 Good evening. Well, it's very exciting to be here tonight at the beginning of a year when we will be able to rejoice in several events in which Australia single-handedly won World War One and one of them happens to the Battle of Beersheba, which we will be hearing about tonight. As you know tonight's lecture is part of our Warstone series, is that correct? And it's called the Battle of Beersheba Myths and History 100 Years On and we could hardly have a more distinguished scholar on this topic than my colleague Dr. Zhong Wu, who is a senior lecturer here in the Strategic and Defense Studies Centre at the ANU where his teaching duties include lecturing at the Australian Defense Forces Command and Staff College. But Zhong, as many of you will know, is a very widely published author in Australian military history, author, co-author and editor of some ten books and I won't list them all this evening, but the most important, I think, for this evening's presentation, his history of light horse, the history of Australia's mounted arm. He's also recently published together with Peter Dennis, one of the volumes in the Centenary History of Australia in the Great War, the AIFM battle and is currently working or has just completed volume for the official history of Australian peacekeeping, humanitarian and post-Cold War operations called the Limits of Peacekeeping. But I know we're going to hear tonight about his many years of research on the light horse in the campaign in Palestine, in particular the Battle of Beersheba. Thank you very much, Joan, for that and thank you all for coming along to listen to me talk tonight. What I'm going to do is, I'm a little bit tied to the lectern because of the recordings. I do norm to, I prefer to pace around a little bit, but so having been stuck to the lectern, I'm going to start with a few quotes that perhaps might set the tone for what you've already heard about in the last day or so as we lead up to the Centenary tomorrow and probably here for the next couple of days as we wind down until such time as the Centenary of Beersheba becomes, as I say, fishwrapping. So, what did Jonathan King have to say about Beersheba? I think the Battle of Beersheba should be the cornerstone of our Australian identity. Replacing Gallipoli. Gallipoli was a British-led defeat, Beersheba was an Australian-led victory. Anthony Pratt of the Pratt Foundation and also Cardboard Mogul in the weekend Australian Beersheba in a lift-out magazine on the weekend, in which I had an article. The shock and awe of victory changed the course of Middle East history and paved the way for Israel's establishment some three decades later. Paul Daly, journalist and author in his book, Beersheba, A Journey Through Australia's Forgotten War of 2009, wrote, there is perhaps no more salient military metaphor than Beersheba when it comes to Australian doggedness, perseverance and courage in the face of adversity. It was also the turning point in the British campaign against the Turks. These ones are at least literate and legible, as opposed to the Canberra Times headline today, which we just said, Anzac Light Regiment cavalry charge at Beersheba poised for reenactment. Clearly sub-editors are no longer employed at the Canberra Times. So what we have there is a pretty good sampling, I think, of some of the stuff that we hear about Beersheba and whenever it comes up, it is the sort of things that we tend to hear. And as I said, I think there's going to be a lot of it in the next 24 to 48 hours. So with that sort of as the backdrop, I think it's fairly safe to say that Beersheba is pretty famous as far as battles go. Writing for the war time, the War Memorial magazine, an edition that came out just a few weeks ago, I posited partly as I admit as a hook for the article, but I did wonder whether actually Beersheba is the most second most famous battle in Australian military history. There'd be lots of contenders for that and anyone here who is a Second World War historian might take issue with that, perhaps LL Amain, perhaps as Kokoda, but Beersheba is very much alone in being the only Australian battle to have been recreated twice for Australian feature films. And I think it's this which has actually done a lot to make the battle of Beersheba as famous as it is. Because it is nicely reducible to a simple and exciting story, so you can invert that into a movie and that lodges in the public memory in a way that perhaps no other battle really can, with the exception of course in Australia of Gallipoli, which I think will always remain at the top of the pile if you like. So, and that fame has some consequences. In the first instance, it really reduces the Australian experience of the campaign in Palestine basically to the battle of Beersheba itself. And indeed when it comes to the battle, the real thing that most people are interested in is the charge. So the 15 to 20 minutes at the end of the day in which two regiments crossed all that ground to get into the southeast of town itself. It's a very reductionist issue, a very reductionist way of approaching the battle, but I think that's the way it is. And also Beersheba has plenty of myths. Some of them are old and some of them are more recent. I think you've probably all heard the claim that it's the last great cavalry charge in history. That's one that gets a lot of airtime, and we'll get some more in the next couple of days already has. The alternative, it's a turning point in the campaign, which Paul Daly highlights. There's a whole bunch of lower level myths about what actually happened in the battle itself. I'm going to go into those tonight because it's getting down into the weeds a little bit. Of course there's the so-called famous photograph which is purported to be a photograph of the charge. I'll come back to that a little bit later on. And one of the more newer ones, and one that's gaining a lot more traction I think, is that Beersheba is somehow linked to the creation of the State of Israel. Which I think has some interesting things to say about Australian politics and international relations with the Middle East. So tonight my purpose is to revisit the battle and in doing so I'm going to provide some context for the battle to give a better understanding of where it sits in the broader scheme. I'm going to examine the battle itself, mostly so as to think about what happened and to hopefully make it a little bit more than just the recounting of the charge. And to conclude I'm going to have a look at a few of those myths and I'll be up front. I'm going to do a little bit of myth-busting as part of that. So the first part of the context is just absolutely bearing in mind that this period is a global war. It is the Great War, the First World War. This is a war which claimed millions of lives. It is a global war between empires. And several of those empires will disappear at the end of the war. What happens in Palestine is to a large extent something of a sideshow in the context of the First World War. It is called a sideshow by many of the participants during the war, but that's really only the case for the main combatants. For some of the minor players, particularly the people who live in the Middle East, much bigger things were at stake. But from the British view and indeed from the French view is more important than we tend to give credence for these days. And from the Ottoman point of view, what is happening in Palestine is a sideshow. It's understandable for Britain because of what's going on on the western front and indeed it is certainly more understandable for the French, given what's going on on the western front. It is somewhat more perplexing for the Ottomans, given a lot of the fighting is taking place on Ottoman territory. But nevertheless during the war what happens in Palestine and also Mesopotamia seems to be a somewhat lower priority for them than what's going on in other parts of the war, particularly in the Caucasus. Now that's not to say this campaign is not important. I think it is important for several reasons. It has a profound effect on the history of the Middle East, though whether I draw any links to the creation of Israel I'm not quite so sure. And if you're interested in warfare I think there's a lot to be said for getting away from the western front, particularly in the latter part of the war. Of course in Australia we will focus on Gallipoli a lot at the beginning of the war and then once we hit 1916 it's all about the western front. And this is very much the case in a lot of Anglophone history and I dare say Francophone as well. But of course what happens on the western front is not the be all and end all of the war. As the map up there signifies and all those red circles indicate on the globe where a land campaign, some of them brief, some of them long