Gallipoli Diary, Volume 1

NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 1920
PRINTED BY UNWIN BROTHERS, LTD.—WOKING—ENGLAND

SIR ROGER KEYES, VICE-ADMIRAL DE ROBECK, SIR IAN HAMILTON, GENERAL BRAITHWAITE


On the heels of the South African War came the sleuth-hounds pursuing the criminals, I mean the customary Royal Commissions. Ten thousand words of mine stand embedded in their Blue Books, cold and dead as so many mammoths in glaciers. But my long spun-out intercourse with the Royal Commissioners did have living issue—my Manchurian and Gallipoli notes. Only constant observation of civilian Judges and soldier witnesses could have shown me how fallible is the unaided military memory or have led me by three steps to a War Diary—
(1) There is nothing certain about war except that one side won't win.
(2) The winner is asked no questions—the loser has to answer for everything.
(3) Soldiers think of nothing so little as failure and yet, to the extent of fixing intentions, orders, facts, dates firmly in their own minds, they ought to be prepared.
Conclusion:—In war, keep your own counsel, preferably in a note-book.
At the time, I am sure my diary was a help to me in my work. The crossings to and from the Peninsula gave me many chances of reckoning up the day's business, sometimes in clear, sometimes in a queer cipher of my own. Ink stands with me for an emblem of futurity, and the act of writing seemed to set back the crisis of the moment into a calmer perspective. Later on, the diary helped me again, for although the Dardanelles Commission did not avail themselves of my formal offer to submit what I had written to their scrutiny, there the records were. Whenever an event, a date and a place were duly entered in their actual coincidence, no argument to the contrary could prevent them from falling into the picture: an advocate might just as well waste eloquence in disputing the right of a piece to its own place in a jig-saw puzzle. Where, on the other hand, incidents were not entered, anything might happen and did happen; vide , for instance, the curious misapprehension set forth in the footnotes to pages 59, 60, Vol. II.