British infantry on the march

British infantry on the march, Palestine. Although the Anzac and British mounted troops won most of the public's attention for their daring exploits in the Sinai and Palestine campaigns, neither would have been won without the vital but often overlooked contribution made by the ever reliable British infantry.

The battles around Gaza saw the infantry play a much more prominent role in the fighting than had hitherto been the case as the conditions increasingly came to resemble the trench warfare found on the Western Front. In the Second Battle of Gaza the infantrymen of the 53rd (Welsh) and 54th (East Anglia) divisions suffered appalling casualties in what amounted to a frontal assault on the Ottoman lines, losing 5000 men in a single day.