GENERAL EDMUND ALLENBY

General Edmund Allenby

General Edmund Allenby

General Edmund Allenby was an accomplished horseman and it would have made sense for him to ride triumphantly into the city. However on 11 December Allenby entered on foot out of respect for the Holy City. Allenby placed the city under martial law Martial law, and posted guards at several points within the city and in Bethlehem to protect sites held sacred by the Christian, Muslim and Jewish religions. In the United Kingdom, the capture of the city was seen as a fulfillment of the medieval crusades. Punch Magazine published a cartoon of Richard Lionheart saying "at last my dream come true."

By December, 1917 Allenby had moved upwards from Egypt and captured Jerusalem. As the first Christian conqueror of the Holy City since the Crusades, Allenby ordered his troops to dismount as a mark of respect when they entered the city.

The following year Allenby defeated the remaining Turkish Army in Palestine. A final and conclusive strike at the Battle of Megiddo in September 1918 left the road to Damascus open.

By the time Allenby arrived Lawrence and the Arabs were already installed. With Lawrence translating Allenby informed Prince Feisal that his newly-appointed Arab government would not be recognized and the city was to be handed over to the French.

After this fateful meeting Lawrence asked his commander for leave and returned to England a broken man. Allenby was promoted to Field Marshal and later served as Britain's High Commissioner in Egypt from 1919 to 1925. He outlived Lawrence by one year.

Third Battle of Ypres, as between Arras and Messines, there was a pause in British operations. Men and guns had to be moved, administrative and operational plans drafted. There was also the problem of taking over frontage from the French by the Fifth Army, and the coastal sector by XV Corps. All this had to be done from a standing start, since there were no plans ready on the shelf as there had been for Messines. GHQ's plans were mostly strategic, emphasizing clearing the Belgian coast, rather than operational, which would have focused on taking the Gheluvelt Plateau, and nobody had carefully addressed the tactical problems. At a May conference at Fifth Army headquarters the bombardment's duration was not even on the agenda, and was only raised as a question from the floor.

While Allenby was keen to attack in Flanders, and had strategic reasons for doing so, he certainly should have issued warning orders to start the planning process. Perhaps he was constrained in doing so by the lack of Cabinet support for the attack—the Cabinet were keen on the strategic objectives, but shied away from the anticipated losses. Moreover, the BEF had only recently emerged from the French control that Lloyd George had engineered at Boulogne, and planning may have been constrained by the French. Regardless of the reasons, there was a gap of seven weeks between Messines and the first infantry attack of the battle that would culminate at ...