Those of us who were fortunate enough to witness the nature of the preparations for the first of General Allenby’s great and triumphant moves in Palestine can speak of the debt Britain and her Allies owe not merely to the Commander-in-Chief and his Headquarters Staff, but to the three Corps Commanders, the Divisional Commanders, the Brigadiers, and the officers responsible for transport, artillery, engineer, and the other services.  The Army had to be put on an altogether different footing from that which had twice failed to drive the Turks from Gaza.  It serves nothing to ignore the fact that the moral of the troops was not high in the weeks following the second failure.  They had to be tuned up and trained for a big task.  They knew the Turk was turning his natural advantages of ground about Gaza into a veritable fortress, and that if their next effort was to meet with more success than their last, they had to learn all that experience on the Western Front had taught as to systems of trench warfare.

And, more than that, they had to prepare to apply the art of open warfare to the full extent of their powers.

A couple of months before General Allenby took over command, General Chetwode had taken in hand the question of training, and in employing the knowledge gained during the strenuous days he had spent in France and Flanders, he not only won the confidence of the troops but improved their tone, and by degrees brought them up to something approaching the level of the best fighting divisions of our Army in France.

This was hard work during hot weather when our trench systems on a wide front had to be prepared against an active enemy, and men could ill be spared for the all-important task of training behind the front line.  It was not long, however, before troops who had got into that state of lassitude which is engendered by a belief that they were settling down to trench warfare for the duration of the war—­that, in fact, there was a stalemate on this front—­became inspired by the energy of General Chetwode.  They saw him in the front line almost every day, facing the risks they ran themselves, complimenting them on any good piece of work, suggesting improvements in their defences, always anxious to provide anything possible for their comfort, and generally looking after the rank and file with a detailed attention which no good battalion commander could exceed.

The men knew that the long visits General Chetwode paid them formed but a small part of his daily task.  It has been said that a G.O.C. of a force has to think one hour a day about operations and five hours about beef.  In East Force, as this part of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force was then called, General Chetwode, having to look months ahead, had also six worrying hours a day to think about water.  For any one who did not love his profession, or who had not an ardent soldierly spirit within him, such a daily task would have been impossible.  I had the privilege of living in General Chetwode’s camp for some time, and I have seen him working at four o’clock in the morning and at nine o’clock at night, and the notes on a writing tablet by the side of his rough camp-bed showed that in the hours when sleep forsook him he was planning the next day’s work.