n), having been taught in
my youth by Lord Roberts that nothing written to a Commander-in-Chief,
or his Military Secretary, can be private if it has a bearing on
operations. A letter which may influence the Chief Command of an Army
and, therefore, the life of a nation, may be "Secret" for reasons of
State; it cannot possibly be "Private" for personal reasons.[2]

At the time, I am sure my diary was a help to me in my work. The
crossings to and from the Peninsula gave me many chances of reckoning up
the day's business, sometimes in clear, sometimes in a queer cipher of
my own. Ink stands with me for an emblem of futurity, and the act of
writing seemed to set back the crisis of the moment into a calmer
perspective. Later on, the diary helped me again, for although the
Dardanelles Commission did not avail themselves of my formal offer to
submit what I had written to their scrutiny, there the records were.
Whenever an event, a date and a place were duly entered in their actual
coincidence, no argument to the contrary could prevent them from falling
into the picture: an advocate might just as well waste eloquence in
disputing the right of a piece to its own place in a jig-saw puzzle.
Where, on the other hand, incidents were not entered, anything might
happen and did happen; _vide_, for instance, the curious misapprehension
set forth in the footnotes to pages 59, 60, Vol. II.

So much for the past. Whether these entries have not served their turn
is now the question. They were written red-hot amidst tumult, but
faintly now, and as in some far echo, sounds the battle-cry that once
stopped the beating of thousands of human hearts as it was borne out
upon the night wind to the ships. Those dread shapes we saw through our
periscopes are dust: "the pestilence that walketh in darkness" and "the
destruction that wasteth at noonday" are already images of speech: only
the vastness of the stakes; the intensity of the effort and the grandeur
of the sacrifice still stand out clearly when we, in dreams, behold the
Dardanelles. Why not leave that shining impression as a martial cloak to
cover the errors and vicissitudes of all the poor mortals who, in the
words of Thucydides, "dared beyond their strength, hazarded against
their judgment, and in extremities were of an excellent hope?"

Why not? The tendency of every diary is towards self-justification and
complaint; yet, to-day, personally, I have "no complaints." Would it not
be wiser, t