2,000 miles away from the trench stalemate in France,
another war was being fought in the desert wastes of the Middle East.
An old-fashioned war of small armies and large spaces,
where manoeuvre counted and success depended not on millions of men,
not on the products of industry, but on the leadership of generals.
Where cavalry wasn't an out-of-date spectator of vast killing matches,
but a vital instrument of fast offensives.
Where rivers were lifelines,
like in the campaigns of Alexander The Great and Napoleon Bonaparte.
This region bridged Europe and the East,
the East and Africa.
In the rich soil of its river valleys - the Nile,
the Tigris, the Euphrates - human civilisation had been born.
Down the centuries,
tide after tide of conquests had flowed over the Middle East -
the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians,
the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs and the Turks.
Under Turkish rule, life stagnated.
Poverty and disease afflicted the people.
The 19th century brought the Arabs ancient memories of nationhood.
Men prophesied a free and united Arabia rid of alien Turkish rule.
In 1883, a French traveller noted -
"Everywhere, I came upon the same abiding and universal sentiment -
"hatred of the Turks.
"The notion of concerted action to throw off the detested yoke
"is shaping itself. An Arab movement is looming in the distance,
"and a race hitherto downtrodden
"will claim its due place in the destinies of Islam."
Towards the end of the 19th century,
the Jews were also reviving memories of nationhood.
They had scattered after Emperor Titus captured Jerusalem in AD 70.
Now there was a movement to bring the Jewish race home again,
and build in Palestine a new, Jewish state.
The Jews began to return.
The races of the Middle East were stirring
against the bonds of the senile Turkish empire.
But the Turks still ruled over the crossroads of the world,
collision point of the imperial ambitions of the European powers.
The Middle East was the key to the British hold on her Indian Empire.
To keep the Middle East from France,
Nelson had sunk Napoleon's fleet at the Battle Of The Nile.
To keep it safe from Russia, Britain had fought the Crimean War.
Since its opening in 1869, the Suez Canal had become the direct route,
linking Britain to India, Australia and New Zealand.
And since 1882,
the British had been the paramount power in Egypt.
The early years of the 20th century gave the British
added concern about the Middle East - oil.
In 1908, oil had been discovered in Persia, near the Persian Gulf.
With aircraft and motor transport, oil was becoming vital for Britain.
The Navy, too, was changing over from coal to oil.
Unlike coal, which lay safe under British fields, this new fuel
was in lands that might be menaced by hostile powers.
From London and from Delhi,
the British continued to keep watch on the Middle East.
MACHINERY CREAKS
The eyes of the German empire
were also fixed on the head of the Persian Gulf.
Through the Balkans and Turkey, and across the sands of Mesopotamia,
there lay Germany's road to the East.
A road for her busy salesmen and industrialists.
The Berlin to Baghdad railway.
By 1914, all but 400 miles had been completed.
Germany's interest had been proclaimed
by the Kaiser's visit to Turkey and the Holy Land in 1898.
"His Majesty, The Sultan and the Muslims who revere him as caliph
"may rest assured they will always have a friend in the German emperor."
When the Kaiser visited Turkey again 19 years later,
the war between the nations of Europe
had engulfed Turks, Arabs, Jews and Egyptians alike.
But he had redeemed his promise.
In 1914, Germany gave Turkey the warships
Goeben and Breslau to replace two Turkish ships
being built in Britain and seized for the Royal Navy.
Britain's act of seizure
and Germany's friendship pulled Turkey from neutrality.
In Constantinople, the crowds were in holiday mood.
DRUMS BEAT AND MEN CHEER
But the Kaiser saw them, and their fellow Muslims everywhere,
as a means of destroying Britain's Indian Empire,
that Empire which tormented him with envy.
"We must inflame all the Mohammedan world to frantic rebellion
"against this treacherous, conscienceless nation of shopkeepers.
"For if we are to bleed to death,
"England shall, at all events, lose India."
Turkey went to war with a German-trained, German-equipped, German-advised army
recruited from some of the toughest fighting stock in the world.
Which way would the Turks march?
Across the Sinai Desert to the Suez Canal?
