aesar and
Herod its prosperity and fame increased. In succeeding centuries
Gaza's commerce flourished under the Greeks, who founded schools
famous for rhetoric and philosophy, till the Mahomedan wave swept
over the land in the first half of the seventh century, when the town
became a shadow of its former self, though it continued to exist as a
centre for trade. The Crusaders made their influence felt, and many
are the traces of their period in this ancient city, but Askalon
always had more Crusader support. Napoleon's attack on Gaza found
Abdallah's army in a very different state of preparedness from von
Kress's Turkish army. Nearly all Abdallah's artillery was left behind
in a gun park at Jaffa owing to lack of transport, and though he had
a numerically superior force he did not like Napoleon's dispositions,
and retreated when Kleber moved up the plain to pass between Gaza and
the sea, and the cavalry advanced east of the Mound of Hebron, or Ali
Muntar, as we know the hill up which Samson is reputed to have carried
the gates and bar of Gaza. For nearly a century and a quarter since
Napoleon passed forwards and backwards through the town, Gaza pursued
the arts of peace in the lethargic spirit which suits the native
temperament, but in eight months of 1917 it was the cockpit of strife
in the Middle East, and there was often crammed into one day as
much fighting energy as was shown in all the battles of the past
thirty-five centuries, Napoleon's campaign included.

Fortunately after the battles of March and April nearly all the
civilian population left the town for quieter quarters. Some of them
on returning must have had difficulty in identifying their homes. In
the centre of the town, where bazaars radiated from the quarter of
which the Great Mosque was the hub, the houses were a mass of stones
and rubble, and the narrow streets and tortuous byways were filled
with fallen walls and roofs. The Great Mosque had entirely lost its
beauty. We had shelled it because its minaret, one of those delicately
fashioned spires which, seen from a distance, lead a traveller to
imagine a native town in the East to be arranged on an artistic and
orderly plan, was used as a Turkish observation post, and the Mosque
itself as an ammunition store. I am told our guns were never laid on
to this objective until there was an accident within it which exploded
the ammunition. Be that as it may, there was ample justification for
shelling the Mosqu