In view of my comments upon the appointment of Sir Edmund Allenby to succeed Sir Archibald Murray, the following extract from the Manchester Guardian of September 17, 1919, is of interest:

The Victor and His Predecessor.

When Field-Marshal Allenby stepped off the train at Victoria to-day one of the first men whom he greeted was General Sir Archibald Murray, his predecessor in the East. The meeting must have been a pregnant one to them both. Sir Edmund Allenby came home victor of our most successful campaign in the war to receive a peerage, while inside and outside the station London was roaring its welcome. General Murray, after the failure of the battle of Gaza, had been transferred home and had been received there with the severest criticism and some personal attacks. The War Office is famous for its short ways when it does make up its mind to do something disagreeable, and its treatment of Sir Archibald Murray is said to have lacked nothing in discourtesy. Since then a good deal has come out about the early part of our war in the East and the work done by General Murray, and the nearness he got to success with quite inadequate support had become recognized even before Sir Edmund Allenby's dispatch was published, which officially re-established his military reputation.

To-day, at Dover, Sir Edmund Allenby spoke even more clearly of the debt he owed for the foundations laid by General Murray and for the loyal way in which he started him off as a beginner. It is not too common in our military history to find great commanders on the same battle-ground as sensitive about one another's reputation as they are of their own. It is so easy to say nothing and leave matters to history. The lustre of Allenby's achievement is even greater for his acknowledgment of his debt to his predecessor.

The First Palestine Campaign.

Something may be added now about General Murray's work in the East. He commanded in Egypt from January, 1916, to May, 1917. During that time he dealt with the Gallipoli forces, disorganized and with most of their supplies gone. He had to reorganize them into a fighting force again and to send them West. He had to organize and plan the campaign against the Senussi, to be responsible for the internal condition of Egypt, and to defend Egypt from the Turks, then relieved of the Gallipoli operations. The Turkish attack was beaten off and four thousand prisoners taken, the defences of Egypt were pushed forward through the Sinai desert, water-lines carried up and wire ways laid, and all the vast preparations made by which it became possible to take Palestine. His two assaults on Gaza failed, but he held the ground he had taken, including the Wadi Ghuzze, which would have been a big natural defence of Palestine.

He was fighting with three divisions very far short of their full strength and several battalions of dismounted yeomanry, four big guns, and thirty aeroplanes, all of old-fashioned type. His pipe-line was within distance from which it seemed possible to "snap" the Turks at Gaza, but fog delayed the start, and the man[oe]uvre took too long, and the cavalry fell back from want of water. The snap was so near a success that they picked up a wireless from the Germans in Gaza to their base saying "Good-bye," as they were going into captivity. That was the main point of the story.

According to General Murray's friends what happened in Palestine was what has happened so often in our history. A general is given a job to do with insufficient forces, and urged on despite his appeals for a sufficient force. He fails. Another commander is appointed, and the new man naturally can exact his own conditions, begins the task with an adequate force, and succeeds. All this, of course, does not take away a single leaf from Sir Edmund Allenby's brilliant bays or suggest that General Murray could have done so well. All that is suggested is that he did not get the same chance.