by Paul Terry
THE WORLD AT WAR
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, cut quite a figure as he stepped ashore at Sydney’s Farm Cove in the autumn of 1893. Handsome and square-shouldered, he looked every bit the European prince as he was welcomed to Australia on his tour of the world. Although he spoke barely a word of English, he made his pleasure known as he visited a meat-packing plant and witnessed a sheep-shearing demonstration.
Later, accompanied by scores of attendants and dignitaries, the archduke toured western New South Wales for a hunting expedition. The archduke was very impressed by Australian animals. He was so impressed, in fact, that he set out to kill as many of them as he could, and he was followed by a team of taxidermists as he laid waste to a legion of kangaroos, wallabies, emus and wild turkeys. He even shot a platypus. Each specimen was gathered for preservation and transportation to Austria, much to the disappointment of the Australians in the shooting party, who had hoped for a nightly meal of roasted turkey.
Apart from a regrettable incident in which a zealous landlady on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait had refused to let the archduke drink a beer outdoors on a Sunday, the archduke’s visit had been a great success. When he sailed out of Sydney in late May, he declared through an interpreter that after Austria, Australia was his favourite country. The women, he said, were ‘superlatively beautiful’ and the men ‘light-hearted and unconventional’. Australians were flattered by this regal praise but, as Franz Ferdinand’s warship sailed through the heads at Sydney bound for New Caledonia, none in Australia could imagine that the next time he made national news in his second-favourite country it would change the world, and, in doing so, accelerate the transformation of Australia from a British colony to a young nation in its own right.
Two decades after the archduke’s visit to Australia, Europe was simmering with tension. Extreme nationalism was rife and an arms race had seen the hurried building of war ships and other weapons. At the heart of the unrest was the Balkans—where Franz Ferdinand’s Austro–Hungarian empire was competing with Russia and Serbia for territory and influence. Austria–Hungary had infuriated Serbia by annexing Bosnia-Herzegovina six years earlier; a growing Turkish military threatened to stifle Russia’s hopes of achieving greater influence in the Balkans; and, in France, many still burned with the desire for revenge after the German annexation of Alsace–Lorraine following the Franco–Prussian war in 1870. The great powers, including Britain, were tied to this time bomb through a series of complicated alliances that promised military support to any ally that might be attacked.
A spark in the wrong place could ignite the powder keg. That spark was struck when Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie visited the Austro–Hungarian troops in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1914.
It was a risky venture. Serb radicals had already made several attempts on the lives of high-ranking Austro-Hungarian officials and, as a strong supporter of combining Slavic lands under the control of his crown, the archduke was at the top of the hit list for extremists. It was into this volatile environment that the royal couple arrived in Sarajevo on the bright and sunny morning of 28 June.
Franz Ferdinand and Sophie alighted from a train at Sarajevo station shortly before ten o’clock. There they were met by six cars which would transport the couple, their retinue and a small security force first to a brief inspection of a nearby military barracks and then to a reception at the town hall. Dressed in military uniform capped by a hat adorned with green peacock feathers, the archduke travelled with his wife in the back of the third vehicle, an open-top sports car with the top neatly rolled down at the back. After the visit to the barracks, the lightly defended motorcade made its way towards the town hall where Franz Ferdinand was scheduled to deliver an address. He may well have been nervous about the visit. According to one account, he had said to a family member a few weeks earlier: ‘I know I shall soon be murdered.’ His fears were well-founded.
As the motorcade made its way towards the town hall, a team of three assassins was lying in wait along the riverside road, the Appel Quay. The first assassin blended in with the crowd at the front of a café. He was armed with a bomb. Further along the route, the second attacker had a bomb and a pistol. Leaving little to chance, a third killer, Nedeljko Cabrinovic, waited near the bank of the Miljacka River, a small bomb hidden under his clothes. The mastermind of the plot, Gavrilo Princip, was a few streets away, awaiting news of the archduke’s death.
The motorcade passed the first two assassins without incident. Either their nerve failed or they could not get a clear shot at the motorcade because neither pistol nor bomb was deployed. The plot was at risk of failure. But the third terrorist, Cabrinovic, was made of sterner stuff.
As the cars passed his riverside ambush point, Cabrinovic hurled his bomb at Franz Ferdinand’s open-topped car—but his aim was poor. The bomb bounced off the car’s folded-down top and fell to the street. Seconds later it exploded, injuring about twenty bystanders and damaging the fourth car in the convoy. The archduke and his wife were shaken but unharmed. The motorcade, now down to five cars, continued on its way.
After the official function at the town hall, the rattled archduke changed his plans and decided to visit some of those wounded in the bombing at the Sarajevo hospital. Again, Franz Ferdinand travelled with Sophie in the back of the third car. It seemed the attempt on his life had failed. The course of the entire century might have changed then, but for a simple case of human error. Franz Ferdinand’s driver thought the convoy was travelling to the hospital as first intended. Nobody had told him that the royal party’s destination had changed. Instead of travelling directly along the Appel Quay to the Sarajevo hospital, the driver turned the royal car right into Franz Josef Street.
