After the war of 1870 the French did not get possession of their Lorraine frontier till the indemnity was paid and the occupying army was withdrawn. Then they fortified it so effectively from Belfort to Verdun that everybody said the Germans would come round through Switzerland or Belgium, if ever they came again. (I remember people saying this, about 1878 and onwards, quite as a matter of course.) Against Switzerland there was the fortress of Besançon, and against Belgium there was supposed to be a line from Verdun to Dunkirk through Lille. But this line never was made effective, and gradually fell into decay. That certainly was no affair of ours in the days of the Two Power standard, when we were building ships to fight the French and Russians. But after the Entente I thought we might request the French to pay attention to their Swiss and Belgian frontiers. No doubt, they could not make as strong a line from Dunkirk to Verdun as from Verdun to Belfort; but the Germans were not likely to embroil themselves by going through Belgium, if they had to face a line on the French frontier there of anything like the same strength as the French line in Lorraine. One of those learned Germans was making a tour in England five-and-twenty years ago; and I met him at Portsmouth, and went over the Victory with him. He showed much emotion at it all; and when we reached the place where Nelson died, he quite broke down and burst out into tears. And the quartermaster said, “I’m blowed.” He may have pictured it more vividly than we did, for he was a veteran of 1870, and knew what warfare meant. A great-uncle of mine was on the Impregnable at the battle of Algiers in 1816, and I have heard him say that it was really nauseous to have two hundred killed and wounded all crowded up in such a narrow space. Unless a naval battle has been fought close by the shore, no landsman can well picture to himself what it was like. Looking down upon the island and the straits of Salamis, I have seen the battle as vividly as Trasimene or Waterloo; but I have never been able to conjure up Trafalgar by thinking of the latitude and longitude that I was in. I have tried it several times and always failed. There have been many naval battles in the Dardanelles, in ancient times and in the middle ages; but I did not think of these when I was there in 1880. Our fleet had gone up through the straits two years before; and that seemed much more real. People criticised some things that Hornby did, especially his sending ships right up the gulf of Xeros; but everybody seemed quite sure that the strategic point was in the throat of the peninsula, five miles north-east of Gallipoli, not in its toes at Suvla bay and cape Helles, more than twenty and thirty miles south-west. So, being out of date, I imagined that our Gallipoli expedition would try to land near Yenikli-liman.