Needless to say, if a cavalry commander considers that he can carry out the task assigned to him without the help of his guns, and time presses, he is perfectly justified in pushing on at once with his cavalry, and leaving the guns to follow as best they can, as was done, quite properly, by the 5th Cavalry Division when crossing the Carmel Range in September 1918.
One of the greatest difficulties with which the cavalry had to contend throughout the operations arose from the constant struggle to keep the horses sufficiently fit to carry on. This is, of course, always the case in war time, but the difficulties in the Syrian campaign were probably greater than in any previous one in which the British Army had taken part.
_Climate._--To begin with, the climate encountered included every extreme of heat, cold, drought, and rain. For the first three weeks from the commencement of the 1917 campaign, the weather was extremely hot, the temperature running up to 110° in the shade. For two days, November the 10th and 11th, matters were rendered worse by a burning hot east wind, which raised clouds of suffocating dust. Then the rains broke, and, for the next six weeks, constant wet, deep mud and piercing cold winds were the order of the day. After a short period of good weather, the cavalry moved to the Jordan Valley, where they spent the summer of 1918, under conditions of heat and discomfort which have already been described. Finally, in the following winter, the horses found themselves sometimes standing in six inches of snow.[28]
_Condition._--In the second place, the health of the horses was in an unsatisfactory state when the cavalry operations commenced.
Whatever their outward appearance might have been, and it varied considerably in different units, their internal condition was by no means good. The great bulk of them had taken part in the advance across Sinai, and had been in Egypt for a long time prior to that. Two years of unaccustomed and indifferent forage, added to the large quantities of sand they had consumed in their food while in the desert, had more or less permanently injured their digestive organs. It is true that sand colic, that scourge of the desert, had almost ceased to trouble the force by the end of the summer of 1917, but the dire effects of the sand were evident in every post-mortem. In a large number of cases the membrane of the stomach and intestines was freely marked with the scars of old ulcers, and in some instances large portions of it had sloughed away. Sand muzzles were almost universally employed up to the commencement of the advance on Beersheba, but it was impossible to prevent sand getting into the forage; indeed quantities of it had been purposely placed there by the dishonest native merchants, in order to increase the weight of bales and sacks.