into consideration, I am somewhat surprised
to see that the 4,500 which Maxwell can send you are apparently not
required by you. With the aid of these I had hoped that you would have
been in a position to press forward.

"The Lowland Division is leaving for you."

This is a queer cable. Seems as if K. was beginning to come up against
those political forces which have ever been a British Commander's bane.
The words in which he begs me to try and prevent "a withdrawal with all
its dangers in the East ... from entering the field of possible
solutions," sounds uncommonly like a cry for help. He means that I
should help him by remembering, and by making smaller calls upon him.
But the only way I can _really_ help him is by winning a battle: to
pretend I could win that battle without drafts, munitions and the Army
Corps asked for would be a very short-lived bluff both for him and for
me. We have had it from other sources that this strange notion of
running away from the Turk, after singeing his beard, has arisen in
London and in France. So now that the murder has peeped out, I am glad
to know where we are and to feel that K. stands solid and sound behind
us. He need have no fear; all that man can do I will do by pressing on
here and by asking for not one man or round more than is absolutely
essential for the job.

As to that passage about the 4,500 Australians, a refusal of Australians
would indeed be good cause for surprise--only--it has never taken place,
and never will take place. I can only surmise that my request made to
Maxwell that these 4,500 men should come to me as drafts for my skeleton
units, instead of as a raw brigade, has twisted itself, going down some
office corridor, into a story that I don't want the men! K. tells me
Egypt is mine and the fatness thereof; yet, no sooner do I make the most
modest suggestion concerning anything or anyone Egyptian than K. is got
at and I find he is the Barmecide and I Schac'abac. "How do you like
your lentil soup?" says K. "Excellently well," say I, "but devil a drop
is in the plate!" I have got to enter into the joke; that's the long and
the short of it. But it is being pushed just a trifle too far when I am
told I _apparently do not require_ 4,500 Australians!

The whole of K.'s cable calls for close thinking. How to try and help
him to pump courage into faint-hearted fellows? How to do so without
toning down my demands for reinforcements?--for evidently these demands
a