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.

The map showed a path from Akir through Mansura towards Junction
Station, from which the so-called Turkish road ran south. In the
gathering gloom my driver picked up wheel tracks through an olive
orchard and, crossing a nullah, found the marks of a Ford car's wheels
on the other side. The rain fell heavily and soon obliterated all
signs of a car's progress, and with darkness coming on there was
a prospect of a shi