WITH the capture of Jerusalem the immediate task imposed on General Allenby by the Prime Minister had been accomplished. As Allenby told T. E. Lawrence, the achievement left the British Army exhausted; their enemy was similarly finished for the present. It was now winter, and both armies had largely outrun, or lost touch with, their supplies during the previous month. It was wet and cold, and the troops were hungry and weary, and required to be re-equipped; the fighting died down to patrolling, both by air and by land.

This was not the only reason the fighting ended, however, for the crossing of the Auja and the repulse of the Turkish counter-attacks north of Jerusalem both showed that the British forces, if not the Turks, were still capable of forward movement. Allenby suggested that the ‘rainy season’ was a major hindrance, but the real reason for the halt was the uncertainty as to the next move. That is, it was necessary to elicit a new political directive before the British army could go on to conquer territory to the north, much of which had been assigned diplomatically to the French in the putative post-war division of the spoils.

Allenby had achieved what he had been sent east to do. But in the meantime the war at large had changed. Two Russian revolutions had resulted in the Bolshevik Party's seizing power, and it was clear that in order to keep its grip on that country it was going to have to stop fighting its German and Austrian enemies. By December a truce been agreed, and the Bolsheviks and the Germans were involved in peace talks, though it took another three months to reach agreement. It was clear that the Germans had won their eastern war.

This was exactly what Robertson and Haig had long feared. There was now absolutely no doubt that the Western front in France and Belgium and Italy had become the only fighting front which mattered, with the exception of the submarine war. To every general with the slightest imagination, to every politician in the West who had access to even the most superficial information, it was clear that the spring would bring a massive German offensive on the Western front.