Allan Mallinson
The Times
General Allenby entering Jerusalem at the Jaffa Gate on December 11, 1917
General Allenby entering Jerusalem at the Jaffa Gate on December 11, 1917

New Year’s Eve on the Western Front in 1917 was an occasion for “fireworks”. In Undertones of War, Edmund Blunden, who had joined the army in 1915 almost straight from school, was now a captain in the Royal Sussex, with a Military Cross from the Somme and still not fully recovered from being gassed in November, wrote of the “successions of coloured lights . . . but the sole answer to the unspoken but importunate questions was the line of lights in the same relation to Flanders as at midnight a year before. All agreed that 1917 had been a sad offender. All observed that 1918 did not look promising at its birth.”
It was certainly true of the Western Front — and indeed the Eastern and Southern Fronts. Each new offensive in 1917 had failed. What was left of the Eastern Front was falling apart as Russia descended into civil war. On the Southern Front(s) a sizeable chunk of the North Italian Plain lay in enemy hands after the Austro-German counteroffensive in October, and in December Romania, isolated after the Russian collapse, gave up the fight, releasing yet more Germans and Bulgarians for the Macedonian Front.
On the Western Front the French were still licking their wounds after the ruinous Nivelle Offensive, and the British, now the stronger ally, had been stopped in their tracks at Third Ypres (“Passchendaele”), which was why the line of lights in Flanders had not advanced in a year. The Americans were arriving, but not yet in large numbers, and their troops were very green.
However, there had been good news farther afield. Jerusalem, whence the Ottomans exercised their rule in Palestine, had fallen to British and Dominion troops of General Sir Edmund Allenby’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force. Lloyd George, the prime minister, whose despair had been growing with the continuing failures in France, called it a Christmas present to the nation. Allenby entered the city on December 11 by the Jaffa Gate on the western side, but on foot rather than mounted in the traditional fashion of the victorious general. “Only one man rides into Jerusalem,” he said simply, although Jesus of Nazareth had entered the city on “Palm Sunday” via the Golden Gate on the east side.
Jerusalem had fallen without a shot too. Allenby had simply outmanoeuvred the Turks, and within a mere six months of arriving in theatre. With Allenby having been relieved of command of the Third Army in France in June in the wake of the failures to make progress at Arras, Lloyd George had chosen him to replace the hapless Sir Archibald Murray after the second failure to break through the Turkish defences at Gaza, key to Palestine.
Murray had been a serial failure — first as chief of staff of the British Expeditionary Force in 1914 under Sir John French, then as chief of the imperial general staff in London, and now as a commander-in-chief. He was, however, a methodical planner; it had been his eye for detail that had got the Egyptian Expeditionary Force through the Sinai desert — an immense logistical challenge.
On the other hand, Allenby, “the Bull”, brought dynamism to the campaign. Although he was now facing Field Marshal Erich von Falkenhayn, who had worsted the Romanians before, in September, being made commander-in-chief of the Ottoman army group in Palestine, Allenby was well served by his three corps commanders: the infantryman Lieutenant-General Edward Bulfin, the cavalryman (and later the poet John Betjeman’s father-in-law) Philip Chetwode, and the Australian Henry Chauvel — “Light Horse Harry”, who, unusually even in the higher ranks of the Australian forces, was a regular.
In early November Allenby broke the Gaza defences by a surprise attack at Beersheba, whose famed wells would prove invaluable to Chauvel’s Desert Mounted Corps comprising “Anzac” light horsemen and British yeomanry. Now the pace could quicken, for hitherto, especially during the transit of Sinai, water had been a constant problem, and much reliance had had to be placed on the slower-moving camel for reconnaissance and logistics.
Having opened the door to Palestine at Gaza, Allenby pressed his advance on two axes — one towards Jaffa, the other towards Jerusalem. On November 12 four divisions of the Ottoman 8th Army counterattacked in front of Wadi Sara Junction on the Jaffa-Jerusalem Railway, but were held by the Australian Mounted Division fighting dismounted. In turn the next day Bulfin’s XXI Corps, augmented by elements of Chauvel’s, attacked and dislodged the 8th Army, who were deployed in hastily constructed, but naturally strong, defences. This and the failure of the Turk rearguards to check XXI Corps’ follow-up in the coming days forced the 8th Army out of Jaffa, while the 7th Army withdrew into the Judean Hills to defend Jerusalem.
Despite a series of counterattacks in the coming days checking the first attempt to surround Jerusalem, on December 8 Chetwode’s corps, which had relieved Bulfin’s in the advance took the heights to the west of the city, and the Turks, now threatened with envelopment, gave up the ground that evening.
The mayor of Jerusalem, with white flag, offering surrender to two British sergeants on December 9, 1917
The mayor of Jerusalem, with white flag, offering surrender to two British sergeants on December 9, 1917GETTY IMAGES
Exactly what happened the next morning is the subject of much anecdote. The mayor of Jerusalem, Hussein Salim al-Husseini, wanting to spare the city from bombardment, rode out to deliver the Ottoman governor’s letter surrendering the city to Allenby’s forces, but had difficulty finding anyone to accept it.
In his memoir The Romance of the Last Crusade: With Allenby to Jerusalem, Major Vivian Gilbert of the Machine Gun Corps recounts how the mayor’s first attempt — to a foraging cook, a certain Private Murch of “one of the London regiments”, met with failure. Murch’s commanding officer had sent him into the village of Lifta to find eggs for breakfast. The cook, “a miserable specimen”, his clothes “covered with grease and filth”, wearing a misshapen helmet “at least one size too small”, and in boots so worn that his “very big red toe” stuck out of one of them, got lost and stumbled into the mayor’s party.
