Who Were The Light Horsemen

I’ve written in the past about the light horsemen’s crucial contribution to Allenby’s campaign in wresting Palestine from the Ottoman Empire (you can reread it in the Jan 2007 and Feb 2007 blog archives or ZFA's Finger On The Pulse No. 51 )But just who were these Australian light horsemen who played such an key role in the conquest of Palestine, therefore making possible the implementation of The Balfour Declaration?

What I’ve done to answer that question is borrow heavily (cut ‘n’ paste) from the appropriate chapter in The Australian Imperial Force in Sinai and Palestine, 1914–1918 (10th edition, 1941)by H.S.Gullettavailable online from the Australian War Memorial site. Gullet was a Member of Parliament and cabinet minister for the Nationalist Party of Australia and the United Australia Party, predecessor of the Liberal Party of Australia. So cut him some slack and take his style with a grain of salt as you read his appraisal of our Australian light horseman. He comes across as a polite if not erudite WASP, but then again he probably wouldn’t have appreciated being accused of post modern political correctness either.

The Light Horseman and His Horse
The light horse was not a cavalry force. Its members were not armed with sword or lance. They were mounted riflemen, or in other words, mounted infantry, and their horses were intended merely to give them the greatest range of activity as a mobile body. True, the Australians at Anzac and in Sinai and Palestine made up only a part of the Allied forces engaged ; but they were always a great fighting vanguard, and it may safely be said that without them Turkey would not have been so utterly overthrown and destroyed.
Many of the Australian Light Horsemen, including a large number of their officers, had served with distinction as mounted riflemen in the South African War, only twelve years before WWI, and the lessons learned against the elusive Boers had a strong influence upon their efficiency.
Another factor which gave the Australian countryman natural fitness for his work in Palestine was that he was bred in a land of strong sunshine. From his birth he had been accustomed to very high summer temperatures, to dusty roads, and to the exercise of careful thought concerning water-supply. All who enlisted from inside the Dividing Range had known seasons of short rainfall; all had more than once been compelled to call forth their ingenuity to find water for sheep and cattle and horses. The heat of Sinai was scarcely worse than the heat of many parts of Australia; nor was the scanty supply of water, which restricted operations and often exhausted and disheartened men from colder latitudes, a matter of surprise or serious concern to the light horsemen.
The Australian possessed, therefore, remarkable qualities, both natural and acquired, for a mounted war in a hot, dry country. He was, when engaged in such a war, living and fighting under conditions closely resembling those to which he had been accustomed all his life. He needed only to learn discipline, and to become skilled in the effective use of modern destructive weapons, to be a formidable soldier.
The light horse regiments were further marked, as well as strengthened, by the extent to which they were built up of groups of friends who had enlisted together, and who went to Gallipoli in the same troops and squadrons. The light horse force, as it sailed from Australia in the end of 1914 and early in 1915, was, in brief, a remarkable band of brothers in arms, a capable band drawn from a wide and fragrant countryside, animated by a noble cause, thrilled and expectant with the sense of a grand adventure in foreign lands, and knit together by the common interest of their peace-time callings and the still closer ties of personal friendship and affection.
They formed a force essentially easy to train and discipline, provided they were handled with quick intelligence and sympathy.
British regular officers, without an understanding of their native qualities, sometimes found them difficult; but, as the war developed, it became recognised that the Australian officer who had trouble with the light horsemen was not fit for his command.
The Australian Light Horse was in body and spirit the true product of the wide Australian countryside. Some of the regiments, whose recruiting areas were close to cities and towns, included a small number of townsmen; but the light horse as a whole was essentially a force of countrymen, most of who actually bred and owned the horses on which they did their few weeks of compulsory annual training.
The outbreak of war (WWI) was followed by a spirited rush to the recruiting stations in every Australian country district. From the 12,000-mile coast-line to the very heart of the continent, 1,500 miles inland, young men bade farewell to their farms and their “runs” and rode in to place themselves at the disposal of their country. Many of them offered not only themselves but also their cherished horses.
These men were the very flower of their race. All were pioneers, or the children of pioneers. Ninety seven out of every hundred came from pure British stock; they were children of the most restless, adventurous, and virile individuals of that stock; many, deserting in their youth the limited holdings of their pioneer fathers near the coast, had followed the explorers’ lonely footsteps and pushed the outposts further out.” All were workers; the Australian countryside is not yet old enough to support luxurious drones. All were men of resource, initiative, and resolution; all were accustomed from their earliest boyhood to carry responsibility, and to take an intelligent interest in the growth of crops or the breeding and care of live-stock. They represented every phase of Australia’s diverse rural industries: dairymen and small cultivators from the long rich coastal belt between the Dividing Range and the sea; orchardists from the foot-hills; timber-getters from the sparkling forests on the ranges; men from the larger farms of the long wheat-belt, on the inside slope of the mountains; and men whose lives had been spent on the sheep and cattle stations of the vast inland plains. On hundreds of outback stations there are intervals of days, sometimes of weeks, between successive arrivals of mails and newspapers. Many of the men lived in those remote areas-which are exempt from compulsory military training and had never seen a soldier’s uniform. But the response of the lonely settler of the interior and the far north, and farther north-west, was as instant and whole-hearted as the response of those who dwelt within sight of passing trains and steamers. Every worn road and grass-grown track carried its eager, excited volunteers, some riding singly, some in twos and threes. Squatters and stockmen and shearers, farmers and labourers and prospectors, they paced the same road in that spirit of true democracy, which, as the war went on, became perhaps the most beautiful and valuable of all the great qualities that in this war shone out of the Australian soldier.
