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We know from papers taken from the enemy that the Turks believed General Allenby intended to go right up the plain to get to the defile leading to Messudieh and Nablus and thus threaten the Hedjaz railway, in which case the position of the enemy in the Holy City would be hopeless, and the Turks formed an assault group of three infantry divisions in the neighbourhood of Tul Keram to prevent this, and continued to hold on to Jerusalem.
General Allenby gave the fullest consideration to this document, and after he had made as complete an examination of the front as any Commander-in-Chief ever undertook the General was in one or other sector with his troops almost every day for four months General Chetwode's plan was adopted, and full credit was given to his prescience in General Allenby's despatch covering the operations up to the fall of Jerusalem.
The native mind, keen, discerning, receptive, understood the meaning and depth of this simplicity, and from the moment of high noon on December 11, 1917, when General Allenby went into the Mount Zion quarter of the Holy City, the British name rested on a foundation as certain and sure as the rock on which the Holy City stands.
It was Allenby himself who led his retreat at the head of his division by the side of a French guide carrying a lantern. For twenty miles our cavalry urged on their tired horses through the night, and along the sides of the roads came a struggling mass of automobiles, motor-cycles, and motor-wagons, carrying engineers, telegraphists and men of the Army Service Corps.
The English attitude was firm. The Egyptian attitude was no less firm. The cabinet at once resigned, no new cabinet could be formed, and the British High Commissioner, General Allenby, was forced to assume unveiled control. Meanwhile the nationalists announced that they were going to hold a plebiscite to determine the attitude of the Egyptian people.
Every one that I had ever met who knew General Allenby was wildly enthusiastic about him, and you had only to be with him a few minutes to realize how thoroughly justified their enthusiasm was. He represented the very highest type of the British soldier, and more need not be said. On the morning on which I arrived an attack was in progress and we could hear the drumming of the guns.
The retreat which followed the fall of Warsaw was sympathetically represented as a masterly operation, and the failure of the Germans to envelop and isolate the Russian armies as proof of the breakdown of their strategy. But all retreats in the war, with the exception of the Turks' before Allenby, were similarly described in the appropriate quarters.
To-day, at Dover, Sir Edmund Allenby spoke even more clearly of the debt he owed for the foundations laid by General Murray and for the loyal way in which he started him off as a beginner. It is not too common in our military history to find great commanders on the same battle-ground as sensitive about one another's reputation as they are of their own.
The 180th Infantry Brigade, whose brigadier, Brig.-General Watson, had the honour of being the first general in Jerusalem, the first across the Jordan, and the first to get through the Turkish line in September 1918 when General Allenby sprang forward through the Turks and made the mighty march to Aleppo, was composed of the 2/17th London, 2/18th London, 2/19th London, and 2/20th London, 519th Coy.
"About 7:30 in the morning General Allenby received a message from Sir Charles Fergusson, commanding the fifth division, saying he was very hard pressed and in urgent need of support. On receipt of this message General Allenby drew in his cavalry and endeavored to bring direct support to the fifth division.
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