was fought. So all the way from the Pacific including Australia taking rebel and New Zealanders taking Samoa, all the way up to the western front on the North Sea and lots of places in between, down in Africa, up in China as well. The green squares represent places where there were significant rebellions during the war at least against the British and the French and of course the top one is for Ireland and the bottom one is for one of the periodic rebellions that occurred in Algeria during the war. So the war is more than just the western front. So for that reason I think examining what goes on in Palestine is useful for understanding warfare in its broader sense in the early part of the 20th century. The other thing to bear in mind is that this is very much a clash of empires. To a certain extent it is what's going on in Palestine is simply about taking the war to your enemy, in this case the British and French empires taking it to the enemy, the Ottoman Empire. But in many ways this is a campaign which imperial ambitions are very much at the heart of what's going on. Now I'm not going to sit up here and bang on about the evils of British, French, Ottoman or anybody else's imperialism. Well evils there undoubtedly were but imperialism is simply part and parcel of the imperial or of the world order in the period. Any nations, self-respecting nation state with enough material resources and enough military power is on the imperial make in one way or another. And in fact I think it would be easier to write a list of countries that were not than it would be to write a list of countries in the earlier 20th century that were. Of course the big problem for everybody is that Germany has imperial ambitions but the problem is that those desires reflect ambitions in Europe. Elsewhere, Britain and France and places like Belgium are on the make expanding their empires in Africa, Middle East and anywhere else the opportunity presents itself. Even the supposedly anti-imperialist United States uses, partly uses the war as an excuse to occupy Haiti in the Dominican Republic in the midway part of the war. As I've mentioned, even the love of Australia seeks to set up its own little empire with an empire by taking New Guinea. So big war blends with sort of imperial ambition and opportunism along with a whole bunch of regional entities and local rivalries to give us a global war and Palestine reflects this very much. What's going on in the Middle East is absolutely a reflection of these imperial contests. If we look at the war in Europe and on the Western Front it's rather easy to put the Germans in some black hats, the French and the British in some white hats and then go off and worry about whatever the problem is because Germany seems to be upsetting the apple cart. But if you go to the Middle East everybody's hat is a shade of ground. There are no out and out good guys and there are no out and out bad guys in the Middle East either. And in that vein everybody with probably the exception of the United States is involved in the Middle East campaigns in one way or another. Germany, Britain, France, Italy, the Ottoman Empire, the Austrians, everybody is taking part in this campaign. It's also just worth bearing in mind that it's not just contests between the two opponents in the war, there are also issues between allies. No doubt the Ottomans and the Germans had their own issues and they certainly had plenty of them. But even if you just look at the French and the British, they are trying to manage an alliance relationship in the Middle East. Britain and France might be age-old enemies but they haven't actually gone to war for this stage about 100 years. They've come close once or twice but for the last 50 or so years and the lead up to the war in particular, the French and the British have done a very good job of dividing the world up between themselves and coming to a series of agreements about how to manage the world and how to become respectably the first and second largest imperial powers in the world. And in the context of 1917 and what's going on in Palestine, when it comes to the Sykes-Picot agreement of May 1916 and indeed the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, to a large part these are agreements that have been forged with an eye to maintaining and delineating the relationship between Britain and France. Okay, so having set out a little bit of context at the higher levels if you like, I'm going to drop down to the campaign level and set up what's going on at Bishiba in 1917. Very briefly, the lead up begins in 1916 with the opening of what we know collectively as the Sinai-Palestine campaign of 1916 to 1918. And this begins essentially as a British project to defend the Suez Canal, which of course is a great lifeline to the British Empire, but also the British holding of Egypt, which of course is a British protectorate even though technically it remains part of the Ottoman Empire. Initially this is to defend the canal close to the canal itself, around about there, but very quickly the British figure out this is not very viable, it's a difficult place to maintain defences, so they're going to push out into the eastern Sinai to develop a defensive position on much firmer ground out here around about El-Rish. The Ottomans of course have their own ambitions and they push a force across the Sinai in late July, early August, which leads to the battle of Romani here, right in the western Sinai. This is the high point of Ottoman expansion during the war. I'll come back to this a little bit later, but from this point onwards the Ottoman Empire is on the defensive in this theatre. Alright, this is followed by further action. The advance across the Sinai for the British is basically dictated by the rate at which they can build a railway and a water pipeline because you can't survive out there without the water. So as they're building it across, the British move across the mountain trips, in particular doing a lot of patrolling and minor actions, and eventually in December they've got as far as they can launch themselves at El-Rish, which is if you recall as their ultimate objective, they pounce on El-Rish to find the enemy who have disappeared, so they immediately move on to Magdaba which is just up the wadi, there's a big wadi there between El-Rish and Magdaba. They defeated Ottoman Garrison there in December and then in January they move on to take another Ottoman outpost here at Rafa on the frontier between Egypt and Palestine. Now right about here is where the imperial ambition from the British point of view anyway starts to become more apparent. Up until now it has been essentially conceived up as a defensive operation. But having secured the part of the eastern Sinai that they've been aiming at, now they start to creep into advancing into Palestine. It's actually quite difficult to decide the moment when any decision about this is taken. It's almost taken instinctively. Britain became an imperial power by thinking imperialy. The essence of empire is opportunism and Britain was going to take the opportunity. So without much to do the campaign shifts into an offensive one. Part of this is also a tactical issue about chasing ground. Having taken Rafa, they decide it's not that very easy to secure and perhaps pushing northwards to Gaza seems like a good idea it might be a better defensive position. This is a problem that comes out in the Middle East from time to time, similar sort of things happened in Mesopotamia as well which partly leads to the disaster at Kut in early 1916. So having made the decision to continue the advance into Palestine what happens is the first battle of Gaza in March 1917. I won't go into too much details but it's suffice to say it's essentially a British defeat. The British had actually pretty much won the battle but they didn't know it. And at the end of the day partly due to concerns with water anxieties that an Ottoman relief force is on the horizon the British opt to withdraw at the end of the day. Supposedly the Ottoman Garrison commander was so amused he literally fell around laughing he couldn't believe the British had walked away. So the British fluff first Gaza which leads to the second battle of Gaza just a few weeks later on the 19th of April. Now the intervening weeks the Ottomans were used with great industry. They basically evacuate the population of Gaza such as it is. They then tear Gaza apart to get out every little bit of construction material they can find. They managed to chase up some barbed wire. The Ottomans always a bit shelled of barbed wire but they managed to find some fairly large quantities. And they basically convert Gaza which had essentially been an undefended township into what was described at the time as a building fortress. They dig entrenchments, build and