Meanwhile the Australian Mounted Division and the Yeomanry Division, on the east, pushing their tired horses slowly after the retreating Turks, advanced a few miles, and located the left half of the enemy's line running from Kustine, roughly through Balin and Berkusie, to the neighbourhood of Beit Jibrin.
The headquarters of the Australian Division was at El Faluje on the 10th and 11th. Shortly after its arrival there, the headman of the village, which is the seat of a _Nahie_,[12] came to pay his respects to the British General. After a few polite compliments, he asked anxiously if we had any men from his village among our prisoners. We, of course, could not tell, as all prisoners were sent back as soon as possible after being taken. The old man remarked sadly that he had not had much hope of finding any of them, as he believed they had all gone to the Caucasus. About two years ago, he said, a Turkish battalion had suddenly arrived at the village one morning, and carried off 500 of his young men to be pressed into the Army, and from that day no word had been heard from any of them.
All through the campaign we heard similar accounts of Turkish recruiting methods. The Turks always sent their conscripts to fight in a theatre of war as far removed from their native country as possible, in order to discourage desertion. In spite of this, their soldiers were constantly deserting, either to find a ready hiding-place in some neighbouring town or village, or to give themselves up to us. So serious had the question become in the Turkish Army that there was a standing reward of £5 Turkish offered to all natives for delivering a deserter to the Army authorities. An organised propaganda was also carried on by the officers, by means of lectures to their men, the chief feature of which was a description of the tortures and hideous deaths inflicted on their prisoners by British soldiers. These lectures were illustrated by pictures supplied by Berlin. Our reply to this propaganda was to scatter from our aeroplanes hundreds of handbills over the Turkish lines. These sheets showed, on one side, the signed photograph of a fat and smiling Turk, one of our prisoners, with an autograph letter from him, inviting his friends to join him, and, on the other side, a bill of fare of the prisoners' camps that must have made the hungry Turkish soldiers positively slobber!