scovered at a later date. Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman had fully
realized the importance of this Dardanelles transaction of 1906. He
had perceived that it was a matter of quite exceptional secrecy. He
had dreaded the disastrous results which might well arise were news by
any mischance to leak out and to reach the Sublime Porte that the
naval and military authorities in this country had expressed the
opinion that successful attack upon the Dardanelles was virtually
impracticable, and that H.M. Government had endorsed this view. Tell
the Turk that, and our trump card was gone. We could then no longer
bluff the Ottoman Government in the event of war with feints of
operations against the Straits--the very course which I believe would
have been adopted in 1914-1915, had the Admiralty War Staff and the
General Staff considered the question together without Cabinet
interference and submitted a joint report for the information of the
War Council. That 1906 memorandum and the Committee of Imperial
Defence transactions in connection with it were treated differently
from any C.I.D. documents of analogous kind then or, as far as I know,
subsequently. I never saw the memorandum from 1906 till one day in May
1915, when Mr. Asquith pushed a copy across the table to me at a
meeting of the War Council in Downing Street, and I recognized it at
once as in great measure my own production. It would not seem to have
been brought to the notice of the Dardanelles Commission that the
memorandum (to which several references are made in their Reports) was
practically accepted by the Committee of Imperial Defence as governing
the military policy of the country with respect to attack on the
Straits in the event of war.

The consequence of my having made myself familiar with the question in
the past was that, when at the beginning of September 1914 Mr.
Churchill raised the question of a conjunct Greek and British
enterprise against the Straits, it was a simple matter for me to
prepare a short memorandum on the subject, a memorandum of a decidedly
discouraging nature. As a matter of fact, what was perhaps the
strongest argument against the undertaking at that time was by
oversight omitted from the document--the Greeks had no howitzers or
mobile heavy artillery worth mentioning, and any ordnance of that
class that we disposed of in the Mediterranean was of the prehistoric
kind. The slip was of no great importance, however, because there
never was the re