Asquith followed this by agreeing to hold Commissions of Inquiry into the conduct of the Dardanelles and of the Mesopotamian campaign, where Allied forces had been forced to surrender at Kut. Sir Maurice Hankey, Secretary to the War Committee, considered that, "the Coalition never recovered. For (its) last five months, the function of the Supreme Command was carried out under the shadow of these inquests." But these mistakes were overshadowed by the limited progress and immense casualties of the Battle of the Somme, which began on 1 July 1916, and then by another devastating personal loss, the death of Asquith's son Raymond, on 15 September at the Battle of Flers–Courcelette. Asquith's relationship with his eldest son had not been easy. Raymond wrote to his wife in early 1916, "If Margot talks any more bosh to you about the inhumanity of her stepchildren you can stop her mouth by telling her that during my 10 months exile here the P.M. has never written me a line of any description." But Raymond's death was shattering. Violet wrote as follows: "…to see Father suffering so wrings one", and Asquith passed much of the following months "withdrawn and difficult to approach". The War brought no respite; Churchill remarked, "The failure to break the German line in the Somme, the recovery of the Germanic powers in the East [i.e. the defeat of the Brusilov Offensive], the ruin of Roumania and the beginnings of renewed submarine warfare strengthened and stimulated all those forces which insisted upon still greater vigour in the conduct of affairs."