It was, no doubt, unfortunate, from the point of view of the Dardanelles campaign, that there was so much hesitation about sending out the very substantial reinforcements which only actually reached Sir I. Hamilton at the end of July and during the early days of August. But it by no means necessarily follows that if they had reached their destination, say, six weeks sooner, the Straits would have been won. Much stress has always been laid upon the torpor that descended upon Suvla during the very critical hours which followed the successful disembarkation of the new force in that region; but those inexperienced troops and their leaders must have acted with extraordinary resolution and energy to have appreciably changed the fortunes of General Birdwood's great offensive against Sari Bair. Information from the Turkish side does not suggest that Liman von Sanders gained any great accessions of strength during July and early August. It was the ample warning which the enemy received of what was impending before ever a soldier was landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula that, far more than anything which occurred subsequently, rendered the Dardanelles operations abortive. The Dardanelles Committee came into being in June. This body included most of the more prominent figures in the Coalition Cabinet. Attending its deliberations from time to time one acquired the impression that an undue amount of attention was being given in Government circles to the Aegean theatre of war, an attention out of all proportion either to its importance or to our prospects of success; for the talk ranged over the whole wide world at times and the Committee dealt with a good deal besides the Dardanelles. Its members always took the utmost interest in the events in the Gallipoli Peninsula, and, up to the date when the August offensive in that region definitely failed, they were mostly in sanguine mood. One or two optimistic statements made in public at that time were indeed quite inappropriate and had much better been left unspoken. The amateur strategist, that inexhaustible source of original and unprofitable proposals, was by no means inarticulate at these confabulations in 10 Downing Street. He would pick up Sir I. Hamilton's Army and would deposit it in some new locality, just as one might pick up one's pen-wiper and shift it from one side of the blotting-pad to the other. That is how some people who are simply bursting with intelligence, people who will produce whole newspaper columns of what to the uninformed reads like sensible matter, love to make war. In a way, the U-boats in the Aegean served as a blessing in disguise; they helped to squash many hare-brained schemes inchoated around Whitehall, and to consign them to oblivion before they became really dangerous.