Fortunately after the battles of March and April nearly all the civilian population left the town for quieter quarters.  Some of them on returning must have had difficulty in identifying their homes.  In the centre of the town, where bazaars radiated from the quarter of which the Great Mosque was the hub, the houses were a mass of stones and rubble, and the narrow streets and tortuous byways were filled with fallen walls and roofs.  The Great Mosque had entirely lost its beauty.  We had shelled it because its minaret, one of those delicately fashioned spires which, seen from a distance, lead a traveller to imagine a native town in the East to be arranged on an artistic and orderly plan, was used as a Turkish observation post, and the Mosque itself as an ammunition store.  I am told our guns were never laid on to this objective until there was an accident within it which exploded the ammunition.  Be that as it may, there was ample justification for shelling the Mosque.  I went in to examine the structure a few hours after the Turks had been compelled to evacuate the town, and whilst they were then shelling it with unpleasant severity.  Amid the wrecked marble columns, the broken pulpit, the torn and twisted lamps and crumbling walls were hundreds of thousands of rounds of small-arms ammunition, most of it destroyed by explosion.  A great shell had cut the minaret in half and had left exposed telephone wires leading direct to army headquarters and to the Turkish gunners’ fire control station.  Most of the Mosque furniture and all the carpets had been removed, but a few torn copies of the Koran, some of them in manuscript with marginal notes, lay mixed up with German newspapers and some typical Turkish war propaganda literature.  That Mosque, which Saladin seized from the Crusaders and turned from a Christian into a Mahomedan place of worship, was unquestionably used for military purposes, and the Turks cared as little for its religious character or its venerable age as they did for the mosque on Nebi Samwil, where the remains of the Prophet Samuel are supposed to rest.  Their stories of the trouble taken to avoid military contact with holy places and sites were all bunkum and eyewash.  They would have fought from the walls of the Holy City and placed machine-gun nests in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Mosque of Omar if they had thought it would spare them the loss of Jerusalem.

Gaza had, as I have said, been turned into a fortress with a mass of field works, in places of considerable natural strength.  If our force had been on the defensive at Gaza the Germans would not have attacked without an army of at least three times our strength.  It is doubtful if the Turks put as much material in use on Gallipoli as they did here.  Their trenches were deeply cut and were protected by an immense amount of wire.  In the sand-dune area they used a vast quantity of sandbags, and they met the shortage of jute stuffs by making small sacks of bedstead hangings