would not find himself in the front line at this stage – perhaps because of the malaria that infected many of the men, his battalion was assigned a logistics support role. The men of the 1st and 6th Leinsters were given an unglamorous but vital task – organizing camel convoys to carry water for the men and horses engaged in combat. Each camel carried two fifteen-gallon water tanks known as ‘fanatis’. After the capture of Beersheba, the Leinsters moved up to the town itself. The historian of the Leinster Regiment has left a vivid account of horses almost mad with thirst at Beersheba, and being dragged away by exhausted men after they had the ‘briefest drink’ at the troughs.19
The 6th Leinsters was placed in reserve behind a small hill, as Allenby’s forces continued the offensive on the Turkish positions. Some of the Leinsters had a bird’s eye view of the fighting from observation positions on the hill. When the Turks were forced to retreat, the Leinsters moved up to occupy the Turkish trenches. On 5 November the two Leinster battalions joined the advance on Jerusalem, some forty miles northeast of Beersheba. It was a campaign of movement and manoeuvre, much different from the more static trench warfare that Dalton had experienced on the Western Front. They marched through hill country, bivouacking at night. Sometimes they came under sniper fire from the Turks, who were supported by German units. In one incident Dalton’s superior, Lieutenant Colonel John Craske, commander of the 6th Leinsters, was wounded by a Turkish marksman.20 The 29th Brigade with its two Leinster battalions was in support during some significant operations, including the capture of the Hareira Redoubt, a Turkish fortification, by 2nd Royal Irish Fusiliers of the 31st Brigade.
Turkish forces pulled out of the symbolically important city of Jerusalem, clearing the way for Allenby’s forces to occupy the city. In a letter to a relative in the US, Dalton referred, with a note of pride, to the capture of Jerusalem on 9 December. He said that a couple of weeks ago they had taken Jerusalem and tomorrow ‘we are going to do a big offensive, and I hope to come out of it alive’. He said he considered himself ‘really lucky’ to be alive after the amount of war he had seen.21 The Ottoman Turks had captured Jerusalem in 1517. Now the city where Christ once walked was in the hands of the British – and an Irish division had played a role in its capture.
Bad weather delayed Allenby’s next offensive to push the Ottoman Army further north. The 10th Division had to suffer through a bleak, rain-sodden Christmas in the district of Beit Sira, about twenty-five miles northwest of Jerusalem.22 On St. Stephen’s Day, the division attacked the Zeitun Ridge, a well-fortified Turkish position protected by numerous machine gun emplacements. Attacking troops had to negotiate steep ground and deep ravines or wadis. Dalton’s battalion was fortunate. When they advanced to occupy a position at Shabuny, the 6th Leinsters found the Turks had fled, under enfilade fire from the 1st Leinsters and the 5th Connaught Rangers.
On 4 January 1918 the 6th Leinsters moved into an area around Suffa, northwest of Jerusalem, occupying part of the long line held by the Corps, and would stay there for some weeks, living among the stony, barren hills. Dalton was among those who lived in tents. With the occasional heavy rain it was not the ideal time to camp out. The work of the battalion included road making, disrupted by heavy falls of rain. Those not employed on road work were engaged in training.23 One of the roles of the battalion was to repel any counter-attack by the Turks. Dalton, carried out extended reconnaissance patrols on horseback, shadowed by covering parties. Dalton gained considerable experience of negotiating his way on horseback through rough, rocky terrain and the local wadis.
