One of the most atmospheric accounts of the first tense minutes at Anzac as the first glimmering of light began to pierce the gloom is that of the British war correspondent, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett: ‘Every eye was fixed on that grim-looking line of hills in our front, so shapeless, yet so menacing in the gloom, the mysteries of which those in the boats, which looked so tiny and helpless, were about to solve.’3 Initially, it seemed as if the Turks had been taken completely by surprise and there would be no opposition. Then the firing began: Bean calculated it started at 4.29 a.m.4 Jumping into the water up to their waists and sometimes up to their armpits, the Anzacs struggled ashore. One recalled, ‘Hell was loosed in all its furies . . . stopping to think meant certain Death . . . looking down at the bottom of the sea, you could see a carpet of dead men who were shot getting out of the boats.’ Another wrote of ‘sitting jammed together like sardines in the boats, while the Turks blazed away merrily at us from the top of a big hill just skirting the shore’.5 Under the unexpectedly heavy fire, the Anzacs scrambled up the steep slopes to find themselves in a tangle of scrub-covered gullies, ravines, and dry watercourses. Contact between, and within, units was easily lost. Sergeant George Mitchell of the 10th (South Australia) Battalion in the Australian 3rd Brigade described the attempted advance as one of sudden spurts: ‘A scramble, a rapid pounding of heavy boots and clattering equipment, a startled yell and a crumpling body which has to be leaped over, a succession of slithering thuds, and we are down in the bushes forty yards ahead.’6 Some groups got about a mile and a half inland, but increasing Turkish resistance pushed them back. With cohesion breaking down by the afternoon, men – both wounded and unwounded – began to make their way back down to the beach. Charles Bean later challenged the conclusions about Australian morale drawn by the British official historian, Cecil Aspinall-Oglander, but there is overwhelming evidence of what was termed ‘straggling’ by inexperienced, disorganised and disoriented troops.
Commanding the Australian 3rd Brigade, Colonel Sinclair MacLagan also overcompensated for the troops landing too far to the north by ordering Colonel James McCay to direct his 2nd Brigade towards Gaba Tepe, leaving the Anzac centre and left weak in the face of counter-attacks mounted by Mustafa Kemal's Turkish 19th Division. MacLagan feared a Turkish attack from his right, but by focusing on the so-called ‘400 Plateau’ (soon to be called Lone Pine) to the south, he diverted attention from what would prove to be the dominating heights of Sari Bair to the north. The latter was the very axis down which Mustafa Kemal directed the weight of his counter-attack, securing the high ground at Chunuk Bair and forcing the Anzacs off another key feature called ‘Baby 700’. Though little field artillery was available, the situation was made worse by the guns being landed late, and then being ordered withdrawn by the commander of the 1st Australian Division, Major General William Bridges, for fear that they would be overrun as the situation continued to deteriorate.
Coming ashore at about 8.00 p.m. to consult with Bridges and Major General Alexander Godley of the New Zealand and Australian Division, the corps commander, Lieutenant General Sir William Birdwood, was told that the only course was to abandon the landing and re-embark. Birdwood sent a message to be relayed to Hamilton offshore in HMS Queen Elizabeth at about 8.45 p.m. It made stark reading:7
Both my Divisional Generals and Brigadiers have represented to me that they fear their men are thoroughly demoralised by shrapnel fire to which they have been subjected all day after exhaustion and gallant work in the morning. Numbers have dribbled back from the firing line and cannot be collected in this difficult country. Even New Zealand Brigade which has been only recently engaged lost heavily and is somewhat demoralised. If troops are subjected to shell fire again tomorrow morning there is likely to be a fiasco, as I have no fresh troops with which to replace those in the firing line. I know my representation is most serious but if we are to re-embark it must be at once.
Convening with Birdwood again at about 10.00 p.m., Godley and Bridges did not want to wait for Hamilton's decision, but to evacuate immediately. Birdwood wanted to remain. Rear Admiral Thursby, who had supervised the landing, felt evacuation to be too risky. Thursby's opinion carried weight and at about 2.30 a.m. on 26 April, Hamilton sent Birdwood the famous exhortation that the Anzacs must ‘dig, dig, dig, until you are safe’.8 The Anzacs did, indeed, hang on, though Hamilton again contemplated withdrawal on 8 May, until dissuaded by Birdwood. It is not clear how many casualties were suffered on 25 April, but between the landing and 3 May, Bean's official history records some 8,100, including 2,300 killed: possibly 500 or so died on 25 April. By the time the campaign was abandoned, and the Anzacs were finally evacuated on the night of 18 December 1915, 8,141 Australians and 2,271 New Zealanders had been killed.
