Brigadier General Granville de Laune Ryrie leads the 2nd Australian Light Horse Brigade across the desert at Esdud on the Philistine Plain in 1918
THE CHARGE of the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba has inspired Australians for generations.
The veterans of the charge re-enacted it in Charles Chauvel’s 1940 movie Forty Thousand Horsemen—a confidence booster for a beleaguered nation at war.
As a young boy at boarding school in the early ’60s I watched it again and again—we all imagined ourselves spurring our horses through the Ottoman fire, leaping across the trenches and onward to victory.
Where so many armies had marched and charged before, it was one of the last great cavalry charges, an act of bravery that has echoed through the century since; an against-the-odds victory that broke the Ottoman lines and spurred the Allied forces on to Jerusalem.
The charge itself was an astonishing achievement. At dusk on October 31, 1917, Brigadier General William Grant gave the 800 Australians of the 4th Light Horse Brigade their orders: “Men, you’re fighting for water. Use your bayonets as swords. I wish you the best of luck.”
The cavalry began with a trot, accelerated to a canter and then to a gallop across 6km of open country outside Beersheba, under ferocious fire from well-entrenched Ottoman defenders.
Trooper Edward Dengate recorded the desperate charge. “We spurred our horses… the bullets got thicker… three or four horses came down, others with no riders on kept going, the saddles splashed with blood.”
Brutal hand-to-hand combat followed and 31 Australians were killed. But the 4th Light Horse Brigade prevailed. They had defeated an Ottoman force five times their size, and taken Beersheba and its vital water supply with it.
Just weeks later, the Australians marched with General Allenby into Jerusalem, while in London the Balfour Declaration was signed, paving the way for the creation of the modern state of Israel.
A century on, the city of Be’er Sheva is an oasis of technology and great practical ideas—a shining example of the best attributes of Israel and the Israeli people—ingenuity, resilience, and hard work.
Today, Australia and Israel share these values. We have an unbreakable bond that is only getting stronger. As we honour the memory and sacrifice of the Anzacs of 1917, we are determined to strengthen the ties between our two nations in 2017, and in the years to come.
Lest we forget.
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