It took our car ten hours to run forty miles, and as the last ten miles was over wet sand and on rabbit wire stretched across the sand where the car could do fifteen miles an hour, we had averaged something under three miles an hour through the mud. Wet through, cold, with a face rendered painful to the touch by driven rain, I reached my tent with a feeling of thankfulness for myself and deep sympathy for the tens of thousands of brave boys enduring intense discomfort and fatigue, coupled with the fear of short rations for the next day or two. The men in the hills which they were just entering had a worse time than those in the waterlogged plain, but no storms could damp their enthusiasm. They were beating your enemies and mine, and they were facing a goal which Britain had never yet won. Jerusalem the Golden was before them, and the honour and glory of winning it from the Turk was a prize to attain which no sacrifice was too great. Those who did not say so behaved in a way to show that they felt it. They were very gallant, perfect knights, these soldiers of the King. CHAPTER XIII INTO THE JUDEAN HILLS When the 52nd Division were moving out of Ludd on the 19th November the 75th Division were fighting hard about Latron, where the Turks held the monastery and its beautiful gardens and the hill about Amwas until late in the morning. Having driven them out, the 75th pushed on to gain the pass into the hills and to begin two days of fighting which earned the unstinted praise of General Bulfin who witnessed it. For nearly three miles from Latron the road passes through a flat valley flanked by hills till it reaches a guardhouse and khan at the foot of the pass which then rises rapidly to Saris, the difference in elevation in less than four miles being 1400 feet. Close to the guardhouse begin the hills which tower above the road. The Turks had constructed defences on these hills and held them with riflemen and machine guns, so that these positions dominated all approaches. Our guns had few positions from which to assist the infantry, but they did sterling service wherever possible. In General Palin the Division had a commander with wide experience of hill fighting on the Indian frontier, and he brought that experience to bear in a way which must have dumb-founded the enemy. Frontal attacks were impossible and suicidal, and each position had to be turned by a wide movement started a long way in rear. All units in the Division did well, the Gurkhas particularly well, and by a continual encircling of their flanks the Turks were compelled to leave their fastnesses and fall back to new hill crests. Thus outwitted and outmatched the enemy retreated to Saris, a high hill with a commanding view of the pass for half a mile. The hill is covered with olive trees and has a village on its eastern slope, and as the road winds at its foot and then takes a left-handed turn to Kuryet el Enab its value for defence was considerable.