When I entered Beersheba our troops held a line of outposts sufficiently far north of the town to prevent the Turks shelling it, and the place was secure except from aircraft bombs, of which a number fell into the town without damaging anything of much consequence.  Some of the troops fell victims to booby traps.  Apparently harmless whisky bottles exploded when attempts were made to draw the corks, and several small mines went up.  Besides the mines in the Mosque there was a good deal of wiring about the railway station, and some rolling stock was made ready for destruction the instant a door was opened.  The ruse was expected; some Australian engineers drew the charges, and the coaches were afterwards of considerable service to the supply branch.

CHAPTER VIII

GAZA DEFENCES

Meanwhile there were important happenings at the other end of the line.  Gaza was about to submit to the biggest of all her ordeals.  She had been a bone of contention for thousands of years.  The Pharaohs coveted her and more than 3500 years ago made bloody strife within the environs of the town.  Alexander the Great besieged her, and Persians and Arabians opposed that mighty general.  The Ptolemies and the Antiochi for centuries fought for Gaza, whose inhabitants had a greater taste for the mart than for the sword, and when the Maccabees were carrying a victorious war through Philistia, the people of Gaza bought off Jonathan, but the Jews occupied the city itself about a century before the Christian era.  Later on the place was captured after a year’s siege and destroyed, and for long it remained a mass of mouldering ruins.  Pompey revived it, making it a free city, and Gabinius extended it close to the harbour, whilst under Caesar and Herod its prosperity and fame increased.  In succeeding centuries Gaza’s commerce flourished under the Greeks, who founded schools famous for rhetoric and philosophy, till the Mahomedan wave swept over the land in the first half of the seventh century, when the town became a shadow of its former self, though it continued to exist as a centre for trade.  The Crusaders made their influence felt, and many are the traces of their period in this ancient city, but Askalon always had more Crusader support.  Napoleon’s attack on Gaza found Abdallah’s army in a very different state of preparedness from von Kress’s Turkish army.  Nearly all Abdallah’s artillery was left behind in a gun park at Jaffa owing to lack of transport, and though he had a numerically superior force he did not like Napoleon’s dispositions, and retreated when Kleber moved up the plain to pass between Gaza and the sea, and the cavalry advanced east of the Mound of Hebron, or Ali Muntar, as we know the hill up which Samson is reputed to have carried the gates and bar of Gaza.  For nearly a century and a quarter since Napoleon passed forwards and backwards through the town, Gaza pursued the arts of peace in the lethargic spirit which suits the native temperament, but in eight months of 1917 it was the cockpit of strife in the Middle East, and there was often crammed into one day as much fighting energy as was shown in all the battles of the past thirty-five centuries, Napoleon’s campaign included.