Ellwood Memories
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Ellwood: We folded up the Turkish left flank at Beersheba, we were on the move, more or less, all the time and the only time we stood still was while we were waiting for our lines of communication, our supplies to come up.
Turnbull: Tell me, you were saying to me earlier today that it was really the smell of the water that the horses got which played a large part in the Charge.
Ellwood: Oh, only to this extent. They became almost unmanageable. But I can't tell you much about what happened after I was wounded, its only what I hear and what I know. I know what the horses were like after any other stretch without a drink. But I can quite imagine what would happen after they were what 36 hours or something without water, they would be just uncontrollable. But talking about water and smell, on one occasion, chasing the S we were going up towards , we were visiting the different to see if the S was there and all that sort of business, you know, and we were always conditioned and always carried extra water so it would give us enough to go where we had to go and back to our camp or until our supply column came up. On this occasion for some reason or the other we were stretched out as far as we could go and we were looking forward to obtaining water for our horses and ourselves at a certain H or oasis, they called them. And I can remember quite well on this occasion we approached this hod just the horses and everybody anxiously looking for water, well everybody more or less so as they didn't drink their two water bottles full and we smelt the stench from sheep and goat dung and when we got to the wells all the sheep and goat dung around them for years had been raked up an put into the wells and the water smelt...and I don't like saying it...it tasked like nothing and I saw the horses then vomiting the water up and we had to drink it and the horses had to drink it, I'll never forget that. The Bedouin or the Sen or whoever he was had filled the wells up to destroy them you see, not exactly to destroy them but to make them unpalatable, he could have bailed them out afterwards, and we had to, we weren't supposed to, we were supposed to carry enough to cope with our position, but some of us, a number of us and a number of our horses did drink that water and I'll never forget it.
Turnbull: Did a number of men get sick from drinking it.
Ellwood: They vomited it back again a lot of them. And whether it affected them afterwards of course is something I don't know, but it was a nasty experience, believe me, I'll never forget it.
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