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By Root 1286 0

German fixation for years. The railway line being driven from Berlin to Baghdad was physical evidence of the German commitment to the Ottoman Empire, and offered the possibility of a German presence in the Gulf – and thereby a menace to imperial communications with India. In 1898 the Kaiser had visited the Ottoman possessions and declared himself a friend of Islam. There were even rumours in the Turkish press – which his officials did nothing to scotch – that he might become a Muslim himself. And in November 1914 the sultan of Turkey responded to his courtesy by duly declaring holy war on Britain and its allies.

In 1917, after years when gains on the Western Front were measured in yards, the British government decided it was time for a dramatic victory in another theatre of the war. The commander chosen for this mission, Edmund Allenby, had initially been an imperial reject: even after an education at Haileybury, the former training school for the East India Company – augmented by sessions with a crammer – he still failed the exams for the Indian Civil Service. Twice. A career in an unglamorous Irish cavalry regiment, which at least offered the prospect of decent fox-hunting, had been a tolerable second-best and imperial soldiering turned out to suit him well. He emerged from the Boer War – which he had spent leading his troops on forays across the bush hunting out Afrikaner guerrillas – a colonel.* Allenby certainly looked the part – well over six feet tall, active, physically fit, the hair lacking on the dome of his head more than made up for by his bristling moustache. As he rose up the chain of command, his natural sympathy for his men grew deeper and his temper shorter: the slightest thing could set him off, especially a failure to wear chinstraps properly. In June 1917, ‘the Bull’ was summoned to see the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, to be given a new task. The War Cabinet, he was told, wanted General Allenby to take command of a demoralized Egyptian Expeditionary Force, strike north and drive the Turks out of the remnants of their empire in the Middle East.

It did not seem a particularly promising command. It was true that the British still held their number-one objective in the region, the Suez Canal, ensuring that they could continue to move troops from India and Australasia to the European theatre. With the help of their German allies the Turks had built a defensive line to block any British advance from the south, running from Gaza on the Mediterranean coast inland 30 miles to Beersheba. Allenby was to smash through it and seize Palestine. In contrast to the war in Flanders, where the sucking quality of the mud seemed to express the stagnation of the campaign, the Middle East assault was to be one of dash and movement. Its prize offered one of the most dramatic symbols of the entire conflict, Jerusalem.

The force Allenby was to command was truly imperial, containing soldiers from across the empire, at perhaps its most exotic in the Imperial Camel Corps, a regiment made up of British, Australian and New Zealand cavalrymen, supported by artillery from the Hong Kong and Singapore Mountain Battery, which was made up of Indians. When he arrived to take command, he found the troops downcast, for the Turks looked immovable. The Bull immediately drew up a plan, ordered roads built, commandeered all the beer in Egypt for his men and then moved his headquarters to a wooden shed ten miles from the front line. Four months later, Allenby’s exotically assorted forces struck, not towards Gaza, which the Turks were expecting, but at Beersheba. One after another the Turkish strongholds fell, as Allenby poured troops through each gap he created. By early December 1917 he had captured 60,000 prisoners and taken hundreds of guns. His army stood at the walls of Jerusalem, where one morning a couple of squaddies out collecting water were accosted by the mayor of the city. He had come out looking for someone to whom he could surrender the keys of Jerusalem. A fawning biographer appreciated the historical echoes. ‘Israelite,