by Stephen O'Brien
Grandpa Gordon White was seventy when I was born in 1962. As I was growing up mother repeatedly told me that he’d been a soldier on horseback and that he’d entered Damascus before Lawrence of Arabia. I had no idea who Lawrence of Arabia was until the movie came on television in the mid-1970s. My mother saw little difference between movies and documentaries and she was most miffed at the movie version of the entering of Damascus. My grandfather himself hated war movies and I learned while still in primary school never to ask old soldiers about war. However, as he entered his nineties and beyond he began to talk more, just in little snippets at smaller family gatherings
In my twenties, I bought a copy of Gullet and photocopied, on enlargement, passages about such events as the Es Salt Raid that overlapped some of his stories. Those he liked to read because, often for the first time, he got a view of the overall picture. Grandpa’s stories were just vignettes of personal experience and his explanation of the background was frequently based on soldier-talk from those years. In relating these stories, I do so more or less in Gordon’s own terms. The details regarding circumstances are not necessarily perfect, for folk such as Gordon were only cognisant of what was directly before them at the time. Also, the stories only came to me in fragmentary anecdotes and I may have made mistakes of my own in splicing them together.
Grandpa never talked much about the war until well after his ninetieth birthday. One of the few times he said anything at all was in 1962 when the movie blockbuster Lawrence of Arabia was the must-see film of the year. Grandpa was most put out by the scene where Lawrence and Prince Faisal rode in triumph through the streets of Damascus, having supposedly liberated the city.
Grandpa hadn’t given too many details, but he was staunch about one thing. Lawrence wasn’t the first allied soldier into the city. It had been a small group of the Tenth Light Horse, himself included. That much my mother was able to tell me. That and one other thing. Grandpa and his mates had robbed a train on the way.
It was over twenty years before Grandpa told me some of the finer details. By the time he was into the nineties he had started to talk more about the times when he was Trooper Gordon White, Tenth Light Horse. He told of the day-after-day drudgery of constant riding.
“We all had lice”, he explained. “Anybody who said they never had lice wasn’t there. You had two shirts. You rode along wearing one while you had the other draped over the shoulders of your horse, with a long crease folded from side to side. The lice would crawl away from the sun by sheltering under the fold. When you had a rest you dismounted, got your shirt and hammered the blazes out of the creased bit.”
At some rest stops, they were simply too exhausted to kill lice. He described one ride where men and horses were covered in a layer of fine pale dust that made them almost unrecognisable as individuals. Every mans’ face was a mask of dust with moist reddish slits marking their eyes and mouths. Given the chance to dismount and rest they did so silently. Too tired to converse or stretch each man just sat in the heat with his own thoughts. Then one weary voice piped up with the comment, “Cow of a place that Australia, isn’t it?”
And everybody laughed.
In the light of such experiences, it was no surprise that the time when the men and their horses were able to swim in the Jordan was often quoted by Grandpa as one of his only two really nice experiences of the entire war. The other one was Damascus.
Following the aborted invasion of Turkey at Gallipoli, the emphasis of the war against the Ottoman Turks shifted to Damascus, the seat of German and Ottoman military power in the Arab Middle East. By the end of September 1918, the Allies were nearing the city and it was evident that Damascus would soon fall. A stream of refugees was fleeing the city along the road that ran along the Barada River.
On the evening of September 30, the Australians, having attained the heights above the river, engaged the Turkish and German forces as they fought to withdraw, [1] and disengage from the advancing Australians, resulting in much carnage (There is a good G.W. Lambert oil painting of this at the A.W.M. in Canberra).
The West Australians of the Tenth Light Horse were first down into the gorge the next morning and Gordon described being shocked by what he saw. Grandpa only talked to me about that particular scene the one time, for not only were there dead soldiers but dead civilians. “There were women there, dead women,” he’d said sullenly. In particular, he recalled an abandoned droshny harnessed to two dead horses and containing the well-dressed corpse of what was evidently a woman of some means.
However, they soon had soldiers to face in the form of a train containing hundreds of troops trying to run the gauntlet on the railway that followed the relatively gentle contours at the base of the gorge. The train was stopped, and some 500 prisoners taken. Then the Aussies became aware of all the money and luxury goods that the Germans and Turks were trying to keep out of the hands of Allied authorities.
