in the third week of November at the gathering storm clouds which in bursting flooded the plain with rains unusually heavy for this period of the year.  The surface is a very light cotton soil several feet deep.  When baked by summer sun it has a cracked hard crust giving a firm foothold for man and horse, and yielding only slightly to the wheels of light cars; even laden lorries made easy tracks over the country.  The lorries generally kept off the ill-made unrolled Turkish road which had been constructed for winter use and, except for slight deviations to avoid wadis and gullies cut by Nature to carry off surplus water, the supply columns could move in almost as direct a course as the flying men.  When the heavens opened all this was altered.  The first storm turned the top into a slippery, greasy mass.  In an hour or two the rain soaked down into the light earth, and any lorry driver pulling out of the line to avoid a skidding vehicle ahead, had the almost certainty of finding his car and load come to a full stop with the wheels held fast axle deep in the soft soil.  An hour’s hard digging, the fixing of planks beneath the wheels, and a towing cable from another lorry sometimes got the machine on to the pressed-down track again and enabled it to move ahead for a few miles, but many were the supply vehicles that had to wait for a couple of sunny days to dry a path for them.

My own experience of the first of the winter rains was so like that of others in the force who moved on wheels that I may give some idea of the conditions by recounting it.  We had taken Ludd and Ramleh, and guided by the ruined tower of the Church of the Forty Martyrs I had followed in the cavalry’s wake.  I dallied on the way back to see if Akir presented to the latter-day Crusader any signs of its former strength when it stood as the Philistine stronghold of Ekron.  Near where the old city had been the ghastly sight of Turks cut down by yeomanry during a hot pursuit offended the senses of sight and smell, and when you saw natives moving towards their village at a rate somewhat in excess of their customary shuffling gait you were almost led to think that their superstitious fears were driving them home before sundown lest darkness should raise the ghosts of the Turkish dead.  A few of the Jewish settlers, whose industry has improved the landscape, were leaving the fields and orchards they tended so well, though there was still more than an hour of daylight and their tasks were not yet done.  They were weatherwise.  They could have been deaf to the rumblings in the south and still have noticed the coming of the storm.  I was some forty miles from the spot at which my despatch could be censored and passed over land wire and cable to London, when a vivid lightning flash warned me that the elements were in forbidding mood and that I had misread the obvious signal of the natives’ homeward movement.