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  Our last day together came and that is where we got to and no further. I knew nothing more I could say. I disembarked at Port Said thoroughly occupied having to safeguard twenty pieces of luggage to the train station en route to Cairo. Jilloch kissed me farewell and stayed on board the ship and that was that. I was so damnably lonely and miserable, back on my own again.

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  Not only do I know no one, but I have arrived too late and missed all the action. The tide of war here has turned. The Turks and Germans are on the run it seems. Jerusalem has been captured by General Allenby after hundreds of years of Ottoman rule.

  The Australian Light Horse are in reserve somewhere remote, no one knows quite where. After ten days of waiting at railheads and haphazard train journeys and being jammed in trucks surrounded by my boxes, I wake up on Christmas Eve on the floor of a goods train in a railway siding in the desert. Even with the train now stationary the rumbling in my head continues, and I realise there are lightning flashes and dark ominous clouds and a violent wind thick with desert sand that gets through all my clothing. I negotiate with railway wallahs for my cameras and equipment to be carried a half-mile to a small encampment. It starts to rain and there is literally no inn and certainly no rooms to be had, and I find myself sharing a tent with three strangers. I am wakened in the middle of the night by cold wet canvas across my face. The pegs have lifted from sodden ground and the tent has collapsed. The heavens then burst well and truly and soon there is two feet of water running across the clay floodplain where we are camped. I salvage my gear and manage to reset the tent on top of large trestle tables, where my companions and I actually manage to get some sleep despite having to clench and hold down the tent walls in the storm gusts.

  My mind goes back to being flooded in the Snuggery on Elephant Island. I do not know what a normal Christmas is! When will I have a Christmas Day at home? I wonder.

  It is almost New Year’s when Henry Gullett, newly appointed Head of War Records, Middle East Section, tracks me down and finds me a billet in Khirbet Deiran, a small Jewish settlement where the Light Horse are based. Gullett is a younger, better-fed version of Bean, without the red hair and sharp proboscis. He is also a journalist by trade, but unlike Bean he actually served in the army before taking up his current position. After helping me stack my luggage in a fine house in the village, Gullett makes a pot of tea and we sit outside on a low whitewashed stone wall in the shade of Australian eucalypt trees, introduced here because of their ability to withstand arid climes.

  ‘I’m afraid, Hurley, I should have got you here several weeks earlier, before Jerusalem fell. Nothing can happen now this rain has started. Can you believe we missed the chance to film a cavalry charge?’

  ‘Beersheba?’

  ‘Two whole regiments of Light Horse ordered to charge Turkish trenches, their rifles slung across their backs and just bayonets in hand.’

  ‘I can’t see how they weren’t massacred. Coming from Flanders, you would need to see it to believe it. Would have been impossible to film unless I had been in the Turks’ frontline. And the Turks, I hear, are good fighters.’

  ‘They are tough bastards and they’re used to the desert. Got their tails up after Gallipoli. They are a very superior kind of nigger. We’ve been fighting them now for two years, only this time they are the invader. Some of our lads think they are on an old fashioned crusade, throwing heathens out of the Holy Land.’

  I can only shake my head. ‘By God, no one who had been to Ypres would say that. But it’s a different war here. Perhaps without constant shellfire I can actually get decent photographs of the conflict.’

  ‘You’ll get your chance. The Suez and Egypt are secure and the Turk has been cleared out of the Sinai, so now we’re on the offensive. With the capture of Jerusalem, the way I see it, the fighting’s just moved from the Old Testament to the New Testament.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s lost on me.’

  ‘I mean there’ll be more action in Palestine once this rain stops.’

