and curtains which, in the dry heat of the summer, wore very well.  Looking across No Man’s Land one could easily pick out a line of trenches by a red, a vivid blue, or a saffron sandbag.  The Turkish dug-outs were most elaborate places of security.  The excavators had gone down into the hard earth well beneath the deep strata of sand, and they roofed these holes with six, eight, and sometimes ten layers of palm logs.  We had seen these beautiful trees disappearing and had guessed the reason.  But an even greater protection than the devices of military engineers had been provided for the Turks by Dame Nature.  Along the southern outskirts of the town all the fields were enclosed by giant cactus hedges, sometimes with stems as thick as a man’s body and not infrequently rearing their strong limbs and prickly leaves twenty feet above the ground.  The hedges were deep as well as high.  They were at once a screen for defending troops and a barrier as impenetrable as the walls of a fortress.  If one line of cactus hedges had been cut through, infantry would have found another and yet another to a depth of nearly two miles, and as the whole of these thorny enclosures were commanded by a few machine guns the possibility of getting through was almost hopeless.  There were similar hedges on the eastern and western sides of Gaza, but they were not quite so deep as on the south.  On the western side, and extending south as far as the desert which the Army had crossed with such steady, methodical, and one may also say painful progression, was a wide belt of yellow sand, sometimes settled down hard under the weight of heavy winds, and in other places yielding to the pressure of feet.  The Turks had laboured hard in this mile and a half width of sand, right down to the sea, to protect their right flank.  There was a point about 4000 yards due west from the edge of the West Town of Gaza which we called Sea Post.  It was the western extremity of the enemy’s exceedingly intricate system of defences.  The beach was below the level of the Post.  From Sea Post for about 1500 yards the Turkish front line ran to Rafa Redoubt.  There were wired-in entrenchments with strong points here and there, and a series of communication trenches and redoubts behind them for 3000 yards to Sheikh Hasan, which was the port of Gaza, if you can so describe an open roadstead with no landing facilities.  From Rafa Redoubt the contour of the sand dunes permitted the enemy to construct an exceedingly strong line running due south for 2000 yards, the strongest points being named by us Zowaid trench, El Burj trench, Triangle trench, Peach Orchard, and El Arish Redoubt, the nomenclature being reminiscent of the trials of the troops in the desert march.  Behind this line there was many a sunken passageway and shelter from gunfire, while backing the whole system, and, for reasons I have given, an element of defence as strong as the prepared positions, were cactus hedges enclosing the West Town’s gardens.