They left behind them the unpleasant trail of a defeated army.  Turks had fallen by the way and the natives would not bury them.  Our aircraft had bombed the road, and the dead men, cattle and horses, and smashed transport were ghastly sights and made the air offensive.  There they lay, one long line of dead men and animals, and if a London fog had descended to blind the eyes of our Army the sense of smell would still have carried a scout on the direct line of the Turkish retreat.

I will break off the narrative of fighting at this point to describe a scene which expressed more eloquently than anything else I witnessed in Palestine how deeply engraved in the native mind was the conviction that Britain stood for fair dealing and freedom.  The inhabitants, like the Arabs of the desert, do not allow their faces to betray their feelings.  They preserve a stolid exterior, and it is difficult to tell from their demeanour whether they are friendly or indifferent to you.  But their actions speak aloud.  Early on the morning after the Lowlanders had entered Mejdel I was in the neighbourhood.  Our guns banging away to the north were a reminder that there was to be no promenade over the Plain, and that we had yet to make good the formidable obstacle of the wadi Sukereir, when I passed a curious procession.  People whom the Turks had turned out of Gaza and the surrounding country were trekking back to the spots where they and their forefathers had lived for countless generations.  All their worldly goods and chattels were packed on overloaded camels and donkeys.  The women bore astonishingly heavy loads on their heads, the men rode or walked carrying nothing, while patriarchs of families were either held in donkey saddles or were borne on the shoulders of younger men.  Agriculturists began to turn out to plough and till the fields which had lain fallow while the Turkish scourge of war was on the land, and the people showed that, now they had the security of British protection, they intended at once to resume their industry.  The troops had the liveliest welcome in passing through villages, though the people are not as a rule demonstrative; and one could point to no better evidence of the exemplary behaviour of our soldiers than the groups of women sitting and gossiping round the wells during the process of drawing water, just as they did in Biblical days, heedless of the passing troops whom they regarded as their protectors.  The man behind a rude plough may have stopped his ill-matched team of pony and donkey to look at a column of troops moving as he had never seen troops march before, a head of a family might collect the animals carrying his household goods and hurry them off the line of route taken by military transport, but neither one nor the other had any fear of interference with his work, and the life of the whole country, one of the most unchanging regions of the world, had suddenly again become normal, although only yesterday two armies had disputed possession