the artery being severed that they anticipate
mortification. I should have thought better have a try at cutting off
the leg, but they are not for it. Bridges will be a real loss. He was a
single-minded, upright, politics-despising soldier. With all her
magnificent rank and file, Australia cannot afford to lose Bridges. But
perhaps I am too previous. May it be so!

Spent a good long time talking to wounded men--Australians, New
Zealanders and native Indians. Both the former like to meet someone who
knows their native country, and the natives brighten up when they are
greeted in Hindustani. On returning to Imbros, got good news about the
Lancashire Territorials who have gained 180 yards of ground without
incurring any loss to speak of. They are real good chaps. They suffer
only from the regular soldiers' fault; there are too few of them here.

_17th May, 1915. H.M.T. "Arcadian." 10 p.m._ Too much work to move. In
the evening the Admiral came to see me and read my rough draft for an
answer to Lord K.'s cable. We show the Navy all our important operations
cables; they have their own ways of doing things and don't open out so
freely. On the face of it, we are invited to say what we want. Well, to
steer a middle course between my duty to my force and my loyalty to K.
is not so simple as it might seem. That middle course is (if I can only
hit it) my duty to my country. The chief puzzle of the problem is that
nothing turns out as we were told it would turn out. The landing has
been made but the Balkans fold their arms, the Italians show no
interest, the Russians do not move an inch to get across the Black Sea
(the Grand Duke Nicholas has no munitions, we hear); our submarines have
got through but they can only annoy, they cannot cut the sea
communications, and so the Turks have not fled to Bulair. Instead, enemy
submarines are actually about to get at us and our ships are being
warned they may have to make themselves scarce: last--in point of
time--but not least, not by a long way, the central idea of the original
plan, an attack by the Fleet on the Forts appears to have been entirely
shelved. At first the Fleet was to force its way through; we were to
look on; next, the Fleet and the Army were to go for the Straits side by
side; to-day, the whole problem may fairly be restated on a clean sheet
of paper, so different is it from the problem originally put to me by K.
when it was understood I would put him in an impossible posit