Abstract
In September 1917, Lewis gunner Oswald Evans wrote to his mother in England of the monotony and boredom of the Palestine trenches. “Nothing seems to have happened to help pass the time,” he complained, almost wishing he were back in the more active theater in France.1 This wish, though, appears to have been an idle one, for Evans made no effort to return to France. On the contrary, he tried fruitlessly to have his brother Joe transferred away from the Western Front to join him in the far safer environment of the EEF.2
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Notes
See, for period descriptions of the geography, Allenby’s favorite reference, George Adam Smith, The Historical Geography of the Holy Land especially in Relation to the History of Israel and of the Early Church (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1906), 147, 261.
Bernard Blaser, Kilts Across the Jordan: Being Experiences and Impressions with the Second Battalion “London Scottish” in Palestine (London: H. F. & G. Witherby, 1926), 90–2.
See the lively retelling of this battle and the evocation of its impact on the minds and memories of Australians, Middle Easterners, and others in Paul Daley, Beersheba: A Journey through Australia’s Forgotten War (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009). See, also, Jean Bou’s discussion of the myths of the battle in Bou, Australia’s Palestine Campaign, 54–5.
Director of Medical Services, EEF, GHQ, War Diary, 12 November 1917, WO 95/4386, NAUK; Eran Dolev, Allenby’s Military Medicine: Life and Death in World War I Palestine (London: I.B. Taurus, 2007), 79. See Dolev’s detailed description of and high praise for the Royal Army Medical Corps’ responses to each new transportation difficulty, 84–105.
Philip Hugh Dalbiac, History of the 60th Division (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1927), 130.
Patrick Hamilton, Riders of Destiny: The 4th Light Horse Field Ambulance in the Palestine Campaign 1917–1918 (Surrey Hills, Vic, Australia: N. Sharp, c. 1985), 69. See also Rex Hall’s description of the Turkish shooting of stretcher-bearers and wounded men in The Desert Hath Pearls (Melbourne: The Hawthorn Press, 1975), 95.
Bertha Spafford Vester, Our Jerusalem: An American Family in the Holy City, 1881–1949 (Garden City, N. Y., Doubleday & Co., 1950), 243.
J. Johnston Abraham, A Surgeon’s Journey: The autobiography of J. Johnston Abraham (London: Heinemann, 1957), 207.
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© 2012 Edward C. Woodfin
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Woodfin, E.C. (2012). Mountains of Mourning. In: Camp and Combat on the Sinai and Palestine Front. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137264800_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137264800_6
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