were strong by the sword alone. The Ptolemies invaded Syria by this
way, and here the Greeks put their colonising hands on the country.
Alexander the Great made this his route to Egypt. Pompey marched over
the Maritime Plain and inaugurated that Roman rule which lasted for
centuries; till Islam made its wide irresistible sweep in the seventh
century. Then the Crusaders fought and won and lost, and Napoleon's
ambitions in the East were wrecked just beyond the plains.

Up the Maritime Plain we battled at Gaza, every yard of which had
been contested by the armies of mighty kings in the past thirty-five
centuries, at Akir, Gezer, Lydda, and around Joppa. All down the ages
armies have moved in victory or flight over this plain, and General
Allenby in his advance was but repeating history. And when the
Turks had been driven beyond the Plain of Philistia, and the
Commander-in-Chief had to decide how to take Jerusalem, we saw the
British force move along precisely the same route that has been taken
by armies since the time when Joshua overcame the Amorites and the day
was lengthened by the sun and moon standing still till the battle
was won. Geography had its influence on the strategy of to-day as
completely as it did when armies were not cumbered with guns and
mechanical transport. Of the few passes from the Maritime Plain over
the Shephelah into the Judean range only that emerging from the green
Vale of Ajalon was possible, if we were to take Jerusalem, as the
great captains of old took it, from the north. The Syrians sometimes
chose this road in preference to advancing through Samaria, the Romans
suffered retreat on it, Richard Coeur de Lion made it the path for his
approach towards the Holy City, and, precisely as in Joshua's day and
as when in the first century the Romans fell victims to a tremendous
Jewish onslaught, the fighting was hardest about the Beth-horons, but
with a different result--the invaders were victorious. The corps which