redoubt set up fields of barbed wire, do the fire planning and make it into a very difficult nut to crack. As part of that they also extend the defensive line out to the southeast out towards Beersheba. So the British have another go at Gaza and this is safe to say is a disaster. The British do not even come close to taking Gaza. The casualties are very high. Casualties for the day are around about six and a half thousand British troops which would make it the most costly battle of this campaign completely and even by Western front standards would be a pretty bad day at work. Australians are somewhat lucky in that a lot of them are actually involved in the flank securing the flank operations down here to the south although they recently created Australian Mounted Division is involved on some of the assaults here and they have a fairly hard day at work as well. So at this point the British have been well and truly checked in Southern Palestine and there's no immediate chance that they're going to be able to reverse it. The commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force called Archibald Murray he spun what's happened at Gaza. The British war office has figured out that he spun them a bit of a line and they haven't been very happy with him anyway so they take the opportunity to replace him and the chap they send out to replace him is General Edmund Allenby. Until very recently he's been commanding an army on the Western front. Like many British officers of the Second World War he's been fairly rapidly promoted up to army command. He starts the war as the commander of the cavalry division during the retreat from the Mons. Allenby takes this as actually a signal of personal failure. He's not the first choice. Jan Smuts is the first choice but he doesn't take the job. The British government is casting around who's going to send out to the Middle East. Allenby's name comes up and Douglas Haig and Allenby didn't, they weren't enemies but they didn't get on particularly well. They'd actually been to Staff College together and when Allenby's name comes up Haig makes no effort to keep him and signals that he's willing to let Allenby go. So Allenby's recalled to London and he's been the senior commander for the recent Battle of Arras, which like most Western front battles of the period goes well at the beginning and then bogs down so he thinks this is a sign of his failure. But you have to give Allenby his due. He goes out to the Middle East and he kind of gets at the impression most of he just relaxed and he'll do well in Palestine. By the end of the war he'll have be the victor of the campaign. He'll be a field marshal and it won't be that long before he'll be Viscount Allenby. So he's going to do quite well out of this. And he'll deserve those accolades too by the time it comes around. When he goes out there he's however greeted by the grim person who knew that his only child Michael has just been killed serving as the military subordinate on the Western front. Interestingly I read an article about Allenby in the interwar period just recently and the interwar period actually gets interested in pacifist causes. Wouldn't call him personally a pacifist but he certainly supports pacifist causes in the interwar period and this article suggests that it was due to the death of his son on the Western front in 1917. Alright so Allenby, the thing that really comes with Allenby is firstly a direction from the British government that they'd really like him to capture Jerusalem but more importantly is resources. Murray has had to fight this campaign on a shoestring and he has had very few resources either physical or in terms of troops and that reverses for Allenby. Now Allenby is never going to be absolutely swimming in the things that he wants but the war office is going to give him enough work with and that's going to make a significant alteration to the way of the campaign pans out. He will now have enough troops to constitute a reasonably balanced force, they'll send him some heavy artillery, they'll send him some of the new latest aircraft so that he will actually start to gain air superiority which up until now in this theater had been held by the Germans and Allenby is going to have a much easier time in that regard. Now underneath Allenby also is part of this and he casts the Egyptian expeditionary force. Up until now it's largely been really just an ad hoc colonial expeditionary force but he rebuilds it into this which is a modern combined all arms army. He's got two infantry corps and he's got enough cavalry to constitute a full cavalry corps which of course is led by Harry Chevelle, the first Australian to become the Lieutenant General and to command a corps beating Monash that by nearly a year. Chetwood commands 20 corps. Look, Chetwood is a very accomplished and capable competent officer in the interwar period. He'll become Field Marshal Baron Chetwood and Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army. Both of them I must admit I don't know that much about but he certainly does reasonably well in Palestine. Now he can draw on when Allenby arrives he's got to come up with some sort of plan about how they're going to get this campaign restarted and in doing that he can draw on an appreciation done by Chetwood around about mid-year not long before Allenby arrives in the Middle East. And this is known as the Chetwood Appreciation and it forms the basis of what's going to happen in the second half of the year. Now Chetwood had very much come to the conclusion that going against Gaza again wasn't very sensible the EEF's been beaten there twice. Going up there and maybe losing again would be a devastating blow to morale and everyone's going to look a little bit foolish if they get beaten at Gaza again. So he in his appreciation sets out a plan for attacking the line further to the southeast and attempting to break through the line and then get in behind Gaza. Now when Allenby arrives he reads the appreciation. He'll modify the scheme a little bit but in essence he adopts what Chetwood is talking about. So what's going to become the third battle of Gaza or the third battle of Gaza slash Bershiba which the battle of Bershiba is part of. The idea is that rather than going headlong and bashing your head against Gaza again the idea is going to be to break in up the far southern flank of the Ottoman position having broken through there, drive up to the north and the west hopefully getting behind Gaza and the idea is to trap the large Ottoman garrison at Gaza there, encircle it, force it to surrender or pound it into non-existence. So that's the basic scheme of what Bershiba is about. Bershiba becomes the preliminary operation because that's the chosen target to break through and why it's chosen target is the water wells because in order to drive up this way they need access to water. Water dominates all logistical concerns in the Middle East and Bershiba is a place where there is thought to be substantial water supply and indeed Bershiba is supposedly famous for all the wells that are there. The plans requires a little bit of engineering work because it requires a lot of operation out here and then driving in on Bershiba they need to find water sources out here but they manage to find some water sources, send some field engineers down there and start developing those and once that has been developed they are now have the logistic underpinnings to be able to make the attack on Bershiba itself. So on around about the 27th of October British artillery opens up in front of Gaza essentially as a deceptive measure and the troops that are earmarked to go to Bershiba make march off into the desert as it were to make the attack on the town and they're moving into position on the 29th the 30th and including on the night of the 30th through to the 31st when the battle will actually be fought. So on the morning of the 31st of October the battle commences with an infantry attack to the west. It's all about the light horse, it's all about the charge by the 4th and 12th, well this is a two core operation. The desert mounted core is going to constitute the mounted troops but also involved is Chetwood's 20 core and 20 core has starts the day with an attack on the fixed defences to the south west of town. The attack begins around about dawn when the artillery opens up on an Ottoman outpost line. Ottoman counter-battery fire is not long in coming most of it actually doesn't hit the British artillery what it does tend to hit is the British infantry who unfortunately are sitting there and they're forming up places waiting for somebody to blow the whistle. So British infantry start taking casualties pretty much first thing in the morning. The infantry move off around about 8.30 in the morning capture the outpost line then things