PERICLES’ FUNERAL SPEECH; _Thucydides_, ii. 43. PREFACE From the outset the Dardanelles Campaign attracted me with peculiar interest. The shores of the Straits were the scene of the Trojan epics and dramas. They were explored and partly inhabited by a race whose legends and history had been more familiar to me from boyhood than my own country’s, and more inspiring. They belonged to that beautiful part of the world with which I had become personally intimate during the wars, rebellions, and other disturbances of the previous twenty years. But, above all, I was attracted to the Campaign because I regarded it as a strategic conception surpassing others in promise. My reasons are referred to in various chapters of this book, and indeed they were obvious. The occupation of Constantinople would have paralysed Turkey as an ally of the Central Powers; it would have blocked their path to the Middle East, and averted danger from Egypt, the Persian Gulf, and India; it would have released the Russian forces in the Caucasus for action elsewhere; it would have secured the neutrality, if not the active co-operation, of the Balkan States, and especially of Bulgaria, not only the most resolute and effective of them, but a State well disposed to ourselves and the Russian people by history and sentiment; by securing Bulgaria’s friendship, it would have delivered Serbia from fear of attack upon her eastern frontier, and have relieved Roumania from similar apprehensions along the Danube and in the Dobrudja; it would have confirmed the influence of Venizelos in Greece, and saved King Constantine from military, financial, and domestic temptations to Germanise; above all, it would thus have secured Russia’s left flank, so enabling her to concentrate her entire forces upon the Lithuanian, Polish, and Galician frontiers from the Memel to the Dniester. The worst apprehensions of the Central Powers would then have been fulfilled. Blockaded by the Allied fleets in the Adriatic, and by the British fleet in the Channel and the North Sea, they would have found themselves indeed surrounded by an iron ring, and, so far as prophecy was possible, it seemed likely that the terms which our Alliance openly professed as our objects in the war might have been obtained in the spring of 1916. The subsidiary and more immediate consequences of success in the Dardanelles, such as the supply of munitions to Russia, and of Ukrainian wheat to our Alliance, were also to be considered. The saying of Napoleon, in May, 1808, still held good: “At bottom the great question is--Who shall have Constantinople?”