Down the Tigris and Euphrates to the oil fields of Persia?
For the British, the loss of either would have been a catastrophe.
In London and Delhi, orders were given.
Troops sailed to parry the Turkish threat.
Indians, Australians and New Zealanders to Egypt,
British and Indians to the Persian Gulf.
The expedition from India landed at the head of the Gulf.
They captured Basra, the Turkish port
where the Tigris and Euphrates flowed to the sea.
The army discovered Mesopotamia,
where even the towns were crumbling heaps of mud-houses.
An Arab proverb said,
"When Allah had made hell, he found it not bad enough.
"So he made Mesopotamia
"and added flies."
Gradually, a primitive base was built up
amid the palm groves of Basra.
More troops arrived to share the flies and the dysentery.
The oil fields were safe.
There seemed nothing more for the army to do. But its new commander,
Lieutenant General Sir John Nixon, would not rest on the defensive.
"General Nixon had a well-earned reputation for dash.
"He himself thought he was selected for command on account of it."
Nixon dispatched a British and Indian force north-westwards
to find and defeat the Turks.
Through the spring floods of 1915,
between and along the great rivers,
the army laboured slowly forwards towards Baghdad.
In country where an army must provide for itself,
everything had to be improvised.
It was the rainy season and the rivers were in flood.
For transport, the British used small, native boats.
Gunboats protected the advance, as they had
for Kitchener's advance up the Nile in 1898.
But, unlike Kitchener,
the British were not building a railway line behind them.
By June, the army was at Amara,
200 miles from its base in Basra.
So far, the Turks had been beaten easily.
Should the British press on? Nixon asked the Government at home
for instructions.
The Government were dazzled by the easy successes.
They told Nixon to march on, if he thought the risks acceptable.
Nixon ordered the force commander, General Townsend, to advance.
Townsend, too, was a man with Napoleonic aspirations.
While his troops marched, rested or battled with the flies,
he decided to try a stroke of daring.
"I told Nixon, if I routed the Turks,
"I might follow them to Baghdad.
"I was told if I went into Baghdad,
"it would have the same importance
"as entering Constantinople. The news would go through all Asia."
Constantinople. Baghdad.
Cities of legend.
The lure of Baghdad blinded soldiers and politicians alike
to the squalid reality of 20th century Mesopotamia in midsummer,
to the weakness of the link with far-off Basra.
It was a link strained to breaking point
by the hoards of filthy and hungry refugees
fleeing from the clamour of a foreigners' war.
It was 1915. The summer of the Battles of Artois and Neuve Chapelle in France.
The sun glared down on the troops round Amara.
Water that teemed with germs
had to be purified before it could be drunk.
And in the heat, men and beasts craved for water.
The day temperature reached 125 degrees Fahrenheit.
Disease swept the army.
With contaminated water came dysentery and cholera.
With rats and lice came plague and typhus.
With insects came sandfly fever and malaria.
Above all, there was the crushing, annihilating heat.
I had malaria, and I was looking in this window at the back of me,
a room full of strong young men,
all dying slowly of heatstroke.
Further and further up the turgid rivers,
further and further into the heat and emptiness,
Townsend's men advanced.
Now Townsend himself began to feel qualms.
"The army commander does not realise
"the weakness and danger of his line of communications.
"We are now 380 miles from the sea."
With the capture of Kut al Imara,
just another Arab mud town on the river,
Townsend halted to rest and build up supplies.
In Basra, Nixon was still confident. He telegraphed to India -
"I consider I am strong enough to open the road to Baghdad."
November 1915.
Once more, Townsend's weary men
plodded north along the river.
Behind them ambled a transport column
that belonged not to the 20th century,
but to the campaigns of Alexander or Xerxes -
620 camels, 240 donkeys,
1,000 mules, 660 carts, a collection of bullocks and cows
and a strange regatta
of river-craft.
At last, Townsend came up with the main Turkish army.
Only 16 miles from Baghdad,
but nearly 500 from Basra.
The Turks lay entrenched in the plain,
where only the great ruined arch
of the ancient Palace of Ctesiphon broke the flat horizons.
But when we come into the 300 yards mark,
they opened a pretty heavy lot of shooting.
