in the forward supply yards prevented congestion, and when a train arrived at its destination and was split up into several parts, well-drilled gangs of troops and Egyptian labourers were allotted to each truck, and whether a lorry or a tractor had to be unshipped and moved down a ramp, or a truck had to be relieved of its ten tons of tibbin, boxes of biscuit and bully, or of engineers’ stores, the goods were cleared away from the vicinity of the line with a celerity which 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 conducted by General Chetwode’s XXth Corps, consisting of four infantry divisions