His staff was entirely composed of hard workers, and perhaps no command in this war ever had so small a staff, but there was no officer in East Force who laboured so long or with such concentration and energy and determination as its Chief.  This enthusiasm was infectious and spread through all ranks.  The sick rate declined, septic sores, from which many men suffered through rough life in the desert on Army rations, got better, and the men showed 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.