[Footnote 1: It is stated that an ingenious device caused these mines to sink after a certain time and come back on an under-current that flows _up_ the Dardanelles, and then rise at the Narrows for recovery. This may have enabled the Turks to keep up their presumably limited supply of mines; but how well the automatic control worked is not known.] [Illustration: DARDANELLES DEFENSES] There is some military support for the opinion that if, on the 18th or at some more suitable time, the fleet had acted in the spirit of Farragut's "Damn the torpedoes! Full steam ahead!" and, protected by dummy ships, bumpers, or whatever other devices naval ingenuity could devise, had steamed up to and through the Narrows in column, it would not have suffered much more severely than during the complicated maneuvering below. Of such an attack General von der Goltz, in command of the Turkish army, said that, "Although he thought it was almost impossible to force the Dardanelles, if the English thought it an important move in the general war, they could by sacrificing ten ships force the entrance, and do it very fast, and be up in Marmora within 10 hours from the time they forced it."[l] Admiral Fisher estimated that the loss would be 12 ships. [Footnote 1: Repeated by Baron van Wangenheim to Ambassador Morgenthau, prior to the attack of March 18, AMBASSADOR MORGENTHAU'S STORY, _World's Work_, September, 1918. See also Col. F. N. Maude, Royal Engineers, _Contemporary Review_, June, 1915.] After such deductions, there would be no great surplus to deal with the _Goeben_, which would fight desperately, and with the defenses of Constantinople. Indeed, such losses would seem absolutely prohibitive, if viewed only from the narrow standpoint of the force engaged, and without taking into fullest account the limited value of the older ships and the fact that the Government was fully committed to a prosecution of the campaign. It is of course easy to see that victory purchased by the loss of 10 predreadnoughts and 10,000 men would be cheap, as compared with the sacrifice of over 100,000 men killed and wounded and 10,000 invalided in the later campaign on land.