the riband with the Military Cross was hung around his neck, Dalton was to bow from the waist down in deference to the King. Thinking about the Easter Rebellion the previous year, he decided not to make the obeisance, and stayed standing ramrod straight in defiance of the court etiquette The moment the last presentation had been made, Dalton bolted from the room and left the palace.16
Dalton was promoted from 2nd Lieutenant to Lieutenant on 1 July 1917, and just over a week later was deployed abroad to Salonika, where allied forces were engaged in hostilities with the Bulgarians. He was now with the 6th Battalion, Leinster Regiment, having been transferred from the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. The Prince of Wales’ Leinster Regiment had its home depot at Crinkill Barracks, Birr, in the Irish midlands, and drew its recruits largely from counties such as Longford, Westmeath, Offaly (King’s County) and Laois (Queen’s County). The regiment had been in the thick of the fighting at Gallipoli.
Bulgaria, which occupied a strategic position in the region, had entered the war on the side of the Central Powers, attacking Serbia in October 1915. The 10th (Irish) Division was among the Allied formations deployed to the region. The 6th and 1st Battalions of the Leinster Regiment were located in the Struma Valley. During his service in Salonika, Lieutenant Dalton, like many other Irish soldiers, contracted malaria. While in a rest camp he encountered a Scotsman who had been a professional golfer. The Scot instilled in Dalton an interest in golf that would develop into a life-long passion.17 However, his first opportunity to test his skills on the green would come in an unlikely place, Egypt, a country not then noted for its golfing facilities.
War in the Middle East
In September 1917, the 10th (Irish) Division moved from Salonika to Egypt for service in the Middle East. The British top brass had decided that it was more urgent to confront the Turks in Palestine than the Bulgarians. It was on 14 September that men from the 6th Leinsters embarked on the steamer Huntsgreen. Five days later, after an uneventful voyage, they arrived at the ancient, bustling port of Alexandria. For Dalton and many of the Leinsters, this would be their first experience of the exotic world of Arabia. It would be an interesting period of service for Dalton, and he would learn about living under canvas in the desert and the rugged hills of the region, and the more mobile nature of the war in the Middle East.
On arrival at Alexandria, the 6th Leinsters boarded trains and travelled by way of Ismailia to Moascar where the battalion set up camp with other elements of the 10th Division. The battalion began a programme of desert route marches along with regular bathing in the salt water lakes of Ismailia which, it was hoped, would help cure the malaria that affected many of the men. Dalton would have first glimpsed the commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF), General Allenby, when the latter came to inspect the camp, with the men of the battalion lining up outside their tents. Then they marched along the Suez Canal, finally reaching Kantara on 2 October, where Dalton and his comrades put their surplus kit in storage. Allenby had been developing and upgrading railway facilities through the Sinai to facilitate the movement of troops to areas close to the front line. Dalton’s battalion moved by train to Rafah, reaching it on 4 October. Training was carried out by the battalion. The water had to be piped from Kantara and was in short supply. Each man was limited strictly to three-quarters of a bottle a day ‘for all purposes’.18
Allenby’s forces moved into position and on 26 October the Third Battle of Gaza began, on the Gaza-Beersheba front. Dalton 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
