bombs will be ready at the Japanese Arsenal, and
five hundred the following month. The trench mortars--bomb guns they
call them--will be ready in Japan in two and a half months' time. Two
and a half months, plus half a month for delay, plus another month for
sea transit, makes four months! There are some things speak for
themselves. Blood, they say, cries out to Heaven. Well, let it cry now.
Over three months ago I asked--_my first request_--for these primitive
engines and as for the bombs, had Birmingham been put to it, Birmingham
could have turned them out as quick as shelling peas.

Am doing what I can to fend for myself. This Dardanelles war is a war,
if ever there was one, of the ingenuity and improvised efforts of man
against nature plus machinery. We are in the desert and have to begin
very often at the beginning of things. The Navy _now_ assure me that
their Dockyard Superintendent at Malta could make us a fine lot of hand
grenades in his workshops if Lord Methuen will give him the order.

So I have directed a full technical specification of the Turkish hand
grenades being used against us with effects so terrible, to be sent on
to Methuen telling him it is simple, effective, that I hope he can make
them and will be glad to take all he can turn out.

_23rd June, 1915. Imbros._ Another day in camp. De Robeck and Keyes came
over from the _Triad_ to unravel knotty points.

Am enraged to recognize in Reuter one of my own cables which has been
garbled in Egypt. The press censorship is a negative evil in London; in
Cairo there is no doubt it is positive. After following my wording
pretty closely, a phrase has been dovetailed in to say that the Turks
have day and night to submit to the capture of trenches. These cables
are repeated to London and when they get back here what will my own men
think me? If, as most of us profess to believe, it is a mistake to tell
lies, what a specially fatal description of falsehood to issue
short-dated bulletins of victory with only one month to run. I have
fired off a remonstrance as follows:--

"(No M.F. 359). From General Sir Ian Hamilton to War Office. A Reuter
telegram dated London, 16th June, has just been brought to my notice in
which it is stated that the Press Bureau issues despatch in which the
following sentence occurs: 'Day and night they (the Turks) have to
submit to capture of trenches.' This information is incorrect, and as
far as we are aware, has not been sent from he