Quite a lot of our fellas got it. About half the regiment wiped out.
Well, we carried on. We captured that first line -
the Turks had all gone away from it. We captured the place we was after.
We couldn't go on no further.
It was a victory,
but it cost nearly half the British infantry.
The Turks had been reinforced.
Townsend was 500 miles from his base.
Outnumbered, cumbered with sick and wounded,
he faced disaster.
The army fell back.
The sick and wounded now began a journey
whose horror recalled the Crimea.
Jolted over the rough desert in the cushionless transport carts,
wounded men crawled across the desert on hands and knees
rather than endure the shaking,
or used dead bodies as cushions between them
and the bottom of the carts.
Worse was to come. Packed into riverboats,
the wounded lay without medical aid until they reached Basra.
"The patients were so huddled they couldn't defecate clear of the ship.
"The whole of the ship's side was covered with stalactites of faeces.
"We found a mass of men huddled up, some with blankets and some without.
"They were lying in a pool of dysentery,
"covered in dejecta from head to toe.
"The first man I examined had a fractured thigh,
"perforated in five or six places.
"He had been writhing about on deck."
On 3rd December 1915, Townsend found shelter in the town of Kut.
Soon he was cut off and besieged by the Turks.
"I have shut myself up in Kut.
"The state of extreme weariness and exhaustion
"of my men demands instant rest."
On Christmas Eve, there were quite a number of troops in front of us
and they started at dawn on an attack.
They blew different holes in our walls.
They got in. We counterattacked and drove them out again,
I suppose about half a dozen times. They broke in at different places.
In January 1916, fresh troops from Basra
fought desperate battles to try to break through and relieve Kut.
Instead of the summer's heat,
winter brought floods, torrential rains, bitter cold.
Once more, supplies and medical care
were improvised, inadequate.
The months dragged on.
The relief attacks failed, with heavy losses.
In Kut itself, hope grew dim.
The rations came down finally
to 3oz of bread and 12oz of horse meat.
The horse meat was difficult to eat
because some of these mules we ate
had been fed on mules themselves
and the meat was very lean and hard to digest.
After five months, on the 29th April 1916,
Kut surrendered
and General Townsend and 13,000 men, British and Indian,
went into Turkish captivity.
Capture did not end the sufferings.
Painful marches, thirst and hunger, brutal treatment lay ahead.
Two thirds of them were to die in captivity.
The fall of Kut released Turkish reserves.
In 1915, feeble Turkish attacks on the Suez Canal had been easily repulsed.
Now, in August 1916,
the Turks launched a major offensive in Egypt.
HORSES NEIGH AND MEN SHOUT
SHELLFIRE AND SHOUTING
MACHINE-GUNFIRE
Half their force was destroyed and the rest retreated into Palestine.
Egypt and the Suez Canal were secure.
The British commander in Egypt, Sir Archibald Murray,
wanted to crown his success with a counterstroke.
Gradually, the British in Egypt were drawn
into a major campaign for the conquest of the Holy Land.
Across the Sinai Desert they marched, a route taken by Bonaparte in 1799.
Like him, the British Government allowed themselves to be dazzled
by the names of fabulous cities,
holy places that had lured European soldiers since the Crusades -
Jerusalem and Damascus.
This, too, was a war for old-fashioned objectives.
But it was fought with modern means.
A wire-netting vehicle track was laid across the sand,
and a pipeline to bring up the water
without which the men and beasts could not live.
A railway was laid behind the Army,
linking it with its base in the Nile delta.
By March 1917, Murray was through the desert
and at the gates of Palestine.
Murray's mounted regiments, British, Australian, New Zealand and Indian,
were the key to his plan of attack on the Turks.
Our job was to follow through with the Light Horse,
get the other side of Gaza and come round towards the sea
so the Turks were enclosed,
with the sea on one side and troops all round.
EXPLOSION
In the confusion of battle, the British thought they had failed,
whereas the Turks were near defeat.
There was a withdrawal and we went back a short way for the night,
much to our disappointment, because the objectives had been reached.
But the dismay and bewilderment was all the greater the next morning,
when we had to do it all over again.
