Description
Title: Beersheba – A Journey through Australia’s Forgotten War.
Author: Daley, Paul
Condition: Near Mint
Edition: 1st Edition
Publication Date: 2009
ISBN: 9780522855999
Cover: Soft Cover without Dust Jacket – 352 pages.
Comments: In an evocative narrative in the vein of Les Carlyon’s masterpiece, Gallipoli, Beersheba tells a story about a place and its players that’s long overdue for acknowledgement.
It was a glorious triumph of arms for Australian forces, a romantic moment of dash and bravura that stood out in the tragedy of World War I.
Yet it barely registers in Australia’s national consciousness.
In October 1917 members of the 4th Australian Light Horse Brigade took part in what is now known as the ‘last great cavalry charge’. Waving bayonets overhead, they charged across six kilometres of open ground, cheating bombs, shells and bullets before capturing, in a desperate hand-to-hand battle, the Turkish trenches that held the key to the strategic stronghold of Beersheba.
The charge was the last daring act of a day-long fight by combined British forces to capture Beersheba, and also a turning point in Britain’s war against the Ottoman Empire, sending the Turks fleeing north to ultimate defeat.
Yet the story has slipped through the cracks of history.
Journalist Paul Daley’s journey in search of Beersheba takes him from Australia to Israel, from past to present, and from the battlefields to the archives, where he discovers a dark episode in Australian history that sits starkly at odds with the Anzac myth and legend.
For Daley, the Beersheba of then and now comes to take on new meaning.
