WITH ALLENBY IN PALESTINE.

Taranaki Daily News, 3 December 1919, Page 9

WITH ALLENBY IN PALESTINE.

GREAT MILITARY LEADER. BOOKMAN AND NATURALIST AS WELL. Although it took Field-Marshal Lord Allenby just one year to do what the Crusaders were unable to accomplish in 100 years, nevertheless, while carrying out the most brilliantly executed campaign in the annals of military history, he by no means spent all of his time fighting Turks (says Mr. Lowell Thomas, the American war®correspondent). One expects a great military leader to be conversant with military tactics and the history of the war, but it is a bit extraordinary to find the leader of a great army a bookman and naturalist. But Lord Allenby probably knows as much as any man living about the flowers and wild animals and birds of the Holy Land. He stationed a Yorkshire sergeant at a watering place which migratory birds frequented, and whenever a new species arrived the. commander-in-chief would forget the cares of his campaign and slip off to the pond to see the bird for himself. He is the type of man whom John Burroughs would make a boon companion. While with our forces in Palestine, I discovered that Allenby was exceptionally popular with the men in the ranks. But I was. told everywhere that his Generals got shaky in the knees when in his presence, because' if anything went wrong you could hear the deliverer of Jerusalem all the way from Dan to Beersheba. SOLDIER AND BOOIC-LOVER. Since the Boer war, when he first made his reputation as a great cavalry leader, he has been known to his men as "Bull" Allenby, and the rank and file of the Tommies and Anzacs seldom •go far wrong in their measure of a man. A thousand years from now historians, I believe, will rank Allenby with Thothmes 111., Rameaes 1., Joshua, Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander the Great, Titus, Richard Coeur de Lion, Saladin, and the other mighty conquerors who have led their hosts across the Plains of Sharon and Armageddon. And I believe they will write his name at the head of the list. •' Allenby succeeded where even Napoleon failed. His was a campaign such as all military men have dreamed of, but few have realised. But though essentially a man of war, wiio prefers to wear a uniform of the same cloth as that worn hy his privates, to eat the same food, and to roar like a lion, Allenby has another side to his nature. He reads both 'Greek and Latin fluently, and he carries with him on his ■ campaign such books as George Adam Smith's Geography of the Holy Land, a Bible Dictionary, and, of course, a copy of the Holy Scriptures. Jii3t after the capture of Jericho, Allenby and the Duke of Connaught took 1 a run down to the edge of the Dead 1 Sea. When they arrived the soldiers 1 were enjoying their noonday siesta, and - there were some motor boats lying out a 1 bit too far, being knocked about by the ; waves. THE DUKE ON THE ROPE. i The C.-in-C. angrily ordered them to be pulled in. Both he and the Duke lent , a hand. The temperature was about 110 degrees. Both were wringing wet with perspiration, and hardly as comfortable as the soldiers helping them, who were wearing absolutely no clothing. When the job was done, Allenby remarked quietly to* one of the boys that it was a pity they couldn't have taken a cinema of His Royal Highnesß pulling on the rope between two naked Australians. An hour later, on their way back to Jericho, the car rounded a bend withiri gunshot of the Turks. Somewhere near the place that Joshua and the Israelites are supposed to have crossed the Jordan on dry land, the Rolls-Royce sank up to its hubs in quicksand and salt. Instead of allowing his men to do it, Allenby insisted on crawling through that slime, scooping out roou to lie down under the car, and then, using his enormous hands as shovels, he scooped out the white mud around all four wheels so that the Rolls-Royce could be pulled out by his staff captain's car. When he crawled out, the conqueror of the Holy Land was absolutely unrecognisable, and covered with a mass of ozy slime,. I THE HUMAN SIDE. People are far more interested in little stories about the human side of General Allenby than they are in how he turned the Turkish flank at Beersheba, or how he captured Aleppo and cut the Bagdad railway. When Allenby captured Jerusalem he had accomplished one of the moat dramatic feats of all human history. The best that Richard Coeur de Lion could do was to reach the top of Nebi Samwil and get a view of the Holy City. Herr Wilhelm Hohenzollern, before his bubble burst, showed the world what a buffoon he was by entering Jerusalem on a white charger,. dressed in white fobes and followed by his resplendent comic opera cavalry. As everyone knows, when Allenby, the great deliverer, entered the Holy City, he merely walked in with three officers in front of him who occupy a far more prominent position in the official photographs than Allenby himself. When the Kaiser rode intp Jerusalem he went to the German Cathedral and delivered an oration, as if he were the reincarnation of the Apostle Paul. When Allenby entered he stood modestly while another J man read his very brief proclamation for him. HOW IT FELT TO CAPTURE JERUSALEM. One day, while having lunch with the Duke of Connaught and Lord Allenby, I asked the Commander-in-Chief what his feelings were when he received the news that his men had taken Jerusalem, the City of David, "the city which, more than Athens, more than Rome, taught , the nations civil justice, the city which ( gave her name to the ideal city which ' men are ever striving to build on earth, J the city which gave her name to the city 1 of God which shall one day descend from ] Heaven—the new Jerusalem." t Allenby replied: "Oh, I guess I felt ( pretty much the same as you feel when 1 you capture any town." ( Lieut.-General Sir Philip Chetwode, jj who commanded the army corps which I captured Jerusalem, one of Allenby's ' most closest friends, his companion ' through the Boer war, and his second in ' command during the campaign in the \ Holy Land, described the deliverer of t Palestine to me one day while we were seated in the Kaiser's palace on the ( Mount of Olives, as "the straightest man ' wlio ever drew on a boot."