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Thus, in order to arm, move and feed its huge army (and the civilians left behind), it depended on imports. Its only all-season ports were on the Black Sea, and all that shipping had to pass through the narrow Dardanelles, from the Mediterranean. Its Baltic ports were blockaded by the Germans; its Arctic ports were useful only for a brief period in summer — and Germans attacked shipping in the North Atlantic that might be headed for them. Even leaving aside the political, economic, and military consequences of the failed attack on the Dardanelles later, the loss of an all-season supply line crippled the Russian army, prevented shipments of food to alleviate famine, and contributed to the level of discontent and disorganization which — in the end — made the Revolution both inevitable and more bloody. And of course, the disorganization of the tsar’s army prevented an effective Eastern Front, leaving the stagnant Western Front of trenches.

The long-term political and economic consequences of British attempts to cripple the Turks in the Near and Middle East are still with us today; the dependence on Middle Eastern oil started then, when Britain and Germany both needed it for their newer, oil-fired navies. The next war would run on oil entirely, and all combatants knew it. Whether by intimidation, cajolery, or placation, it was necessary to get the cooperation of the Near Eastern and Middle Eastern oil-producing areas; all those were tried, and all had consequences reaching into the twenty-first century. The need for oil meant growing power for oil-producing nations, and that meant a resurgence of Islam as a political power, enriching Islamic nations to a level they had not known since they exhausted the resources of the lands they had conquered a thousand years before.

Promises made then are still referred to in the bitter, angry words of today’s terrorists. The philosophical alliance between anti-Jewish despots in the Near East (such as the Mufti of Jerusalem) and future Nazis started then, and through that link, to what is now a widespread intolerance in a religious culture which was, formerly, known for its tolerance. (It is difficult to imagine the great Islamic leaders of the past saying — as textbooks in some Islamic countries say now — that Jews are the cause of all their problems and should be exterminated.) Arab nationalism had already shown up (fanned in part by German agitators before World War I), but grew enormously in this period, as the British offered the same plum to win converts to their side.

Faced with Turkey’s entry into the war on the side of Germany and Austria and recognizing that without supply via the Black Sea ports Russia could not mount any effective actions on the Eastern Front, Churchill conceived the bold (and, with better commanders, probably quite workable) plan to attack Turkey from the sea and reopen that vital supply line, also cutting Germany off from Middle Eastern oil. Had the plan gone forward when he wanted it to, it might well have succeeded, but it didn’t. As a result, Churchill was discredited, removed from his post, and, after serving in the trenches himself, became a political outcast, remembered only as the fool who had cost so many British (and New Zealand and Australian) lives on a harebrained scheme. Without Churchill’s energy, enthusiasm (sometimes misplaced but never dull), and unembarrassed patriotism, postwar England slid into apathy and depression — and eventually into appeasement, making Hitler’s rise to power, and his initial military gains that much easier.

Without those years of political exile, Churchill might not have developed the character that made it possible for him to lead England in World War II — but it might not have been necessary, had he been in the government in the 1920s and 1930s. In any event, the failure in the Dardanelles changed both England and Churchill, with consequences that went far down the years ahead.

So one of the mistakes Churchill made — an uncharacteristic one