peaceful, naturally kindly, naturally indisposed to haste, plagued with the scholar’s and the barrister’s torturing ability to perceive many sides to every question, and hoping to crown a laborious life by the accomplishment of political and domestic projects which, at the first breath of war, must wither away. Yet he decided. [Sidenote: MR. CHURCHILL’S IDEA] Third in influence upon the War Council (that is to say, upon the direction of all naval and military affairs) stood Mr. Winston Churchill. In his evidence before the Commission, Mr. Churchill stated: “I was on a rather different plane. I had not the same weight or authority as those two Ministers, nor the same power, and if they said, This is to be done or not to be done, that settled it.”[17] The Commissioners add in comment that Mr. Churchill here “probably assigned to himself a more unobtrusive part than that which he actually played.” The comment is justified in relation to the Dardanelles, not merely because it is difficult to imagine Mr. Churchill playing an unobtrusive part upon any occasion, but because, as we have seen, the idea of a Dardanelles Expedition was specially his own. It was one of those ideas for which we are sometimes indebted to the inspired amateur. For the amateur, untrammelled by habitual routine, and not easily appalled by obstacles which he cannot realise, allows his imagination the freer scope, and contemplates his own particular vision under a light that never was in office or in training-school. In Mr. Churchill’s case, the vision of the Dardanelles was, in truth, beatific. His strategic conception, if carried out, would have implied, not merely victory, but peace. Success would at once have secured the defence of Egypt, but far more besides. It would have opened a high road, winter and summer, for the supply of munitions and equipment to Russia, and a high road for returning ships laden with the harvests of the Black Earth. It would have severed the German communication with the Middle East, and rendered our Mesopotamian campaign either unnecessary or far more speedily fortunate. On the political side, it would have held Bulgaria steady in neutrality or brought her into our alliance. It might have saved Serbia without even an effort at Salonika, and certainly it would have averted all the subsequent entanglements with Greece. Throughout the whole Balkans, the Allies would at once have obtained the position which the enemy afterwards held, and have surrounded the Central Powers with an iron circle complete at every point except upon the Baltic coast, the frontiers of Denmark, Holland, and Switzerland, and a strip of the Adriatic. Under those conditions, it is hardly possible that the war could have continued after 1916. In a speech made during the summer of the year before that (after his resignation as First Lord), Mr. Churchill was justified in saying: