At the War Council meetings of January 28 a demonstration extending to the possible capture of Constantinople was thus decided upon, and the demonstration was to be purely naval. All the members of the Council would have agreed that a joint naval and military (or “amphibious”) attack would have made success surer; but Lord Kitchener declared the necessary troops could not be supplied, and his decision was accepted without question. The evidence shows that when first Admiral Carden was commanded to attack, no hint of military support was given him. He was expected to depend entirely upon small landing-parties of his own marines to demolish the forts.[53] Mr. Churchill has himself told us that, if an amphibious attack had then been thought essential or seriously contemplated, nothing at all would have been done. Nothing less than 100,000 or 150,000 men could have been asked for, together with large supplies of high explosives and artillery. Whereupon, “all the military experts” (_i.e._ Lord Kitchener, with the possible addition of Lord French) “unanimously would have said that the men were not available, and the ammunition could not be spared from the French front.”[54] Whether it would not have been well, even at this last moment, to abandon the whole scheme rather than act contrary to the best judgment of experts and laymen alike, has now, unfortunately, become a matter of vain speculation. [Sidenote: HESITATION RENEWED] Hardly had the naval orders been given, and the ships dispatched, when the Council began to waver. It is impossible to fix a day for this change, for the change itself wavered. In his evidence, General Callwell (the D.M.O.) said: “We drifted into the big military attack”;[55] and “drift” is the precise word for the Council’s uncertain course. By the middle of February the feeling had evidently set towards an amphibious movement; but up to the middle of March they hoped that the need of landing troops upon a large scale might be avoided by purely naval success. It appears that early in February Lord Kitchener began to yield. Probably his former decision was shaken by the abandonment of a large-scale offensive in France, and by the failure of the Turkish attack upon the Suez Canal (February 3 and 4). Though the Turkish force was allowed to retreat without the destruction which greater energy in the Egyptian Command might have brought upon it, the troops then in Egypt had proved more than sufficient for defence; and Egypt, as we have noticed, was always Lord Kitchener’s peculiar care. On February 9 he remarked in the War Council that “if the Navy required the assistance of the land forces at a later stage, that assistance would be forthcoming.” [Sidenote: THE 29TH DIVISION DETAINED]