then pause for a little bit while the artillery is leapfrogged forward and another artillery barrage commences around about 10.30, 11 o'clock in the morning that goes on for a couple of hours. They have to bores the barrage every so often because it kicks up so much dust they can't actually see what they're shooting at so they have to stop every now and then wait for the dust to settle a little bit, see what the effect of the fire has been and then re-engage. Of course their main objectives are apart from destroying Ottoman positions is to cut the barbed wire because there is barbed wire out in this part of the position. Once that fire program is finished the infantry go forward again and there's some pretty stiff fighting. The casualties, British infantry casualties here for the day are about 1200 troops and one British soldier from the Royal Welsh Feudaliers will win a Victoria Cross. So this is not a cakewalk by any means and the casualty figure is one that's perennially forgotten in Australia often in our headlong rush to note how light the casualties were in the charge on Bathsheba in the 4th Brigade or the Lighthouse Brigade. Now the infantry have actually taken their objectives by pretty much early in the afternoon and at that point they could probably have continued onwards but their orders were actually to stop because in the greater scheme of the Third Battle of Gaza Allenby is anticipating heavy fighting north of Bathsheba and he wants his infantry fresh for that fighting. So the infantry take their objectives and basically sit tight even though they probably could have continued on with the advance into Bathsheba itself because the door to them is essentially open. Okay so for the mounted troops and to the battle to the east of Bathsheba as the British infantry obviously are making the attack on the west during the night the preceding night the Desert Mounted Corps not complete some of the Yeomanry are attached to cover gaps and things like that make a big long approach march right down around the south and come in on the eastern side of Bathsheba. Their two main objectives to begin with are two hills. The first one is on this map it's Bir-es-Sakhiti. I've seen it spelt and pronounced various ways sometimes it's Tel-El-Sakhiti, sometimes Tel-Sakhiti, sometimes it's Bir-es-Sakhiti. Just call it Sakhiti I guess. This has to be taken because it's a way to cut the Bathsheba-Hebron row here. That'll act as a cut-off for the troops of the garrison that are in Bathsheba and it will also act as a way to forestall any order of Ottoman reinforcements that might come down the road from the north. So the second Light Horse Brigade is sent up to Tel-El-Sakhiti. That's basically the first action of the morning and they're very quickly in the thick of it. They eventually get themselves onto the Tel or the hill. Tel is a word meaning hill but it also traditionally implies the hill is defensible. So if you just go to Israel and you see a Tel something or other somewhere in its history it has been a defended hill and of course in the Middle East that history can be a very long one. Anyway so they get onto Tel-El-Sakhiti and they manage to cut the road. They also managed to bag an Ottoman convoy in the process but they're kind of stuck there. They're under clear observation and fire from the enemy and the mental image you can have of the Light Horse guys on that hill is pretty much lying there getting shot at most of the day wishing all they were in was just that little bit bigger and a little bit deeper. But nonetheless they have done the job. Now the bigger nut to crack is Tel-El-Sakhiti which as you can see there is at the confluence of Awadi directly to the east of the town. This, that's Tel-El-Sakhiti there. If you've ever been to Bezheba, Bezheba to the south and to the east is as flat as a tack. This large hill dominates the area around it and it dominates the eastern approaches to the town. You are not going to be doing anything to the east of Bezheba from a military point of view unless you take that. So taking Tel-El-Sakhiti is really important. I don't, with this photo it's impossible to tell if it was taken from the north or from the south. I think it was taken from the south. You can see the Wadi in front of it. You can see the remains of some of the Ottoman trenches up there. This is obviously taken after the battle. This is a photo taken on top of the Tel looking towards south to the south. You can see the Ottoman trenches there and you can see the view over the ground to the south. That is where the charge took place. The charge basically went across there. So anybody who's out there and if the Ottomans control that hill on a difficult day, they are going to be under observation and fire from the Tel and of course any artillery that anybody on the Tel can control. The Tel is not that big. It's quite a tall mound but in terms of the hill itself it's not that big and the guys that get the job of taking it is the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade. The New Zealanders go against it around about mid-morning and what begins is a fairly difficult long day in front of the Tel. The problem that the New Zealanders have am I going for time? The problem that the New Zealanders have at Tel Sabah is a problem that had also been evident at a couple of places across Sinai. That is if you're sending mounted troops against prepared defensive positions they have a decided lack of manpower and firepower. So in fact everybody loves to describe the light horses mounted infantry. They are not mounted infantry. Technically their term is mounted rifles and I know that sounds similar but it's not the same thing. They have a different military role. They are a form of cavalry. The organisation is a cavalry organisation. They do not have heavy firepower. The support they've got is their medium machine guns, that is their Vickers guns and their attached batteries of Royal Horse Artillery which are small guns by this stage of the war, 13-pounders. Not the 18-pounders that everybody knows from the western front. If you send them against a defensive position like that they just have difficulty generating enough firepower to be able to reduce it. This becomes apparent at Tel El Sabah and will come up again in the campaign. I think success tended to mask the problem a little bit and they never really quite learned the lesson as hard as they should have. If you can't generate the firepower they have to do what the mounted troops had done at places like Magdaba and Rafa and that's essentially edge your way forward by short bounds and rushes, presumably some of which is on stomachs, and until you can get close enough to affect enough local fire superiority that you can rush it. But at Tel El Sabah this proves a fairly difficult thing and time now is starting to creep on. It's getting into the early afternoon and the town has to be taken that day to keep the timetable and the grander plan for the third battle of Gaza on schedule. So Harry Chevelle who's overseeing what's going on here send support. Some light horse brigade, the second and third, well part of the remainder of the second light horse brigade and the third light horse brigade are thrown in to help the New Zealanders. And they fundamentally had the same problem but now it's got that many more people sitting there shooting at the hill. The artillery, the raw horse artillery batteries, there's a couple of batteries in action here they're starting to affect a little bit more fire superiority. But a 13 pounder just simply can't blast the enemy out of their trenches. It's really just a case of keeping the enemy's head down to such a point that you can creep forward and launch a final assault. Around about mid-afternoon that finally happens. The New Zealanders get close enough that they're able to get up by the whistle and affect an assault on the hill. And the hill finally falls at about three o'clock in the afternoon. Which is great. The road to Bishiba is now open but the problem is the clock has been ticking and as I said the town has to be taken by the end of the day. Now there's disputes about who did what and who was thinking about at what time. I won't go into them too much. But basically Chevelle makes the decision that a mounted attack is the best way to crack the nut. To finish the day off. Now who was behind the suggestion? A lot of people have claimed some role in it. The commander of the Fourth Brigade Grant was one person who claimed his idea. I don't know that Chevelle actually ever claimed specifically his idea but I suspect the main instigator of it is the commander of the Australian Mounted Division. British officer by the name of Henry Hodgson. He's a British regular cavalry officer and he's been a proponent of mounted attack while he's been in the