jeopardising the whole of this enterprise. But if I allow my
anxieties to get too much the upper hand, why then I may be
ruining some larger enterprise, the true bearing of which I have
no means of gauging.

You will understand, then, the principles which have been
my guide in drafting, with the assistance of the level-headed
Braithwaite, my various cables to you in connection with this
latest development. It is especially in cabling that these
difficulties arise, as it is impossible to be explanatory or full.

Now that I am writing to you it is another matter. At the
present moment the Tenth Division and one brigade of the
French are under orders. In my cables I have shown that
(at a real pinch such as I understand this to be) I can spare
either one more brigade of French or the Fifty-third Division.

But our position when these troops are gone will be such
as to cause me myself the most serious concern pending the
arrival of reinforcements, and there is no use blinking the fact
that until that time the general situation of the Dardanelles
Expedition will be dangerous. It is not only that a large
proportion of my troops are of second-line quality, but that
the very best of them, i.e. the Australians and the Twenty-
ninth Division, are, as they put it themselves, "not the men
they were." I have a medical report in my hands stating
that 50 per cent of the old troops examined at Anzac from
seven battalions have a rapid, feeble heart with shortness of
breath, and that 78 per cent of these have diarrhœa, and
64 per cent sores on skin. Amongst an equal number of
men examined from people who had only been at Anzac a
week, there were no feeble hearts, no shortness of breath, only
8 per cent of sores on skin, and 14 per cent diarrhœa. This
is a result of having been in the trenches under continuous
shell and musketry fire for eighteen to twenty weeks. There-
fore, in a physical sense, my first-class troops can no longer
be regarded as first-class. Anywhere else, I suppose, these
men would be in convalescent homes, but here they must carry
on, and, God be praised, their spirit and moral are unshaken.

Consider for a moment what these troops have to do. Not
only must they continuously be under fire -- for the rest-

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