My colleague Robyn Van Dyk and I have probably taken well over 1,200 people on guided tours of the Memorial’s current special exhibition Lawrence of Arabia and the Light Horse. As ANZAC Day 2008 approaches it is interesting to reflect on which Light Horse images have  resonated most profoundly with our visitors. This week, I also took some veterans from the Vietnam War through the exhibition. They had served in the battle for Fire Support Patrol Base Coral in May 1968 and I asked them which images had a special meaning for them.

So, I’d like to draw attention to several images, each of which has something to reveal about the ANZACs involved in the campaign from the defence of the Sinai in 1916 through to their great ride to Damascus in late 1918. (This will probably take at least two posts.)

Lieutenant General Sir Harry Chauvel of the Light Horse

In 1916, after the Gallipoli campaign, the Australian Light Horse brigades remained in Egypt and, with the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade, were formed into the ANZAC Mounted Division under the command of Major General Harry Chauvel. Light Horsemen were hardy, self-reliant and independent minded. They could shoot straight and ride well. Harry Chauvel was no exception and his soldiers knew it.

He emerged from the First World War as one of Australia’s most effective and widely respected generals. It was Chauvel who issued the order to charge at Beersheba in the third and successful attack on the Gaza defensive line of the Turks. His able and dynamic command spearheaded the British advance through Palestine in 1917 and 1918, and projected it through Damascus to the northern Syrian border and the final capitulation of the Turkish forces.

James McBey, a British official war artist, has captured this very candid image of Chauvel as the commander of the Desert Mounted Corps in Homs at the end of the campaign in mid-October 1918. He is shown proudly wearing his slouch hat and the emu plumes worn by many Light Horse regiments. Chauvel looks older than his 53 years, but appears very much to be a man in the moment. By this stage he was responsible for thousands of Turkish prisoners, hospitals over-flowing with wounded soldiers and others struck by serious diseases including typhoid and malaria, and for restoring order in the large cities like Damascus that were suffering from the chaos that followed the Turkish withdrawal. Chauvel was shocked by this portrait:  I think he probably hadn’t realised how much the war had aged him. He wrote to his wife in London that the painting was drying in his hotel room and he expected that it would give him night mares. read on

This post is a further comment regarding Emily Robertson’s post on the Shellal Mosaic. When researching for the exhibition I came across some references to the mosaic in the collection of papers of General Sir Henry George Chauvel. In a letter to his wife on 3 May 1917 he mentions some damage done to the mosaic by Turkish forces and that he had contacted the Director of Antiquities to remove it. The letter was transcribed into Lady Chauvel’s scrapbook which she compiled after the war. The page of the scrap book displayed here also includes three photographs of the mosaic before it was removed.

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John Lafferty from the Memorial’s Information Technology section has taken himself and his trusty camera to Gallipoli on our annual Battlefield Tour. John is a gifted photographer and he is maintaining a blog from the tour while they are all in Gallipoli. You can find the Gallipoli Battlefield Tour blog here.

The Dardanelles campaign is not covered by our exhibition, but both Lawrence and the Light Horse were involved. 

Many members of the Light Horse who were later involved in the defence of the Sinai and Allenby’s advance through Palestine had earlier served on Gallipoli. Sir Harry Chauvel and his 1st Light Horse Brigade landed at Gallipoli on 12 May 1915.

During the Dardanelles campaign Lawrence worked for the Cairo Intelligence Department and provided maps and intelligence for the forces on the Gallipoli Peninsula. He was also keenly involved in pioneering work done to use aerial photography taken over Gallipoli to produce maps.

This post is a bit of a stretch, but I think the link is there and it is interesting enough, so here it goes. Recently, I have been reading up on the actions of our Light Horse in Palestine, particularly in late 1917 and 1918. This has all been related to the development of the exhibition text or storyline. Earlier, our efforts had concentrated on selecting items for the exhibition and then negotiating loans for those items that have to be borrowed. There’ll be more about that soon. Currently, we are trying to finalise the text and all the captions and then get a designer on board.

