our enfeebled forces to crack, but they
seemed to think that if we were once to get the enemy on the run, with
the old 29th Division and the new, keen Yeomanry on their heels, we
might yet go further than we expected. One Brigade of the 29th Division
has been brought round from Helles to put shape and form into the 53rd
Division. Peyton's men are to be attached to the Irish Division. There
is a new spirit of energy and hope in the higher ranks but the men have
meanwhile been aimlessly marched and counter-marched, muddled, and
knocked about so that their spirit has suffered in consequence.

No end of Yeomen on the beaches; the cream of agricultural England. Many
of them recognized me from my various home inspections. Would like very
much to have had a war inspection, but the enemy gunners are too
inquisitive.

De Lisle tells me he has now been round every corner of Suvla and that
the want of grip throughout the higher command has been worse than he
dared to put on paper. To reorganize will take several weeks; but we
have to try and act within two or three days.

Skeen told us that when the Turks stuck up a placard saying Warsaw had
fallen, the Australians gave three hearty cheers.

The chief trouble in making plans for the coming attack lies in the want
of cover on, and for a mile inland of, the Suvla Bay beaches. The whole
stretch of the flat land immediately East and South of the Bay lies open
to the Turkish gunners. This is no longer a serious drawback if the men
are holding lines of trenches. But when the trench system is not yet in
working order, and they want to deploy, then it is so awkward a factor
that I would have been prepared to turn the whole battle into a night
attack. The others were not for it. They thought that the troops were
not highly enough trained and had lost too many officers to be able to
find their way over this country in the darkness. They are in immediate
touch with the men: I am not.

Lindley asked if he might walk with me to the Beach, and on the way down
he told me frankly his Division had gone to pieces and that he did not
feel it in himself to pull it together again. Very fine of him to make a
clean breast of it, I thought, and said so: also advised him to put what
he had told me into writing to de Lisle, when we will relieve him and I
promised for my part, to try and fit him with some honourable but less
onerous job.

On Hammersley's report, Sitwell, Brigadier of the 34th Brigade,