Lord Kitchener's judgement in respect to general military policy in the Near East and the Levant, during the time that he was War Minister was, I think, to some small extent warped at times by excessive preoccupation with regard to Egypt and the Sudan. His hesitation to concur in the evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula until he had convinced himself of the urgent necessity of the step by personal observation, was, I am sure, prompted by his fears as to the evil moral effect which such a confession of failure would exert in the Nile Delta, and up the valley of the great river. Soon after Sir Archie Murray had become C.I.G.S., and when the War Council had taken to asking for the considered views of the General Staff upon problems of the kind, a paper had to be prepared on the subject of how best to secure Egypt. This document I drafted in the rough in the first instance. Sir Archie and we Directors of the General Staff then went carefully through it and modified it in some respects. Its purport when presented was that the proper course to pursue with regard to Egypt would be to depend upon holding the line of the Suez Canal, and some minor areas in front of it, as a comparatively small force would suffice for the purpose. Lord K. was much disappointed. He sent for me, expressed himself as strongly opposed to our view, and he seemed rather hurt at the attitude we had taken up. He favoured the despatch of a body of troops to the Gulf of Alexandretta with the idea of carrying on a very active defence; he wished to keep the enemy as far away from Egypt as possible for fear of internal disturbances, and this opinion was, I know, concurred in by Sir R. Wingate and Sir J. Maxwell. We should, no doubt, have concurred in that view likewise, had there been unlimited numbers of divisions to dispose of, and had there been no U-boats about. But an army merely sufficient to hold the Egyptian frontier would have been entirely inadequate to start a campaign based on the sea in northern Syria, and experiences in the Dardanelles theatre of war hardly offered encouragement for embarking on ventures on the shores of the Levant. Lord K. called Sir D. Haig, who happened to be over on short leave at the time, into counsel; Sir Douglas supported the contention that a comparatively small force distributed about the Canal would render things secure. The Chief then despatched General Home (who in those days was known rather as an expert gunner than as commander of aggregates of army corps) to Egypt to report; I had ceased to be D.M.O. before the report came to hand, but I believe that it favoured our plan, the plan which actually was adopted and which served its purpose for many months.