So, now back to “Hooky” Walker . . . One of the loans we have negotiated from the UK is a sketch map that was drawn by Lawrence. It covers part of the route taken by Sharif Nasir’s expedition from Wejh to Akaba in July 1917 to capture the Red Sea port from the Ottomans. This map is owned by the Royal Society for Asian Affairs in London and my negotiations for this loan were greatly assisted by Sir Harold “Hooky” Walker, their Chairman. Sir Harold told me that his grandfather was Lieutenant General Sir Harold “Hooky” Walker, who as an English regular officer had commanded the 1st Australian Division. General Walker took command of the 1st Australian Division temporarily on Gallipoli in May 1915 after Major General Sir William Throsby Bridges was mortally wounded.  After being wounded himself, General Walker left Gallipoli, but returned to command the Division as a Major General in France from March 1916 until July 1918 when he relinquished command “to the deep regret of his officers and men” according to Bean. read on

One of the more significant contributions to the legend of the Light Horse comes from the literature of Ion Idriess. A prolific and well loved author, whose books sold in the millions, Idriess is perhaps most famous for his stories set in the outback and Northern Australia. The Desert Column is based on the diaries that he kept throughout the war. Published in 1932, it is one of Idriess’ earliest works. Harry Chauvel noted in the foreword that it was the only book of the campaign that to his knowledge was “viewed entirely from the private soldier’s point of view”.

Idriess served as a sniper with the 5th Australian Light Horse. Enlisting in 1914, he began his diary “as we crowded the decks off Gallipoli” and he continued writing until returning to Australia unfit for further active service in March 1918. He mentions in his introduction to The Desert Column that “I would whip out the little book and note, immediately, anything exciting that was happening. As the years dragged on, my haversack became full of little note books.” The diaries cover his experience of some of the war’s major events from life in the trenches at Gallipoli to the battles at Romani and Beersheba.  read on

The political background to the entry into Damascus is complex and murky. Yet, only by identifying the underlying web of forces involved, can sense be made of what happened as control of the city passed from the Turks to the Allies.

It is clear that parts of the 10th Australian Light Horse Regiment were the first troops formally to enter Damascus when they passed through on their way to secure the Homs road and that Major Olden was handed the city by the acting governor, Emir Said, a member of the influential al-Jaza’iri or Qadir family. But within hours this unexpected turn of events was overshadowed by the political need for Damascus to be seen to be liberated by the Hashemite army led by Feisal that had fought its way north from the Hejaz.

An article published in 2005 by the British historian Dr Matthew Hughes of Brunel University reviews and updates the evidence supporting this view which was first identified more than 40 years ago by Professor Elie Kedourie of the London School of Economics. Both show that, as part of a wider Imperial policy originating in London, the British were keen to establish the Hashemites in a strong position in central Syria to destabilise French claims to this area enshrined in the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement. Independently the Hashemites wanted to move their power-base from the distant and sparsely populated Hejaz to Syria and establish themselves as the legitimate and natural heirs to Turkish rule there. In this respect the British and Hashemites were equal partners of self-interest. read on

Exactly 90 years ago, with the capture of Rafa on 9 January 1917, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force arrived in Palestine. The Turkish raid on the Suez Canal in February 1915 had shown the limitations of defending both Egypt and the Canal from its western bank. Beginning with the establishment of a new defensive line 10 km east of the Canal, the British military authorities in Egypt had gradually extended this zone of protection eastwards across the Sinai Desert. After General Sir Archibald Murray assumed command in Egypt in January 1916, he moved the line of forward defence to Katia and began to build both a standard-gauge railway and a 12-inch steel water pipeline across Sinai so that he could eventually move it at least as far east as El Arish, approaching the traditional border between Egypt and Palestine at Rafa.

Following the defeat of the Turks at Romani at the beginning of August 1916, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force began a steady advance eastwards. The speed was limited to the rate at which the railway and pipeline could be built. Using the Egyptian Labour Corps this was maintained at 25km a month.