In broken English al-Husseini addressed him: “Where is General Allah Nebi? I want to surrender the city please. Here are the keys; it is yours!”
“Murch” (Gilbert appears to have disguised his true identity) is supposed to have replied, in rich cockney: “I don’t want yer city. I want some eggs for my hofficers!”
The mayor rode on and some time later came across two scouting sergeants, James Sedgwick and Frederick Hurcomb, of the 19th Battalion, London Regiment (Territorials). They too refused to take the letter, but sent word of it back. Eventually Brigadier-General Charles Watson, commanding the 180th (London) Brigade, came forward, found the mayor and rode with him to the city, where a small, yet jubilant crowd met them outside the Jaffa gate. Watson formally accepted the surrender and returned to his headquarters, only to learn that the divisional commander, Major-General John Shea, a Bengal Lancer, was on his way to take the surrender instead. Watson therefore rode back to Jerusalem with the keys and asked the mayor to wait for General Shea.
Shea arrived by car not long afterwards and was warmly greeted by a now larger crowd. The mayor once again surrendered the city and he and the general gave short speeches, to loud cheers.
On returning to his headquarters, Shea telegraphed to Allenby: “I have the honour to report that I have this day accepted the surrender of Jerusalem.”
Allenby, however, appreciating that the moral significance of taking Jerusalem was far greater than its military importance, immediately telegraphed back that he would “himself accept the surrender of Jerusalem on the 11th inst”. Shea again returned the keys to the mayor, and two days later Allenby made his pointedly humble entry. It was a gesture not lost on the Arabs, who had seen the Kaiser enter the city on a white horse during his visit to the Holy Land 19 years before.
Although it would be another ten months before the whole of Palestine was occupied, the fall of Jerusalem was indeed a fillip to British morale. In one respect Britain’s troubles here were just beginning, because there were conflicting promises to be reconciled. Grand Sharif Hussein ibn Ali al-Hashimi, the guardian of the holy city of Mecca, had been given to understand that by siding with Britain and the western Allies against Constantinople, he would win unity and independence for the Arabs at the end of the war. In particular, London would recognise the independence of a united Arab state comprising the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, including all of Palestine.
However, in May 1916 Britain, France and Russia had reached a secret agreement in which the largest part of Palestine was to be “internationalised”, and in subsequent developments a secret letter by Arthur Balfour, the secretary of state for foreign affairs, to the British Zionist Baron de Rothschild promised support for the establishment in Palestine of a “national home” for the Jewish people. The Balfour Declaration would become one of the future League of Nations’ first and thorniest problems.
To the high command on the Western Front, Palestine was a sideshow, because it occupied few Germans. Only in France and Flanders could Germany be beaten, because that was where Germany’s strength lay (although not, of course, its weakness). Yet how was the German army to be beaten after three years of failed offensives? General Émile Fayolle, who had been appointed to command the French central army group when Philippe Pétain was made commander-in-chief, before being sent to Italy in the wake of Caporetto, confided bleakly to his diary: “How the devil can we finish this war?”
There were other voices suggesting that the allies — in particular Britain — could not do so without self-defeating losses, and therefore should not try to end the war by force of arms. The most compelling of the advocates for a negotiated peace was the Marquess of Lansdowne, who as foreign secretary in 1904 had overseen the “Entente Cordiale” and whom Asquith had brought into his coalition cabinet as minister without portfolio.
In November 1916, as the Somme offensive dragged on with increasing losses, he had put a bleak memorandum before the cabinet, asking: “Are we to continue until we have killed ALL our young men?” He argued that the war would destroy the nation’s vital strength and that peace should therefore be negotiated on the basis of the status quo ante bellum – in other words, without annexations or reparations.
The memorandum was not well received, and when Lloyd George became prime minister the next month, Lansdowne was quietly dropped from the cabinet.
For many months he continued to try to persuade his former colleagues of his argument, before deciding to mount a public campaign. He invited the editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson, to publish a letter outlining his proposals for a negotiated peace, but Dawson decided that publication was not in the national interest. Lansdowne then offered the letter to The Daily Telegraph, which published it on November 29, 1917:
“We are not going to lose this war, but its prolongation will spell ruin for the civilised world, and an infinite addition to the load of human suffering which already weighs upon it . . . We do not desire the annihilation of Germany as a great power . . . We do not seek to impose upon her people any form of government other than that of their own choice . . . We have no desire to deny Germany her place among the great commercial communities of the world.”
The letter was almost universally condemned as “a deed of shame”. It was also probably unrealistic, for later research suggested that the German government’s minimum peace terms would have been incompatible with Lansdowne’s proposals, and that Berlin would have summarily rejected them. Field Marshal Haig, for one, countered by saying that the prospects for 1918 were “excellent”.
If Haig’s prediction was necessarily confident — he had the morale of an army to maintain — it was nevertheless disingenuous. On December 28 he would write in his diary of his first proper meeting with General John J (“Black Jack”) Pershing, the commander-in-chief of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF). Haig told him that, expecting a huge German offensive to be mounted in the spring, the “crisis of the war would be reached in April”, and he had one question for Pershing: how might the AEF help?
What Haig could not yet have appreciated, however, was that there was soon to be a sea change in the Allied direction of the war. On November 16 Georges Clémenceau, at 76 still the most dynamic of all French politicians — he was not known as “the Tiger” for nothing — became prime minister. From an office in the war ministry, rather than the Matignon, the premier’s traditional residence, “Le Tigre” declared his policy in the simplest of terms: “Je fais la guerre” – “I [intend to] make war.”
He had once said that war was too important to be left to the generals, and he was now determined that he (and Lloyd George) would direct the strategy in the year ahead.