f March 1918--a three months'
excursion. This scheme seems to have been evolved quite _au grand
serieux_ and not as a joke. At all events, a conference (which I was
called in to attend as knowing more about the Dardanelles business
from the War Office end than anybody else) assembled in the Chief of
the Imperial General Staff's room one Sunday morning--the First Sea
Lord and the Deputy First Sea Lord with subordinates, together with
General Horne who happened to be over on leave from his First Army,
and prominent members of the General Staff--and we gravely debated the
idiotic project.

Nobody but a lunatic would, after Gallipoli experiences, undertake
serious land operations in the Alexandretta region with less than six
divisions. To ship six divisions absorbs a million tons. There were
United States troops at this time unable to cross the Atlantic for
want of tonnage, and, allowing for disembarkation difficulties on the
Syrian coast, two soldiers or animals or vehicles could be transported
from America to French or English ports for every one soldier or
animal or vehicle that could be shifted from Marseilles or Toulon to
the War Cabinet's fresh theatre of operations, given the same amount
of shipping. Our Italian allies were in sore straits over coal for
munitions and transportation purposes, simply because sufficient
tonnage could not be placed at their disposal. Our own food supplies
were causing anxiety, and the maintenance of the forces at Salonika
afforded constant proof of the insecurity of the Mediterranean as a
sea route. But fatuous diversion of shipping represented quite a minor
objection to this opera-bouffe proposal. For, allowing for railing
troops from the Western Front to the Cote Azure and embarking them,
and for the inevitable delays in landing a force of all arms on a
beach with improvised piers, the troops at the head of the hunt would
already have to be re-embarking in Ayas Bay by the time that those at
the tail of the hunt came to be emptied out on the shores of the Gulf
of Iskanderun; otherwise the wanderers would miss the venue on the
Western Front.

Had this been suggested by a brand-new Ministry--a Labour Cabinet,
say, reviewing the military situation at its very first
meeting--nobody could reasonably have complained. People quite new to
the game naturally enough overlook practical questions connected with
moving troops by land and sea, and do not realize that those questions
govern the who