Although the bulk of the Turkish forces had been withdrawn back across the desert to El Arish, outposts were maintained at locations such as Bir el Mazar and Maghara. Murray used his most effective and desert-worthy division, the Anzac Mounted Division under Major General Harry Chauvel, to patrol aggressively across Sinai and launch heavy raids against the Turkish outposts. On 17 September Chauvel’s men, supported by horse artillery and part of the Imperial Camel Corps, attacked Bir el Mazar. After a difficult battle, Chauvel ordered the attack to be broken off and his men withdrew. Two days later the Turks gave up their strong position and fell back towards El Arish. read on

The David Lean film Lawrence of Arabia is one of the more famous examples of art contributing to the Lawrence legend. Lesser known is the Australian feature film Forty Thousand Horsemen which can also be considered as significant for its role in legend making, however, for the Australian Light Horse.

Released in 1940, the film’s nationalistic sentiment and dramatisation of Australian success in battle touched a strong chord with a new generation at war. The story follows three larrikin Light Horsemen and their role in the desert campaigns. The three leads, played by Grant Taylor, Chips Rafferty and Pat Toohill, are introduced to us playing two-up in a market place and indulging in tom foolery, including taking a wild donkey ride through town and into a cabaret club. The celebrated climax of the story plays out the famous charge at Beersheba. The film broke national box office records and also had considerable success on the international market.

The film’s director, Charles Chauvel was the nephew of Sir Harry Chauvel, initially commander of the Australian and New Zealand Mounted Division and later the Desert Mounted Corps, the first Australian to command a corps in the war. From the early phases of the film’s production, Charles Chauvel was able to build upon the support of veterans, the light horse and even the Australian War Memorial. Chauvel used real Light Horsemen for one of the first shot scenes. A Light Horse regiment, gathered in Sydney for the New South Wales sesquicentenary celebrations, was permitted to take part in the filming for one day, playing out the charge at Beersheba. This was an ambitious undertaking that succeeded through some good fortune: with Light Horsemen, cast and crew all waiting for the rain to cease and the sun to come out so as to start the shoot. read on

The papers of General Sir Henry George Chauvel are one of the highlights of the Memorial’s written collections.  This collection contains numerous correspondence exchanged between “Harry” Chauvel and his family and also includes two spectacular, large leather bound, gold embossed, scrap books created by Lady Chauvel after the war. The volumes document Chauvel’s military engagements during the war and offer an insight into his actions and thoughts. They contain a selection of his letters, hand transcribed by his wife, as well as photographs, maps, field message notes and news cuttings. The first volume includes a water colour scene of Palestine signed by Will Longstaff and was bound using fine calf from the Chauvel family’s own animals. The second volume was bound by the Memorial in matching style following its donation.

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The blog has recently received a number of comments that reveal the entry into Damascus in October 1918 still inspires strong feelings.

The question of who was the first to enter the city has been disputed ever since. The evidence now points to the men of Brigadier General L C Wilson’s 3rd Light Horse Brigade as being the first troops to enter Damascus in the early hours of 1 October. It has always been the intention of both the exhibition and the blog to draw attention to this fact as part of a wider historical story. Indeed, to illustrate this we plan to feature some of Brigadier Wilson’s material, as well as some of General Sir Harry Chauvel’s, along with original documents from the unit war diaries.

On 14 September 2006 we posted an article in this blog about the rare and lavishly produced 1926 subscribers’ edition of Lawrence’s Seven pillars of wisdom that the Memorial holds in its collection and that will also be featured in the exhibition. After the Memorial had purchased its 1926 edition Chauvel, who was a member of the Memorial’s then Board of Trustees, drew attention to some of the inaccuracies contained in the book. He wrote to the Memorial’s Director on 1 January 1936 that he ‘agreed to the purchase of this book as a very remarkable publication in connection with the late War likely to increase in value, not as an accurate record of events’. In a very detailed 13 page letter, Chauvel went on to outline his main concerns with Lawrence’s account. read on