He employed masons to chisel the stone used for
revetting, and in places the stones fit well and truly one upon the
other, while an enormous amount of rock must have been blasted to
excavate the trenches. The system adopted was to have three fire
trenches near the top of the hills, one above the other, so that were
the first two lines taken the third would still offer a difficult
obstacle, and, if the defenders were armed with bombs, it would be
hard for attackers to retain the trenches in front of them. There was
much dead ground below the entrenchments, but the defences were so
arranged that cross fire from one system swept the dead ground on the
next spur, and, if the hills were properly held, an advance up them
would have been a stupendous task. The Turk had put all his eggs into
one basket. Perhaps he considered his positions impregnable--they
would have been practically impregnable in British hands--and he made
no attempt to cut support trenches behind the crest. There was one
system only, and his failure to provide defences in depth cost him
dear.

Looking eastwards from Kustul, the Turkish positions south of the
Jaffa-Jerusalem road, each of them on a hill, were called by us the
'Liver Redoubt' (near Lifta), the 'Heart Redoubt,' 'Deir Yesin,' and
'Khurbet Subr,' with the village of Ain Karim in a fold of the hills
and a line of trenches south-west of it running down to the railway.
Against the 74th Division's front the nature of the country was
equally difficult. From Beit Surik down to the Kulonieh road the hills
fell sharply with the ground strewn with boulders. Our men had to
advance across ravines and beds of watercourses covered with
large stones, and up the wooded slopes of hills where stone walls
constituted ready-made sangars easily capable of defence. The hardest
position they had to tackle was the hill covering Beit Iksa, due
north of the road as it issued from Kulonieh, where long semicircular
trenches had been cut to command at least half a mile of the main
road. In front of the 53rd Division was an ideal rearguard country
where enterprising cavalry could have delayed an advance by infantry
for a lengthened period. To the south of Bethlehem, around Beit Jala
and near Urtas, covering the Pools of Solomon, an invaluable water
supply, there were prepared defences, but though the Division was
much delayed by heavy rain and dense mist, the fog was used to their
advantage, for the whole of the Division's