Some statesmen are ever, unconsciously perhaps but none the less instinctively, gravitating towards the line of least resistance, or towards what they imagine to be the line of least resistance. This, peradventure, accounts to some extent for the singular attraction which operations in the Near East, or Palestine, or anywhere other than on the Western Front, always seemed to present to certain highly placed men of affairs. The idea that the actual strategical position in those somewhat remote regions was such as to constitute any one of them the line of least resistance from the Entente point of view, was based on a complete misreading of the military situation. That theory was founded on the fallacy that the Western Front represented the enemy's strongest point. It was, on the contrary, the enemy's weakest point, because this front was from its geographical position the one where British and French troops could most easily be assembled, and it was the one on which a serious defeat to the enemy necessarily threatened that enemy with a grave, if not an irretrievable, disaster. It is true that for the comparatively short period during which Russia really counted, that is to say during the early months before Russian munitions gave out, the Eastern Front--the Poland Front--was a weak point for the Germans. But the Russian bubble had been pricked in the eyes of those behind the scenes long before the great advance of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies over the Vistula and into the heart of the Tsar's dominions began in the early summer of 1915. Scarcely had the Salonika venture been mooted than the Dardanelles venture cropped up and was actually embarked on; so that for the nonce the advocates of an advance through Serbia--I am not sure that there was more than one at the time--abandoned that project. But although the Serbs had succeeded early in the winter of 1914-15 in driving the Austro-Hungarian invading columns ignominiously back over the Save and the Danube, the position of this isolated Ally of ours was giving grounds for anxiety from an early period in 1915, and it always presented a serious problem for the Entente. Colonel Basil Buckley, my right-hand man with regard to the Near East, had it constantly in mind.