ve seen it emerge triumphantly from a supreme
test.

In the strategy of the world war we made, no doubt, many mistakes, but
in Palestine the strategy was of the best, and in the working out of a
far-seeing scheme, victories so influenced events that on this front
began the final phase of the war--once Turkey was beaten, Bulgaria and
Austria-Hungary submitted and Germany acknowledged the inevitable.
Falkenhayn saw that the Bagdad undertaking was impossible so long as
we were dangerous on the Palestine front, and General Allenby's attack
on the Gaza line wiped the Bagdad enterprise out of the list of German
ambitions. The plan of battle on the Gaza-Beersheba line resembled
in miniature the ending of the war. If we take Beersheba for Turkey,
Sheria and Hareira for Bulgaria and Austria, and Gaza for Germany,
we get the exact progress of events in the final stage, except that
Bulgaria's submission was an intelligent anticipation of the laying
down of their arms by the Turks. Gaza-Beersheba was a rolling up from
our right to left; so was the ending of the Hun alliance.

CHAPTER II

OLD BATTLEGROUNDS

It was in accordance with the fitness of things that the British Army
should fight and conquer on the very spots consecrated by the memories
of the most famous battles of old. From Gaza onwards we made our
progress by the most ancient road on earth, for this way moved
commerce between the Euphrates and the Nile many centuries before the
East knew West. We fought on fields which had been the battlegrounds
of Egyptian and Assyrian armies, where Hittites, Ethiopians, Persians,
Parthians, and Mongols poured out their blood in times when kingdoms
were strong by the sword alone. The Ptolemies invaded Syria by this
way, and here the Greeks put their colonising hands on the country.
Alexander the Great made this his route to Egypt. Pompey marched over
the Maritime Plain and inaugurated that Roman rule which lasted for
centuries; till Islam made its wide irresistible sweep in the seventh
century. Then the Crusaders fought and won and lost, and Napoleon's
ambitions in the East were wrecked just beyond the plains.

Up the Maritime Plain we battled at Gaza, every yard of which had
been contested by the armies of mighty kings in the past thirty-five
centuries, at Akir, Gezer, Lydda, and around Joppa. All down the ages
armies have moved in victory or flight over this plain, and General
Allenby in his advance was but repeating histo