Another incident illustrates the nervous tension which prevailed in those January days. As I noticed that some shutters at the British Embassy were open, Mrs. Morgenthau and I went up to investigate. In the early days we had sealed this building, which had been left in my charge, and this was the first time we had broken the seals to enter. About two hours after we returned from this tour of inspection, Wangenheim came into my office in one of his now familiar agitated moods. It had been reported, he said, that Mrs. Morgenthau and I had been up to the Embassy getting it ready for the British Admiral, who expected soon to take possession! All this seems a little absurd now, for, in fact, the Allied fleets made no attack at that time. At the very moment when the whole of Constantinople was feverishly awaiting the British dreadnoughts, the British Cabinet in London was merely considering the advisability of such an enterprise. The record shows that Petrograd, on January 2nd, telegraphed the British Government, asking that some kind of a demonstration be made against the Turks, who were pressing the Russians in the Caucasus. Though an encouraging reply was immediately sent to this request, it was not until January 28th that the British Cabinet definitely issued orders for an attack on the Dardanelles. It is no longer a secret that there was no unanimous confidence in the success of such an undertaking. Admiral Carden recorded his belief that the strait “could not be rushed, but that extended operations with a large number of ships might succeed.” The penalty of failure, he added, would be the great loss that England would suffer in prestige and influence in the East; how true this prophecy proved I shall have occasion to show. Up to this time one of the fundamental and generally accepted axioms of naval operations had been that warships should not attempt to attack fixed land fortifications. But the Germans had demonstrated the power of mobile guns against fortresses in their destruction of the emplacements at Liège and Namur, and there was a belief in some quarters in England that these events had modified this naval principle. Mr. Churchill, at that time at the head of the Admiralty, placed great confidence in the destructive power of a new superdreadnought which had just been finished--the _Queen Elizabeth_--and which was then on its way to join the Mediterranean fleet.