  The following day I travel in a battered Box Ford to our frontline positions in the Judean Hills. The ground changes from sand and clay to weathered limestone, and the ancient hills are terraced and shaded by rows of olive trees and occasional fig trees. Most spectacularly, the rains have created an abundance of wildflowers; red anemones, blue marguerites, tiny white and yellow narcissi, orange ranunculi and bright yellow cyclamea scattered everywhere in a riot of colour. I peer at a nearby ridge, but see none of the enemy. Each outpost I visit is only lightly guarded. Occasionally there is the clatter of a machine gun and the ping from a sniper’s rifle, but that is all. The Third Brigade Light Horse are here and having a quiet time of it. Even more laconic than their compatriots in Flanders, they do not follow the fashion of turning up on one side their broad-brimmed digger’s hats, for they are horsemen and have little need of marching with rifles shouldered. But to a man they wear an emu feather in their hatband, no matter how battered and dusty their hat. They save energy by saluting only the officers in their own units. Their commanding officer is quite pleased to have them form up on horseback and parade for my cine camera.

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  A week later I returned to Khirbet Deiran and met Gullett for breakfast in the officer’s mess of the Desert Corps, to which I am attached. With abundant fresh produce, the meals served are an embarrassment of riches compared to the shortages in France and England. But Imperial Yeomanry also based in Deiran frequent the same mess, and I find they are quite stuffy. Gullett seems quite chuffed I have started filming each of the Light Horse brigades and have met the Australian commander, General Chauvel. His eyebrows raise when I tell him, ‘Chauvel has promised me thirty men and horses to film entering the streets of the Holy City.’

  ‘Really? Well, that’s splendid; we must have film of Jerusalem under a British flag. But of course, Hurley, the Light Horse were not at Jerusalem when the Turks withdrew. It was General Allenby who marched in.’

  ‘I see. But the Light Horse fought near enough, at Gaza and Beersheba. And, after all, pictures of Jerusalem without Australian soldiers in the frame would be next to useless for Captain Bean.’

  ‘I suppose so. Captain Bean is very enthusiastic about this photographic exhibition in London. Doesn’t want to be criticised for ignoring the Light Horse. So you’ve got your work cut out for you and a lot of ground to cover.’

  Before I could reply I was interrupted by a hand on my shoulder and found myself looking up at the chin of a smooth-faced English officer.

  ‘Excuse me, Captain Hurley. You are likely unaware of the dress code in the mess, but you can’t wear a beanie here. I’m afraid it won’t do. You can wear your officer’s cap.’

  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ I blurted and pulled off my old woollen hat feeling quite mortified.

  ‘We’re just on our way,’ Gullett said as we both shoved handfuls of fruit into our pockets and retreated outside. ‘And I hear,’ he continued as we emerged into the bright morning light, ‘you are to restage the Beersheba cavalry charge?’

  The road to Jerusalem wound up to the east through narrow limestone gorges. At the top of the ridge there were fine views to the north-west some twenty-five miles to Jaffa, on the coast. We negotiated treacherous hairpin bends and soon came in sight of the Holy City, perched on a hilltop just over a mile away. We entered through the ugly surrounding sprawl of the densely populated modern city. With the sun about to set, I captured photographs of my small Light Horse contingent as they rode their mounts down to an ancient causeway outside the main walls of the old city. Fortunately, the Turk chose to abandon the city intact, so I was able to inspect the holiest of its sacred sites. My lack of religious education and biblical knowledge had never been redressed, and I was impressed but mystified at the overt reverence at the Wailing Wall.

  Gaza was not so lucky. Between March and October 1917 there were three pitched battles to capture this city from the Turk. British artillery destroyed the ancient town. It finally
fell after the capture of Beersheba, but not before several thousand lives were lost. I went there with two squadrons of Light Horse to take photographs. The route was picturesque, passing orchards and olive trees and fields of barley. The white dirt road was lined by green cactus hedges, but as we drew closer to Gaza they had all been slashed and used to corduroy the road for army vehicles. The troopers and their commanders were compliant to my every request, no doubt glad to have an easy day. At the ruins of Gaza’s twelfth-century Grand Mosque I chose just one trooper to add human dimension by sitting on crumbled masonry inside the collapsed nave. I set up amid the rubble while he enjoyed the sunlight pouring in through the vaulted and now-open ceiling.

  Meeting later with Gullett he explained, ‘The Turks had promised neither Gaza nor Jerusalem would be used for military purposes. But of course they were never going to give up Gaza without a fight. Allenby said the mosque was being used to store munitions although I could see no sign of that.’

