Dominic Sandbrook

And he will do anything to put himself at the centre of the story.

Yeah, the storm clouds of war are very much present in Churchill's blue sky thinking.

But there is a problem.

Of course.

He's absolutely right that there's a stalemate on the Western Front and that it would be brilliant if they could break it.

But his idea, which is we will come up with sort of great distraction and displacement exercises that will somehow obviate the need for a nutritional campaign on the Western Front, he is deluded.

The war is only ever going to be won on the Western Front.

Yes.

We'd have got on, I think.

Yeah, you would have got on.

Anyway, so he's casting around for something to do.

And it's at this point that his gaze falls on the Ottoman Empire.

Now, to remind people about the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, which is always referred to in the shorthand as Turkey, although it's not just Turkey, of course, the Ottoman dynasty had been ruling in Constantinople for almost 500 years.

And in 1914, they're governing this vast, multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire, multicultural empire.

More than 40 million people from the shores of the Mediterranean to the sands of Arabia.

And this empire, famously described as the sick man of Europe, is in a pretty ramshackle condition.

So having once been one of Europe's great powers, it's now fallen behind the industrial powerhouses of Western Europe.

It's still very much a rural agricultural society, pre-industrial in many ways.

In the late 19th century, the Ottomans had started to lose their Balkan territories.

So they'd lost Serbia, they'd lost Bulgaria, they'd lost Romania.