ness was added tardy awakening on the part of the nation; and no influence such as Napoleon exercised on France in 1803 or Lincoln on America in 1863 was ready to galvanise the chaotic atoms of Great Britain into a harmonious whole.

It is due to all these circumstances, and not to lack of effort or public spirit, that the Dardanelles Report reads like a chapter from the Arabian Nights.'

Discarding all the nonsense which has been written about 'Unseen Hands' and pro-German sympathies, it is only patriotic to investigate the source of this breakdown. In war, personalities count more even than men or munitions. In this respect the cast of the War Council was ill set. Mr. Asquith, whose brain-power exceeded that of all his colleagues, had steered his Government through seven perilous years by occasional firmness and constant compromises. He carried these qualities into the war with some success. If, for instance, he had brought in conscription at the outset, he might have put back the clock. He may claim that he kept the country, as he helped to keep the Allies, together; he dealt pleasantly with foreign statesmen. But war cannot be made by shirking decisions, and it required a Prime Minister of more self-assertion to control the discordant elements by which he was surrounded, and of greater prevision as to the war to estimate the extent to which the personal equation governed the schemes between which he had to choose.

No conjunction of persons could have been less happy than the enforced partnership of Lord Kitchener and Mr. Churchill, by whom, as heads of the two services, the war was carried on in the early stages, with the Prime Minister in an undefined position between them. It is always a danger to link two people in national business who habitually disagree. Either they yield to natural impulses and there is friction, or they make concessions from ultra-fairness and the country is ill served. The bad feeling between Canning and Castlereagh was largely responsible for the Walcheren Expedition and other failures in 1809. In the Crimea, Lord Cardigan would never have led a hopeless charge at Balaclava, but for his old differences with Lord Lucan. More recently an unavoidable association was made in South Africa between Sir Redvers Buller and Lord Roberts, who had never seen eye to eye on military topics. But in a study of opposites'

none of these cases were such poles apart as Mr. Asquith's Secretary for War and his First Lord.

Lord Kitchener had commanded a force at Omdurman in which Mr. Churchill was a subaltern, and had been chief of an army of 250,000 men in South Africa when Mr. Churchill was a newspaper correspondent. Though he had seen war before Mr. Churchill was born, and had organised it for a quarter of a century, he had written nothing and said little; Mr. Churchill, who had rapidly absorbed meteoric impressions in several campaigns in which he fought gallantly, assumed his conpetence to lecture generals and admirals on their duties. Sir Stafford Northcote, speaking of Lord Randolph Churchill's friendliness in 1885, said that he forgot the difference between being at the whip end and the handle end.' Mr. Churchill, who is not vindictive, has a similarly short memory. It did not tend to close confidence that among the sufferers from his public attacks had been Lord Kitchener, when he was not in a position to reply.

Before the war had been going many weeks it was apparent that the two men breathed different atmospheres. Mr. Churchill not only guaranteed the security of the Channel but was ready to hunt out the enemy's fleet 'like rats.' Lord Kitchener's respect for the German threat of invasion kept Sir John French short of his Sixth Division during his heroic retreat. Lord Kitchener, again holding that none but fully trained troops could be put in line, refused to send any of the 300,000 Territorials to France till November; Mr. Churchill bustled the newly raised and untrained Naval Brigade to Antwerp, to be captured. Mr. Churchill ordered immediate preparations for a certain combined attack in January 1915; Lord Kitchener left those on the spot to demonstrate its impossibility. Both were doing their best to serve the country, but the unfortunate Prime Minister must often have felt that, instead of resting securely on combined advice, he was mediating between two independent and not altogether friendly authorities.

When it came to the Dardanelles the divergence developed. Lord Kitchener, who had found the War Office somewhat denuded by the Expeditionary Force, consulted no one; he knew that he could not properly spare troops; moreover, he held that in war to divide forces is fatal. In this respect he represented Sir John French's view as well as his own. Mr. VOL. 225. NO. 460.

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Churchill similarly gave the go-by to his Council. Instead of restraining the ardour of a splendidly venturesome service already itching to get at an evasive enemy, he stimulated it with the impetuosity of a cavalry officer. He genuinely believed that the Dardanelles could be forced by the fleet alone; apparently he was not disturbed by the silence of his expert advisers at the War Council. When by some accident Lord Fisher was asked a vital question as to how many battleships would be lost in attempting to force the Dardanelles and replied 'Twelve,' he seems to have been treated like a Bishop who was defending Church revenues. Such scruples, however natural, must be got over.

Mr. Asquith's speech in the House of Commons on March 20 throws little light on his condition of mind in this dilemma. He seems not to have appreciated his own predominant power. He defended Lord Kitchener handsomely, and made it clear, which no one who knew him doubted, that he had laboured strenuously to bring all his colleagues into line and only wanted to arrive at truth. But if this were all that was needed, a man of far less calibre might have held the first post in the Government.

