Charge at Agagia

At about 3 p.m. on 26 February 1916 three squadrons of the Dorset Yeomanry, volunteer cavalry from the southern English county of Dorset, set off at a gallop against the rearguard of the forces of the Senussi order, which were retreating across the desert from Agagia, some fifteen miles south-east of Sidi Barrani. A few hours earlier Brigadier-General Henry Lukin’s South African infantry had driven the enemy from the fortified dunes. This time those fleeing did not manage to slip away. The charge broke their column, and the commander of the order’s forces on the coast, the Ottoman officer Ja’far al-Askari, was taken prisoner.

The British remembered the previous battles of this campaign well. At Wadi Majid in December and at Halazin in January their infantry had taken the order’s positions, but the cavalry had not been in time to cut off the retreat and the enemy had escaped into the desert. Lukin had therefore kept the yeomanry on the western flank since the morning and told its commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Hugh Souter, to be ready for a pursuit. Souter, a regular cavalry officer of the Indian Army, decided not to attack among the dunes, where trenches and wire might be waiting, but to ride parallel to the line of retreat, about a kilometre from it. As he wrote in his report, at about 2 p.m. he saw the whole enemy column, stretched over a mile and a half: in front camels and baggage trains covered by Bedouin, behind and on the flanks the order’s regular soldiers, the muhafiziya, with machine guns. A squadron of the Buckinghamshire Hussars rode off in pursuit of a small camel convoy and could not be recalled, so Souter attacked with the Dorsets alone. Before the attack he dismounted his men one last time so that the horses could get their breath back and the officers could look over the ground.

The regiment moved off in two lines at a steady gallop, under fire from three machine guns, which was accurate at first and then increasingly erratic. Fifty yards from the enemy Souter gave the order to charge, and the riders crashed with a shout into the rearguard. It had held firm until then, but now scattered before the sabres, and the Bedouin fled into the desert. In the middle of the enemy line Souter’s horse fell under him and, as the colonel wrote, chance had it that its last strides threw him to the ground a few metres from Ja’far himself. Souter, Second Lieutenant John Blaksley and Private Brown, who had also lost their horses, were for a moment alone among about fifty enemy soldiers. The matter was settled only by the arrival of a machine-gun section. The wounded Ja’far and two other Ottoman officers who had not taken to flight were captured. His companion, Nuri Bey, Enver Pasha’s half-brother, managed to escape, although for some time he was thought to have been killed.

The victory was costly. According to the British official history, the Dorset Yeomanry lost 32 killed and 26 wounded, and Lukin’s whole column 184 men. One of the squadrons lost all its officers, and its men, left without leadership, pressed the pursuit too far. The British estimated enemy losses at about 500 men, and took 39 prisoners, 60 camels laden with dates and 40,000 rounds of ammunition. The official history judged the charge the most important event of the whole campaign: without it the enemy would have escaped once more. Souter received the Distinguished Service Order, Blaksley the Military Cross and Brown the Distinguished Conduct Medal.

Ja’far al-Askari, an Arab from Baghdad who for a year had trained the order’s forces and commanded them in successive battles, was sent to prison in Cairo. Without him Sayyid Ahmad’s forces offered the British no further serious resistance. On 28 February Lukin entered Sidi Barrani unopposed, and in mid-March the British recovered Sollum. Ja’far himself later changed sides: he joined the army of the Sharif of Mecca, and after the war he was prime minister of Iraq.