We made our way slowly through the night across the desert that stretched as far as the eye could reach in the moonlight and slipped away into blackness when the moon had set. What it had cost the men who had laid those ties in that wilderness of sand, under the scorching rays of a pitiless sun, no history of war can adequately relate. How often in those days, as we looked reverently at old battlegrounds, we searched for words with which to describe the miracles performed by the engineering corps of the fighting armies! With the morning light, we began to see signs of life on the desert. Great masses of cacti, in clumps as tall as trees, with stems as thick as a man’s body, were growing but a few feet from our windows. Here, during the war, the enemy had hidden their machine guns, a refuge from which they might safely do their deadly work, practically certain that they could not be captured. Many a brave soldier of the Allies gave up his life in agony, caught in the cactus hedge to which the rush of battle had driven him, and many an heroic rescue of a comrade held by the cruel thorns took place on that desert plain. When the cactus growth cleared and the desert was unbroken we stared in amazement at what seemed to be a line of dark earth—a road made in the shifting sand. When we got nearer we found it to be strips of chicken wire. This wire was the solution of a problem that at first threatened to tie up all the plans of Headquarters, for the heavy artillery and the loaded motor lorries, sinking deep into the sand, made progress impossible. The wire road was the result of the ingenuity of some of the men in the ranks. As the fine and coarse net used alternately pressed down upon the sand it gave the resistance that enabled the great guns and loads of supplies to pass over places otherwise uncrossable. When they had passed, soldiers rolled up the wire, loaded it on the camels to be used again over some hard stretch ahead. The war over, it lay there rusting in the sand. Again and again, as one crossed the battlefields of Palestine, he saw evidences of the triumph of man’s mind over earth’s obstacles. Nothing was too ordinary, too commonplace, too insignificant to be used to further the success of the great cause. For fresh supplies of food and water, for “heavies” with which to batter down the defenses of the enemy, the army was for a time dependent upon temporary tracks of chicken wire laid in a waste of moving sand! Against the horizon we could see the slow moving train of camels. A group of Arabs on horseback halted to watch us pass. We were in Palestine, that land of small distances and great deeds.