ry
freely as an auxiliary to their army in its advance along the littoral
towards Trieste, a theory of naval operations which came upon one with
something of a shock at the very start. Pola and other well-sheltered
bowers for under-water craft lie pretty handy to the maritime district
in which King Victor's troops were going to take the field. For
battleships and cruisers to be pottering about in those waters serving
out succour to the soldiers on shore, succour which would in all
probability be of no great account in any case, suggested that those
battleships and cruisers would be transmogrified into submarines at a
very early stage of the proceedings. One wondered if the Ministry of
Marine away south by the Tiber had heard the tragic tale of the
_Hogue_, the _Cressy_ and the _Aboukir_. Nor was that all. The Italian
naval delegates put forward requests that fairly substantial
assistance in the shape of war-craft of various types should be
afforded them within the Adriatic by the French and ourselves.

All this struck even an outsider like myself as somewhat
unsatisfactory, and that was clearly the view which Sir H. Jackson
took. For, in some disorder, he let slip an observation to the effect
that it looked like the recently acquired collaborator with the
Entente being rather a nuisance than otherwise. The rendering of this
expression of opinion of the Admiral's into French at the hands of our
Naval Attache in Paris (Captain Hodges) was a masterpiece of
diplomatic camouflage. In the end the Italian sailors were obliged to
ask for an adjournment to allow of their communicating with Rome,
and, if I recollect aright, the principal one of them had to proceed
home to discuss the question at headquarters. All this took up time,
and we did not finally get the conventions signed for nearly a
fortnight.

M. Millerand gave a banquet at the War Office in honour of us
delegates, at which we met M. Viviani, the Prime Minister, together
with other members of the French Cabinet. I enjoyed the good fortune
of sitting next to M. Delcasse, and so of making the acquaintance of
one of the great Foreign Ministers of our time. Paris is at its best
in spring, and had it not been war-time and had one not been in a
fidget to get back to Whitehall, a few days of comparative idleness
spent in _la ville lumiere_ after nine months of incessant office
work, while the international sailor-men settled their differences,
would have been not unwelcom