Middle East. Now at this point it might be just worth taking diverging a little bit to knock my first myth on the head. And that's the idea that this is somehow a wild impromptu decision that reflects Australia's wild colonial boy heritage kind of stuff. Only wacky Australians would dare to do anything quite so crazy. That's just utter nonsense I'm afraid. Mounted attacks have been undertaken in this campaign already. Mounted or mounted actions of various kinds. Australians have actually tried it once or twice. It was one attempt at Katya which was a battle subsequent to Ramani in 1916. There were mounted attacks, two mounted attacks undertaken by Australian Lighthouse units at the Battle of Magdaba one by the 10th Lighthouse Regiment, another by the 2nd Lighthouse Regiment and there are also mounted movements under fire at the Battle of Rafa. So the idea has been floating around in the campaign that actually mounted troops even in the First World War in this campaign can pull off mounted stuff. Hodgson has actually been pushing for his Lighthouse Regiments so he's commanding the 3rd and 4th Lighthouse Brigades in his division to actually be equipped with swords so that they can make that final leap to becoming full sword carrying cavalry. Now Chevelle knocks him back for reasons that aren't entirely clear but obviously this is not traditionally part of the Lighthouse setup and I think that was essentially a conservative reaction but in the days leading up to Besheba, in fact on the 27th October when the Australian Mounted Division issues its operations order for what's going on at Besheba, it very explicitly points, sets out the idea that look out for the opportunity to conduct a mounted attack. The ground and the terrain around here is very well suited to it, be alive to the opportunities and in that order it also says bayonets should be held high as to pretend it's a sword it may not have much actual physical effect but to an enemy in a defensive position it's going to look like a sword and the division was ordered to sharpen its bayonets for such an eventuality. So in the afternoon of the 31st when this idea has been kicked around this is an idea that has some heritage of at least a few days beforehand. Okay so the job gets given to the 4th Lighthouse Brigade skipped forward a little bit. So we're under the charge now the orders, the job's given to the 4th Lighthouse Brigade largely because they happen to be the closest unengaged brigade. There is a Yeomanry Brigade not far away but they're going to take just a bit longer to get assembled and move into position. So the 4th is there it's only able to assemble two of its regiments so the 3rd Regiment which is the 11th Lighthorse Regiment is not able to get it, it's a little bit further away and by the stage the light's going. It's often forgotten how bad the light is when the charge takes place and the 11th Regiment's war diary notes that one of the reasons why they're not able to assemble is because it's actually getting too dark to pass messages around. So the 11th will eventually get itself together and follow the rest of the brigade but they won't take part in the charge. So now we get to the charge itself. Now this is a pretty good this might have some flaws, there are some very strange maps out there about what happened at the Battle of Bathsheba and indeed some of them are contemporary ones some of the contemporary ones don't make much sense at all I'm not really sure what they were smoking in the headquarters when they put them together but they are rather strange. This one, the major error in this one is that it puts the 4th Regiment behind the 12th actually charge side by side but in broad terms the formation the Ottoman defences, the roads, where everybody was and what they were doing is pretty accurate and is a good indication of what happened on the event. Okay so the 4th and 12th line up outside of town 4th Lighthorse Regiment on the right, 12th on the left, each squadron arrayed behind each other, the formations of the last squadron in each regiment is moot, different sources say different things but nevertheless of course as most of the stories you're probably aware they quickly move to a walk, they move to a canter and they move to a gallop and it's on for young and old. Now as I said the light is pretty bad by this stage one of the artillery officers who's observing the hill from a vantage point makes the note right after the war that it's actually so dark that you can see the muzzle flashes of the Ottoman guns. So Ottoman artillery and rifle fire, machine gun fire from the Ottoman positions, you can actually see the red muzzle flashes so it gives you an idea of how dark it's getting. Not long after the charge starts an Ottoman machine gun opens up on the left flank from this position here and the Knott's Battery Royal Horse Artillery gallops into action, unlimbers and engages the position. They find the range with their second shot, which is partly just demonstration of excellent field gunnery, it's also a demonstration of sheer luck on the battlefield. Because the battery war diary mentions that it was too dark to use the rangefinder. So it gives you an idea how dark things are getting. So they guesstimated the range and managed to get it on their second shot and then of course they're able to fire for effect and silence the machine gun fairly sharply. Now whilst that's going on the regiments are of course galloping onwards. I'm sure to be in the front rank was pretty nerve racking. You're looking across essentially a very, very flat piece of ground. You can see where the enemy is and given the darkness you can see their muzzle flashes. I'm sure there were a few nervous chaps in the front rank. For the second and third ranks I don't think they actually saw very much. The amount of dust kicked up was reportedly voluminous and I suspect the second and third ranks probably didn't see much apart from just getting through the dust that enveloped them. The third rank of the 12th Light Horse which is on this flank actually doesn't seem to have followed the charge straight on. They went, they seem to have moved in column along this wadi here which formed the left flank of the charge. Now the axis of the charge is this road it's called the W Road and that's basically the line of advance the whole way. So they gallop onwards and they hit the Ottoman defences. Now the main thing that really above all else I think that gives you some, that the charge, the ability to succeed is there's no barbed wire. Barbed wire is created to stop animals and throughout the First World War, capital reaction, any form of mounted action in the face of barbed wire just doesn't come off. And it's worth noting it doesn't come off the infantry either a lot of the time. That's why the artillery spent so much time trying to cut the wire. But they know that the ground in front of these positions is not wired and they know that some aerial reconnaissance undertaken before the battle. So there's an element of surprise in all this and the lack of barbed wire is also a very significant action. And indeed one of the regimental commanders says afterwards that if it wasn't for the wire we just wouldn't, lack of wire we wouldn't have got anywhere. The first squadrons hit the enemy positions. They start dismounting as the famous hand to hand fighting that everybody talks about. And of course they move on into town and they take the town itself and luckily they also manage to seize most of the wells although one or two are blown up. Now the charge is not all that's going on. Chefelle's not an idiot. She's doing sensible things. And the charge is part of a general advance. So when the Fourth Light Horse Brigade gets sent to do the charge other people are being moved around as well. So the troops that are up around Tel El Sabah and around Tel El Sarkadi also sent forward. And there's other movements down here. The Seventh Mounted Brigade starts coming up from the south. This is really tightening the noose at the end of the day. It is not just about the charge. And so what we're now getting into is the aftermath. Now of course the idea had been that they would smash through Bathsheba, drive to the northern and circle the enemy. Well that doesn't really come off. The whole effort tends to dissipate because the Ottomans take up defensive positions at the north, particularly here around Tel El Sharia. And there's another place here called Tel El Kawefa. This holds the advance up. And what also proves to be a problem is there's not enough water at Bathsheba to support more operations despite the fact that's what they grabbed it there for. So the mounted troops in particular are really affected by the lack of water and they spend most of their time looking for water sources when they're not actually