The War Lords and the Gallipoli Disaster is not the first book to examine this question, but it carves out a place in this crowded field by positioning the planning for Gallipoli in a broader context than the traditional military one. Its focus is on the global economic, financial, and diplomatic issues that shaped British strategic thinking in early 1915. Moreover, it widens the responsibility for the ultimately disastrous campaign beyond the traditional villain of the piece, Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. At least six other senior politicians, or ‘war lords’, including the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, are held accountable.

Much of this book consists of a forensic examination of the discussions in the British cabinet and key committees. Lambert’s unit of analysis is not the month but the day and sometimes the hour. This is because the war lords kept changing their opinions, often rapidly. Divided among themselves, they simply did not know how to respond to the disruption of global trade, the stalemate on the Western Front and the plight of the Russian ally who was suffering successive defeats in the region of the Masurian Lakes. Lambert concludes that it is difficult to point to any single reason, or set of reasons, for the Gallipoli campaign. Nor was there any ‘tidy decision point’ at which all in the government came to an agreement about the campaign.

In this rampant confusion, a number of military options in addition to Gallipoli were tossed around. Could a confederation of Balkan states attack Austria–Hungary? Should the British capture the port of Alexandretta and use this as a base to harass Ottoman communications? Should the British attempt to seize the German island of Borkum, or commit themselves to further action to support the French on the Western Front?

In late 1914 and early 1915, a major concern was assisting Russia, which was running out of munitions and the finance needed to sustain its war effort. To the alarm of the British, who were preoccupied with maintaining London’s dominant position in the global financial system, the Russian government requested loans well beyond their capacity to service. Some eighty-five per cent of Russian foreign-exchange earnings came from the export of agricultural produce and unprocessed minerals. Turkey’s entry into the war had blocked its ability to export wheat through the Black Sea.

We have long known that Russian wheat was one of the factors that shaped British thinking about Gallipoli, as was the request from the Russians in January 1915 for an Allied demonstration against Turkey in order to divert them from the battles in the Caucasus. What Lambert shows convincingly is why wheat mattered so much to the Asquith government. Britain’s Achilles heel in time of war was its dependence on food imports. If the price of bread rose unduly because of a shortage of wheat, it was feared that social unrest might erupt, fatally undermining the British war effort. Indian supplies of wheat could not be commandeered because the political risk of allowing food prices to rise in that restive part of the British Empire was again unacceptable.

Trade and finance have none of the drama of suicidal charges like the Nek, but they were fundamental to the conduct of World War I. Lambert is part of a recent trend in international scholarship that makes this clear. Countries that ran out of food risked revolution. Those that ran out of money (and many did) had to borrow, incurring massive debts that would destabilise the international economic order well into the future.

In the end, the need to open the Dardanelles to allow the export of Russian wheat was overtaken by other factors in the war lords’ thinking. Here we come to Churchill. Well before the Russian call for help in early 1915, Churchill’s alarmingly febrile mind started to produce a litter of strategic ideas, most of them impractical logistically and diplomatically. In late 1914, he had grand illusions of a Greek army attacking Gallipoli by land. By January 1915 he had convinced himself that British battleships could systematically demolish the Turkish defences guarding the Straits, thereby opening the gate to Constantinople. It was Churchill who insisted, after that naval operation failed in March 1915, that infantry be landed on the Gallipoli peninsula to capture the forts guarding the Narrows. Churchill even proposed the outlandish idea of transporting a Russian army corps from Archangel or Vladivostok to the Dardanelles. As the Foreign Secretary Edward Grey told him: ‘You want a new war with someone once a week.’

Churchill was not alone in such illusions. The military and naval advisers to the cabinet and the commanders who eventually led the amphibious landings in April all doubted the feasibility of the Gallipoli campaign. But the war lords convinced themselves that they needed only to force a passage through the Straits for Constantinople to fall. Thus, although Churchill was mistrusted by many in the cabinet – and certainly by the First Sea Lord, ‘Jacky’ Fisher – his views prevailed.

The problem really was Asquith, who, as prime minister, should have imposed some order on the chaos. But the meetings he chaired often ‘decided not to decide’. Asquith was distracted by an extraordinary infatuation with a young socialite, Venetia Stanley, in whom he confided the secrets of state. His letters, written even as he chaired meetings, were an astonishing breach of security (if a wonderful source for the historian). Other politicians also fed titbits of confidential information to their gossipy friends. Churchill showed his wife a telegram (‘under many pledges of secrecy’) about an offer of help from the Greek government.

The approach that Lambert adopts, of leading us through the many meetings of the war lords, sometimes produces a degree of detail that is overwhelming. Do we really need to know the place of a particular item on an agenda? The early chapters about the development of economic warfare and the international grain trade during the nineteenth century will seem a distraction to some readers. But the detail that is assembled in this book is ultimately compelling; it immerses the reader in the chaos of British strategic thinking. No other conclusion is possible but that Britain’s political leaders, with a breathtaking ineptitude, stumbled into a campaign that professional opinion said they had little chance of winning. We can only be grateful that the men who were launched onto the beaches of the Gallipoli peninsula on 25 April 1915, and the families waiting for them at home, knew nothing of this.