“I am the victim of a political intrigue,” he lamented to a friend. “I am finished!” Displaying the steely determination that would serve him well in World War II, however, the marginalized Churchill did not slink from the fight. In November 1915, the statesman turned soldier. Churchill resigned from the government, picked up a gun and headed to the front lines in France as an infantry officer with the Royal Scots Fusiliers. After several brushes with death, he returned to politics in 1917 as the munitions minister in a new coalition government headed by Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George.
Churchill, however, remained haunted by Gallipoli for decades. “Remember the Dardanelles,” his political opponents taunted when he stood up to speak in the House of Commons. When running for Parliament in 1923, hecklers called out, “What about the Dardanelles?” The “British Bulldog” embraced Gallipoli as a brilliant failure. “The Dardanelles might have saved millions of lives. Don’t imagine I am running away from the Dardanelles. I glory in it,” he responded.
Although many shared the views of a political insider who in 1931 speculated that “the ghosts of Gallipoli will always rise up to damn him anew,” Churchill became prime minister in 1940 with Britain once again embroiled in war. Upon taking office, he wrote, “All my past life had been a preparation for this hour and for this trial.” That included Gallipoli.
https://www.history.com/news/winston-churchills-world-war-disaster
He was quite a man.
I have always felt that the bad things and misfortunes in life contribute to who we are, if we are open enough to accept and deal with them in a positive way where possible.
I have worked with a lot of cancer patients, and an oddly recurring theme is survivors who say they wouldn’t trade it because it changed them in a positive way, and is part of who they are.
The Dardanelles would never go away, and the ghosts of a lot of those men had to be on his mind, but as the last quote from him states...it was one of the things that made him ready.