names of Antwerp and Gallipoli. They are convenient terms of abuse:
I suppose they would have destroyed most politicians; certainly they are
more deadly than such a phrase as "spiritual home," for although the
world may be ignorant of the fact, every honest, educated man must
acknowledge a debt of gratitude to the thinkers of ancient Germany,
while to be associated with operations which involve the suffering, the
death, and the defeat of British troops is in every way more fatal to
reputation.

But, in truth, both these strokes of military strategy were sound in
conception. I doubt indeed if the military historian of the future, with
all the documents before him, will not chiefly condemn the Allies for
their initial failure to make Antwerp a sea-fed menace to the back of
the German Armies; while even in our own day no one doubts that if Lord
Kitchener, in one of his obstinate moods, had not refused to send more
divisions to Gallipoli we should have taken Constantinople. The fault of
those operations lay not in attempting them but in not adequately
supporting them.

Mr. Churchill has had bad luck in these matters, but even here it is the
lack of character which has served him most ill. He never impressed Lord
Kitchener as a man of power, although that sullen temperament grew in
the end to feel an amused affection for him. He did excellent work at
the Admiralty, work of the highest kind both before and at the outbreak
of war, but his colleagues in the Cabinet never realized the importance
of this work, judging it merely as "one of Winston's new crazes,"
Ministers speak of him in their confidences with a certain amount of
affection, but never with real respect. Many of them, of course, fear
him, for he is a merciless critic, and has an element of something very
like cruelty in his nature; but even those who do not fear him, or on
the whole rather like him, will never tell you that he is a man to whom
they turn in their difficulties, or a man to whom the whole Cabinet
looks for inspiration.

General William Booth of the Salvation Army once told Mr. Churchill
that he stood in need of "conversion," That old man was a notable judge
of character.

LORD HALDANE

LORD HALDANE

The Rt. Hon. Richard Burdon Haldane was born in 1856. Graduate of
Edinburgh University; Professor of Philosophy, St. Andrew's
University; Barrister, 1879; Q.C., 1890; created 1st Viscount,
1911; M.P. from Haddingtons