Gallipoli had a particular intensity for all its participants. Allied troops had their backs to the sea in small and heavily shelled enclaves. Unlike on the Western Front, there was no safe rear area. All supplies, including water, had to be brought on to the peninsula from the main bases established at Moudros Bay on the island of Limnos, landed from small boats, and then taken up to the front line under fire. In the summer heat, lice and flies were ever present. Dysentery and enteric was endemic, and the medical systems were unable to cope. By contrast, blizzards, thunderstorms and heavy snowfalls struck the peninsula in November 1915, causing at least 16,000 cases of frostbite, and hastening the desire to abandon a campaign that was going nowhere. For the Anzacs, the campaign revolved around such features as Quinn's Post, Shrapnel Valley, Plugge's Plateau, Russell's Top, Lone Pine and the Nek. For Australians, the latter became almost as evocative as Anzac Cove itself. In the early morning of 7 August, the 3rd Australian Light Horse Brigade took 472 casualties, including 298 dead, in a disastrous attempt to take it. In effect, since MacLagan had pushed the 1st Australian Division to the right on landing, the New Zealand and Australian Division was made responsible for the more critical left flank as it landed later in the morning of 25 April. In effect, the security of the Anzac position fell to the New Zealand and Australian Division, and the 1st Australian Division was a junior partner in the subsequent actions that determined success or failure. The attacks on Lone Pine and the Nek in August, therefore, were in support of primarily New Zealand offensives to the left. There was an increasing tendency to forget the contributions of the New Zealanders: as it happens the first use of the acronym ‘Anzac’ was by a New Zealander, and the nickname ‘digger’ was also first applied to New Zealanders.
From the very beginning, the story of the Anzacs was extensively reported. It was Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett who began to establish the legend in his despatches from the front. These fully confirmed the expectations of the Australian and New Zealand public that their men's exploits would rank with the bravest deeds of empire. The 34-year-old Ashmead-Bartlett was the son of a Conservative MP, Sir Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, who had been a Civil Lord of the Admiralty in Salisbury's administration between 1886 and 1892. Educated at Marlborough College, which he had cordially hated, Ashmead-Bartlett had accompanied his father on a visit to the Turkish army during the Greco-Turkish War of 1897. He had served in the South African War as a subaltern in the Bedfordshire Regiment before being invalided home. Ashmead-Bartlett had then become a war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, covering the Russo-Japanese War, French and Spanish campaigns in North Africa, and the two Balkan Wars. He had also found time to stand unsuccessfully for two different seats in the January and December 1910 general elections. In 1914 Ashmead-Bartlett was then chosen by the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association as the official representative for the London press with the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force.
Tall and fair, self-opinionated and conceited, Ashmead-Bartlett liked to live well and invariably beyond his means: he was declared bankrupt in December 1914, hence his readiness to accept the Gallipoli assignment and its salary of £2,000. Henry Nevinson of the Manchester Guardian, who represented the provincial press during the campaign, recalled that Ashmead
-Bartlett would ‘issue from his elaborately furnished tent dressed in a flowing robe of yellow silk with crimson, and call for breakfast as though the Carlton [Club] were still his corporeal home’.9 He had brought out his own cook and his own supply of champagne. There may have been what Nevinson regarded as an air of ‘magnificence’ about Ashmead-Bartlett, but he appears to have been a man with a kind of inner rage, always ready to rail against perceived slights. Compton Mackenzie, who served on Hamilton's headquarters intelligence staff, was briefly mistaken for Ashmead-Bartlett one day by a staff officer who wanted to avoid dining with him: ‘"Oh, its you, Mackenzie!” he exclaimed. “We thought it was Ashmead-Bartlett, and we didn't want to ask him to lunch.” He shouted jovially, and from other dug-outs all round emerged the relieved faces of the Army Corps staff.’10 Possibly influenced by his deteriorating relationship with Hamilton and his staff, to which his own difficult personality had materially contributed, Ashmead-Bartlett became increasingly critical of the conduct of the campaign.