Gavrilo Princip—‘Gavro’ to his friends—had heard the bomb explode and initially thought the plot had succeeded, but when he saw the motorcade on the move, he knew the archduke was still alive. Bitterly disappointed, but still hoping to make his kill, Princip waited outside a delicatessen on Franz Josef Street. Moments later, the driver of the royal car realised he had taken the wrong turn and brought the car to a halt in the street, directly in front of Princip. The car was immobile in the street, the royal couple horribly exposed in the back seat. Princip seized his chance.
Drawing his pistol from a pocket, the assassin fired two shots from a distance of about 2 metres. One bullet tore into Franz Ferdinand’s neck. The other punched into Sophie’s abdomen, just above her right hip. A thin stream of blood ran from the archduke’s mouth and his head fell forward. Next to him, his wife slid off the seat and collapsed on the car floor, her head resting on her husband’s knees. ‘Sophie, Sophie, don’t die,’ said the mortally wounded archduke, ‘Live for our children!’ Then, as the driver finally regained control of the car and began to race towards the governor’s house for medical treatment, Franz Ferdinand uttered his last words. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said, repeating the phrase several times, his voice growing fainter each time. ‘It’s nothing, it’s nothing . . .’
The archduke was terribly wrong. Sophie was dead when the car arrived at the Governor’s residence and Franz Ferdinand died ten minutes later.
Gavrilo Princip—who tried unsuccessfully to poison himself after the shooting—later said he only wanted to kill the archduke, not start a war. But the assassination was to have global consequences, costing millions of lives. Although the terrorists were quickly caught, anti-Serb riots broke out in Sarajevo and in several cities across Austria and Hungary. A diplomatic storm brewed as Austria made impossible demands on the Serbian Government. Serbia was ordered to suppress anti-Austrian propaganda and submit to an independent investigation into the assassination, or face the military might of Austria and its close ally Germany. But proud Serbia was defiant. Instead of bowing to the threat, the Serbs mobilised their army. On 26 July, Serbian soldiers crossed the Danube River into Austro-Hungarian territory. The situation was slipping out of control.
Two days later, with th
e recalcitrant Serbs still refusing to yield, the Austrians declared war. Then, what should have been an isolated European conflict grew rapidly. One by one, the powers were drawn into the maelstrom. Germany and Italy, as signatories to an alliance with Austria, had no choice but to join the war on Serbia. Russia—which was bound to support Serbia and was also allied to France and Britain—was worried by the threat of a pre-emptive attack from Germany—a fear that proved valid when Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August. Two days later, Germany was also at war with France. Although the Austro-Germans expected Britain to remain neutral, on 4 August, Britain and its dominions declared war on Germany and Austria.
Most people thought that the war would be over within six months. But the mechanised warfare of the twentieth century was very different to that of the past. Soon to be known as the Great War, the European squabble grew into a global conflagration that lasted for more than four years and changed the course of the century. An estimated 17 million people were killed and about 20 million injured. From the heart of the conflict in Europe to the dustiest, most distant colonies of the Empire, young men flocked to the bugle call to lay down their lives in the ‘war to end all wars’. Australians were among the most loyal of supporters and they died in their thousands.
*
Barty Paterson took a great interest in the war. In September 1914, he visited an army training base at Kensington near Sydney, where he was appalled to learn that the men were in dire need of warm shirts, socks, pyjamas and undershirts. A newspaper columnist known as ‘Fanella’ wrote that Paterson appealed to the public to ‘give it now’. According to ‘Fanella’, the soldiers could expect to face weather bleaker than a night on a Scotch moor, and Paterson’s appeal was the ‘most sensible remark that has been uttered for a fortnight’.
But Paterson’s thoughts were turning towards playing a more direct role in the war. These thoughts made news as far away as Perth, where the Sunday Times’ ‘Peeps at People’ column incorrectly reported that he was being held back from the war by ‘indifferent health, a wife and a bunch of children of assorted ages and sexes’. The columnist was right, however, in claiming that Banjo was keen to reprise his role as a war correspondent.
Now aged fifty, Paterson’s health was fine and his family was not holding him back. At a time when thousands of men were leaving their homes, families and jobs to fight in Europe, Paterson also felt the call to arms. If Alice did not support him in this hope, she at least did not oppose it and, in November, Barty sailed with a fleet of troop transports, bound for London, from where he hoped to find his way to the front as a war reporter. It was a bold and somewhat risky gamble; he had made no arrangement to get to the front and had as little idea as the next man on what to expect when and if he got there.
