abled to the Turks from Vienna."

The message took some doing and could not, therefore, get clear of camp
till 11 o'clock when I boarded the destroyer _Grampus_, and sailed for
Helles. Lunched with Hunter-Weston at his Headquarters, and then walked
out along the new road being built under the cliffs from "W" Beach to
Gurkha Gully. On the way I stopped at the 29th Divisional Headquarters
where I met de Lisle. Thence along the coast where the 88th Brigade were
bathing. In the beautiful hot afternoon weather the men were happy as
sandboys. Their own mothers would hardly know them--burnt black with the
sun, in rags or else stark naked, with pipes in their mouths. But they
like it! After passing the time of day to a lot of these boys, I climbed
the cliff and came back along the crests, stopping to inspect some of
the East Lancashire Division in their rest trenches.

Got back to Hunter-Weston's about 6 and had a cup of tea. There Cox of
the Indian Brigade joined me, and I took him with me to Imbros where he
is going to stay a day or two with Braithwaite.

_14th June, 1915. Imbros._ K. sends me this brisk little pick-me-up:--

"Report here states that your position could be made untenable by
Turkish guns from the Asiatic shore. Please report on this."

No doubt--no doubt! Yet I was once his own Chief of Staff into whose
hands he unreservedly placed the conduct of one of the most crucial, as
it was the last, of the old South African enterprises: I was once the
man into whose hands he placed the defence of his heavily criticized
action at the Battle of Paardeburg. There it is: he used to have great
faith in me, and now he makes me much the sort of remark which might be
made by a young lady to a Marine. The answer, as K. well knows, depends
upon too many imponderabilia to be worth the cost of a cable. The size
and number of the Turkish guns; their supplies of shell; the power of
our submarines to restrict those supplies; the worth of our own ship and
shore guns; the depth of our trenches; the _moral_ of our men, and so on
_ad infinitum_. The point of the whole matter is this:--the Turks
haven't got the guns--and we know it:--if ever they do get the guns it
will take them weeks, months, before they can get them mounted and
shells in proportion amassed.

K. should know better than any other man in England--Lord Bobs, alas, is
gone--that if there was any real fear of guns from Asia being able to
make us loosen our grip on the P