March 15, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
LAND & WATER 
OLD SERJEANTS' INN, LONDON, W.C. 
Telephone HOLBORN 2828. 
: 1 , 
THURSDAY, MARCH 15. 1917 
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CONTENTS 
Situation in America. By Louis Raemaekers 
The Dardanelles Report (Leader) 
Bagdad. By Hilaire Bclloc 
The Dardanelles Report. By Arthur Pollen 
Her House in Order. By Mary MacLeod Moore 
Povert}/, Prosperity and Prices. By Harold Cox 13 
A Perfect Day. By an O.T.C. Recruit 17 
Books to Read. By Lucian Oldershaw 18 
The Golden Triangle. By Maurice Leblanc 20 
The West End 24 
Kit and Equipment. xi. 
THE DARDANELLES REPORT 
tT has perhaps been necessary for that portion of the 
press which is professedly political to deal in detail 
with the Commissioners' report upon the Dardanelles 
expedition. We publish on another page Mr. 
Pollen's able criticism of the tactical method employed 
and the reasons which from the beginning foredoomed 
the enterprise to failure. Beyond that we do not pro- 
iwsc to examine the various charges made in the report, 
for no political attitude to what is essentially a poUtical 
document can either advance our knowledge of the 
war or the fortunes of this campaign. 
What has indeed been stated in many quarters, but 
not perhaps sufficiently reasoned in its direct military 
connection with the enormous struggle, is the imprudence 
of such a publication at this moment. It is utterly 
besides the mark to bandy arguments upon the respon- 
sibility for this publication. One man will point out 
that the Commission was ordered and that therefore 
the publication of this document implicitly ordered also 
by the late Government ; another will insist upon the 
responsibihty of the present Government for the pub- 
lication ; a third will concern hirnself with the personnel 
of the Commission and will lay stress according to his 
fancy upon this individual or that. All such discussions 
at this moment are vain and show an inability to grasp 
the scale of the war. Everyone should realize how 
vitally necessary domestic peace is in such a crisis, and 
how equally necessary the concealment from the enemy 
of any domestic controversy whatsoever. 
War is always a matter in which victory is decided 
by concentration of energy. Upon the degree, the 
tenacity, the continuance of that concentration, victory 
depends ; and victory in the tremendous issue of this 
abnormal campaign, is, without rhetoric and without 
exaggeration, life or death for this country. Any 
excitement or emotion not directed towards 
military efficiency in action, in organisation, or even 
in opinion, is a waste — and not- an ounce of waste can 
be afforded when such waste affects the energy, not only 
of the governed (which it must in some degree) but 
especially of the Governors themselves. Everyone is 
fully aware by this time that controversy of an acute 
kind has arisen. It was inevitable. That controversy 
has affected, not only the governed, but the Governors. 
It docs dissipate energy, for the moment at least, to a 
most deplorable degree. Our whole duty is surely to 
check anything of the kind at the outset. 
The enemy has suffered from the most appalling 
blunders due to personal vanity in his leaders, stupidity, 
sloth, and individual irritability. But he has never 
allowed these things to be made public. We discover 
them only in their consequences. We are not able to 
examine them in detail in his own publications, to draw 
our conclusions and to form our plans accordingly. Ho 
can do so jfrom our publications. That is the supreme 
military error of the whole affair, and in time of war — ■ 
especially in such a war as this — it is military error which 
is the gravest and perhaps the only one that counts. 
It cannot be agreed that the publication was of value 
as a deterrent. It has come too late by far in the campaign 
for that ; nor will its lessons appreciably affect the con- 
ditions which still remain essentially political and civilian. 
If anyone desires an object-lesson on the matter, let him 
detach himself from the private interest of political life 
in this country and consider the parallel of a fully pub- 
lished report in Germany upon the Marne. The Dar- 
danelles was a failure in a secondary theatre of war^ 
where success might indeed have discovered a primary 
theatre, but where defeat did not and could not produce 
disastrous consequences. The Marne was a defeat 
which changed the whole course of the war and of human 
history for countless generations to come. All the 
energy, the preparations, the very soul of modern Germany 
were lost at the Marne. Modern Germany will never 
be itself again. Before the Marne, say on September 7th, 
it was rapidly conquering and apparently invincible. 
After the Marne, say on September 14th, it was a power 
defending itself as best it could from encirclement, 
and ever since it has been a power lighting only to survive. 
This enormous catastrophe befell our enemy in the very 
first days of the campaign when there was still time for 
a public criticism to have corrective effect, and still 
time for Berlin to profit from the lesson. Yet conceive 
what a report upon the Marne would have meant to 
us ! We should have known which of the German Com- 
manders suffered from what failings of temper or incon- 
sequences ; what part the ill-restrained vanify of the 
Emperor had had in the misdirection of affairs ; what 
counteracted and nulhfied'the genius of what generals ; 
what was weak in the Government machine, what strong. 
We should have had laid bare to us, as it were, the 
enemy's mind in an unexampled fashion, as an aeroplane 
reveals the physical movement of troops which has 
hitherto been hidden. Such a document would have 
been the key to half of those problems which still demand 
our research and our patience. 
Now it would be an exaggeration, of course, to pretend 
that the error of publishing the Dardanelles report, 
and even the Government's tolerance of the venomous 
comment to which it has given rise, is comparable in 
scale to what a report on the Marne would have been ; 
. but it is parallel in character. 
It is not during the course of war, it is not in the very 
crisis of the struggle, that we can afford to do these things. 
Very much will have to be sifted when the time for 
sifting comes, to be fully debated, to be presented to 
public opinion, and possibly to be judged (with certain 
unpleasant consequences) by the nation as a whole. The 
time for all that is after the war, and most assuredly the 
worst things that must be most severely condemned and, 
if public life is to remain whole, most severely punished, 
will not be the initial errors made in good faith and due 
to the prodigious novelty of such an event, but other 
deliberate actions with baser motives behind them. 