The second battle of Gaza was a British repulse.
As Kut had ended Nixon's command, Gaza ended Murray's.
The Turks still barred the road to Jerusalem and Damascus.
CAMEL GRUMBLES
MEN SHOUT ORDERS
The British and Australian troops settled down for a long wait
in the empty, scorching wastes of the Sinai.
Our biggest problem was monotony.
You'd see the sun get up, a big, red ball in the morning
and go down a big, red ball at night,
and that was your only sense of time.
And nothing but sand dunes as far as the eye could see.
You had the heat in the day, lying in the sand,
the glare of the sun and the glare of the desert.
Your rifle barrels would get so hot, you had to hold them by the wood.
In Mesopotamia, there was now a new commander -
Sir Stanley Maude.
He was an organiser - not a gambler.
The base at Basra was reorganised, re-equipped.
So were the Army's transport services and communications.
There was abundant modern equipment of every kind. By the end of 1916,
Maude commanded an army four times larger than the Turkish force in front of him.
Maude was ready. When the British advanced this time,
there was no gamble, no drama, no adventure.
Maude's personality stamped the expedition
with cool professionalism.
Yet the objective remained the same - Baghdad.
Carefully, irresistibly, Maude swept the Turks
northward out of Kut, on up the River Tigris.
On 11 March, the British at last
entered the city of the caliphs.
"Nothing could have been more casual and easy
"than our entry into Baghdad.
"Four of us - the colonel and the adjutant of the King's Own,
"a gunner officer and myself would be in first.
"The weariness of the long pursuit was forgotten.
"Here they were in Baghdad - the goal of their desires."
At the gates of Palestine,
the forces south of Gaza also had a new commander -
General Allenby - sometimes known as the Bull.
Allenby's leadership transformed
the bored troops in the Sinai desert into an army eager to attack.
Preparations for a great offensive gathered speed.
Allenby wrote home -
"I shall not attempt anything big until I have what was promised me.
"I've made a lot of changes since I came here and have now a good staff
"and some capable commanders.
My army is in good spirits and is confident of success."
The objective remained the Holy Land and Syria,
Damascus and Jerusalem.
In September 1917,
Allenby was ready.
It was the year of the Russian Revolution and of Passchendaele.
Britain needed a prestige victory.
Lloyd George told Allenby he was expected to give the British nation
Jerusalem as a Christmas present.
Cavalry was the instrument of victory.
Allenby tricked the Turks into thinking
he was going to attack Gaza again,
while his horsemen launched a surprise attack on their flank at Beersheba.
The cavalry charge by the Australian Light Horse
was made with fixed bayonets on rifles in three lines of horsemen.
Well, they charged through.
As the first line jumped over the first lot of trenches,
the Turks didn't put up a fight.
That was the finish.
Out-fought, outmanoeuvred, the Turks fell back
with Allenby in relentless pursuit.
In ten days, the British advanced 50 miles.
Arab fishing boats carried essential supplies to beaches
close behind the advancing Army.
While the Arabs hauled their craft ashore, Allenby's pursuit swept on.
The Turks were split in two, one group amid the orange groves
of the Plain of Sharon and the other in the hills of Judaea.
Allenby swung his main weight east, towards Jerusalem,
racing to beat the onset of the winter rains.
Then we began to approach the Judaean hills.
Here we met deluges of rain.
And as we went up those hills, it became colder and colder.
We had our jackets, but we were wet through from morning till night.
With it came troubles with the camels.
The camel is no mountaineer
and the Judaean hills are not high but consist of ridge after ridge after ridge.
You know you have a destination which will take some hours to reach.
You hope each ridge will be the last, but there's always one more ridge.
On 11 December 1917, the Allies took Jerusalem.
Allenby entered the conquered city humbly, on foot,
in contrast to the Kaiser who, in 1898, had ridden on horseback
through a gap specially made in the ancient walls.
Jerusalem was the first famous city
to fall to the Allies during four years of war.
For the first time, an Allied army received the keys of such a city
and posted proclamations of military government
on the walls of a captured capital -
a spiritual capital, the holiest city of three religions
- Christian, Jewish and Mohammedan.
