The First World War was a wonderful opportunity for cockups, seized on with glee by many military commanders or political leaders. In peacetime, such cockups do relatively little harm. In wartime they lead to deaths and injuries, and in this war, to millions of them.

This episode tracks the particular series of cockups that culminated in the catastrophe that was the Gallipoli campaign, with its hundreds of thousands of casualties, to achieve precisely nothing. It follows that up with the story of one man in the campaign, and his strange turns of luck which at first sight looked like terrible misfortunes. He’s someone who’ll be back to inspire more than one episode in the future.

This week also talks about the recruitment campaign that gave Britain its biggest volunteer army, and at the universality of human dumbness, exemplified not just by the British at Gallipoli but also by the Turks in the same campaign and by the Italians, like the Turks, latecomers to the feast.

Quite a spectacle for you to enjoy.

Illustration: ‘Your country needs you’. Kitchener’s image on the iconic recruitment poster. Public domain

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.