not merely to the Commander-in-Chief and his Headquarters Staff,
but to the three Corps Commanders, the Divisional Commanders, the
Brigadiers, and the officers responsible for transport, artillery,
engineer, and the other services. The Army had to be put on an
altogether different footing from that which had twice failed to drive
the Turks from Gaza. It serves nothing to ignore the fact that the
moral of the troops was not high in the weeks following the second
failure. They had to be tuned up and trained for a big task. They knew
the Turk was turning his natural advantages of ground about Gaza into
a veritable fortress, and that if their next effort was to meet with
more success than their last, they had to learn all that experience on
the Western Front had taught as to systems of trench warfare.

And, more than that, they had to prepare to apply the art of open
warfare to the full extent of their powers.

A couple of months before General Allenby took over command, General
Chetwode had taken in hand the question of training, and in employing
the knowledge gained during the strenuous days he had spent in France
and Flanders, he not only won the confidence of the troops but
improved their tone, and by degrees brought them up to something
approaching the level of the best fighting divisions of our Army in
France.

This was hard work during hot weather when our trench systems on a
wide front had to be prepared against an active enemy, and men could
ill be spared for the all-important task of training behind the front
line. It was not long, however, before troops who had got into that
state of lassitude which is engendered by a belief that they were
settling down to trench warfare for the duration of the war--that,