The Western Front was epitomised by the brute force of men against machine and each other. Tens of thousands were lost in the maelstrom of war. In the horror, friendships were forged that endured even through death. This is the story of one such friendship…

Wally Brown was a grocer. He did not necessarily want to be a grocer but neither did he want to follow in the footsteps of his father as a miller. The small Tasmanian community of New Norfolk, into which he was born in 1885, was a progressive ‘postal, telegraphic and money order township’. The town boasted the New Norfolk Literary Institution complete with a library of some 1200 volumes and a ‘very fine and well built lunatic asylum’. Progressive it might have been, but at 26 years of age Brown had itchy feet. In 1911 he left New Norfolk for the bustling lifestyle of Petersham in Sydney.

 

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I realise this is short notice, but we just filmed a short segment on the charge at Beersheba (31 October 1917) in the exhibition this afternoon. It should run on SBS World News Australia, from 6.30 to 7.30 pm. It is being run in conjunction with a story about the dedication of the new Australian Light Horse Memorial at Beersheba by the Israeli President Shimon Peres and the Australian Governor-General Major General Michael Jeffery in Israel on 28 April 2008.

You can read further reports here and here.

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

Ian Jones’ revised edition of “A Thousand Miles of Battles” is now available from our shop (here). It was first published in 1987, but last year a new revised edition was released by ANZAC Day Commemoration Committee (Queensland) Inc.

Ian wrote and co-produced the film The Lighthorsemen and there is an excellent action shot included in the book (p.115) from the film’s scene covering the charge at Beersheba. The book also uses many of the same images we have highlighted in our exhibition and many others I’d like to have used if we had more space. These include AWM B00277 and AWM P03631.087 (see below).

If you want a well produced and written illustrated contemporary history of the Light Horse then it is currently very hard to go past this book.

I received an email today from Charles Kenny of Essex in the UK. He has given me permission to post it here and I’ve put in some relevant links where I could.

Reading about your exhibition, I thought you might be interested in a little known connection.

The Bartlett brothers, Stephen and Alfred S., both pearlers of Broome (W.A.), enlisted together in the 10th Light Horse Regiment in May 1915, and embarked from Freemantle on HMAT Anchises in September. They saw plenty of action. Alfred was recommended for a bravery award at Rafa in January 1917 but sadly died of wounds that April and is buried in Gaza. Steve soldiered on in the great ride to Damascus, and then to patrolling the Delta. After the war he settled in England and became an author, writing under the name of Gurney Slade. 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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This blog post was written by Emily Robertson, a post-graduate student from the Australian National University who briefly worked at the Memorial as an intern in our Art section.

During the second battle of Gaza, on 17 April 1917, a group of Australian signallers led by Corporal (later Sergeant) Ernest Lovell-Shore discovered a mosaic that had been partially uncovered by Turkish troops, who had built a trench on a mound in the Wadi Ghuzze near the town of Shellal. As part of the process of establishing a helio station on the site, the Australian troops uncovered an extraordinary example of Byzantine art which is now known as the Shellal Mosaic. Created in AD 561 – 562 under the reign of the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian, the Mosaic is now held in the art collection of the Australian War Memorial (ART40979) and is on permanent display in the Hall of Valour.

  

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A colleague here has recently alerted me to this online clip of the charge at Beersheba as recreated for the film Forty Thousand Horsemen. You can view a three minute clip here courtesy of the new site australianscreen. We will be screening the whole film at 2 pm on 8 December 2007 in our Telstra Theatre, introduced by Susanne Chauvel Carlsson, Toowoomba author and daughter of Australian pioneer film maker, Charles Chauvel.

The battle of Beersheba took place on 31 October 1917 as part of the wider British offensive collectively known as the third Battle of Gaza. The final phase of this all day battle was the famous mounted charge of the 4th Light Horse Brigade. Commencing at dusk, members of the brigade stormed through the Turkish defences and seized the strategic town of Beersheba. The capture of Beersheba enabled British Empire forces to break the Ottoman line near Gaza on 7 November and advance into Palestine.

The mounted troops spent the summer of 1917 after the second battle of Gaza in constant reconnaissance and in preparation for the offensive to come. The Turkish forces held the line from Gaza near the coast to Beersheba, about 46 kilometres to its south-east. The Allied forces held the line of the Wadi Ghuzzer from its mouth to El Gamly on the East. The positions were not continuous trench lines but rather a succession of strong posts. Both sides kept their strength in front of the city of Gaza.

The newly arrived British commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, General Sir Edmund Allenby used plans prepared by Lieutenant General Sir Phillip Chetwode. The plan was to attack Beersheba by using mounted troops from the east whilst the infantry attacked Beersheba from the south west. The preparation also involved persuading the Turkish forces that the offensive would again be against Gaza. Chetwode was in command the 20th Corps and the Desert Mounted Corps was under Lieutenant General Sir Harry Chauvel. read on

I normally reside in the Research Centre, working with Mal and Robyn, but for the past five months I have been working in the Memorial’s Military Heraldry and Technology section (MHT). MHT’s collection includes uniforms, medals, souvenirs, trench art, weaponry, vehicles and other interesting items. Some items from the MHT collection have been selected for display in Lawrence exhibition. Of the items selected, my favourites are the beadwork items made by Ottoman Prisoners of War in British POW camps.

Ottoman prisoners made many items whilst in captivity. It kept them occupied and was an avenue for them to earn money to supplement their rations and purchase items they required. Some prisoners even sent them home as gifts for family members or used them to barter with other prisoners. read on