For once Grandpa’s mob and the enemy had a common purpose, and quite a lot of stuff was kept from the hands of the Allied authorities that morning. Whiskey, cognac and cigars were sought after items. And so was the cash. Some of this was in soon to be worthless paper money, but much of it wasn’t, for this was a land where the people still preferred to use gold and silver coin. Mexican silver dollars, Maria Theresa thalers and big silver Ottoman coins called mejidis spilled everywhere. Gordon recalled sifting through these and picking out what he called “Turkish sovereigns”, sixty piastre gold pieces of about the same size and weight as an English sovereign. My mother had a brooch made out of one of them, with the calligraphic cartouche of the Ottoman sultan facing outwards, and she’d tell us that grandpa had pinched it from a train during the war. This was kind of strange to us kids, for Mum was a very proper person and the notion of her proudly sporting stolen property was not in keeping with her general character.
Somewhere in their ranks, there was a railways enthusiast and in true trainspotter style he ignored the prospect of filling his pockets with gold and silver and proceeded to remove the bronze identification plate from the locomotive. The plate made it all the way home and is now in the railways’ museum in East Perth.
Finding themselves so far forward and meeting no real resistance their officer led them onwards into Damascus itself. This was pure devilment and they had a pretty good idea that their commanders would have a pink fit if they knew what was up. But they were too far forward of the rest of their lines for anyone high up to register an objection. Nevertheless, there was a certain tremulous uncertainty about what would happen when they entered the city.
Fortunately for the Australians, most of the populations were elated Arabs eagerly awaiting liberation. Also, keenly awaiting them were the Ottoman authorities, anxious to hand over control of the city to somebody other than the potentially vengeful Arabs. Gordon described their spokesman as “a little chappie in a fez who spoke quite good English”. He was most concerned that the Australians not be alarmed by the sound of gunfire. “It is the Arab people. They are welcoming you and are only firing their weapons into the air. They are not trying to shoot you.” Then for a brief period, the Australians found themselves surrounded by a throng of jubilant Arabs who were starting to make them feel that maybe the whole campaign actually had a positive end.
That was Grandpa’s other “good bit”. Two short moments of joy in years of campaigning. Their fun ended abruptly when two British officers arrived and told them to get the hell out of it. Damascus was due to be entered by Prince Faisal accompanied by his Arab army and T.E. Lawrence, who took care to omit the Australians from his later writings about the event. David Lean’s 1962 film also left us out.
Grandpa was happier to tell the story of the time he was sent out as a forward scout. It would have been in Syria or Iraq 1917.
There had been a lengthy engagement the day before and grandpa and two other troopers were sent out with their horses ahead of the main force to check for the presence of a more significant Ottoman force. Out in the desert, well away from any Allied or enemy positions, they encountered three soldiers, two Turkish and one German, all lightly wounded and trying to make their way back to their own lines. Unable to take them prisoner, the Australians instead gave them a blanket and what food and water they could spare. What followed was a cautious and at first silent picnic in the desert.
It was the German who surprised them with the fact that he could speak English.
“They told us that you would not take prisoners”, he said.
“We’re not taking you prisoner. We can’t. We’re forward scouts and you’ll only slow us down.”
“No. You misunderstand. They told us that you would shoot us. Anyone you catch you would kill.”
Further notes were compared. The Australians had been told the same thing about the Turks and the two Turks, with the German as interpreter, were as eager as the Australians to set the record straight. The six soldiers spent some time comparing the propagandistic misinformation fed to them by their respective commanders before parting company to return to their own lines. The German and my grandfather had exchanged addresses, but they never did regain contact. That particular incident was just one of many that turned Gordon firmly against the institution of war.
Grandpa always used to say that war was “a terrible waste”, and that we never seem to learn. Recent news scenes seem to bear this out. The destruction, the deaths of the innocent, jubilant dancing Arabs celebrating the overthrow of a hated regime by a Western power. It’s all happened before. Even the post war miring of Western forces in the land of a disaffected liberated people has happened before. For a great many troops, the 1914-18 war did not end in 1918. Trooper Gordon White and thousands of others were retained as an occupying force doing ‘police work’ in Egypt and not demobilised until 1919, being needed to suppress an angry Arab population who had been led to believe they would have autonomy once the Turks were gone.
Editor’s note:
[1] According to the Official History (Gullett, 1922, pp. 754-55) it was the whole Turkish force attempting to escape from the city: “German machine gunners, operating from the tops of motor-lorries and trains, defied the challenge to surrender, and all along the gorge the unequal issue was joined. The result was sheer slaughter.”
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Postscripts
In 1941 Australian troops were again in Syria. This time they were fighting the French.
Grandpa, Gordon White, died in November 1997, sound in mind but frail in body. He was 106 years old.