"(No. I.D. 116). From General Headquarters, Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, to War Office. My No. I.D. 110. Please inform me whether Murdoch has arrived, and whether my information was correct as regards his carrying a despatch for Sir Harry Lawson from Ashmead-Bartlett."
"(No. 8108, cipher). From War Office to General Headquarters, Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. Your No. I.D. 116. A despatch answering the description has been taken from Murdoch at Marseilles. You should delay action, however, until we have seen it and you hear from us further."
The despatch should have been censored here and ought, therefore, to be sent back here for censoring. The War Office, I suppose, want to have first look in!
22nd September, 1915. Scatters and Cheape sailed back for Suvla at 6.45 a.m.—just in good time to avoid a raid on our Headquarters carried out by three Taubes between 7.50 and 8 a.m. A dozen bombs dropped; no serious harm done.
Heseltine, King's Messenger, came to dinner.
Bad news from Bulgaria. She is mobilizing, not, we may be sure, for the sake of helping those who do not help themselves. Well do I remember Ferdinand, as long ago as 1909, turning to me and saying as he pointed to a picture of himself in the robes of a Byzantine Emperor, "Quand vous arrivez au Bosphore, pensez à moi." Well, there is one good side to working over a narrow Peninsula, under the guns of your own Fleet, all the Bulgars in the Balkans cannot add a rifle to the number of enemy troops on Gallipoli, who already, can only be munitioned, watered and fed with the greatest difficulty. The more targets the enemy cram on to their present narrow front the merrier for our gunners; the better the chance for our submarines starving the lot of them. So long as our Fleet holds the Ægean, we may snap our fingers at the Bulgarians, whereas they, were they fools enough to come here, would live on tenter hooks lest haply some fine morning our Fleet should sail into the Marmora.
Yes, two or three battleships in the Marmora! Think of it! The sea communications, Constantinople-Gallipoli and Asia-Gallipoli, would cease, ipso facto, to exist. The railways between Europe and Constantinople and Asia and Constantinople must shut down. In a fortnight the Turks on the Peninsula begin to pack up; in a month the Turks in Constantinople move bag and baggage from Europe to Asia. Ferdinand watching the cat's jump, prepares to turn those 400,000 bayonets of his against the Kaiser. So wags my world in the might-be; very much "might-be" for the Navy are turning down the "to be" for the third time of asking. Three times the Sibyl makes her prodigious offer: May—August—September a new world for old battleships:—two—four—six!
23rd September, 1915. Stormy weather: the Imogene could hardly crawl out. Have written K. to tell him how day succeeds day, never without incident, but never with achievement; how we are burnt up with longing to get on and how we know that he is as anxious. Yet, as I tell him, we "can't force the pace." How can we? We have not the wherewithal—the stuff. "Byng would like to have four days' successive bombardment for an hour, and then attack, and speaks of one H.E. shell per yard as pat as if they were shells we could pick up on the seashore. I have assured him it is no earthly use; that he shall have his share of what I have got, but that stuff for bombardment is simply not in existence,—not here, at least."
24th September, 1915. Imbros. Fought against exasperation all day. As I thought:—