brave men the knowledge is mercifully hid from them that they died in vain.” Again, this is a digression--but such must be the nature of this book when speaking _ore rotundo_ and from the fulness of a disgusted heart, that such Lions should be led by such Asses. The book can’t convey my feelings, however carefully my good friend the typewriter is taking it down. All the quill drivers, the ink spillers, and the Junius-aping journalists will jeer at you as the Editor, and say, “Why didn’t you stop him? Where’s the argument? Where’s the lucid exposition? Where’s the subtle dialectician who will talk a bird out of a tree? Where is this wonderful personality I’m told of, who fooled King Edward, and ravished virgins, and preached the Gospel (so he says)? Like Gaul, he is divided into three parts; we don’t see one of them.” We’ll get along with the Dardanelles now. All this will make pulp for paper for the _National Review_. “Imperial Cæsar dead and turned to clay Now stops a hole to keep the wind away.” Well, I left off at the “Miasma” that, imperceptibly to each of them in the War Council, floated down on them with rare subtle dialectical skill, and proved so incontestably to them that cutting off the enemy’s big toe in the East was better than stabbing him to the heart in the West; and that the Dardanelles was better than the Baltic, and that Gallipoli knocked spots off the Kiel Canal, or a Russian Army landed by the British Fleet on the Baltic shore of Schleswig-Holstein. Without any doubt, the “beseechings” of the Grand Duke Nicholas in the Caucasus on January 2nd, 1915,[7] addressed to Kitchener in such soldierly terms, moved that great man’s heart; for say what you will, Kitchener was a great man. But he was a great deception, all the same, inasmuch as he couldn’t do what a lot of people thought he could do. Like Moses, he was a great Commissariat Officer, but he was not a Napoleon or a Moltke; he was a Carnot _in excelsis_, and he was the facile dupe of his own failings. But “Speak well of those who treat you well.” I went to him one evening at 5 p.m., with Mr. Churchill’s knowledge, and said to him as First Sea Lord of the Admiralty that if his myrmidons did not cease that same night from seducing men from the private shipyards to become “Cannon-fodder” I was going to resign at 6 p.m. I explained to him the egregious folly of not pressing on our shipbuilding to its utmost limits. He admitted the soft impeachment as to the seduction; and there, while I waited, he wrote the telegram calling off the seducers. If only that had been stuck to after I left the Admiralty, we shouldn’t be rationed now in sugar nearly a year after the Armistice, nor should we be bidding fair to become a second Carthage. We left our element, the sea, to make ourselves into a conscript nation fighting on the Continent with four million soldiers out of a population of forty millions. More than all the other nations’ was our Army.