the minimum necessities for the Palestine force.  General Allenby gave the fullest consideration to this document, and after he had made as complete an examination of the front as any Commander-in-Chief ever undertook—­the General was in one or other sector with his troops almost every day for four months—­General Chetwode’s plan was adopted, and full credit was given to his prescience in General Allenby’s despatch covering the operations up to the fall of Jerusalem.

It was General Chetwode’s view at the time of writing his appreciation, that both the British and Turkish Armies were strategically on the defensive.  The forces were nearly equal in numbers, though we were slightly superior in artillery, but we had no advantage sufficient to enable us to attack a well-entrenched enemy who only offered us a flank on which we could not operate owing to lack of water and the extreme difficulty of supply.  General Chetwode thought it was possible the enemy might make an offensive against us—­we have since learned he had such designs—­but he gave weighty reasons against the Turk embarking upon a campaign conducted with a view to throwing us beyond the Egyptian frontier into the desert again.  If the enemy contemplated even minor operations in the Sinai Desert he had not the means of undertaking them.  We should be retiring on positions we had prepared, for, during his advance across the desert, General Chetwode had always taken the precaution of having his force dug in against the unlikely event of a Turkish attack.  Every step we went back would make our supply easier, and there was no water difficulty, the pipe line, then 130 miles long, which carried the purified waters of the Nile to the amount of hundreds of thousands of gallons daily, being always available for our troops.  It would be necessary for the Turks to repair the Beersheba-Auja railway.  They had lifted some of the rails for use north of Gaza, and a raid we had carried out showed that we could stop this railway being put into a state of preparedness for military traffic.  An attack which aimed at again threatening the Suez Canal was therefore ruled as outside the range of possibilities.

On the other hand, now that the Russian collapse had relieved the Turk of his anxieties in the Caucasus and permitted him to concentrate his attention on the Mesopotamian and Palestine fronts, what hope had he of resisting our attack when we should be in a position to launch it?  The enemy had a single narrow-gauge railway line connecting with the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway at Junction Station about six miles south-east of Ramleh.  This line ran to Beersheba, and there was a spur line running past Deir Sineid to Beit Hanun from which the Gaza position was supplied.  There was a shortage of rolling stock and, there being no coal for the engines, whole olive orchards had been hacked down to provide fuel.  The Hebron road, which could keep Beersheba supplied if the railway was cut, was in good order, but in other parts there