At 11 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918, Winston Churchill was looking out of the window of his Ministry of Munitions, toward Trafalgar Square in London, waiting for the great bell of Big Ben to sound, telling Britons that World War I was finally over.

“And then suddenly the first stroke of the chime,” he recalled in his war memoirs. “I looked again at the broad street beneath me. It was deserted. From the portals of one of the hotels absorbed by government departments darted the slight figure of a girl clerk, distractedly gesticulating while another stroke of Big Ben resounded. Then from all sides men and women came scurrying into the street. Streams of people poured out of all the buildings. The bells of London began to clash.”

“Flags appeared as if by magic,” he went on. “Swarms of men and women flowed from the Embankment. They mingled with the torrents pouring down the Strand on their way to acclaim the king.”

The happy crowds finally knew for certain that one existential threat to the British Empire — German militarism — had been extinguished, albeit at the cost of nearly one million of its citizens. Churchill, however, knew that the war had also thrown up a large number of new threats, foreign and domestic, that together could still overwhelm his country and its empire. Through much of 1919, he started planning for how to deal with them.

He was soon in a powerful executive position to help with that mission. Having done a superb job as minister of munitions during the war, in early January 1919 Churchill, then a Liberal member of Parliament, was promoted to head the twin Ministries of War and Air by the prime minister, David Lloyd George.

Churchill knew that the war had thrown up new threats, foreign and domestic, that could overwhelm his country and its empire.

As munitions minister he had been outside the cabinet, able only to suggest projects from the sidelines. He had been stuck there because there were still severe doubts about his judgment, primarily because of his support for the 1915 Dardanelles offensive, an attack on Turkey that left 147,000 Allied soldiers killed or wounded. Yet Lloyd George valued Churchill’s contributions in government, and certainly did not want him criticizing his ministry from the backbenches.

Churchill’s appointment as minister for both war and air provoked protests from the Conservative press. “Sooner or later he would make a mess of anything he undertook,” The Morning Post wrote. “Character is destiny; there is some tragic flaw in Mr. Churchill which determines him on every occasion in the wrong course.”

When Churchill surveyed the war-weary, broken world of 1919, he recognized that several matters, domestic and foreign, needed to be addressed immediately. The first was demobilization. As minister of munitions he had been in charge of three million factory workers, but as war minister he had to try to get an even larger number of soldiers back into civilian life, with as little disruption to the fragile British economy as possible.

Churchill believed that the rise of Bolshevism needed to be halted, and if possible destroyed, before it swamped Western Europe.

Second, the victorious Allied powers meeting at the Versailles peace conference needed to agree on how Germany and Austria were to be treated, in an atmosphere where, in Britain’s general election in December 1918, the most popular cry on the stump had been “Hang the kaiser,” and the victorious powers were about to demand swingeing war reparations from the defeated. All of this had to be arranged within the context of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which promised self-determination for the patchwork of ethnic nationalities on the European continent. Then, once the fates of the Central Powers had been decided, the problems of Turkey and the Middle East needed to be addressed.

Churchill also believed that the rise of Bolshevism — the precursor to Soviet Communism — needed to be halted, and if possible destroyed, before it swamped Western Europe. Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky had seized power in Russia in the October Revolution in 1917, and by early 1919 Bolshevik cells were raising the red flag of revolution among the defeated, resentful, poverty-stricken people of Germany; they were also dangerously active in Italy and France. Left-wing city councils in the Midlands, northern England and Scotland were likewise flying red flags over their buildings, and rioting, fomented by Communists, erupted over unemployment and austerity in major British cities. For Churchill, what he termed the “bacillus” of Bolshevism needed to be combated everywhere, including in Russia itself, despite the war-weariness of the British people and government.

Churchill hoped that a permanent, multilateral organization dedicated to the maintenance of peace — the League of Nations, headquartered in Geneva — might be able to cement the postwar settlement and provide a framework for the peaceful resolution of international conflict. He recognized that for it to work, all countries, including revolutionary Russia and the isolationist United States, needed to take an active part. The debate over whether America was fundamentally an isolationist or internationalist power might not seem one century old this year, but it is, and by 1920 it was clear that the United States would not be joining the League, to Churchill’s profound disappointment.

In the Middle East, Britain was about to take responsibility for administering the League of Nations mandates for Iraq, Transjordan (modern-day Jordan) and Palestine, regions that had for centuries belonged to the Ottoman Empire. Although Churchill had no direct ministerial responsibility for these areas, as minister for war and air it fell to him to decide how to quell the troublesome tribesmen of Iraq — all under severe budgetary restraints from the Treasury.