fighting somebody. So that when the breakthrough actually occurs here at Tel El Sharia which is probably, I have to say in border terms it's probably more important than the fighting at Bathsheba, the mounted troops can't exploit because they are no longer collected as a mass and they've been severely affected by the lack of water. And what happens of course is the Ottoman garrison which had been in Gaza flies the coop. So the great encirclement never comes off. Nevertheless, Alami does achieve a great victory in some ways because the Ottomans have to begin a headlong retreat northwards. They never lose complete cohesion and they chase hard all the way. They certainly don't lose, don't win any of the fights against the British in the next little bit. And eventually things will come to a rest again in central Palestine around about December. Not during which the British would also take Jerusalem hence fulfilling Lloyd George's directive to Allenby when he's sent out there. Okay, so I've been banging on for a bit now and I will start moving on now so that's the battle in itself in a nutshell. What I'll turn on to now is a little bit briefly looking at some of the myths of the battle of Bathsheba. Bathsheba was a turning point in the campaign. I'm fundamentally sketchy about the notion of turning points in any military campaign. Perhaps in naval warfare it is more pertinent and more relevant but I think in land campaigns these are often problematic conceptions. Why should Bathsheba be the turning point? Why isn't it when Allenby is appointed? Why isn't it when Allenby is given the resources? Why isn't it when Lloyd George sits down with Allenby? It's worth, as I said before, the Ottomans have been on the back foot since the battle of Ramani. If you wanted to pick up a turning point surely Ramani would be a more sensible turning point than the battle of Bathsheba. And of course the campaign's been going for more than a year by this stage of the war and it's still got another year to run. So why you would pluck a Bathsheba out as a turning point I'm not entirely sure. An extension of the idea is that the charge or the battle won the campaign. No, I don't think it did. As I said this is a three year campaign. There are lots of things happening at all sorts of times in those three years. No one battle won the campaign. And as something complex as war no one event can win a campaign. It is as much about sustainment, a willing to commit resources, good leadership, good command, the work of staff officers, the work of logisticians, the work of trainers creating the force to fight. The British victory in the Middle East relied on more than just 800 Australians charging in along the W Road on the afternoon of the 31st of October. Moreover if you take a slightly larger look at the way the war fact does end in the Middle East, it's not just what's going on in Palestine that affects the Ottoman Empire at the end of 1918. In around about the same time as the Battle of Megidot launches off in mid September 1918 the British and the French with the somewhat reluctant Greek allies will break out of the Salonica front. Which is in northern Greece. As they break out of the Salonica front the British will turn right and they will start advancing towards Constantinople. There is no Ottoman army between the British and Constantinople. So as much as the Ottoman Empire is facing a grave crisis in Palestine in the aftermath of the Megidot offensive in mid-September 1918 they're also facing a very grave crisis much closer to home. And it's those twin shocks and out of the two I would suggest that Salonica is perhaps the weightier one which will help drive the Ottoman Empire out of the wall. What also matters is the collapse of Bulgaria which breaks the land bridge between the Ottoman Empire and the rest of the central powers. And of course by September 1918 central power's position is not looking very good. If you're looking at it from Constantinople now seems like a good time to get out of the war. It's not just about what's happening in Palestine. I get variations on this one that it was the last great slash successful slash something else charge in history. Ah, no it wasn't. I suppose the get out of jail card is the great bit. You can say well anything's great if you want it to be greatness is a subjective assessment. I'm sure there are people who think Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott were great prime ministers. I would suggest that perhaps those people would be in the minority. When it comes to this whether this is a great charge or not is very much in the eye of the beholder. But in terms of being the last charge in history not even close. In this campaign alone there were more charges than I could list here from memory. Two big ones or fairly significant ones occur within several weeks of the charge at Bershiba. On the 8th of November a relatively small group, mixed group of British Yeomanry who were part of the 5th Mount of Brigade which was part of the Australian Mount of Division mount a successful charge at Hoogh. It's a fairly costly charge out of the troops that take part, nearly half of them become casualties. That's because they had to charge with no fire support and without having undertaken a reconnaissance it's a very much an off the route of march kind of thing. But nevertheless they take about 9 Austrian field guns. That's one of them there. They literally charge, this is kind of almost Napoleonic and conception, talking about Yeomanry who were equipped with swords lining up during swords and charging at the guns. But this time they get home and they're literally jabbing at gunners, Austrian gunners through the wheels of their guns as they try to defend the guns. And indeed if you're ever in the UK and you're feeling inclined you can go visit the Warwickshire Yeomanry Museum and one of those guns is to be found there today. A few days later on the 13th of November there was an even larger charge by the 6th Mount of Brigade at a place called Elmugar. This one two regiments. It's as large as the charge at Bershiba. This is not a small charge. In fact there's another, it's more Yeomanry involved in dismounted fighting as well. So the whole brigade is involved with it and two regiments involve with the charge. And they clear an enemy ridge of position that had been basically holding up the infantry for a better part of the day. There are more charges in July 1918 around the eastern bank of the Jordan. And if you look at the advance to Damascus in 1918 following the Battle of Megadot there are charges left, right and centre. And indeed Australian light wars will conduct more charges. So it's certainly not the last it's not even the last Australian charge in history. They're alone the last charge in history. And of course if you go digging around in some other wars you'll find other charges as well. And in fact there's at least one reasonably well known one by Italian cavalry on the eastern front in the Second World War. And I've read an account of French Spahy doing a small charge in the Algerian war. So there's certainly plenty of other charges in history. The charge photo. I won't go into this in detail. I've given a public lecture on it in the past. If you want to buy my reasonably priced book on the light horse there's an entire appendix devoted to this. Although I did note that it came out again today in an article by Paul Daly in The Guardian where he mentions some academics by which I assume he means me have taken issue with the supposed authenticity of the charge. So I'll just sum it up and say there's no way in the world this is a photo of the charge of Bathsheba in my view. If anybody wants to argue about it feel free to come up afterwards and we can have a good long argument. And this one is coming out more and more and more. I'm not a historian, not a contemporist. I'm not going to get into the nuts and bolts of modern Australian politics, modern Australian international relations but I think it's pretty fair to observe this is an idea that is being pushed by politics invested interests. Clearly there are the Australian government for various reasons is trying to build his ties with Israel and vice versa and Bathsheba is becoming by and large the vehicle by which this is done to a large extent. At the moment you've got a whole bunch of Australians over there to conduct a reenactment, the Prime Minister is there to do some more glad handing with Benjamin Netanyahu Bill Shorten is also there and so this is an idea, I think you have to draw a pretty long bow to say that Australia somehow has a role in the creation of the State of Israel. Australia was part of a British force which was a British Empire which helped set the conditions which ultimately might have led to the creation of Israel 30 years