel Corps Brigade. The infantry marched along the El Salt road, covered by the 2nd A.L.H. Brigade, as far as Sweileh, where they turned off towards El Sir, to avoid the fighting that was going on at El Salt. The New Zealanders held their position west of the wadi till the infantry had reached El Sir, and had a sharp action with the Turks, who had followed up closely. The enemy was finally repulsed at daybreak, and the New Zealanders then fell back slowly to Ain el Sir, which they reached in the evening. The retirement continued through the night, in the rain and darkness. Just as the rearguard troops of the New Zealand Brigade were moving out of El Sir, they were treacherously fired on by some of the local inhabitants. A troop was at once sent back into the village, and attacked a party of Arabs caught in the act of sniping at our men. Thirty of the natives were killed in the encounter, and this condign punishment had an instant effect. We had no more trouble from the local Arabs.

Meanwhile the fierce attacks on El Salt had continued all through the 31st, and it was not till eleven o'clock at night that the Turks finally drew off exhausted. During the night of the 1st of April, our troops withdrew from the village unmolested, covered by the 1st A.L.H. Brigade, having destroyed all the enemy ammunition and stores there, and the whole force was safely across the Jordan by the evening of the 2nd.

The operations had lasted twelve days, and it had rained almost the whole time. The troops were without tents or shelter of any kind, and, for the last ninety hours of the operations, they had been marching and fighting continuously, without sleep or rest. The fighting, too, had been severe, and our casualties, about 1600 killed, wounded and missing, sufficiently heavy, considering the small size of our force, and the absence of any great artillery concentration against us.

The wounded suffered severely. The nearest hospital was at Jerusalem, separated from Amman by more than sixty miles of bad mountain road. From the firing line the wounded were taken in camel cacolets[19] to a motor ambulance relay station on the road between Amman and El Salt. The tortures of this mode of conveyance to a wounded man have to be experienced to be believed. When the animal, having received its double burden, rises with its peculiar jerk forward, it nearly pitches the patients out of the cacolets. Thereafter, each lurching step of the long, agonising march stretches the unhappy victims upon a species of rack comparable to that of a mediæval torture chamber.

At the relay station, five miles east of El Salt, the wounded were transferred to ambulance motor cars, which ran them into El Salt. Here there was an advanced dressing station, where wounds were attended to, and then the victims were again loaded into ambulances, and run down to the main dressing station at Shunet Nimrin. At this station they were taken over by a fresh relay of cars, which carried them as far as Jericho, if they were lucky. When the bridges were washed away, however, it was for a time unsafe for the cars to cross the one remaining bridge, and the men had to be carried across the river on stretchers, and put into cars on the west bank. At Jericho there was an operating unit for serious cases, and there is no doubt that this unit saved the lives of many by an immediate operation, who would almost certainly have died had they been sent straight on to Jerusalem. Another change of cars was made at Jericho, and another at Talaat el Dumm. And then at last the long nightmare of the journey ended in the blessed peace and comfort of a hospital in Jerusalem.