I had a prolonged interview with the Grand Duke at the palace during the course of the day. He was not only Commander-in-Chief in Transcaucasia but was also Governor-General, and he told me that civil duties took up more of his time than military duties. Like Alexeieff, and probably by arrangement with the Stavka, he raised the question of our sending a force to near Alexandretta, and he put in a new plea for which I was not quite prepared. As he spoke at considerable length it, however, gave one time to think. He maintained that the right policy for the Allies to adopt was to knock the Turks out for good and to have done with them, expressing the opinion that it would not be difficult to induce them to make peace once they had undergone a good hammering. I replied that there appeared to be political problems involved in this which were quite outside my province, but that certain obvious factors came into the question. The prospects of prevailing upon the Sublime Porte to come to terms hinged upon what those terms were to be, and Constantinople seemed likely to prove a stumbling-block to an understanding. The Ottoman Government might be prepared to part with Erzerum and Trebizond and Basrah, and even possibly Syria and Palestine, but Stamboul and the Straits were quite a different pair of shoes. H.I.H. gripped my hand and pressed it till I all but squealed. It was delightful to talk to a soldier who went straight to the point, said he, but he dashed off on another tack, asking what were our military objections to the Alexandretta plan; so I went over much the same ground as had already been gone over at Mohileff, promising to let him have a memorandum on the subject.