More than most, Churchill foresaw the opportunities and difficulties emerging in the Middle East. As a lifelong Zionist, he was acutely conscious of the capacity of the Jews to develop and irrigate Mandatory Palestine, but also the effect that Jewish purchase of Arab land might have on the rest of the population. He was also a supporter of the Iraqi Kurds, who he believed needed active protection in case an anti-Kurdish dictator emerged in Iraq. In some things Churchill had been surprisingly myopic — he had opposed women being given the vote before World War I, for example, although he supported it when it finally took place in Britain in 1918 — but in others he was profoundly farsighted.

What he never lost sight of, however, was how important it was for the future peace of Europe that he and the other decision makers get the key decisions of 1919 right.

Churchill’s first major task — demobilization — might easily have gone terribly wrong. On the very day before he became secretary for war, angry troops marched on the War Office in Whitehall, protesting orders to go to France. “How many troops have we to deal with them?” Churchill asked Gen. Geoffrey Feilding, the commander of London District, and on being told that there were only a battalion of guards and three squadrons of the Household Cavalry, he nonetheless ordered the arrest of the mutineers, which in the event went smoothly. Four days later he completely changed the criteria on which men were demobilized, giving priority to those who had been wounded and those who had served longest. The protests dissolved, and by the end of January almost one million men had returned home.

There were other worries on Churchill’s mind in 1919 — not least a looming sectarian civil war in Ireland — but the future of Britain’s relationship with a newly configured Europe, the perils of a resurgent, aggressive Russia, the danger of American isolationism and the likelihood of unrest in the Middle East were uppermost. None are without their modern parallels, a century later. Although his thoughts on all of these issues were listened to with respect, and indeed he had a front-row seat for all of the dramas as they played out, he was never in a position to exercise control, and would not be until two decades later.

Churchill’s attitude toward Germany and Russia were succinctly summed up in his phrase to his friend Lady Violet Bonham Carter: “Kill the Bolshie, kiss the Hun.” He wanted to reinforce and re-equip the small British military contingent in northern Russia, and then allow it to go on the offensive to help the half-million Tsarist White Russians to extinguish Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Revolution. “If I had been properly supported in 1919,” he was to recall years later, “I think we might have strangled Bolshevism in its cradle, but everybody turned up their hands and said, ‘How shocking!’”

In fact it would have taken a huge international effort to capture Leningrad and Moscow, which in the financial and political context of the period was unlikely to be forthcoming, not least because President Wilson and Prime Minister Lloyd George were profoundly opposed to the expenditure of any more lives and money. Churchill went to Paris to try to persuade Wilson to change his mind; he failed, and Wilson complained that sending supplies to the White Russians would be “assisting reactionaries.” The last chance of saving Europe and the world from a system that would ultimately cost 100 million lives in the 20th century was lost forever.

As well as not being able to kill the Bolshie, Churchill failed in his hopes that the victorious Western powers might kiss the Hun. He was not a delegate to the Versailles peace conference, whose treaty provisions, signed on June 28, 1919, were harsh toward Germany.

“The aim is to get an appeasement of the fearful hatreds and antagonisms which exist in Europe,” Churchill explained two years later, stating that Britain ought to be both “the ally of France and the friend of Germany” in order to mitigate “the frightful rancor and fear and hatred” between the two which, he warned, “if left unchecked, will most certainly in a generation or so bring about a renewal of the struggle of which we have just witnessed the conclusion.”

He did not take his criticisms of the treaty so far as to resign from Lloyd George’s government, but he fully recognized that any hope of kissing the Hun were effectively extinguished, and that the resentments seen in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and World War I would one day reappear.

Churchill had lost many friends to the horrific phenomenon of what he called “Teuton fighting Gaul,” but he could not know in 1919 that he was to lose very many more after the Versailles Treaty spawned the hatred and resentment that allowed Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to emerge from the political gutter and into absolute power.

In retrospect we can see how tragic it was that Churchill’s inspired policy of “Kill the Bolshie, kiss the Hun” was not even seriously contemplated by the Western powers, and that the United States deliberately removed itself from the peacemaking process. What a different — and undoubtedly better — world we missed because Winston Churchill was not heeded a century ago this year.

Andrew Roberts is the author, most recently, of “Churchill: Walking With Destiny.”

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