Photo Friday (vol. LXVII) [zig-zag edition]

I mentioned a few months ago that I have been photographing WWI war graves in Beer Sheva as part of a volunteer project with the British War Graves Commission. 

As I started seeing the names and dates on the headstones I realized that a good portion of the British, Welsh, New Zealand and Australian soldiers buried in this one cemetery had died within a period of about a week to ten days.  This piqued my curiosity and led me to start researching what had happened between the last week of October and the first week of November in 1917 in the sleepy Ottoman outpost of Beer Sheva.

If you want to read about the battle for Beer Sheva, you can go read my previous post in which I have quoted a couple of gripping accounts... especially about the last great mounted charge in history by 800 brave Australians which ultimately turned the tide of the battle and captured Beer Sheva.

Since that time I have been poking around on the outskirts of Beer Sheva in my spare time, looking for any remnants of the Turkish fortified positions and trenches that the British and Anzac troops had found so formidable.

During this time, I also got an email from a Captain in the Australian Army stationed with the Multinational Forces in Sinai who had seen my previous post and asked if I could help set up a visit to Beer Sheva for him and his men to be able to explore this shining bit of Australian military history.  I readily agreed.

Before bringing all of his soldiers, this Aussie Captain and his unit Sargent made a pilot trip to join me in Beer Sheva and the three of us went exploring to the south west of the city in search of the Turkish positions.

Unfortunately we seem to have been looking in the wrong place because the desert refused to give up her secrets so easily.

But with the impending visit of a large group of Australian soldiers looming, I spent some time with a local historian and he explained to me where he had first seen the remains of Turkish trenches back in the 1950s before all the building and urban expansion had taken place.  He explained that some of them should still be just outside the current city limits and gave me detailed instructions as to how to get there.

Sure enough, the moment I turned off the main road near an IDF base and went a few hundred meters down a dirt track, an imposing ridge rose up in front of me... and across the top of the ridge was the unmistakable remains of a network of trenches.

The funny thing is, in the WWI era maps of the Battle of Beer Sheva, the Turkish defensive lines are depicted as zig-zag lines.

 

It never occurred to me that this was more than some cartographer's way of showing a specific feature... and that this was actually how the trenches were dug! 

Well guess what?  The trenches are drawn that way for a reason:

When I got back from exploring the old Turkish trenches I did another Internet search and lo and behold, I found a picture of Turkish soldiers in a trench outside of Beer Sheva (it could even be the same trench I visited), and if you look closely the trench is zig-zaged.

This makes perfect sense if you think about it.  If the trenches were straight an enemy soldier could jump in at one end and fire down the entire length of the trench.  Likewise, if a lucky artillery shell fell into the trench, it would spread shrapnel down the entire length if not for the zig-zag design.

That's it for today... Off to the local cherry festival with the kids.