The first meeting of importance with representatives of the Allies at which I was present took place in Paris at the end of April 1915, and has already been referred to on p. 63. Sir H. Jackson and I were sent over, as representing respectively the Admiralty and the War Office, to take part in a secret conference that was to be held between French, Russian, and British naval and military delegates on the one side, and Italian naval and military delegates on the other side in connection with Italy's entry into the war as an associate of the Entente. That Italy was to join the Allies had already been arranged secretly between the four governments, and it was understood that she was to open hostilities in the latter part of May. The purpose of the Conference was to permit of the situation being discussed, and formal naval and military conventions were to be drawn up between the contracting Powers. Sir Henry and I were accompanied by small staffs, and we put up at the Ritz in the Place Vendome. M. Millerand, who was French War Minister at the time, presided at the Conference which assembled in the War Office, and he made an ideal chairman--the French are always admirable at managing such functions. The principal French military delegate was General Pelle, General Joffre's Chief of Staff; the Russians were represented by their Military Attache in Paris, Colonel Count Ignatieff, and the principal Italian military delegate was a colonel (whose name I cannot recall), a most attractive and evidently an extremely capable soldier, who unhappily was killed within a few months when in command of a brigade in one of the early fights near Gorizia. In so far as framing the military convention was concerned, that part of the proceedings gave little trouble. The Italian representatives, it is true, were anxious that the Allies should undertake to embark upon an offensive on the greatest possible scale practicable, simultaneously with the Italian army crossing the frontier about the Isonzo; but General Pelle and I could give no guarantee to that effect, the more so seeing that a Franco-British offensive had already, as it was, been decided upon to start in the Bethune-Vimy region within a few days and before the Italian army would be ready. One had a pretty shrewd suspicion that there was no opening whatever for an offensive on the Eastern Front in view of our Russian Allies' grave munitions difficulties, although the French seemed strangely unaware of the nakedness of the land in that quarter; still, it was no part of the game to hint at joints in our harness of that kind to the Italian representatives. Ignatieff, bluff and cheery, was careful not to commit himself on the subject. The end of it was that our military convention amounted to little more than an agreement that we were all jolly fine fellows, accompanied by cordial expressions of good-will and of a determination on the part of the four contracting Powers to do their best and to stick together.