d have
succeeded in turning the main positions on the left. The 52nd Division
on the coast was ready to go ahead immediately there was any sign that
the enemy, seeing that the worst was about to happen, intended to
order a general retirement, and then it would be a race and a fight to
prevent his establishing himself on the high ground north of the wadi
Hesi. Should he fail to do that there was scarcely a possibility of
the Turks holding us up till we got to the Jaffa-Jerusalem road,
though between Gaza and that metalled highway there were many points
of strength from which they could fight delaying actions. It is very
doubtful whether the Turkish General Staff gave the cavalry credit for
being able to move across the Plain in the middle of November when the
wadis are absolutely dry and the water-level in the wells is lower
than at any other period of the year. Nor did they imagine that the
transport difficulties for infantry divisions fed as ours were could
be surmounted. They may have thought that if they could secure the
wadi Hesi line before we got into position to threaten it in flank
they would immobilise our Army till the rains began, and there was a
possibility of sitting facing each other in wet uncomfortable trench
quarters till the flowers showed themselves in the spring, by which
time, the Bagdad venture of the German Higher Command proving hopeless
before it was started, a great volume of reinforcements might be
diverted to Southern Palestine with Turkish divisions from the
Salonika front and a stiffening of German battalions spared from
Europe in consequence of the Russian collapse.

Whatever they may have been, the Turkish calculations were completely
upset. The cavalry's water troubles remained and no human foresight
could have smoothed them over, but the transport problem was solved in
this way. During the attack on Beersheba XXIst Corps came to the aid
of XXth Corps by handing over to it the greater part of its camel
convoys and lorries, so much transport, indeed, that a vast amount of
work in the Gaza sector fell to be done by a greatly depleted supply
staff. When Beersheba had been won and the enemy's left flank had been
smashed and thrown back, the XXth Corps repaid the XXIst Corps, not
only by returning what it had borrowed, but by marching back into the
region of railhead at Karm, where it could live with a minimum of
transport and send all its surplus to work in the coastal sector. The
switching