Gaza had already tasted a full sample of the war food we intended it should consume.  Before the attack on Beersheba had developed, ships of war and the heavy guns of XXIst Corps had rattled its defences.  The warships’ fire was chiefly directed on targets our land guns could not reach.  Observers in aircraft controlled the fire and notified the destruction of ammunition dumps at Deir Sineid and other places.  The work of the heavy batteries was watched with much interest.  Some were entirely new batteries which had never been in action against any enemy, and they only arrived on the Gaza front five weeks before the battle.  These were not allowed to register until shortly before the battle began, and they borrowed guns from other batteries in order to train the gun crews.  So desirous was General Bulfin to conceal the concentration of heavies that the wireless code calls were only those used by batteries which were in position before his Corps was formed, and the volume of fire came as an absolute surprise to the enemy.  It came as a surprise also to some of us in camp at G.H.Q. one night at the end of October.  Suddenly there was a terrific burst of fire on about four miles of front.  Vivid fan-shaped flashes stabbed the sky, the bright moonlight of the East did not dim the guns’ lightning, and their thunderous voices were a challenge the enemy was powerless to refuse.  He took it up slowly as if half ashamed of his weakness.  Then his fire increased in volume and in strength, but it ebbed again and we knew the reason.  We held some big ‘stuff’ for counter battery work, and our fire was effective.

The preliminary bombardment began on October 27 and it grew in intensity day by day.  The Navy co-operated on October 29 and subsequent days.  The whole line from Middlesex Hill (close to Outpost Hill) to the sea was subjected to heavy fire, all the routes to the front line were shelled during the night by 60-pounder and field-gun batteries.  Gas shells dosed the centres of communication and bivouac areas, and every quarter of the defences was made uncomfortable.  The sound-ranging sections told us the enemy had between sixteen and twenty-four guns south of Gaza, and from forty to forty-eight north of the town, and over 100 guns were disclosed, including more than thirty firing from the Tank Redoubt well away to the eastward.  On October 29 some of the guns south of Gaza had been forced back by the severity of our counter battery work, and of the ten guns remaining between us and the town on that date all except four had been removed by November 2.  For several nights the bombardment continued without a move by infantry.  Then just at the moment von Kress was discussing the loss of Beersheba and his plans to meet our further advance in that direction, some infantry of the 75th Division raided Outpost Hill, the southern extremity of the entrenched hill system south of Ali Muntar, and killed far more Turks than they took prisoners.  There was an intense bombardment of the enemy’s works