The End
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Footnote 1: Anglice, bank.(Back to main text)
Footnote 2: He brought his revolution off all right and was for a time President of the Southern China Republic.(Back to main text)
Footnote 3: While this volume has been in the press Sir G. Arthur’s Life of Lord Kitchener has appeared, giving a different version of this story and probably the correct one. Walter Kitchener was speaking, I think, from hearsay.(Back to main text)
Footnote 4: A single “preliminary scheme of operations” would have been of little service to the C.-in-C. of “Medforce”—it must have been based on the mistaken assumption (which held good when he started) that the fleet would force the Straits, and it would consequently have concerned itself with undertakings totally different from those which, in the event, Sir Ian had to carry out. If the army was to derive any benefit from projects elaborated in the War Office, there must have been a second “preliminary scheme of operations” based on the assumption that the fleet was going to fail. What profit is there in a plan of campaign that dictates procedure to be followed after the first great clash of arms? In the case under consideration, the first great clash of arms befell on the 18th of March, five days after Sir Ian left London with his instructions, and it turned the whole business upside down.(Back to main text)
Footnote 5: The first I heard of the Tanks, which made so dramatic a debut near the Somme a year and a half later.(Back to main text)
Footnote 6: So late as the 21st of April 1920 The Times included the following passage in a leading article: “Every gunner officer on the Western Front during the winter of 1914-15 knows that there was a grave and calamitous deficiency of shells, and that no satisfactory attempt was made to rectify it until the matter was exposed in The Times.” Dragging in the “gunner officer” at the front (who could not possibly tell what steps were being taken to rectify the deficiency) does not alter the fact that this passage amounts to an accusation that no satisfactory attempt was made to rectify the deficiency until after the Northcliffe Press stunt. The Times may have been so ill-informed as to the actual facts in 1915 as to suppose that this was true. The Times cannot have been so ill-informed as to the actual facts in 1920 as to suppose that it was true.(Back to main text)
Footnote 7: On the 1st July we had 23 divisions (exclusive of Indian divisions) in the field, and one on the water. The “Expeditionary Force” consisted of six divisions, but a vague sort of organization for a seventh had also existed on paper.(Back to main text)