Running into censorship problems, Ashmead-Bartlett persuaded Keith Murdoch of the Melbourne Age, en route to London to run the United Cable Service in August 1915, to carry a highly critical letter for him to give to Prime Minister Asquith. Informed by Nevinson, the military authorities detained Murdoch at Marseilles and seized the letter. In fact, Ashmead-Bartlett had already voiced his criticisms to Asquith and many others when briefly back in London in May 1915. Reaching London himself, Murdoch also met Asquith and other ministers. In September he wrote his own critical and greatly overstated letter to Fisher's Labor government in Australia, with which he was on close terms. Asquith also circulated Murdoch's letter to the Committee of Imperial Defence. Hamilton always believed the affair had played a significant role in his recall from the Gallipoli command in October. Succeeding Fisher as Australian prime minister that same month, William Morris Hughes was less willing to rock the imperial boat and requested that no other Australian journalists be allowed to visit the peninsula without his approval. Hughes, however, was a populist and not above exploiting the Anzac myth for his own ends, and was to employ Murdoch as a kind of unofficial cheerleader.
Ashmead-Bartlett was also sent home on 2 October 1915, subsequently undertaking public lecture tours in the United States and Australia in 1916, speaking on ‘With the Anzacs at the Dardanelles’. He also showed film he had taken: this was later produced as the short feature, With the Dardanelles Expedition: Heroes of Gallipoli, with captions written by Bean. There had been considerable alarm on the part of the British and Australian governments at the prospect of the lecture tours and Ashmead-Bartlett was required to submit his text in advance. Short of money as always, however, Ashmead-Bartlett recognised the need to modify any criticism to maximise the commercial opportunity. He drew good crowds and took the opportunity to sell his Gallipoli diary to the Mitchell Library in Sydney. He also sold copies of the photographs he had taken on the peninsula to the public.
Whatever his faults, Ashmead-Bartlett undeniably wrote vivid and engaging prose. He did not venture as close to the front line as Bean. Therefore, his information was often second-hand but more analytical. Since transmission of Bean's first despatch was held up in Egypt, it was Ashmead-Bartlett's account of the Anzacs that was published first, on 7 May 1915. It made an instant impact. For its author, the Anzacs were ‘the finest lot of men I have ever seen in any part of the world’ and ‘a race of giants’. These ‘raw Colonial troops in those desperate hours proved themselves worthy to fight side by side with the heroes of Mons and the Aisne, Ypres, and Neuve Chapelle’.11 Bean later acknowledged the importance of Ashmead-Bartlett's despatch, as the ‘first to impress on the world the main facts of the landing and the impression is still there’.12 Motivated by a sense of personal slight and economic necessity Ashmead-Bartlett, however, did not have any consciousness of creating a political and cultural legacy.
The publication of Ashmead-Bartlett's despatches in 1915 was soon followed by other similar paeans to Australian heroism. E. C. Buley completed his Glorious Deeds of Australians in the Great War in October 1915, and various participants’ memoirs appeared in 1916. The first full narrative of the campaign was Australia in Arms: A Narrative of the Australasian Imperial Force and Their Achievements at Anzac by Philip Schuler of the Melbourne Age, who had visited Gallipoli in July 1915. Echoing Ashmead-Bartlett, Schuler proclaimed the landing as the moment when ‘Australia attained nationhood by the heroism of her noble sons.’13 Australian schoolchildren were also receiving as school prizes such titles as John Adcock's Australasia Triumphant in 1916. The perpetuation of the legend of Anzac, however, was to be principally the work of Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean.
Born at Bathurst in New South Wales in 1879, where his English father was headmaster of the college, Bean moved to England with his family upon his father's appointment as headmaster at Brentwood School in 1891. Educated at his father's alma mater, Clifton College, where Douglas Haig was also a pupil, Bean won a scholarship to Hertford College, Oxford. Returning to Australia in 1904, Bean briefly took up the law and teaching, before some articles he had written brought him a job with the Sydney Morning Herald in 1908. Bean represented the newspaper in London between 1910 and 1912, before returning to Sydney in 1913 as its leader-writer. In 1914 he narrowly won the ballot to be the official representative of the Australian Journalists’ Association with the AIF: Murdoch was placed second. Bean went ashore at Anzac between 0930 and 1000 hours on 23 April and was the only journalist to be present on the Gallipoli peninsula throughout the campaign, despite being wounded in the leg in August. At the time of his appointment, Bean also secured an agreement from the Australian Defence Department that he would go on to write an official history of Australia's contribution to the war.
