more interest
in their work and were keener on their sport. The full effects had not
been wholly realised when the War Cabinet selected General Allenby
for the control of the big operations, but the improvement in the
condition of the troops was already most marked, and when General
Allenby arrived and at once directed that General Headquarters should
be moved from Cairo, which was pleasant but very far away from the
front, to Kelab, near Khan Yunus, there was not a man who did not see
in the new order of things a sign that he was to be given a chance of
testing the Briton's supremacy over the Turk.

The improvement in the moral of the troops, the foundations of which
were thus begun and cemented by General Chetwode, was rapidly carried
on under the new Chief. Divisions like the 52nd, 53rd, and 54th, which
had worked right across the desert from the Suez Canal, toiling in a
torrid temperature, when parched throats, sun-blistered limbs, and
septic sores were a heavy trial, weakened by casualties in action and
sickness, were brought up to something like strength. Reinforcing
drafts joined a lot of cheery veterans. They were taught in the
stern field of experience what was expected of them, and they worked
themselves up to the degree of efficiency of the older men.

The 74th Division, made up of yeomanry regiments which had been doing
excellent service in the Libyan Desert, watching for and harassing the
elements of the Senussi Army, had to be trained as infantry. These
yeomen did not take long to make themselves first-rate infantry, and
when, after the German attack on the Somme in March 1918, they went
away from us to strengthen the Western Front, a distinguished General
told me he believed that man for man the 74th would prove the finest
division in France. They certainly proved themselves in Palestine,
and many an old yeomanry regiment won for itself the right to bear
'Jerusalem, 1917' on its standard.

The 75th Division had brought some of the Wessex Territorials from
India with two battalions of Gurkhas and two of Rifles. The 1/4th Duke
of Cornwall's Light Infantry joined it from Aden, but for some months
the battalion was not itself. It had spent a long time at that dreary
sunburnt outpost of the Empire, and the men did not regain their
physical fitness till close upon the time it was required for the Gaza
operations.

The 60th Division came over from Salonika and we were delighted to
have them, for they not on