down the road but to draw links between the Australian involvement at Bathsheba and what happens in the aftermath of the Second World War seems a rather long bow to me. Okay so Joan will be pleased to know that I'm about to conclude and we can move on to some questions. What I've said here is not meant to diminish in any way what the Australians did at Bathsheba. It is a remarkable feat of arms and the charge deserves some of the notoriety that it has but there needs to be some pretty big caveats applied to that. This is not an Australian victory beyond the tactical sense of what the Australian units engaged at Bathsheba did. Yes they won their respective fights but broadly speaking this is a British victory in which Australians played a significant but by no means dominant part. It is worth remembering that the battle at Bathsheba is an operation conducted by two corps of the EEF. Twenty corps takes a lot of the load on the day and indeed it takes the casualties and of course this is just one part of the bigger third battle of Gaza which of course in its turn is just one part of a three year campaign. So the Australian contribution is as amazing as it was from a storytelling viewpoint and indeed the achievement in a tactical sense needs to be kept in perspective and given a little bit of context. The Australian involvement is just one part of a vast multi-layered history to deal with a war which was an epochal and devastating war. And to extract Bathsheba from that is some sort of defining moment I think is to invest a small if reasonably significant tactical action with far too much. Thank you Joan. Well I'm sure you'll all agree with me that that was an absolute tour de force and I know having tried to summarise this campaign for my own writing how measly complex and difficult it is to understand and you made it extremely comprehensible. I was particularly interested in the last point about the role of the campaign or the action in the foundation of Israel. There's an emerging literature now about what's called memorial diplomacy that is politicians across the world using the anniversaries of famous battles as essentially the stage to enhance bilateral or multilateral relations and this seems to be a good example as we speak. I mean to be fair to Bathsheba it's not the first time I've seen this I mean Paul Keating kneeling at Kokoda or John Howard talking about Gallipoli or something else it's hardly alone. And successive anniversaries of D-Day perform this function in Europe but I know you all have questions and I think we have about 25 minutes I think so thank you. You look after the questions. Ali Kazar you mentioned the link between the bottle of Qashiba and the establishment of Israel and your last comments. Now few points needed to be mentioned here which are very important the fact that the Arabs and Palestinians fought beside the allies against the Ottoman Turkey and that's nothing being mentioned no acknowledgement of the Arab role in the defeat of the Ottoman and the winning of the allies is mentioned anyway and that's the point. The second thing is that in 1917 there was not one single Jew living in Bathsheba. It was all Palestinians and Bathsheba was part of the Palestinian state in accordance to the United Nations Partition Resolution of Palestine which is a major role to impose upon us the results of all this is the dispossession of the Palestinian people they ethnically cleanse the Zionist terrorist groups they completely ethnically cleanse the entire population of Bathsheba who are now living in miserable conditions thanks for the last 70 years in Gaza few kilometers away from their homes and properties. Now for us as Arabs and Palestinians to see that there is you know completely not one single mention of all this is appalling. Well I can't comment on the partition of Israel I could but that's not really what I'm here to talk about tonight. You're quite right I mean there is an Arab involvement in this campaign I didn't mention it tonight because it's not particularly relevant to the battle of Bathsheba they become much more important in 1918. The battle of Bathsheba wouldn't have won the Palestinian population were against the allies the role of the Arabs becomes much more important in 1918 as the campaign influences northwards it links up with the head jazz uprising and other Arabs living to the east of the Jordan river there certainly are there I mean I've been to Bathsheba and you're right there are no Arabs in Bathsheba anymore but as I said I'd rather not comment about that because it's not really what I'm here to talk about tonight. In broader terms you're quite right the fact that Arabs are involved in the campaign on the British side should probably be getting a lot more traction than it is and as you're right at the moment in the Bathsheba stuff it doesn't factor in at all. Whether it will factor in in commemorations next year might be interesting to see. My question is not so much political or historical it's more to do with equipment so most modern troops and reservists even they train with light flares so you either use night vision goggles or you use light flares so the wrong guy throws a night flare up and then you shoot the target. So I was wondering after Bathsheba which officer or who in logistics they couldn't see we should get something like light flares Well there's certainly illumination flares in the First World War nobody if you're talking about in the charge well it is still light but the light is going nobody seemed to have think to fire any illumination at that time. The horse artillery batteries which are mostly providing artillery support don't carry a lot of ammunition with them because they're mobile. No no the illumination flares being used on the western front and other places in the First World War so I came a bit confused about some of the things you said midway when you saw the sort of actually cavalry. My initial question was why did Australia have a light force and not a cavalry tuition of carrying saver and lance? That was my initial question. There is there had been sort of more traditional cavalry in the pre-federation forces if you like after federation the decision is taken to uniformly equip everybody as mounted rifles are conceived of essentially as a type of abbreviated cavalry and the reason why they're not equipped with the sword is that it's thought too difficult to train non-regular troops in the use of what's called at the time the arm blanche the white arm meaning swords or lances there's a bit of a vague notion for example the first Australian military regulations that are created after federation is this idea that in war time they might be equipped with such a weapon but that kind of disappears by around 1907, 1908. Australians aren't alone in that thinking. The New Zealanders are affected by the same thing. South African mounted rifle troops are affected by the same thing. In Britain the Yeomanry are as well but they benefit from a decision taken not long before the war breaks out that if they get mobilised they'll be equipped with the sword. So the Australians use the same training manuals and doctrine that the British Yeomanry do. The New Zealand rifles do, in fact the manual is called the Yeomanry and Mounted Rifle Training 1912. As I said they're created and organised to carry out a cavalry roll. They're meant to do all the things that cavalry do with the exception of charging with a sword or lance. My last question would be do you see there's a deficiency in this? Well that was the view that they came to in the Middle East by 1918. As I said Hodgson is pushing equipment with the sword in 1917 he gets knocked back. He tries again in early 1918 and gets knocked back but after some mounted actions that occur in the middle of 1918 he gets permission and the Australian Mounted... Now not all the light horse do this. The light horse in the ANZAC Mounted Division never convert or never adopt the sword but the light horse regiments in the Australian Mounted Division do undertake the advance to Damascus as full sword carrier and cavalry. You mentioned that the machine gun on the left flank is taken out artillery. I presume there were machine guns in the trenches that they were charging. Was it that it was getting darker and say that therefore the machine guns found it hard to draw a beat? Because normally you would think that machine guns if they're in place would have made it very difficult for the charge to be successful. It's difficult to know exactly whether they had or not. I'll be honest I could not give you a definitive answer. I've never read anywhere that there are machine guns in the positions that they're actually charging on. There are certainly ones on the flank and that one on the wadi that they knock out. There's certainly plenty