Dominic Sandbrook

This is going to be much quicker.

Of course.

The Ottomans know what's coming.

I mean, they're not idiots.

And also, another contrast with, say, D-Day.

And his task is made harder because the Secretary of War, Lord Kitchener, gives him a very rag-tag collection of troops, many of them untested and untrained.

So to give people a sense, there's the 29th Division of the British Army, and that had basically been cobbled together by loads of colonial garrisons.

So people who'd been serving all over Asia or whatever are now told, you're going to come back and you're going to fight and you're going to be lumped in with these other blokes.

Then there is Churchill's Royal Naval Division.

Churchill's so proud of this, you know, his favorite child or whatever.

They're basically a load of naval reservists and volunteers who signed up to join the Navy when the war broke out, but there was nothing for them to do.

So they've been told, you know, you're going to be like a sort of little naval marine force fighting on land.

Then there's the French, the Orient Expeditionary Corps, as they're called.

And a lot of these people are colonial troops from Algeria and from Senegal.

So they're there too.

And then most famously, the ANZACs, the Australian Imperial Force and the New Zealanders Expeditionary Force.

And these had been made up of volunteers sent by the two dominions of Australia and New Zealand at the outbreak of war.

They thought they were going to fight in Europe and they have been training in the desert outside Cairo.

So that'll prepare them for the mud of Flanders.

Right.