g as the prepared positions, were
cactus hedges enclosing the West Town's gardens.

From El Arish Redoubt the line ran east again to Mazar trench with
a prodigal expenditure of wire in front of it, and then south for
several hundred yards, when it was thrown out to the south-west to
embrace a position of high importance known as Umbrella Hill, a dune
of blazing yellow sand facing, about 500 yards away, Samson's Ridge,
which we held strongly and on which the enemy often concentrated his
fire. This ended the Turks' right-half section of the Gaza defences.
Close by passed what from time immemorial has been called the Cairo
Road, a track worn down by caravans of camels moving towards Kantara
on their way with goods for Egyptian bazaars. But there was no break
in the trench system which ran across the plain, a beautiful green
tinted with the blooms of myriads of wild flowers when we first
advanced over it in March, now browned and dried up by absolutely
cloudless summer days. In the gardens on the western slopes of the
hills running south from Ali Muntar the Turk had achieved much
spadework, but he had done far more work on the hills themselves, and
these were a frame of fortifications for Ali Muntar, on which we once
sat for a few hours, and the possession of which meant the reduction
of Gaza. By the end of summer the hill of Muntar had lost its shape.
When we saw it during the first battle of Gaza it was a bold feature
surmounted by a few trees and the whitened walls and grey dome of a
sheikh's tomb. In the earlier battles of 1917 much was done to ruffle
Muntar's crest. We saw trees uprooted, others lose their limbs, and
naval gunfire threatened the foundations of the old chief's burying
place. But Ali Muntar stoutly resisted the heavy shells' attack. As
if Samson's feat had endowed it with some of the strong man's powers,
Muntar for a long time received its daily thumps stoically; but by
degrees the resistance of the old hill declined, and when agents
reported that the sheikh's tomb was used as an observation post,
8-inch howitzers got on to it and made it untenable. There was a bit
of it left at the end, but not more than would offer protection from a
rifle bullet, and the one tree left standing was a limbless trunk. The
crest of the hill lost its roundness, and the soil which had worked
out through the shell craters had changed the colour of the summit.
Old Ali Muntar had had the worst of the bombardment, and if some
f