e. I went in to examine the structure a few hours
after the Turks had been compelled to evacuate the town, and whilst
they were then shelling it with unpleasant severity. Amid the wrecked
marble columns, the broken pulpit, the torn and twisted lamps and
crumbling walls were hundreds of thousands of rounds of small-arms
ammunition, most of it destroyed by explosion. A great shell had cut
the minaret in half and had left exposed telephone wires leading
direct to army headquarters and to the Turkish gunners' fire control
station. Most of the Mosque furniture and all the carpets had
been removed, but a few torn copies of the Koran, some of them in
manuscript with marginal notes, lay mixed up with German newspapers
and some typical Turkish war propaganda literature. That Mosque, which
Saladin seized from the Crusaders and turned from a Christian into
a Mahomedan place of worship, was unquestionably used for military
purposes, and the Turks cared as little for its religious character or
its venerable age as they did for the mosque on Nebi Samwil, where the
remains of the Prophet Samuel are supposed to rest. Their stories of
the trouble taken to avoid military contact with holy places and sites
were all bunkum and eyewash. They would have fought from the walls of
the Holy City and placed machine-gun nests in the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre and the Mosque of Omar if they had thought it would spare
them the loss of Jerusalem.

Gaza had, as I have said, been turned into a fortress with a mass of
field works, in places of considerable natural strength. If our force
had been on the defensive at Gaza the Germans would not have attacked
without an army of at least three times our strength. It is doubtful
if the Turks put as much material in use on Gallipoli as they did
here. Their trenches were deeply cut and were protected by an immense
amount of wire. In the sand-dune area they used a vast quantity of
sandbags, and they met the shortage of jute stuffs by making small
sacks of bedstead hangings and curtains which, in the dry heat of the
summer, wore very well. Looking across No Man's Land one could easily
pick out a line of trenches by a red, a vivid blue, or a saffron
sandbag. The Turkish dug-outs were most elaborate places of security.
The excavators had gone down into the hard earth well beneath the
deep strata of sand, and they roofed these holes with six, eight, and
sometimes ten layers of palm logs. We had seen these beautifu