His health has been against him: his heart and his lungs have not given him the support he needs for his adventurous and stormy career. At times, when every man's hand has seemed to be against him, he has had to fight desperately with both body and mind to keep his place in the firing line. Some of his friends have seen him in a state of real weakness, particularly of physical weakness, and for myself I have never once found him in a truculent or self-satisfied frame of mind. I believe he is at heart a modest man, and I am quite certain he is a delicate and a suffering man. But for the devotion of his wife I think he could not have held his place so long. Fate, too, has opposed him. His enemies are never tired of shouting the two names of Antwerp and Gallipoli. They are convenient terms of abuse: I suppose they would have destroyed most politicians; certainly they are more deadly than such a phrase as "spiritual home," for although the world may be ignorant of the fact, every honest, educated man must acknowledge a debt of gratitude to the thinkers of ancient Germany, while to be associated with operations which involve the suffering, the death, and the defeat of British troops is in every way more fatal to reputation. But, in truth, both these strokes of military strategy were sound in conception. I doubt indeed if the military historian of the future, with all the documents before him, will not chiefly condemn the Allies for their initial failure to make Antwerp a sea-fed menace to the back of the German Armies; while even in our own day no one doubts that if Lord Kitchener, in one of his obstinate moods, had not refused to send more divisions to Gallipoli we should have taken Constantinople. The fault of those operations lay not in attempting them but in not adequately supporting them. Mr. Churchill has had bad luck in these matters, but even here it is the lack of character which has served him most ill. He never impressed Lord Kitchener as a man of power, although that sullen temperament grew in the end to feel an amused affection for him. He did excellent work at the Admiralty, work of the highest kind both before and at the outbreak of war, but his colleagues in the Cabinet never realized the importance of this work, judging it merely as "one of Winston's new crazes," Ministers speak of him in their confidences with a certain amount of affection, but never with real respect. Many of them, of course, fear him, for he is a merciless critic, and has an element of something very like cruelty in his nature; but even those who do not fear him, or on the whole rather like him, will never tell you that he is a man to whom they turn in their difficulties, or a man to whom the whole Cabinet looks for inspiration. General William Booth of the Salvation Army once told Mr. Churchill that he stood in need of "conversion," That old man was a notable judge of character. LORD HALDANE LORD HALDANE