them back on to
their defences at Sheria. It was a series of battles for the wells, in
effect, for here the eternal problems of transport and water were acute.
The former was more or less solved in time for the big operations; the
latter was the difficulty it had always been for the past two years, but in
a different way. In the desert, whilst the wells were few and far between
they were seldom more than fifty or sixty feet deep; in the district around
Beersheba there were, to exaggerate a little, almost as many wells as in
the whole of the Sinai Desert, but you could not get at the water! Scarcely
a well was less than a hundred feet deep and most of them were anything
over that up to a hundred and eighty; of course there were no pumps. The
old shadouf of the desert, unwieldy though it was, would have been a
veritable godsend to the troops here.

A cavalryman could not pack a two-hundred foot coil of the lightest rope on
to his saddle; it was as much as he could do to climb into it over the
conglomeration of picketing-pegs and ropes, rifle-bucket, and sword which
constituted his full marching order, and it was more or less the same in
the artillery.

Those patriarchs of old who built the wells would doubtless have been
vastly diverted to see a trooper sit down and solemnly remove his putties
with which to lengthen a "rope" already consisting of reins, belts, and any
odds and ends of rope he had acquired, and when even these additions proved
insufficient--! It was a joke which matured but slowly.

Imagine half a brigade of cavalry clustered round a well frantically
devising means to reach the cavernous depths, while the other half were
fighting like tigers to keep off the Turks a few miles away! It was nothing
out of the ordinary for a squadron or battery to take five hours to water
their horses; and it added a piquancy to the situation that you were never
quite sure when a marauding party of Turks would appear over the top of a
neighbouring hill. Ultimately the extraordinary exertions of the engineers
saved the situation; with incredible labour and ingenuity they fixed
pumping-appliances to the wells.

They must have used most of the kinds known to science, and assuredly a
great many not in the textbooks. In the course of their work they performed
the functions of a hundred trades--including divers: in fact a large part
of their time was of necessity spent in the water, and a singularly
unpleasant business it must ha