Dominic Sandbrook

and they have been very busy so this german guy otto lehman von sanders he has been modernizing the ottoman army and he has now been moved specifically to the dartnells and told

Take charge of the Fifth Army.

The Ottoman Fifth Army is going to defend the Straits from these blokes.

And Lehman has been given 200,000 men.

And he thinks, well, you know, he's not an idiot.

He can see what's happened on the Western Front and whatnot.

And he says, right, well, obviously what we're going to do is we're just going to wait for them to land and then we'll just kill them all.

We'll let them approach us.

We'll establish trenches.

We'll establish our barbed wire.

We will lay mines.

We will have supply roads ready to bring up more ammunition.

We will prepare our positions on the high ground.

When the Allies land, you know, we will basically just drive them into the sea or side them down with our machine guns.

So we now get to mid-April.

On the 10th of April, Sir Ian Hamilton and his senior officers arrive on the island of Lemnos in the northern Aegean.

And two days later, they're joined there by the Anzacs from Egypt and then by the 29th Division of the British Army and also by the French.

Meanwhile, Churchill's Royal Naval Division have been training on the island of Skiros, which is to the south of Lemnos.

And one of the men on the island is the Cambridge-educated poet Rupert Brooke.

And Rupert Brooke is 27 years old.