The Turkish railway from Beit Hanun relieved the pressure to some extent, when the damage it had suffered from our shells had been made good. The only way it could be used was in conjunction with the mercantile marine, who landed stores on to the beach as they had done at Belah before the second battle of Gaza. One such landing-place was at Wadi Sukerier, a bleak, inhospitable swamp north of Ascalon, where a great dump was established in the mud, the supplies from which were transported north by camel convoys. The great obstacles in the way of landing stores from ships were the extremely dangerous coast and enemy submarines. The Mediterranean, as elsewhere, was alive with "U" boats in the summer and autumn of 1917. They levied a heavy toll on "troopers" and supply-ships coming out East, and the Navy in its work of guarding the coast of Palestine during the landing of supplies did not escape unscathed. That this was carried on successfully and the troops in the Judaean hills were fed was very largely owing to the untiring vigilance of British and Allied monitors and destroyers. The port of Jaffa was also used, and here the conditions were even worse. Strictly speaking Jaffa is a port only in name, for all vessels have to anchor off-shore and passengers and stores have to be landed in surf-boats. In the rainy season the bar is almost impassable four days in the week and the roar of the breakers can be heard miles away. Even when the sea was calm enough for stores to be landed, the ground swell was such as to make the ordinary landsman agree with Dr. Johnson's remark "that he would rather go to gaol than to sea." It is easy to understand why the materials for Solomon's Temple were brought to Jaffa on rafts; no other craft of those days would have withstood the buffetings of the breakers. But why Jonah ever chose this place from which to start his long journey to Tarshish passes my comprehension unless, indeed, it was Hobson's choice. He must certainly have been violently ill ere ever his flimsy boat had crossed the bar--a feat his whale could never have accomplished at all--and for a man of his temperament, soured by many trials, this must have been the last straw. Patience, by the way, was a powerful characteristic of the sailors engaged in landing stores on the coast. A supply-ship, finding the sea at the Wadi Sukerier too high to permit of stores being landed, went on to Jaffa, found the breakers impossibly high there and returned to Sukerier. This amusing pastime went on for three days, when the waters abated somewhat and the stores were safely landed. As there was a "U" boat in the offing most of the time, however, the humour of the situation did not strike the sailors till afterwards.