14th January 1915
The Dorsets spent the day in billets in Dranoutre.
The Daily Telegraph journalist, and ex-Bedfords officer, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, summaries the war so far in a prescient article entitled “Waiting for Spring” on page 10 of today’s newspaper. He writes that “this strange war is drifting through a dull period.” and so he turns to speculate on the outcome of the war. He goes on to ask the reader “which nation will produce the great man, the inspired genius, who will devise a means of making modern warfare decisive?”
The title of the article echoes Kitchener’s recent alleged soundbite (overheard secondhand from a British officer in a French mess) that “I don’t know when it [the war] will end, but I know when it will begin, and that is in the month of May!”
Ashmead-Bartlett went out to Gallipoli as a war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and even filmed the only movie footage of the battle. He was very critical of the Dardanelles campaign and its commander, General Sir Ian Hamilton. He later spent time on the Western Front. After the war he went off to fight Bolsheviks in Hungary, as you do, returned to become a Tory MP and died in Lisbon at the early age of 50.