Bean was tall and thin, with his wire-framed spectacles adding a distinctly academic look, though this was offset to some extent by the wavy red hair. There was no doubting his courage, however, and he was recommended for the Military Cross at one point but could not receive any decoration as a civilian. He was always far closer to the front line than Ashmead-Bartlett, who suggested that Bean almost counted the bullets in any action he described. Stemming from Bean's earliest journalism on workers in the Australian wool trade, he was passionately interested in the individual. In many ways, Bean's writing can be characterised as micro-history and, in his subsequent official history, countless individuals were to be mentioned, with brief biographies appended as footnotes to the text.
Bean was also very much a product of his public-school upbringing, espousing the robust Social Darwinism exemplified by Sir Henry Newbolt's 1908 poem in praise of Bean's own school, ‘The Island Race: Clifton Chapel’. Bean certainly subscribed to the kind of concerns about ‘national efficiency’, and the deterioration of the imperial race that had been voiced in Britain during and immediately after the South African War. This had stimulated the establishment of the Royal Commission on Physical Training in Scotland in 1902, the Inter-departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration in 1903, and investigation into the condition of the working class by Seebohm Rowntree and Charles Booth. For Bean, the physical products of a century of British industrialisation recruited into the British army in 1914 possessed ‘neither the nerve, the physique, nor the spirit and self control to fit them for soldiers’.14 By contrast, therefore, Australian soldiers represented the very best imperial stock, independent, enterprising and adventurous, ‘[b]y reason of open air life in the new climate. And of greater abundance of food, the people developed more fully the large frames which seem normal to Anglo-Saxons living under generous conditions.’15
Bean was aware that not all Australians were supermen. In any given action, perhaps 20 per cent of men would not want to go forward at all, and 80 per cent of the rest would not want to go on once they had started. The remaining 20 per cent of those who started did keep going. Bean felt, however, that a larger percentage of those prepared to go forward would be found in the ranks of Australians as opposed
to other national units. As he saw it in September 1915, his role was to tell the story of those who went forward and not the ‘weaker ones who retired through them at the same time’.16 Moreover, the story of those who went forward would provide a suitable and dramatic testament to the role Australians had played for the first time on the world stage. The official history in particular would be a ‘permanent memorial in writing’, and a national history ‘that will be read by my nation as long as it exists’.17
Clearly, to tell the story only of those who went forward required a process of selection. This was already apparent in Bean's despatches from Gallipoli. Indeed, he had learned from an adverse reaction to his despatches covering the training of the Anzacs in Egypt, in which he had reported on Australian indiscipline. Now there could be no admission of any Australian errors, and failure would be converted into heroism in the face of adversity. In terms of the landing at Anzac Cove on 25 April, there could be no question of men ‘straggling’. Indeed, the Australian government was to be successful in having such references cut from the post-war British official history. The reality was that of ‘16,000 disorganised and inexperienced soldiers being held at bay for most of the day by five weak and widely spread Turkish battalions’.18 Similarly, while Ashmead-Bartlett described the Light Horse's disastrous assault on the Nek as an ‘utterly futile attack . . . which the merest tyro could perceive had no possible chance of succeeding’, for Bean it was ‘sheer self-sacrificing heroism’.19
Compared to Ashmead-Bartlett, Bean's despatches were somewhat clinical and lacking in the kind of visual imagery that the Australian press wanted, to the extent that some newspapers contemplated dropping their publication in the autumn of 1915. The style, though, was plain and lucid, a series of individual stories, based on immediate post-action interviews, linked to become a narrative. What Bean wished to conceal was also evident in an even earlier venture, The Anzac Book, published in aid of patriotic charities in 1916. The idea was not Bean's but that of a British officer, Major Stephen Seymour Butler, who solicited contributions from Anzacs serving at Gallipoli in November and early December 1915 – when plans for evacuation were already advanced – with the intention of producing a kind of New Year magazine for the troops. With evacuation, therefore, it became more of a souvenir. Barely 150 contributions were received, and the resulting publication was very much Bean's production. He carefully edited the material for publication, omitting anything that smacked of fear, boredom, malingering, and even a longing for beer. Replete with classical allusions and redolent of the values of Bean's public-school background, The Anzac Book conformed precisely to Bean's vision of the Anzacs, selling over 104,000 copies by the end of 1916.
The Making of the First World War Page 8