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no evidence that they did anything of the kind. Ex parte and general statements by the First Lord were held to cover all that need be said, and naval strategy was dealt with as if it were a case of adding a few thousand pounds to the Estimates.

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'Both the Prime Minister and Mr. Balfour, with whom I 'discussed the matter,' says Mr. Churchill, were inclined to 'my view.' Did either of them cross-question Lord Fisher, Sir Arthur Wilson, or Sir Henry Jackson? We understand they did not do so at the War Council. The meeting after the second bombardment took place at the Admiralty.' Were they present? Did they hear the sailors' protest? If they did not, and still inclined to support Mr. Churchill,' assuredly they must now reproach themselves. Both of these statesmen have unblemished records, but they seem to have lacked the judicial faculty at the critical moment, for the weakest judge who ever sat on a bench would go through the form of hearing the witnesses for the other side, even if he had made up his mind.

But a far wider and deeper question is raised by Sir Ian Hamilton's evidence. Every one fully realises the temptation to undertake the bombardment, and can make allowance for the difficulty in deciding between expert opinions not very clearly given on a course of action on which there were few fixed signposts. The British nation will always be generous to administrators who make mistakes through excess of driving power. But we now reach a phase of the proceedings which can only be viewed with amazement.

'As early as November 1914 the idea of attacking the 'Dardanelles had been mooted, but there does not appear at that 'time to have been any sort of intention of making a purely 'naval attack.' From the beginning of January the question of ships without troops, or ships with troops, had been incessantly debated. The Admiralty had made great provision for transport and for landing. Stores were being accumulated. The exact locale of the attack was doubtful, but the project was alive. What was being done by way of preparation in the only department of the War Office in which preparation was possible? The answer is given in Sir Ian Hamilton's own words (section 108). There was total absence of information furnished to him by the War Office Staff. No preliminary scheme of

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operations had been drawn up. The Army Council had disappeared.' No arrangements had been made about water supply. There was great want of Staff preparation.'

This point must be pressed to an issue. The War Office as a whole has no right to be exposed to obloquy for shortcomings which do not lie at its door. No servants of the State have come better out of the war than those who constitute the War Office. Restricted by the orders of successive Governments to providing

(1) An Expeditionary Force of 150,000 men,

(2) 400,000 men for Home Defence,

(3) 75,000 men in India,

this department, against which so much has been written in the past, not only provided all that had been laid down but expanded the Expeditionary Force tenfold within six months, and, with the exception of munitions which could not be improvised, maintained throughout the highest standard of equipment and supply of any troops in any army.

The quality of the Army, which carried out unbroken the retreat from Mons, one of the brightest feats in military history, left nothing to be desired. The soldiers who in the past made that retreat possible-Lord Wolseley and Sir Evelyn Wood, and later Lord Roberts and Sir John French-did not rest satisfied with putting the troops in line. The debt which Great Britain owes to Lord Wolseley has been forgotten. He passed away without a word of acknowledgment in either House of Parliament. Not merely did he, when AdjutantGeneral during the fateful years 1882-1890, and after 1895 as Commander-in-Chief, put new spirit into the training of the Army, but he was the founder of the Intelligence Department and General Staff.

This all-important branch of the War Office, developed under his auspices, dates from 1885, although General Brackenbury, one of the brilliant group of soldiers who had shared his campaigns, found at first little sympathy from the 'bow-andarrow Generals,' to use Lord Wolseley's phrase, to whom he owed allegiance.

Under Mr. Stanhope and Lord Lansdowne the Staff rapidly developed, and when Lord Roberts returned from South Africa, General (now Field-Marshal) Lord Nicholson obtained a com

manding position and became, after Lord Roberts, the most important member of the War Office Council. It is a matter for lasting regret that this gifted officer was removed from the War Office by Lord Esher's Committee, after less than three years' service, on the trivial pretext that new blood was required, and since 1905 the appointment has been rather the reward of field service than of special Staff aptitude. Needless to say, the immense complexity of the problems which beset the British Empire all over the world makes the post of Chief of the Staff one with which no human brain could cope successfully without some permanence of tenure.

To the ordinary peace calls for studying the conditions under which expeditions might have to be undertaken in a dozen different spheres, the outbreak of war added enormously. The despatch and transport of troops to France was a settled service; on the other hand questions of change of venue' were limited in number but of transcendent importance. Mesopotamia, Arabia, Asia Minor, the Balkans, the coast of Belgium, Schleswig-Holstein-each furnished its quota.

