thought it an important move in the general war, they
could by sacrificing ten ships force the entrance, and do it very
fast, and be up in Marmora within 10 hours from the time they forced
it."[l] Admiral Fisher estimated that the loss would be 12 ships.

[Footnote 1: Repeated by Baron van Wangenheim to Ambassador Morgenthau,
prior to the attack of March 18, AMBASSADOR MORGENTHAU'S STORY,
_World's Work_, September, 1918. See also Col. F. N. Maude, Royal
Engineers, _Contemporary Review_, June, 1915.]

After such deductions, there would be no great surplus to deal with
the _Goeben_, which would fight desperately, and with the defenses of
Constantinople. Indeed, such losses would seem absolutely prohibitive,
if viewed only from the narrow standpoint of the force engaged,
and without taking into fullest account the limited value of the
older ships and the fact that the Government was fully committed
to a prosecution of the campaign. It is of course easy to see that
victory purchased by the loss of 10 predreadnoughts and 10,000 men
would be cheap, as compared with the sacrifice of over 100,000
men killed and wounded and 10,000 invalided in the later campaign
on land.

General Callwell has pointed out that the naval commanders were
properly worried about what would happen after they got through
the Straits, if the Sublime Porte should not promptly "throw up
the sponge." "The communications would have remained closed to
colliers and small craft by movable armament, if not also by mines.
Forcing the pass would in fact have resembled bursting through a
swing door. Sailors and soldiers alike have an instinctive horror
of a trap, and they are in the habit of looking behind them as
well as before them."[1] But according to Ambassador Morgenthau,
who was probably in a better position than any one else to form
an opinion, "The whole Ottoman State on the 18th day of March,
1915, was on the brink of dissolution." The Turkish Government
was divided into factions and restive under German domination, and
there was thus an excellent prospect that it would have capitulated
under the guns of the Allied fleet. If not, then there might have
been nothing left for the latter but to try to get back the way
it came.

[Footnote 1: NINETEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER, March, 1919, p. 486.]

Feeling in Constantinople during the month from February 19th to
March 19th has already been suggested; it was nervous in the extreme.
Neither Turks nor Germans