revolutionaries while travelling by
railway somewhere near Petrograd in 1917. General Yudenitch, we found,
happened to be in Tiflis, and at the call that we paid him I arranged
to present him with his order on the following morning.

I had a prolonged interview with the Grand Duke at the palace during
the course of the day. He was not only Commander-in-Chief in
Transcaucasia but was also Governor-General, and he told me that civil
duties took up more of his time than military duties. Like Alexeieff,
and probably by arrangement with the Stavka, he raised the question of
our sending a force to near Alexandretta, and he put in a new plea for
which I was not quite prepared. As he spoke at considerable length it,
however, gave one time to think. He maintained that the right policy
for the Allies to adopt was to knock the Turks out for good and to
have done with them, expressing the opinion that it would not be
difficult to induce them to make peace once they had undergone a good
hammering. I replied that there appeared to be political problems
involved in this which were quite outside my province, but that
certain obvious factors came into the question. The prospects of
prevailing upon the Sublime Porte to come to terms hinged upon what
those terms were to be, and Constantinople seemed likely to prove a
stumbling-block to an understanding. The Ottoman Government might be
prepared to part with Erzerum and Trebizond and Basrah, and even
possibly Syria and Palestine, but Stamboul and the Straits were quite
a different pair of shoes. H.I.H. gripped my hand and pressed it till
I all but squealed. It was delightful to talk to a soldier who went
straight to the point, said he, but he dashed off on another tack,
asking what were our military objections to the Alexandretta plan; so
I went over much the same ground as had already been gone over at
Mohileff, promising to let him have a memorandum on the subject.

He pronounced himself as most anxious to aid us in Mesopotamia, did
not seem satisfied with what his troops in Persia had accomplished,
and was concerned at my rather pessimistic views with regard to Kut.
Kut actually held out for ten days longer than I had been given to
understand was possible at the War Office. He also conveyed to me a
pretty clear hint that in his view Major Marsh, our Military Attache
with him, ought to have his status improved. There I was entirely with
him, but did not say so; there had been a misunder