The British nation had received its Christmas present.
After going through Jerusalem, we passed the Garden of Gethsemane
and went up the Mount of Olives, where we camped for quite a few days.
From the Mount of Olives, one gets a wonderful view of Jerusalem town.
We were all very impressed with that
and couldn't help thinking of our Bible stories we'd read in the past.
The Turkish empire, so long senile and decadent,
was crumbling into collapse.
Her Arab lands had already been the subject
of secret bargaining between France and Britain.
But other parties were involved now.
Britain had encouraged Arab hatred of the Turk, sending Sherif Hussein of Mecca
and his son, Faisal, money, weapons and explosives.
She had sent the Arabs a leader - Colonel TE Lawrence.
"I was a stranger to these Arabs,
unable to think their thoughts or subscribe to their beliefs,
"but charged to lead them forward and develop any movement of theirs
"profitable to England in her war."
British help, together with hatred of the Turk,
ostered the Arab revolt. The Arab irregulars
moved swiftly and secretly through the desert east of Jordan on camels,
blowing up Turkish railway lines, attacking isolated posts
and even capturing the holy city of Mecca.
12,000 Turkish troops were tied down by the Arab irregulars,
a valuable diversion of strength
away from the decisive battles in Palestine.
The Arabs believed that, as a reward for their help,
Great Britain would only conclude peace
on terms that gave freedom to the Arab peoples.
The Jewish hope of founding a new state of Israel in Palestine
grew brighter in the shadow of Turkey's defeats.
The Allies needed the help and support of Jews all over the world.
They bought that help, as they had that of the Arabs, with promises.
"His Majesty's Government view with favour
"the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people
"and will facilitate the achievement of this object,
"it being understood that nothing shall be done
"to prejudice the civil or religious rights of non-Jews in Palestine."
The war between the Europeans
was bringing mighty changes to the Middle East.
New hopes,
new and massive human forces had been set rolling
among peoples long sunk in apathy.
Clashing ambitions and promises carried the threat of new conflicts
at a time when the conflicts of the old order were still being resolved.
While Allenby prepared for the 1918 offensive,
a new German commander had arrived in Palestine -
Liman von Sanders. Before the war, he had trained the Turkish armies.
He had led the successful defence of Gallipoli.
But now, his Turkish troops were slinking away to their homes.
Only his German contingent could be relied on.
The Turkish empire was near to death. But, in the collapse of imperial Russia,
Turkish leaders saw an opportunity
to carve out a new empire in the Caucasus and Persia.
While the Turkish troops marched and fought
in the Caucasus in pursuit of this fantasy,
von Sanders faced Allenby, outnumbered by two to one.
WAGON WHEELS RUMBLE
EXPLOSION
Early in the morning of 19 September 1918,
Allenby struck under cover of a hurricane barrage.
His troops tore a gap in the Turkish positions on the coast,
wheeled right and pushed the Turks into the hills.
Allenby's cavalry swept forward across the Turkish communications.
Co-operation between cavalry and aircraft,
the oldest and the newest striking forces,
brought Allenby a brilliant victory.
Ceaseless air attacks isolated von Sanders from his troops
and blocked the crossings of the River Jordan.
The Turkish army strove to escape.
Only the German soldiers remained steady in the welter of confusion and disaster.
The cavalry rode 70 miles in 24 hours
to cut off the Turkish retreat to the north.
In three days, Allenby destroyed two Turkish armies.
Beyond the Jordan, in the barren hills, a third Turkish army was cut to pieces
by Arabs avenging the cruelties
of centuries of Turkish rule.
On 2 October 1918, another of the legendary cities of the Middle East
fell into British hands - Damascus.
Allenby was the hero of the Arabs.
But the moment of Arab liberation was poisoned
by conflict between the different Allied promises.
The problems of victory remained for others to solve.
Victory had not been cheap. The Middle East campaigns had drawn in
over two million soldiers of the British Empire.
They had cost over 160,000 casualties.
Painful marches and stern battles
had barely affected the issue of the world struggle.
But the Turkish empire had been destroyed.
To Allies and Arabs alike,
for the moment, this was enough.