To put it clearly, it is admitted on all hands that the diversion was an attractive one. It assisted the Russians; it impressed the Balkan States; it relieved the muddy deadlock on the West Front; it gave the Navy a chance. The question was whether it could be carried out by the fleet alone; if not, were troops available in sufficient strength to support it? if attempted, would the Government be prepared to persist or risk the loss of prestige by drawing off?

These were the points on which the Prime Minister should have secured a clear decision. Apparently he drifted with the stream, and left the various eddies to prevail according to their respective momentum.

Yet he must have realised that all the forces around him were combining for different reasons to stake a precious array of ships, lives, prestige, and material on this gamble. The Foreign Secretary felt the new departure to be a trump card in diplomacy. Mr. Churchill was 'out for' a great coup and, with a considerable turn for military affairs, was irrepressibly sanguine. Lord Kitchener, if the overtaxed army could be spared, had a keen eye to the East. The heads of the two

services were thus impelled to take the risk with ships. Surely with two men of such dominant personality who consulted subordinates little and distrusted each other much, there was a double need to call in the experts associated with them.

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Moreover, Mr. Asquith had recently in the Ulster crisis found at the War Office how little the haphazard opinions of military men are to be relied upon without cross-examination. was President of a Court in which he was possibly the only minister without a bias. The conduct of Lord Fisher in not speaking out is gravely criticised; Mr. Asquith left no doubt on the mind of the Commission that his interposition would have been welcome. Lord Grey said the War Council went solely by the opinions of the two ministers. Lord Crewe said the political members of the Committee did too much ' of the talking and the expert members as a rule too little,' a view in which Lord Haldane concurred. Mr. Balfour and Mr. Lloyd George assumed that experts assented if they did not dissent, a view which it is to be hoped the present Prime Minister does not now rely upon. During a whole series of meetings Mr. Asquith and his colleagues were counting on Lord Fisher and the experts to open their minds; Lord Fisher thought he must be silent or resign. Politicians and admirals, following the precedent of Lord Chatham and Sir Richard Strachan, were waiting on each other' for many weeks, while the Cabinet accepted the views of the soi-disant interpreter who advised them.

The picture of the War Council on the 28th January 1915 is a tragic one.

Mr. Churchill'kept on saying he could do it without the 'army'; Lord Fisher during the Council was manoeuvring about the room to get away and resign; the other ministers no doubt saw all that passed, but were content at a second meeting that day to take the leap in the dark without a word from Lord Fisher or Sir Arthur Wilson, and to hang on the words of a young man in a hurry' the biggest naval operation undertaken since Trafalgar.

The story does not end here. After the first bombardment on February 19 it was quite obvious that troops would be needed; after the second, on March 18, the heavy loss made it clear to all on the spot that the ships could not get through.

Sir Ian Hamilton had fortunately then arrived at the Dardanelles, and was taking a strong hand in the decision. His telegram to Lord Kitchener of March 19th saved the country from a great naval disaster :

'I am being most reluctantly driven towards the conclusion that the Dardanelles are less likely to be forced by battleships than at one time seemed probable. . . . The army's share will not be a case of landing parties for the destruction of forts, &c., but rather a deliberate and progressive military operation carried out in force in order to make good the passage of the navy."

Mr. Churchill none the less again tried to force the running, in the face of Sir Ian Hamilton's and Admiral de Robeck's opinions, but was headed off by the combined weight of Lord Fisher, Sir Arthur Wilson, and Sir Henry Jackson, and the dash to victory was abandoned. Instead of 'rushing' the Dardanelles it was decided that naval and military forces were to be employed together on a large scale to clear the Turks from the Gallipoli peninsula.

The narrative of events ends at March 23rd. Two very serious questions present themselves upon it. The first of these can be disposed of in a few words. Naval strategy is proverbially most imperfectly understood. There have been great military changes during the war, but trench warfare has reproduced many of the old siege conditions. Naval warfare has been incomparably more changed, and there have been no precedents to guide us. The naval experience of the RussoJapanese war was partial and unreal. The relation of ships to forts and of mines to ships was realised to some extent at Port Arthur, but the submarine did not exist, and the fight at Tushima, where one fleet was old-fashioned and barnacled by months of voyage, was a travesty of naval war on the modern scale. Moreover the effect of modern guns on forts, as shown at Liége, Namur, and Antwerp, had not been tested by ships. These changes were all realised by sailors, and few of them would re-echo Lord Fisher's cocksure pronouncement quoted above of the exact loss incident to any operation. The meagre nature of the data by which to steer and the awful risks involved, apart from the fact that a repulse at sea would affect British prestige at its most vital point, should surely have combined to make impartial judges scrutinise every detail of the case with microscopic severity. There is