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1 EASTWARD BOUND In September 1915, Private A. S. Benbow experienced perhaps the most exciting day of his young life. He had worked for London Assurance in Pall Mall before his Yeomanry unit had been mobilized. Marching through the streets of Liverpool, he was on his way to a foreign land. His memory of that moment was that "a lot of people had gathered on either side of the road and many were in tears as we marched (or rather staggered ) along; one old woman, I remember, called out 'God bless you all and bring you back soon.' Gaining the dockside at last we were awed at the mighty size of the good ship we were to travel on, and almost leaping with excitement up the long gangway we found ourselves (for the first time for many of us) on board an ocean going liner." As his liner, the White Star Olympic, left the dock and moved toward the open sea, "all liners in dock and the river, the ferry boats passing up and down and in fact every ship with enough steam up let go with their sirens in farewell to the men going abroad, many of whom, we knew, would never come back."1 Benbow and the other members of "D" Squadron of the West Kent Yeomanry were uncertain of their destination, but they discovered soon enough that they were destined to fight Turks. Not surprisingly, many of these young soldiers who had never been on foreign soil before had an Arabian Nights image of Turks. Captain T. H. Chamberlain, 1/lst Berkshire Yeomanry, who fought at Gallipoli before serving in Palestine, discovered that his men "had heard of the Turks but few had ever seen one—some had vague memories of a picture in a school book showing a large dark man, bare chested, large muscles and an enormous sword."2 Just before Britain's entry into the war, Turkey had concluded a secret treaty with Berlin. Within days of this agreement, two German warships , the Goeben and the Breslau, anchored at Constantinople in clear 2 Hell in the Holy Land violation of international law. Despite the presence of these enemy warships , London tried to keep Turkey neutral. The Turks, however, edged toward war. Turkish leaders, egged on by the German Military Mission (which had arrived in Turkey the previous year) prepared plans to attack both the Russians and British. On October 29, the Goeben and Breslau, now a part of the Turkish navy and renamed, respectively, Sultan Selim Yanuz and Midilli, attacked Russian installations. Russia declared war against Turkey on November 2; Britain followed suit three days later. Turkey responded by invoking a jihad, or holy war against the infidels. The emergence of this Turko-German threat to the British Empire came at a time when the war was going disastrously for the British Regular Army. Dispatched to the Continent, the British Expeditionary Force found itself in the path of a massive German flanking movement through Belgium and into northern France, the so-called Schlieffen Plan. British losses in the retreat from Mons and in the ensuing battles were horrendous and beyond anything that the War Office had anticipated. The question that demanded an immediate answer was, how could the War Office field the necessary forces to maintain its position in France and also defend the Empire against the global threat posed by the TurkoGerman alignment?3 Prewar reforms of the military had created two British forces: a professional army (the Regulars) and a home force (the Territorials). In 1914, the Territorial Force consisted of fourteen formed infantry divisions and fifty-three voluntary mounted regiments called the Yeomanry. Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, was leery of these summer and weekend soldiers, who represented the amateur tradition in British warfare. His study of the U.S. Civil War led him to conclude that the hastily raised American armies had represented little more than armed mobs with little cohesiveness and scant knowledge of the art of war. Dismissing the Territorials as "a town clerks army," he feared that they promised to be no better. Indeed, the Territorials, in the words of A. J. Smithers, "always seemed something like a social club with sporting and military overtones,"4 especially in the Yeomanry and in the London units, which were largely composed of white-collar workers. Not surprisingly, a gulf existed between many career officers and newly minted Territorial officers. When the Territorials were mobilized in 1914...

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