Meanwhile the cavalry, pushing through the gap near the sea
where Cceur de Lion's Western knights defeated Saladin in Septem- ber, 1191, rode hard for the north, accompanied by armoured cars. By midday they had forced their way through the retreating Turks to Liktera, nineteen miles from their starting-point. Here they separated. One body, riding northward past the fort of Carmel and then bearing north-east across the Haifa Railway, made direct for Nazareth. At sunrise on Friday week they climbed the hill on which the town stands, surrounded the place, and captured it after a few hours' sharp fighting. General Liman von Sanders, the German-Turkish Commander-in-Chief, had fled the night before. The main cavalry force struck north-eastward from Liktera through the pass to Megiddo, on the Plain of Esdraelon. Emerging from the pass on Friday morning, the Indian Lancers in advance had the rare pleasure of charging a Turkish battalion, whose numerous machine-guns did not save it from instant destruction. Then the cavalry rode on to the railway and captured the vital junction of the Haifa and Gaza lines at Afuleh, with all its garrison and rolling- stock. Still unsatisfied, the horsemen continued their course eastward along the railway to Beisan, in the Jordan Valley, and the neighbouring ford, and thence detached a. force to occupy Jisr el Mujamia, further north, where the railway to Damascus crosses the Jordan. This detachment rode seventy miles in the two days to fulfil its task of closing the last outlet from Southern Galilee for the beaten Turk.
