nder the
circumstances was to return to the War Office. General Gallieni, when
the position of affairs was explained to him, was most sympathetic,
quoted somebody's dictum that "la politique n'a pas d'entrailles," and
hinted that he did not always find it quite plain sailing with his own
gang. Still, there it was. The Twenty-Three had thrown the War Council
over (it was then composed of Messrs. Asquith, Bonar Law, Lloyd
George, and Balfour, and Sir E. Grey, assisted by the First Sea Lord
and the C.I.G.S.) and they were leaving our army marooned on the
Gallipoli Peninsula, with the winter approaching apace, in a position
growing more and more precarious owing to Serbia's collapse and to
Bulgaria's accession to the enemy ranks having freed the great artery
of communications connecting Germany with the Golden Horn.

Life in the War Office during the Great War, even during those early
anxious days of 1914 and 1915, had its lighter side. The astonishing
cheeriness of the British soldier under the most trying circumstances
has become proverbial; but his officer shares this priceless
characteristic with him and displays it even amid the deadening
surroundings of the big building in Whitehall. The best laugh that we
enjoyed during that strenuous period was on the morning when news came
that Anzac and Suvla had been evacuated at the cost of only some
half-dozen casualties and of the abandonment of a very few worn-out
guns. Then it was that an official, who was very much behind the
scenes, extracted a document on the familiar grey-green paper from his
safe and read it out with appropriate "business" to a joyous party.

This State paper, a model of incisive diction and of moving prose,
conceived in the best Oxford manner, drew a terrible picture of what
might occur in withdrawing troops from a foreshore in presence of a
ferocious foe. Its polished periods portrayed a scene of horror and
despair, of a bullet-swept beach, of drowning soldiers and of
shattered boats. It quoted the case of some similar military
operation, where warriors who had gained a footing on a hostile
coast-line had been obliged to remove themselves in haste and had had
the very father and mother of a time during the process--it was
Marathon or Syracuse or some such contemporary martial event, if I
remember aright. This masterly production, there is reason to believe,
had not been without its influence when the question of abandoning the
Gallipoli Peninsula wa