The German General Staff would have set to work on such problems in a few hours. Leaving the great centre in France to the trained body who had been accustomed to work together in the War Office, they would have called up their reserves, and delegated a section of each of the other possible fields of action to independent officers. Lord Nicholson was still available, so were a score of others of trained capacity and great knowledge of the East. Instead of this being done, a' general post' was commenced in August 1914, which, when we remember the tens of thousands of lives lost in consequence of it, can hardly be forgiven.

Sir Charles Douglas, a good officer of no special Staff ability, was Chief of the General Staff at the outbreak of war; greatly overtaxed, he died in October 1914. The office without any undue haste was bestowed on Sir James Wolfe Murray, Lord Kitchener performing the duties in the meantime. A year later, when the Salonika Expedition was under discussion, Sir James Wolfe Murray was hastily removed and Sir Archibald Murray appointed. In December 1915, after sixteen months of war and 300,000 casualties, the full importance of the post was at last appreciated and Sir William Robertson, to the infinite advantage of the country, was brought back from France

and an Order in Council issued 'restoring the power of the 'Chief of the General Staff which had been allowed to lapse.' These remarkable proceedings speak for themselves. I should prefer to leave them without comment. If Lord Kitchener were alive one might say something as to his methods, especially as to the evidence given by General Callwell, the Director of Military Operations, that the real reason why the General Staff practically ceased to exist was because 'it was never consulted.'

But it must not be forgotten that it is due to those who waited to employ Lord Kitchener till the last moment that he had no experience of the great War Office machine till it was strained to snapping point by the war. And going still higher, how are we to account for the inactivity of the War Council who, realising the breakdown of the Staff preparations for the Dardanelles, took no steps to have this department properly reconstituted till a fresh breakdown had occurred in the case of Salonika? The Commission has yet to give its verdict on the effect of this neglect of the first principles of war. We know from the present report that the land expedition, for transporting which preparations had been begun four months before, was committed to Sir Ian Hamilton, with definite instructions to force his way through, but without the data necessary for doing so. It is common knowledge that on landing the maps were found to be inexact and insufficient, the arrangements for water supply were necessarily in arrear, and land transport was in its infancy. These conditions could have been obviated if a few of the officers who were denied the right to co-operate in a service to which they had devoted their lives had been allowed to transfer their activities from the library of the 'Senior' to Montagu House.

It is to be feared that when the Commissioners go further we shall find there is worse to come. The Ministry, as is clear from these papers, showed no lack of nerve in deciding to advance to the fullest extent that their resources made possible. Whether for a purely naval attack, or a naval attack with a military reserve, or a combined attack, they had plenty of courage. But in the absence of agreement between the Admiralty and War Office on anything but the general proposition that an attempt should be made to push through, they were in the dark as to what they were undertaking. If

the troops were only to seize and occupy forts when cleared by the fleet, obviously the place of landing depended on the action of the navy, but from the moment Sir Ian Hamilton telegraphed on March 19th the task of the army predominated. The army was to clear the way to make good the passage of the navy. If this had been appreciated in Downing Street probably the whole course of the campaign would have been different. Is it possible that Sir Ian Hamilton's views were never clearly made known to the War Council?

Constantinople could be threatened from three quarters,— directly from the Dardanelles, from Asia Minor, or from Suvla or Bulair. The direct route was strongly fortified, although the forts were under the fire of naval guns; but even if they were occupied the troops would be under a cross fire from the other side of the straits. If it was open to Sir Ian Hamilton to make his onslaught on both flanks and let the navy keep up the original attack, there is no more to be said.

But the reverse, as we gather from this report, was the case. Sir Ian Hamilton was sent to assist the navy; he had received from Lord Kitchener what he regarded as 'a peremptory 'instruction to take the Peninsula.' Any wasting of troops on flank movements on a large scale would not have been within his instructions, for he was greatly outnumbered by the Turks. In other words he must land at Helles in the teeth of the enemy's guns. It is more than doubtful whether any general of experience, if left to himself on the spot and allowed to use the navy to further his expedition to the best advantage, would have come to such a conclusion.

It is necessary to make this point perfectly clear, because there is little doubt that if Sir John French on landing in France had been hampered as Sir Ian Hamilton was on landing in Turkey, his army would have been annihilated. The only concern of the nation now is that such confusion should not recur, and the obvious method of securing that consummation is that, at whatever sacrifice, the ministers who press the button which starts a hurricane should see that all the preliminary steps have been strictly observed. The first of these is to satisfy themselves that any expedition proposed to them has been weighed in all its bearings and the results put before them. Lord Haldane never wearied of extolling the 'clear thinking which he had established in the War Office, but apparently the

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