Picking up from Volume I in July 1915, this unusually outspoken and meticulously detailed diary, backed up with official dispatches, sets out Hamilton's defense of his conduct in the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign. Hamilton pulls no punches in his portrait of a military hierarchy shot through with incompetence—despite his own position at its apex. In his introduction he states, "There is nothing certain about war except that one side won't win."