In his book on the charge at Beersheba Mr. Daley has crafted a superb account of the Great War in the Levant, the Australian role in the campaign, the massacre at Surafend, and the enduring legacy of Beersheba in Australian and Israeli history. Mr. Daley has made an admirable effort to not just describe the battle but its place in the larger campaign and subsequent century, digging through archives, interviewing surviving family members, and speaking with scholars and enthusiasts.

The military portion is competently done. The actions of the various UK and Commonwealth forces are all given their due and the various tactical and strategic decisions are examined. Oddly enough, the battle section was a bit difficult to get through, largely because the various players were difficult to distinguish between. I, perhaps unfairly, compared it to Mark Bowden's book on Hue where each actor, although they share similar backgrounds, is distinct in the narrative. Here it was simply an Australian Soldier with a familiar name did something, while another Australian soldier with a familiar name did something else. It was just a bit difficult to invest in the narrative.

However, the rest of the book was superb. The reader is introduced to surviving relatives of the light horsemen, often complaining about Colonel Lawrence (of Arabia), religious enthusiasts convinced that the battle and the Australians' role in it was God's divine will to help establish Israel, to Israeli generals who recognize the success of the charge but downplay it in the overall campaign, let alone as a pivotal moment in the founding of Israel.

An important feature of this book is the amount of time that it devotes to the massacre of Arabs at Surafend. Mr. Daley studies the various descriptions, often brushing it off in a line or two of text, as well as General Allenby's verbal reprimand of the Australian light horse. In this work it can certainly not be said that Mr. Daley has brushed over Surafend, it gets four or five chapters devoted to the actions of the ANZACs and other British and Commonwealth soldier both during the massacre and in the subsequent years of brushing the atrocity under the rug.

Overall, this was an excellent and in depth work on this much romanticized, though often forgotten, battle of the First World War, from its place in the larger campaign to it's legacy stretching a century to the modern day.

While I was expecting this book to be a straight-up history of the Light Horse regiments and the attack on the Turkish stronghold of Beersheba, it turned out to be much more. Perhaps half of it is devoted to Daley's efforts to research the story. That is valuable insight. We learn about the knowledge--or lack of it--of the history in Australia. And the honor that the Light Horse is held in in Israel. And the people Daley (and earlier historians) interviewed to put together the history. Fully a quarter of the book is about the massacre of a Bedouin village by troopers of the Light Horse at the end of the war, and the efforts to erase knowledge of that atrocity from the history of British imperial involvement in the Middle East.

Beersheba is thoroughly researched and well written. If someone is expecting just military history, he will be either disappointed or pleasantly surprised, depending on his tastes, by the secondary story of Daley's journey to ferret out and tell the complete story.

Paul Daley’s ‘Beersheba’ was first published in 2009 and now appears in a new edition to mark the centenary of the Australian Light Horse cavalry charge which successfully overran entrenched Turkish infantry positions at Beersheba (or Be’er Sheva) in Palestine on 31 October 1917.

Beersheba and the campaign of which it formed part are significant because central to the debate about whether the increased lethality of firepower by the time of the Great War had rendered cavalry obsolete.

Paul Daley, the journalist who wrote this book, Tony Wright who wrote its foreword and the book’s publisher all make great play of the claim that Beersheba is “dormant in the national consciousness”, which is ironic given that Wright writes that he first became interested in the subject as the result of being tasked with interviewing a survivor of the charge as Simon Wincer’s epic 1987 Australian film on the subject “was about to hit the cinemas”.

Beersheba certainly lacks the high profile in the history of Australian arms enjoyed by, say, Gallipoli and the Somme. Daley and Wright suggest that this was because it was not witnessed by a war correspondent but it might also have something to do with the fact that precisely because Beersheba was a success it does not fit neatly into the prevailing view of the Great War as a bloody exercise in futility.

Some readers, like myself, may tire of Daley’s lengthy accounts of revisiting the battlefields, his conversational style and his habit of quoting from the sources at considerable length, whilst acknowledging that he deserves praise for helping to raise popular consciousness of Beersheba, for including a chapter on the ANZAC massacre at Surafend and for considering the extent to which commemoration of the engagement is sometimes politicised.

It is a moot point whether even in 2009 Daley’s characterisation of Beersheba as “a forgotten Australian victory” was justified. It is certainly not true now.