road about a dozen miles north of Jerusalem.  A brief survey of the country to be attacked would convince even a civilian of the extreme difficulties of the undertaking.  North and east of Latron (which was not yet ours) frown the hills which constitute this important section of the Judean range, the backbone of Palestine.  The hills are steep and high, separated one from another by narrow valleys, clothed here and there with fir and olive trees, but elsewhere a mass of rocks and boulders, bare and inhospitable.  Practically every hill commands another.  There is only one road—­the main one—­and this about three miles east of Latron passes up a narrow defile with rugged mountains on either side.  There is an old Roman road to the north, but, unused for centuries, it is now a road only in name, the very trace of it being lost in many places.  In this strong country men fought of old, and the defenders not infrequently held their own against odds.  It is pre-eminently suitable for defence, and if the warriors of the past found that flint-tipped shafts of wood would keep the invader at bay, how much more easily could a modern army equipped with rifles of precision and machine guns adapt Nature to its advantage?  It will always be a marvel to me how in a country where one machine gun in defence could hold up a battalion, we made such rapid progress, and how having got so deep into the range it was possible for us to feed our front.  We had no luck with the weather.  In advancing over the plain the troops had suffered from the abnormal heat, and many of the wells had been destroyed or damaged by the retreating enemy.  In the hills the troops had to endure heavy rains and piercingly cold winds, with mud a foot deep on the roads and the earth so slippery on the hills that only donkey transport was serviceable.  Yet despite all adverse circumstances the infantry and yeomanry pressed on, and if they did not secure all objectives, their dash, resource, and magnificent determination at least paved the way for ultimate triumph.

To the trials of hard fighting and marching on field rations the wet added a severe test of physical endurance.  The troops were in enemy country where they scrupulously avoided every native village, and no wall or roof stood to shelter them from wind or water.  The heat of the first two weeks of November changed with a most undesirable suddenness, and though the days continued agreeably warm on the plain into December, the nights became chilly and then desperately cold.  The single blanket carried in the pack—­most of the infantry on the march had no blanket at all—­did not give sufficient warmth to men whose blood had been thinned by long months of work under a pitiless Eastern sun, and lucky was the soldier who secured even broken sleep in the early morning hours of that fighting march across the northern part of the Maritime Plain.  The Generals, with one eye on the enemy and the other on the weather, must have been dismayed