me, is to keep quiet rather than add one iota to the anxieties
of people staggering under a load of responsibilities and cares. In the
good old days the Gordons fought in two decisive battles in two
Continents within a few months and no one worried the War Office about
drafts! The 92nd carried on--had to carry on; they fell to quarter
strength--still they were the Gordons and they carried on, just as if
they counted a thousand rifles in their ranks. Now, I am quite prepared
to do that to-day--_if that is the policy_. If that _were_ the policy;
not one grouse or grumble should ever cross my lips. But that is _not_
the policy. Press and People believe a Division is a unit made up in
scientific proportions of different branches and numbering a certain
number of rifles. They are told so; the War Office keep telling them so;
they believe it, and, in fact, it is an absolute necessity of this
modern trench war that it should be so. Although the Gordons got no
_drafts_ between the battle of Kandahar and the battle of Majuba Hill,
they got six months' _rest_; which was even better. In those days, apart
from sieges, a battle was an event, here it is the rest or respite that
is an event. Even British soldiers can't stick day and night fighting
for ever. The attack spirit begins to ebb _unless_ it is fed with fresh
blood. Whether K.'s mind, big with broad views, grasps this new factor
with which he has never himself come into personal contact, God knows.
But for his sake, every bit as much as for my own, it is up to me to
keep hammering, hammering, hammering at drafts, drafts, drafts.

Dined with the ever hospitable and kind hearted de Robeck on _Triad_.
The Navy are still divided. Some there are who would wish me to urge the
Admiral to play first fiddle in the coming attack. This _I will not do_.
I have neither the data nor the technical knowledge which would justify
me to my conscience in doing so.

_4th August, 1915. Imbros._ Have been out seeing the New Army at work.
Some of the XIth Division were practising boat work in the evening and
afterwards a Brigade started upon a night march into the mountains. The
men are fit, although just beginning to be infected with the Eastern
Mediterranean stomach trouble; i.e., the so-called cholera, which saved
Constantinople from the Bulgarians in the last war.

_5th August, 1915. Imbros._ The day so longed for is very near now. O
that it had come at the period of our victories! But there is