We must protest against a detestable series of paragraphs which
appeared in the. TfreeHy .Dispatch of last Sunday- in regard to the Report of the Dardanelles Commission. In the first place, the losses in the Gallipoli operation, are described as " the Dardanelles murders." "Forty thousand murders," we are told, "constitute a record in the history of crime." Then comes the following state- ment :— " As for the latter-day Lord Kitchener—amiable, amusing, vacillating --the public knew as little-about him as they did about thereal state of affairs In the corpse-strewn peninsula, An easy-going man, with a. narrow forehead, who was unaware. that Welsh was spoken in Wale; or that the Irish Nationalist soldiers required Catholic priests, he had one-faculty in-his-latter days—he 'spoke as little-lie possible in Council for fear of giving himself away. By then he had incomo °motional and senile, telling his cronies the same stories over and over again. Thp neuralgia of the eyes from which he suffered robbed him of sleep. This was the real Kitchener. A kindly man and a good friend. The other Kitchener, the strong, silent man, was the creation of the late G. W. Steevens, who created other strong men whose names it would be unkind to mention. The average man knew nothing of K. of K. excepting that he was tall and was always in the picture papers. The outside world, unfamiliar with the garrulous vacillator, wanted to imagine that they had a strong man at the helm, and they readily believed In Sir Medley Le Bas's posters depicting a stern, solemn soldier, remorseless and wonderful. After 31 months the Great Illusion is shattered. The Old Gang knew his latter-day character but hid behind him. They knew that the mob had been fooled. ` Father's best Poster,' was Miss X.'s description of Lord K."
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