ch a goods-yard foreman at home would have
applauded as the smartest work he had ever seen. There was no room for
slackers in the Army, and the value of each truck was so high that
it could not be left standing idle for an hour. The organisation was
equally good at Kantara, where the loading and making up of trains had
to be arranged precisely as the needs at the front demanded. Those
remarkable haulers, the caterpillar tractors, cut many a passage
through the sand, tugging heavy guns and ammunition, stores for the
air and signal services, machinery for engineers and mobile workshops,
and sometimes towing a weighty load of petrol to satisfy their
voracious appetites for that fuel. The tractors did well. Sand was no
trouble to them, and when mud marooned lorries during the advance in
November the rattling, rumbling old tractor made fair weather of it.
The mechanical transport trains will not forget the service of the
tractors on the morning after Beersheba was taken. From railhead to
the spot where Father Abraham and his people fed their flocks the
country was bare and the earth's crust had yielded all its strength
under the influence of the summer sun. Loaded lorries under their own
power could not move more than a few yards before they were several
inches deep in the sandy soil, but a Motor Transport officer devised
a plan for beating down a track which all lorries could use. He got a
tractor to haul six unladen lorries, and with all the vehicles using
their own power the tractor managed to pull them through to Beersheba,
leaving behind some wheel tracks with a hard foundation. A hundred
lorries followed, the drivers steering them in the ruts, and they made
such good progress that by the afternoon they had deposited between
200 and 300 tons of supplies in Beersheba. The path the tractor cut
did not last very long, but it was sound enough for the immediate and
pressing requirements of the Army.

Within a month of his arrival in Egypt, General Allenby had visited
the whole of his front line and had decided the form his offensive
should take. As soon as his force had been made up to seven infantry
divisions and the Desert Mounted Corps, and they had been brought up
to strength and trained, he would attack, making his main offensive
against the enemy's left flank while conducting operations vigorously
and on an extensive scale against the Turkish right-centre and right.
The principal operation against the left was to be co