At dusk on October 30, 1917 hundreds of troopers from the Australian Light Horse regiments stole away from the British rail-head at Gaza to outflank the vital Turkish defences at Beersheba. After a 50 kilometre desert night-march they were in position at dawn.
Ninety years later their successors, 50 mounted men and women from the Australian Light Horse Association, are beginning to understand what the troopers must have gone through even before the first shot was fired.
By noon on Saturday - half way through the first of three days of 16 kilometre stages - the heat and dust were making themselves known.
"I think we've realised the huge amount of stuff they carried," said Deryn Binnie, grand-daughter of General Henry Chauvel, the commander of the mainly Australian mounted corps which captured Beersheba.
Mounted on horses and ponies from Israeli riding stables, the latter-day light horsemen are wearing First World War-style twill uniforms, complete with slouch hats and leather ammunition bandoliers, and are seated on replica military saddles.
Yet their forebears - many are descended from Light Horse veterans - also carried service rifles, ammunition, grenades and other weapons, as well as a day's water, three days' fighting rations and 19 pounds of fodder for their mounts.
"I don't know how they did it," confided Mrs Binnie. "We've got some serious horsemen on this trip, but there's only one or two of us who are still carrying all the kit they started with."
If you close one eye to block out the Israeli military radar installations on the horizon, or the tower blocks of troubled Gaza to the rear, the scene in Wadi Besor could have been set 90 years ago.
In single-file, at walking pace, the khaki-clad figures picked their way along the same stony trail that the Light Horsemen took in 1917. At times the only sounds to be heard were the gentle tapping of hooves and the breath of the horses, and the not-so-gentle voice of parade commander Frank Patterson, a former Regimental Sergeant Major from Queensland, shouting the commands.
For a group of riders whose association with horse-soldiering was at best ancestral the Australians made a remarkably neat job of parading in three ranks, and dressing themselves in sections of four.
Kathleen Margaret Curnow, 48, a molecular biologist from Balmain, is making the trip with her father Ken, 75, owner of a pony club in Wirlinga NSW. Ken's father Rupert joined the 8th Australian Light Horse shortly after the Battle of Beersheba and was wounded during the later drive to Damascus.
"It's been incredible," she said. "We are a group of people who wouldn't normally get together but we've got this common interest. The idea of being able to do it together with my father was amazing."
Bill Hyman, 47, formerly of New South Wales but now living in England, is the grandson of Major Eric Hyman, who won the Distinguished Service Order for commanding the 12th Light Horse from the Hunter Valley when it lunged, along with the 4th Light Horse from Victoria, to seize the vital wells at Beersheba.
The Australians plan to re-enact the charge - one of the last successful mounted charges in western military history - over the same ground on its 90 anniversary on Wednesday.
"To be doing this here, sometimes I have to hold back the tears, it's so emotional, to be here and wondering what was going through his mind at the time," said Mr Wyman, himself an ex-serviceman in the Territorial Army.
"I was two when my grandfather died. I have memories that have been told to me and through photographs. The one memory I do have is picking strawberries with him in his front garden." And at that point he did have to stop talking for a while.
(But that about the last successful cavalry charge is Disputed due to technicalities)
