Gallipoli Diary, Volume I | Page 6

What would I do? From what quarter could I attack Constantinople? How would I hold it when I had taken it? K. asked me the questions.
With the mud of prosaic Whitehall drying upon my boots these remarks of K.'s sounded to me odd. But, knowing Constantinople, and--what was more to the point at the moment--knowing K.'s hatred of hesitation, I managed to pull myself together so far as to suggest that if the city was weakly held and if, as he had said, (I forgot to enter that) the bulk of the Thracian troops were dispersed throughout the Provinces, or else moving to re-occupy Adrianople, why then, possibly, by a coup de main, we might pounce upon the Chatalja Lines from the South before the Turks could climb back into them from the North. Lord K. made a grimace; he thought this too chancy. The best would be if we did not land a man until the Turks had come to terms. Once the Fleet got through the Dardanelles, Constantinople could not hold out. Modern Constantinople could not last a week if blockaded by sea and land. That was a sure thing; a thing whereon he could speak with full confidence. The Fleet could lie off out of sight and range of the Turks and with their guns would dominate the railways and, if necessary, burn the place to ashes. The bulk of the people were not Osmanli or even Mahomedan and there would be a revolution at the mere sight of the smoke from the funnels of our warships. But if, for some cause at present non-apparent, we were forced to put troops ashore against organized Turkish opposition, then he advocated a landing on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus to hold out a hand to the Russians, who would simultaneously land there from the Black Sea. He only made the suggestion, for the man on the spot must be the best judge. Several of the audience left us here, at Lord K.'s suggestion, to get on with their work. K. went on:--
The moment the holding of Constantinople comes along the French and the Russians will be very jealous and prickly. Luckily we British have an easy part to play as the more we efface ourselves at that stage, the better he, K., will be pleased. The Army in France have means of making their views work in high places and pressure is sure to be put on by them and by their friends for the return of the 29th and Naval Divisions the moment we bring Turkey to book. Therefore, it will be best in any case to "let the French and Russians garrison Constantinople and sing their hymns in S. Sophia," whilst my own troops hold the railway line and perhaps Adrianople. Thus they will be at a loose end and we shall be free to bring them back to the West; to land them at Odessa or to push them up the Danube, without weakening the Allied grip on the waterway linking the Mediterranean with the Black Sea.
This was the essence of our talk: as it lasted about an hour and a half, I can only have put down about one tenth of it.
At odd times I have been recipient of K.'s reveries but always, always, he has rejected with a sort of horror the idea of being War Minister or Commander-in-Chief. Now by an extreme exercise of its ironic spirit, Providence has made him both.
In pre-war days, when we met in Egypt and at Malta, K. made no bones about what he wanted. He wanted to be Viceroy of India or Ambasssador at Constantinople.
I remember very well one conversation we had when I asked him why he wanted to hang on to great place, and whether he had not done enough already. He said he could not bear to see India being mismanaged by nincompoops or our influence in Turkey being chucked out of the window with both hands: I answered him, I remember, by saying there were only two things worth doing as Viceroy and they would not take very long. One was to put a huge import duty on aniline dyes and so bring back the lovely vegetable dyes of old India, the saffrons, indigoes, madders, etc.; the other was to build a black marble Taj at Agra opposite the white and join the two by a silver bridge. I expected to get a rise, but actually he took the ideas quite seriously and I am sure made a mental note of them. Anyway, as Viceroy, K. would have flung the whole vast weight of India into the scale of this war; he would have poured Army after Army from East to West. Under K. India could have beaten Turkey single-handed; aye, and