"No decision has been arrived at yet on this question of evacuation, but I feel that I ought to have your views.
"In your reply you need not consider the possible future danger to the Empire that might be thus caused."[15]
If they do this they make the Dardanelles into the bloodiest tragedy of the world! Even if we were to escape without a scratch, they would stamp our enterprise as the bloodiest of all tragedies! K. has always sworn by all his Gods he would have no hand in it. I won't touch it, and I think he knew that and calculated on that when he cabled. Anyway, let K., cat or Cabinet leap where they will, I must sleep upon my answer, but that answer will be NO!
Just as I am turning in, a cable from the S. of S. saying, "there is an idea that Sir John Maxwell is not sending you as many troops as he might from Egypt. Have you any complaints on this score?" Rather late in the day this "idea." Certainly, I have never made any "complaints" and I don't mean to do so now. The War Office have only to look up their returns and see how many men are being maintained to defend us from the Senoussi!
Maxwell has never had less than 70,000 troops in Egypt, a country which might have been held with 10,000 rifles--ever since we landed here, that is to say. My troops can sail back to Egypt very much faster than the Turks--or the Senoussi for that matter--can march to the Canal.
In the same cable the S. of S. asks what is the cause of the sick rate and remarks that, "some accounts from the Dardanelles indicate that the men are dispirited." Small wonder if they were! When they see two Divisions taken away from the Peninsula; when their guns can't answer those of the enemy; when each unit finds itself half-strength, and falling--why then, tumbling as they do to the fact that we won't get through till next year, they _ought_ to be unhappy. But the funny thing is that the Cabinet, the Secretaries of State, are the people who are "dispirited" and _not_ the people out here. If the P.M. could walk round the trenches of the Naval Division at Helles, or if K. could exchange greetings with the rank and file at Anzac and Suvla, they would find a sovereign antidote for the blues and would realize that it was they who were down-hearted and _not_ the men at the Dardanelles. There was an old French Colonel, killed at Gravelotte; he had studied the classic world battles and he shows that it was never the front line who gave way first, but always the reserves:--they, the reserves, watched bloodshed in cold blood until they could stand it no longer and so took to their heels whilst the fighting men were still focussed upon victory. Not the enemy in front but the friends behind are the men who spread despondency and alarm.