jesting turn, there was no sting in his witticisms, his jests were easy and never offensive. When he was angered, his emotion lasted but a few seconds, and afterwards he was as light-hearted as a child. Such was the Mark Sykes of 1914 when the War broke out. He took up his part in the War with all his patriotism and with his idealistic faith in the victory of justice. In 1915 he was with his regiment busy in hard training and ready for the field. He often told me how it had come to pass that the East had become his sphere of action. One day Lord Kitchener said to him: “Sykes, what are you doing in France, you must go to the East.” “What am I to do there?” asked Sykes. “Just go there and then come back,” was Lord Kitchener’s answer. Sykes travelled to the East, made his way through accessible and inaccessible districts, and came back. His observations and experiences constituted the material upon which all the great things that afterwards happened were based. He then voluntarily entered the service of the Government as expert, as adviser, and as draughtsman of their policy. He was one of the pioneers of the new British War Policy in the East, one of the protagonists of the “Eastern School.” In the year 1916 he undertook with M. Georges Picot a journey to Russia. It was then the Czarist Russia with its eye fixed upon Constantinople; that was the occasion upon which the so-called Sykes-Picot agreement was signed. From the standpoint of Zionist interests in Palestine this agreement justly met with severe criticism; but it was Sykes himself who criticised it most sharply and who with the change of circumstances dissociated himself from it entirely. It was a product of the time, a time when there was as yet no decided plan formed of launching a definite campaign in the East, when the prime necessity was some sort of agreement, since otherwise no progress would have been made. This was long before Mr. Balfour’s declaration, and since at this time the Zionist interests in Palestine had as yet received no attention because they were unknown and not debatable, and also as it was essential to come to terms about Constantinople with the old regime in Russia, this agreement was a necessary prelude to action. This agreement Sykes regarded later as an anachronism.