Lieutenant Dalton’s role was that of Assistant Adjutant, engaged in mainly administrative work, such as courts martial arrangements, and drawing maps of the positions held by the various units in the area. He was, apparently, an efficient typist, pounding away on a typewriter and producing circulars for the battalion.24 From mid-January until the following April, Dalton kept a diary, written in small neat handwriting in a military notebook, using just one side of each page.25 A picture emerges from his writings of a rather boyish figure, who regularly writes home to ‘Mamma’ and ‘Pappa’. He was delighted to get letters from his parents, and also from his younger brothers Charlie and Brendan, and from friends. Like many a soldier at the front he read and re-read these precious letters. He was generous in sending a ‘check’ (he uses the American spelling) to his parents to buy presents ‘for the boys’. Apart from writing to members of his family he also wrote to a young woman whom he calls ‘Kittens’ – possibly his childhood sweetheart Alice whom he would later marry. There were other female friends with whom he corresponded – Mai Broderick and May Doyle, as well as a person called Marnie.26 From his diary and from other evidence, Dalton emerges as a prolific letter writer, corresponding with relatives as far away as America.
For a young soldier in the desert hills, far away from home, letters assume enormous importance – the writing of them and the receiving of them. Dalton in his diary makes careful note of letters written and received. Some letters reached him literally months after being posted. He was often homesick, and felt particularly down or even irritable when the mail arrived and there was no letter for him. At one stage he remarked in his diary, ‘I don’t think I would feel so fed up as I do, if I could only see the dear folks at home occasionally…’ However, he also reflects that ‘there are fellows out here who have not been home for two years’.27 Although Dalton was extremely busy at times, he also found spare time to write letters, read novels, or kick a football around. He tried to learn foreign languages but gave up Arabic and Russian as too difficult. To get photographs of loved ones or presents from home in the post was a great morale booster. He was delighted when plum pudding arrived and he shared it with his fellow officers. ‘It was simply topping and everybody was pleased.’ On another occasion he received the Christmas edition of Our Boys, the magazine produced by the Christian Brothers for their students – an event significant enough to be mentioned in his diary.
Dalton was diligent in fulfilling his religious duties, and attended 07:30 Mass every Sunday morning. He was still in his teenage years and his boyish exuberance emerges occasionally from entries in his diary – he notes that he cut the nose of the Padre, Father Burns, while they were playing a game of ‘bombing each other’. There were times when he felt very down, and times also when he felt unwell or suffering from fever – possibly due to malaria.
To compensate for the homesickness, there were interesting sights to see. Jerusalem was not too far away, and was one of the places that soldiers stationed in the region liked to visit on leave. An entry in Dalton’s diary indicates that he was particularly intrigued by the sights of the Holy City – he mentions doing a sketch of the Damascus Gate, which he sent to his father.28 (In another entry he mentions sending drawings to his brother Charlie, probably the next best thing to sending photographs of local scenes. Another drawing, a self-portrait of himself in uniform and wearing a sun helmet, survives in his papers in the National Library.)
While Dalton’s battalion was not engaged in combat at this period, there were regular reminders of the war. One day he saw an aerial fight between a German and a British aircraft – apparently the latter brought down the former without too much difficulty. In the latter part of January, Dalton received a grim reminder of the threat posed by German submarines to allied troopships, when 2nd Lieutenant O’Mahony joined the battalion – he was one of the survivors when the troopship Aragon was sunk by a German submarine outside the port of Alexandria on 30 December 1917, causing the deaths of more than 600. Dalton got a first-hand account of this horrific event from O’Mahony.29
There was a social side to a young officer’s life in the hills. Visits were made to other battalions and regiments, and an officer going to Jerusalem or Cairo on leave would often bring back presents or souvenirs for his associates. Dalton notes that Bill Cooke returned from Cairo ‘with a good supply of cigarettes for me’, and Major Graham returned from Jerusalem with souvenirs for his colleagues. ‘Mullins got a lovely book of pressed flowers. Petrie got a lovely little box of polished olive wood.’ Dalton himself received from Graham several postcards ‘which I intend to send home today’. Lt. Colonel John Craske, the veteran battalion commander, seemed to take a paternal interest in the progress of his subordinate officers, and Dalton notes that Craske attended a dinner to celebrate the award to Captain Monaghan of the Military Cross.30 There was one officer whom Dalton disliked, Major King, with whom he had arguments on those two ever-sensitive topics –