  ‘Gaza,’ I said, ‘is the Ypres of Palestine. There is not a building intact.’

  Some days later I set up the cine camera in a trench to film a re-enactment of the charge on Beersheba. At the appointed time, two regiments of the Fourth Brigade Light Horse, eight hundred horses and men, formed up in three lines some seven hundred yards across, with three hundred yards between each line. From one mile away I watched a long low cloud of dust rise up. Then a line of small dark centaur figures emerged, but at first appeared not to be moving as the cloud rose higher behind them. For a few moments the figures were suspended in midair, and only then did the drumbeat of thousands of hooves reach me like a low purring sound. There was a glint of steel as bayonets were raised and the purring turned to low thunder as horses and riders came belting across the plain. The ground trembled with pounding hooves as the Light Horse drew closer. At five hundred yards, grains of sand started to dance along the front edge of the trench. At three hundred yards, my hand winding the film through began to vibrate on the crank handle. At two hundred yards, my whole weight was leaning on the cine camera tripod to brace against the onslaught. And then the first wave of attackers were upon me and the furious dark glistening horses rose as one and cleared the trench, leaving me in a blinding, choking cloud of dust.

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  In Flanders fields the poppies grow

  Between the crosses, row on row . . .

  These lines are the best known of any poem from this terrible war. Yet I did not pause to photograph the flowers in Belgium at the end of the European summer. Here in Palestine time moves slower. Torrential deluges have flooded the Holy Land, ending the fighting and creating new life. I see so many red anemones that I am reminded of the graves in Ypres and the Somme. Colour images on the battlefield in Flanders were next to impossible, as even with the new Paget process the required exposure was several times longer than for black-and-white film. However, the light in Palestine in winter is the equivalent of an English summer, and without constant shelling there is time to compose. These hardy daisies, though, are so small that in a patch of several square yards it is difficult to find a central focus.

  George, one of my Light Horse trooper assistants, offers to display a bouquet of anemones for the camera. He crouches on the desert sand, his face deeply etched by shadows from the bright midday sun. The emu feather in his slouch hat quivers slightly in the breeze while he holds his prayerful pose. Only later, when I am exulting in the colours achieved on the negative, do I see that George is an elderly man, more than twice the age of the other troopers. It caused me to think of my own father—what would he think of this war. Surely George must have lied about his age to enlist. When I later ask him about this, his answer amuses me greatly. ‘The enlistment officer rejected me,’ he explains, ‘even though I was an experienced veteran of the Boer War, so I went back again with my son, who had to put his age up three years and I put mine down thirteen. The enlistment officer looked at us both and said, “I see. Well you’d both better go.”’

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  Still there was no action and I was being driven mad by requests to do portraits of this and that smug red tab in their polished riding boots and on their favourite horse. I arranged my escape to the aerodrome at El Mejdel, where the newly established No. 1 Squadron, Australian Flying Corps, was based. I had no sooner set up my cine and stills cameras when one of the squadron’s new Bristol fighter aeroplanes came into view with smoke billowing from the fuselage. I seized the opportunity and had the cine camera running as the biplane came in to land. As soon as it came to a stop, flames could be seen licking up around the engine cowling and the pilot leaped from the cockpit. Within seconds there was an explosion and the aircraft was engulfed in flames. The pilot was safe and I had some terrific action shots. I had to avoid crowing about my luck.

  Then it was finally my turn for a long-awaited first flight. Captain Ross Smith was entrusted to find me something to photograph from the air and bring me safely back to earth. Smith had enlisted in the Third Light Horse but, dismayed by the dismal conditions at Gallipoli, he then volunteered for the AFC.

