The Last Charge of the Australian Light Horse

By Peter Fitzsimons
Published by Hachette
RRP $49.99 in hardback  |  ISBN 9780733646676

On 31st October 1917, as the day’s light faded, the Australian Light Horse, 4^th and 12^th regiments, charged the town of Beersheba, the desperate need for water acting as a spur to their efforts.

Eight hundred men and horses galloped four miles across open country towards the artillery, rifles and machine guns of the Turks occupying the seemingly unassailable town, prompting official war historian Charles Bean to observe that ‘Australians had never ridden any race like this’.

Once in control of the town, new problems emerged including numerous booby traps, one with enough gelignite to have reduced the town to ruins

This, of course, is not the first book to tell the story of the last mounted charge of the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba but in the true storyteller style we’ve come to expect from Fitzsimons, he takes us into the centre of the action.

It is, after all, a tale of ordinary men doing extraordinary things.

Notable characters include writers Banjo Paterson and Ion Idriess plus hundreds of others whose names have not passed into history. This was a war fought in an ancient land with modern weapons; where the men of the Light Horse were trained in sight of the pyramids, drank in the brothels of Cairo and fought through lands known to them only as names from the Bible.

VERDICT: On the one hand, this book describes a boy’s own adventure that inspired generations. On the other hand, there was a price to pay for the grieving families of those men who never returned and who lie, forgotten now, in a war grave at Beersheba. It’s a sobering thought to think of the young men, their lives laid waste on the battlefields of a foreign country so far away.

BLOGGER’S NOTE: Throughout Australia, there are families such as mine with faded photographs of a man, in my case a grandfather, mounted, with the famous emu plume in the band of his hat. His name, like others, does not register in the history books. He was a cook, injured in the camp by an exploding mortar. That was how his short time in the Australian Light Horse regiment ended. He was lucky to survive.