All were horsemen of various degrees of excellence; not mere riders of educated horses, but men who had from their school-days undertaken, as a matter of honour and pride or of necessity, the breaking and backing of bush-bred colts and the riding of any horse that came their way. Their horsemanship came next to, if not sometimes before, their religion.
Like all citizen soldiers they found rigid discipline irksome, but to all the essentials in that discipline their obedience was instant and absolute. It was as impossible as it would have been disastrous to stamp out the individual in them. Because of the lives they had lived, it was safe to entrust them with some play for their own personality and initiative. Each man, while subscribing fully to the collective command, waged all through the campaign an intense personal war of his own, animated not by any burning racial or national passion against his enemy, but by a sheer impulse, begotten of his pioneer blood, to do with-all his will and power a task which interested him or which had to be done. He stalked the enemy with the same absorbed interest and deliberation with which he might before the war have stalked a plains turkey. To waste his effort and ammunition in a fight was in his eyes an offence against his personal intelligence.
But the qualities which made him so effective as an individual soldier, and his fire discipline so absolute and unbreakable, rendered him impatient of that side of discipline which may be termed purely ceremonial. The disdain with which he regarded all army formality and etiquette which did not, to his rational mind, have some direct bearing on his work as a fighting soldier, produced much embarrassment, and at times even strained the relations between the light horse commands and the British General Staff in Egypt and Palestine.
The light horseman, with all his unconventional ways and his occasional forcefulness, was at heart distinguished by shyness and reserve. The young Australian countryman leads a simple and peaceful life. He bears himself modestly. A temperate man, his one excess is a harmless celebration at the annual races or agricultural show, or on an occasional visit to the capital city of his State; even then the impelling force is the bursting strength of his youth rather than any disposition for strong drink or unwholesome excitement. Men of all young British countries engage in these occasional sprees, which were in fact a stronger feature of the early pioneering days, when most of the settlers were of British birth, than they are among the native-born. The young countryman of the Commonwealth is neither a hard nor a regular drinker, but, when his rare holiday comes, he engages whole-heartedly in a joyous demonstration. On occasion he did this at Cairo, and at other places abroad, and his high spirits and forceful, but as a rule quite harmless, carnivals sometimes led to misunderstanding in the minds of men who did not know the native wholesomeness of his life at home.
Much that is misleading has been written of the Australian type of manhood. So far as a distinctive type has been evolved, it is to be found among men from the country districts, where there is a preponderance of young men long of limb and feature, spare of flesh, easy and almost tired in bearing, and with a singular native grace of posture. The head is carried forward on long, powerful shoulders; and this, together with a casual, almost lazy, impression conveyed by the whole figure, and the national tendency to lean the body against fences, trees, vehicles, or the shoulders of a horse, misleads the stranger as to the Australian’s great physical strength and superb athleticism.
The keen and surprisingly cynical sense of humour, which is as sharply defined in almost every Australian as his sense of sight or hearing, makes Australians shy of any tangible expression of patriotism. The Australian countryman has never been fond of flying the Union Jack, or even his own Southern Cross flag. His loyalty to Empire is the unconscious loyalty of blood, rather than any defined loyalty to the British Throne. His affection for England is rather affection for the land of his fathers, than for the land that holds the supreme head of his Government. And this affection is strengthened by the fact that every Australian child’s education, no matter how scanty, is based upon the poetry and prose which tells the story of England and Scotland and Wales and Ireland. His racial patriotism is therefore a very real and live thing, which, always smouldering, if without sign of smoke, bursts into flame when the honour of the old land of his fathers is touched. It matters not who or where is the foe; and thus Australia’s young manhood found itself engaged in a long and bloody war with Turkey.
There is something unreal and incongruous in the thought of the young Christian Australian Commonwealth engaged in a fight to a finish with the old Moslem Ottoman Empire. Before the war it is improbable that there were a hundred Turks in Australia or a hundred Australians in Turkey. The trade between the two lands was insignificant; direct diplomatic relations did not exist; each country was profoundly ignorant of and indifferent to the other.
Australian and Turk fought therefore as strangers. The one people waging a holy war” in preservation of its very life, the other battling for the defence of its motherland and its own place among the nations-no two armies ever fought with less personal animosity a protracted and decisive campaign. The Australians, who always referred to the Turk affectionately as “Old Jacko,” regarded him with sincere respect, touched, as was natural in a manhood conscious of race superiority, with pity. They found him a clean, chivalrous fighter, and thought of him, it may almost be said, as a temporarily misguided friend. The Turk in his stolid way returned this good feeling, and always distinguished the Australians and New Zealanders from other troops of the British Army.
So come on down and pay your respects. We owe them that much.