of riflemen and they're certainly supported by artillery but where there's actually any machine guns now for any machine gun charging they're employing frontal fire which is not the best way to employ a machine gun if you want to kill someone who's on for laid fire. What generally happens in this charge and in pretty much any charge in history that's successful is that when you've got 800 blokes charging at you and they're getting closer and closer and closer the aim starts to get a bit wonky. It's not to say they panicked but their ability to adapt to the circumstance. The closer the charge got likely they're the worse they're shooting got. That said I'm not going to poo poo this but it's quite true in the First World War most rifle bullets wouldn't kill a horse straight out and in fact this is one of the arguments against adopting small caliber bullets in the lead up to the war is that it won't stop a horse. If you want to stop a horse you need a big solid bullet and unless you shoot it in the head or get a lucky shot into the heart horse will keep going probably and then it'll stop and then it'll fall over. So even this is all bringing out PhD stuff for me now I can bang on about this for hours. The other thing as well is of course that when riflemen shoot at charging horsemen they aim at the horses they don't aim at the men the men are the ones who are going to do them the damage. There's claims that the Ottomans didn't adjust their sights and things. I actually don't recall ever seeing those claims in the original documents. I have my suspicions that that's a bit of a myth that comes in somewhere along the way and that doesn't account for the artillery. Anyone who's ever looked at a gun knows that guns to press below zero degrees. They might have got inside the fuse settings but not under the guns. So yeah does that answer you? What were the actual casualties amongst the Australians in the charge? In the charge it was about I think it was 31 killed or 30-ish killed most of that actually die in the fighting in the trenches not during the charge itself. So there aren't many men who are killed during the charge especially once they get on to the position and they dismount and they do the and that's the thing that comes out partly by Shiba but also by 1918 they're making the observation on the dismounted core that if you can do a mounted attack always do a mounted attack before you think about dismounting and doing it on foot because your casualties will be lighter. They very rapidly come to the conclusion that mounted attacks actually are not costly things. I just wanted to add on to that. The Ottomans prior to the Shira they used to be trained by from Moltke and some papers say that they never did what he instructed them to do and leading up to a battle in Egypt they actually lost because they never followed the German instructions so it would be quite likely that they didn't have justice sites. Possible. Why do you think this campaign has been played such a large role in Australian memories of World War I because as you say there are the two films one tell them about Chevelle making the film in World War II Well of course you know Charles Chevelle is Harry's nephew. He makes 40,000 horsemen in 1940 The thing with this is the campaign actually I think has very little resonance in the broader memory. What matters is Besheba. I think if you walk up to somebody in the street and said Besheba you might get a glimmer of recognition but that depends on who you're asking and where you're asking and that kind of thing. To echo a story you once told me Joan I was in Melbourne on Friday going to the Shrine of Remembrance and I jumped in a taxi and I said please take me to the Shrine of Remembrance and he looked at me and said what's that? So you know Australian military history is not for everybody. I had to google and show him a picture of it once I was trying to picture him knew where he was going and when I was speaking there I made the observation that really everything about Besheba in Australia was kind of the Palestine campaign has kind of encapsulated it in Besheba. This has come to represent what the Palestine campaign was about. There's nothing in here but if you walked up to somebody in the street and said Ramani you probably wouldn't get any recognition or Megadoe or the Eman Raid or any other number of actions that the Australians are involved in I'd be surprised if you got much recognition from apart from a very few people. So Besheba I think has just become this all encompassing thing and really even that is just reduced to the charge. The charge is set up as an example of Australian sharing do it's supposedly a way of illuminating Australian, supposed Australian traits. But as I said at the beginning I think really the reason why it's got so popular I suspect it has a lot to do with the films. I've always had it in the back of my head that one day I'll do an article on why Besheba got famous and how battle becomes famous and some don't. And I think it's really in Australia a lot of it is down to the two levels. Particularly the 1941, the 1987 one, different period different time. It probably refreshed things a little bit but I think the 1941 is really the one that sets out. And of course that's filmed during the middle of the, well not the beginning, the early part of the Second World War if you look at the baddies in that flick they're very Germanic baddies the Ottomans are. Even though they're charging Besheba it's all about what the evil Fiendish Huns are doing and manipulating the Ottomans and all the rest of it. And I guess in the war time context as well and in an age when going to the cinema was a big thing 40,000 horsemen has just sort of put an imprint if you like which is still with us today I think. This last question I think, thank you. John, for making speculation about what ifs with military baddies is always a dangerous thing to do. How much of the Australians at the time of the end of the day if the charge hadn't been made and also to step into the myth territory. How strict were the Australians? I sort of see if they hadn't got the Wales Australian forces, the British forces really would have been in. What's your view of that? Well from the mount, the board is really important to the mount of troops because horses can only go so long without water. I mean they talk about the whalers and their fantastic endurance in this campaign. As much as there's a fair bit of mythologising about the horsemen, there's also a lot of mythologising about the whalers. So certainly if they hadn't captured Bathsheba by the end of the day the mount of troops would have had some problems. They'd been a bit lucky and there had been some rainfall in the days leading up to it so during the advance on Bathsheba they were actually able to gather up, you know, get watered their horses with water and puddles and things. But certainly if they hadn't captured Bathsheba the mount of troops would have been in a bit of a pickle and they would have had to withdraw during the night presumably to get back to the water sources which were quite a way to the west. In terms of the broader plan, certainly Alanby's conception of what the Third Battle of Gaza should be like would have pretty much faltered on day one. That said getting into what this Alanby would have prevailed sooner or later. He would have had to shift his planning but the reality is in October 1917 he has the Probonter and the Trips. He has a much stronger logistics tail behind him. He has a very well trained army by this stage. He's really recrafted the EEF. It's got quite high morale. The Ottomans have got lots of problems when it comes to fighting. They're quite good defensive fighters but they've got fundamental sustainment issues which are always going to make it more difficult for them. So Alanby would have won if he just would have looked different. It might have been month or so down the road but ultimately I don't think the decision in Southern Palestine was in much doubt. Okay, perhaps just in conclusion I'd say that John and I were privileged to have been taken to be a 10 years ago wasn't it? One of the most striking things about what I might call the memorial landscape is this huge new park called Anzac Park which I think has been funded by the Pratt Foundation and it makes General Alanby's statue look absolutely minuscule doesn't it in contrast. There's a small bust of Alanby and an enormous bronze light horsemen doing things. And this huge park in a new area of Beershevers so it's part of the promotion of the memory of that camp or that particular action in that big campaign but as I said I think we were privileged to hear from John tonight because he really is Australia's authority on this subject. So thank you very much for a wonderful introduction.