ying eyes at Gaza by a gentle rise in the ground. Rations were a bit
thin at this time, with the railhead so far behind us and so large a
force to be fed, but the situation was greatly eased by the fact that we
could now employ wheeled transport with little difficulty. The men were
kept well employed. We had to supply parties of 300, 500 and finally 600
for work in the wadi under R.E. direction, or to act as covering parties
for such work. The former consisted either in cutting ramps to enable
traffic to get down the precipitous banks or in digging wells in the
wadi bottom. The work was hard and progress slow, especially with the
wells. A large square hole had to be dug to a depth of some four feet,
when a shelf would be left, and another four feet taken out, and so on,
till the bottom man was working in the bowels of the earth, and every
shovelful he took out had to be passed up from step to step, so that
four or five other men had been employed before it reached the top. Damp
patches were sometimes found quite early but the hopes they raised were
usually delusive and water was only struck at a considerable depth, and
then not in any abundance. Fortunately wells sunk in other parts of the
wadi proved more successful, but it was a little trying to read in Mr.
Belloc's few paragraphs on our campaign--"of the Wadi Guzzeh, that
considerable body of water, just now in full depth, which runs down ...
to the Mediterranean which it enters by a small elevation called the
calf's hill." One sympathises with the difficulties of a man who sets
out to write of the topography of any part of the world in which there
may be fighting as if he was personally familiar with it--and the calf's
hill (of which we, who were on the spot, had never heard) was a fine
touch. But surely it might have struck Mr. Belloc that if the wadi--in
point of fact bone dry--had contained a considerable depth of water, the
first battle of Gaza would not have failed through drought.

Covering party work was more attractive, for the Turks kept well to
their own side of the valley, where they were doubtless equally fully
occupied with pick and shovel, and there was nothing to do except lie in
the grass and admire the really beautiful flowers. But as under such
circumstances very few men protect very many, it was the digging that
most often came our way. The work went on without intermission from six
in the morning to ten at night, each man doing a five or six hours'