not be won--General Allenby was still able
to achieve his great objective without a drop of blood being spilled
near any of the Holy Sites, and without so much as a stray rifle
bullet searing any of their walls. That indeed was the triumph of
military practice, and when Jerusalem fell for the twenty-third time,
and thus for the first time passed into the hands of British soldiers,
the whole force felt that the sacrifices which had been made on the
gaunt forbidding hills to the north-west were worth the price, and
that the graves of Englishman, Scot and Colonial, of Gurkha, Punjabi,
and Sikh, were monuments to the honour of British arms. The scheme was
that the 75th Division would advance along the main Jerusalem road,
which cuts into the hills about three miles east of Latron, and occupy
Kuryet el Enab, and that the Lowland Division should go through Ludd,
strike eastwards and advance to Beit Likia to turn from the north the
hills through which the road passes, the Yeomanry Mounted Division
on the left flank of the 52nd Division to press on to Bireh, on the
Nablus road about a dozen miles north of Jerusalem. A brief survey
of the country to be attacked would convince even a civilian of the
extreme difficulties of the undertaking. North and east of Latron
(which was not yet ours) frown the hills which constitute this
important section of the Judean range, the backbone of Palestine.
The hills are steep and high, separated one from another by narrow
valleys, clothed here and there with fir and olive trees, but
elsewhere a mass of rocks and boulders, bare and inhospitable.
Practically every hill commands another. There is only one road--the
main one--and this about three miles east of Latron passes up a narrow
defile with rugged mountains on either side. There is an old Roman
road to the north, but, unused for centuries, it is now a road only in
name, the very trace of it being lost in many places. In this strong
country men fought of old, and the defenders not infrequently held
their own against odds. It is pre-eminently suitable for defence, and
if the warriors of the past found that flint-tipped shafts of wood
would keep the invader at bay, how much more easily could a modern
army equipped with rifles of precision and machine guns adapt Nature
to its advantage? It will always be a marvel to me how in a country
where one machine gun in defence could hold up a battalion, we made
such rapid progress, and how having got so d