provisions in 1917, he rejected the idea of Albania as merely a small Muslim state, the fiefdom he believed of Essad Pasha. In December, he was back in England. 1917–1918 The year 1917 saw him working, under Military Intelligence Director George Macdonogh, on plans for a separate peace with Turkey. On 16 July, he conducted a series of meetings with the Turks in Geneva, Interlaken, and Bern, among them a (secret) representative of an influential anti-Enver group. Mustafa Kemal, whom Aubrey knew from Gallipoli, had fallen out with Enver Pasha over the way that – by the Sultan's personal order – his command over the Seventh Army opposite Allenby in Syria had been bestowed on him on 5 July (he had been a staff captain with the Fifth Army in Damascus in 1905). Aubrey took his notes to the Inter-Allied Conference in Paris. In a memorandum to the Foreign Office, he said "If we get the luggage it does not matter very much if the Turks get the labels. When Lord Kitchener was all-powerful in Egypt his secretary was wearing a fez. Mesopotamia and Palestine are worth a fez." In November 1917, Herbert was again sent to Italy under orders from General Macdonogh. Now he was in charge of the British Adriatic Mission, with Samuel Hoare coordinating the Mission's special intelligence in Rome. An earlier Pan-Albanian Federation of America (Vatra) proposal of raising an Albanian regiment under Aubrey's command had been renewed. The matter was a contentious one for the Italians, as Vatra became increasingly anti-Italian. On 17 July 1918, the proposal was formally approved in Boston, and the Italian Consulate accepted, provided it became a unit in the Italian Army. The end of the war prevented the issue from growing more complex. Herbert ended the war as head of the British mission to the Italian army in Albania with the rank of lieutenant colonel. Aftermath Unclear policy led to nationalist criticism from imperial bases such as Egypt (see Saad Zaghloul, 1919) at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919, nor was the resulting political handling cause for much optimism to privileged witnesses such as Aubrey, T. E. Lawrence or Gertrude Bell. At the conference, there was a glimpse of further prospect for Aubrey Herbert when the Italian delegates proposed to assume shared responsibility over the Caucasus, an area of vital strategic importance – the Baku oilfields, access from the north to