  The Bristol had a very tight rear cockpit for an observer or gunner, which is where I squeezed in behind Smith. The roar of the engine was deafening and it was immediately apparent that vibration would be the problem for any airborne stills photography. The Bristol roared and bounced along the aerodrome until it was weightless. Smith pulled back on the stick and lifted us airborne. The hangars and vehicles left behind became toy models. I watched the altitude gauge over Smith’s shoulder: one thousand, two thousand, three thousand feet . . . Below me there was a transformation of perspective the like of which I had never before experienced. The fertile areas cultivated after the rains became a very neat manmade patchwork. Streams, irrigation ditches and wadis became arteries and veins. Roads like white ribbons looped across a piecrust landscape on which there was occasional ant-like traffic. Extraordinarily, even though we were travelling at ninety miles per hour, the Judean Hills appeared stationary.

  At seventeen thousand feet it was freezing, even in a full-length leather coat. Smith then dived down through the clouds until we were skimming above the stagnant surface of the Dead Sea, which is nestled so low in the Jordan Valley we were actually flying below sea level. Over Jericho on the way home black cloud puffs appeared around us, followed by sharp thunderclaps. The Turks’ Archie guns followed us as we turned towards Jerusalem and then home. Back on solid earth I was ecstatic and immediately began planning with Smith to accompany the squadron on a bombing raid.

  After almost two months in Palestine, Gullett at last gave me the nod that a stunt was on. I rushed back to Deiran. Gullett knew I was getting restless. He turned up at my quarters on dusk with bags of oranges and almonds which we devoured sitting outside with cups of tea.

  ‘The Light Horse are on the move,’ he said. ‘There’s to be an attack on Jericho. Chauvel wants to push the Turks back across the Jordan River.’

  ‘Can I go with the Light Horse?’

  ‘That may not be so easy. The main infantry assault will be east along the Jerusalem–Jericho road, but the First Brigade Light Horse are to head across the mountains to the south. That could be pretty steep and rough-going, especially with your equipment.’

  Of course, he knew what my response would be.

  The First Brigade Light Horse were stationed in Bethlehem, where I joined them. It was not hard to understand the excitement of the troopers as their horses filed one after another out through narrow Bethlehem laneways onto the surrounding plains where, long ago, three wise men observed the Star of Bethlehem and shepherds tended their flocks.

  We rode the whole day past great limestone hills. We passed trucks of infantry and tractors hauling heavy artillery guns into forward positions. They cut a swathe through the anemones, narcissi and marguerites, crushing the wildflowers into the red clay soil.

  The further we rode, the more the country increased in its desolation. The desert looked as dry and fierce as the remote p
arts of Northern Australia, but far from being flat it presented an endless array of roughly hewn plateaus, hills and ridges interspersed with broad valleys and a thousand steeply carved gullies, now bone dry after the rains. The few mature trees stood as withered relics from more favourable times.

  We rode till well after nightfall, which tested me severely. My horse, I hoped, would not expose my inexperience as a rider. I led a packhorse in tow with my cameras and equipment. An hour before midnight we tethered the horses and were instructed to have a short kip. It was bitterly cold, my legs and backside were aching and sleep was elusive. We had been ordered to travel light so there were no tents or bivvies, just whatever blankets we carried.

  It was 3.30 a.m. when we saddled up to lead off through a series of gorges towards Nebi Musa, where an attack was to be made on the main Turk defensive line around Jericho. Nebi Musa, I learned, was reputedly the burial place of Moses. Thick cloud blocked out the moon so, in pitch-black darkness, I allowed my mount to pick her way nose to tail behind the horse in front along narrow wadi banks and steep cliff faces. Our column stretched for a mile along the mountain pass. On the ridge above, I glimpsed silhouettes of the leading riders, while below me in the darkness came the sparks of horseshoe on stone.

  Gunshots rang out well before dawn and were followed by the crump of cannon and mortar fire. At first light the brigade assembled behind low hills, with Nebi Musa directly ahead. The Turks held heavily fortified positions on top of two impregnable-looking hilltops. First Brigade was kept in reserve out of sight of the Turk artillery. A regiment of New Zealand Rifles dismounted under cover and threaded their way along winding gullies towards the Turk positions. The Turks sent down long strafing bursts of machine-gun fire and artillery shells. We stayed in reserve the whole day, by the end of which the New Zealand Rifles, joined by two British regiments, had started to climb the rocky precipice below the Turk strongholds, though the enemy remained in control of the heights.