The "heavies" were the first to leave the valley, then the anti-aircraft gun rumbled away on its lorry, and finally we were left in sole possession. At dusk on the fifth day after our arrival we too departed; and the engineers were busy striking the canvas water-troughs in the nullah as we passed. All through the night we travelled, and the journey was a repetition of our first retreat from Gaza, except that this was a voluntary retirement. We seemed to cross the wadi half a dozen times and might, in fact, have done so, for it wound fortuitously across the whole of our front, and we were everlastingly climbing into or out of steep-sided places. The heavy traffic of the last few days had churned up the whole countryside into a powdery dust, which rose in such heavy clouds as to make breathing difficult, and to see even the man immediately in front was next to impossible. In the early hours of the morning we came to Sheikh Nuran, a position which had been very strongly fortified by the Turks but evacuated without a struggle, like those previously at Rafa, when we attacked Gaza the first time. I remember little about this camp save that the Turks had left it in an unspeakably filthy condition, causing us to spend days clearing away their refuse. CHAPTER XII CAVE DWELLERS AND SCORPIONS It soon became evident that we should make no more attempts on Gaza during the summer, and while both sides were preparing for the inevitable finale, a species of trench warfare began. This had little resemblance to the kind that obtained in France, where the rival trenches were frequently within a stone's throw of each other. Here, the nearest point to the Turks was on our left flank, where the trenches were perhaps eight hundred yards apart. Then the line, which for the most part was that taken by the wadi in its meanderings, gradually swung south-eastwards till on the right flank we were at least ten miles away from the enemy; which does not mean that profound peace reigned in this region--on the contrary. The main reason for this wide divergence was the old difficulty of maintaining mounted troops--or indeed, troops of any kind--in a waterless country. Though officially we had crossed the border into Palestine, we were actually a long way from the land of milk and honey; and it may here be stated that the troops saw little milk and less honey even when they did at last reach that delectable spot. In the coastal sector--we rose to the dignity of "sectors" when trench warfare began--the infantry amused themselves by making a series of night-raids the cumulative effect of which was considerable. They were carried out on a small scale with meticulous regard for detail, as was very necessary if only because the storming parties had rarely less than a thousand yards to cover before they reached their objectives.