ABSTRACT
The Asquith government has been severely criticized because of its failure in the spring of 1915 to co-ordinate its diplomatic and military initiatives at the Dardanelles and in the Balkans. The Constantinople agreement meant that the allies could no longer postpone consideration of their territorial war aims until hostilities were over. The British believed that Turkey's entry into the war had been engineered by a small and unpopular group of pro-German zealots belonging to the Committee of Union and Progress. January 1915 the Director of Naval Intelligence, Captain W. R. Hall, sent three agents to Athens to open secret negotiations with dissident members of the Turkish government. The French and British now had to consider their own desiderata in the Turkish empire. In January Herbert Samuel, the President of the Local Government Board, wrote a memorandum suggesting that Britain should annex Palestine at the end of the war.
