From El Arish Redoubt the line ran east again to Mazar trench with a prodigal expenditure of wire in front of it, and then south for several hundred yards, when it was thrown out to the south-west to embrace a position of high importance known as Umbrella Hill, a dune of blazing yellow sand facing, about 500 yards away, Samson’s Ridge, which we held strongly and on which the enemy often concentrated his fire.  This ended the Turks’ right-half section of the Gaza defences.  Close by passed what from time immemorial has been called the Cairo Road, a track worn down by caravans of camels moving towards Kantara on their way with goods for Egyptian bazaars.  But there was no break in the trench system which ran across the plain, a beautiful green tinted with the blooms of myriads of wild flowers when we first advanced over it in March, now browned and dried up by absolutely cloudless summer days.  In the gardens on the western slopes of the hills running south from Ali Muntar the Turk had achieved much spadework, but he had done far more work on the hills themselves, and these were a frame of fortifications for Ali Muntar, on which we once sat for a few hours, and the possession of which meant the reduction of Gaza.  By the end of summer the hill of Muntar had lost its shape.  When we saw it during the first battle of Gaza it was a bold feature surmounted by a few trees and the whitened walls and grey dome of a sheikh’s tomb.  In the earlier battles of 1917 much was done to ruffle Muntar’s crest.  We saw trees uprooted, others lose their limbs, and naval gunfire threatened the foundations of the old chief’s burying place.  But Ali Muntar stoutly resisted the heavy shells’ attack.  As if Samson’s feat had endowed it with some of the strong man’s powers, Muntar for a long time received its daily thumps stoically; but by degrees the resistance of the old hill declined, and when agents reported that the sheikh’s tomb was used as an observation post, 8-inch howitzers got on to it and made it untenable.  There was a bit of it left at the end, but not more than would offer protection from a rifle bullet, and the one tree left standing was a limbless trunk.  The crest of the hill lost its roundness, and the soil which had worked out through the shell craters had changed the colour of the summit.  Old Ali Muntar had had the worst of the bombardment, and if some future sheikh should choose the site for a summer residence he will come across a wealth of metal in digging his foundations.

To capture Gaza the Formidable it was proposed first to take the western defences from Umbrella Hill to Sea Post, to press on to Sheikh Hasan and thus turn the right flank of the whole position.  That would compel the enemy to reinforce his right flank when he was being heavily attacked elsewhere, and if he had been transferring his reserves to meet the threat against the left of his main line after Beersheba had been won for the Empire he would be in sore trouble.