He wasted no time in filing reports for Australian readers, however. On 20 November, The Argus ran his account of the fleet’s uneventful journey over smooth seas, stopping at ports he did not name—presumably for security reasons. Despite the lack of real news to report, his story brought to life Australia’s sense of pride at being part of this great venture for the Empire. It was, he wrote, ‘the greatest national undertaking yet attempted by Australia’ and one that he hoped would lead to a lasting peace.
While he was at sea with the troops, some real news happened. It was, in fact, the most spectacular moment of Australia’s war so far. Since September, the German light cruiser Emden had been prowling the Indian Ocean and had captured or sunk more than twenty British and allied ships. The Emden had also destroyed millions of tonnes of oil in a spectacular raid on the Indian port of Madras. On 28 October, disguised as a British ship with a fake fourth funnel, the Emden raided Penang in British Malaysia and sank a Russian cruiser. Then, as quickly as she had arrived, the Emden slipped out of Penang harbour and escaped.
Now, with a flotilla of allied warships on her tail, she was the most hunted ship in the world. It was only an encounter with the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney that would halt her depredations.
On 9 November, the Emden reached the Cocos (Keeling) Islands where her skipper planned to attack an allied wireless station, but the alarm was raised and the Sydney—which was just 90 kilometres away—was dispatched to take on the German raider. The two ships sighted each other at quarter-past nine in the morning and twenty-five minutes later, the Emden fired the first shots. A total of fifteen shells slammed into the Sydney, but only two exploded. Several men were seriously wounded. The Sydney could have taken a pounding, but she was faster than the German ship, and carried bigger guns. Under the command of Captain John Glossop, the Sydney widened the distance between the two ships and brought her heavier guns to bear. She began to pump dozens of shells into the German raider from a range of about 9 kilometres. The sailors on the German ship were cut to shreds. A gun crew was blown apart with one direct hit and the decks were slippery with blood, yet still the brave Germans fought on.
Even when his guns were silenced, the German captain would not surrender. He gave orders to beach his burning ship on North Keeling Island. Around him, his men continued to die as the shelling continued but the Emden’s battle flag still flew. That afternoon, a reluctant Captain Glossop fired more shells into the beached Emden, until her decimated crew finally hauled down the flag and the battle was won.
It was a victory that fired the Australian troops en route to the front with a patriotic fervour. Australian sailors had struck a blow for their Empire and their country, and the Sydney would go down in naval history. Within two years, as the war continued to rage, no less than three Australian films would celebrate her victory.
The defeat of the Emden was also a victory for the hopeful war correspondent Barty Paterson, who got a scoop on Australia’s biggest story of the war so far. On board his troopship, Paterson had become friendly with a tall, athletic lieutenant named Jack Massie, an international cricketer whom Paterson later described as ‘strong and rugged as an ironbark tree’. Massie was a member of a highly regarded family from Sydney and through his excellent social connections he was acquainted with Captain Glossop. When the troopships arrived in Colombo, Massie arranged a meeting with Glossop so that Paterson could ‘get some stuff that the other correspondents wouldn’t get’. The result was a scoop telling the inside story of the battle, as told by the victorious skipper.
Paterson and Massie found Glossop out of uniform and enjoying a quiet drink on his own. The modest captain was unexcited that he had ‘woke up to find himself famous’ and put his victory down to his ship’s superior speed and firepower. Nonetheless, he agreed to be interviewed and the result was a story that was published in Australian newspapers in late December. It gave a detailed and concise account of the battle—not a bad effort for an author who was more at home on the back of a horse than the deck of a ship.
It was also a sensitive story that paid tribute to the honour of the German captain and acknowledged the suffering of his men. But it was Paterson’s interview with Glossop that enabled the writer to provide a small but stirring detail that fed the already soaring pride that Australians felt in their feat of arms. The story, with the sub-heading, ‘What the boy said’, told of a remarkable moment early in the battle when a shell hit the Sydney, killing a man who was working on a range-finder. This anecdote—published in newspapers around Australia—summed up the way that Australians wanted to see their fighting men:
When the man working the range-finder was killed his body was thrown on top of a 16-year-old boy, who was sitting behind him working with a telescope. The boy was stunned by the concussion, but as soon as he came to himself he struggled to his feet, throwing the dead man’s body from him. He made no comment on the somewhat strenuous proceedings. He simply said, ‘Where’s my blanky [bloody] telescope,’ and, grabbing it off the deck, he fixed it on the Emden again as if nothing unusual had happened. His remark deserves to become historical.
Years later, Paterson reprised his interview with Glossop in his book Happy Dispatches, a series of biogra
phical stories about the important people he had met. Again, this account captured the underlying humanity of the men who fought and died in that historic sea battle. Paterson provided graphic details of the carnage inflicted on the German crew, but he also told of the regret felt by Glossop of having to fire shells into an enemy ship that had already been defeated.
Glossop had signalled the stricken Emden after she was beached, asking whether she would surrender, but her crew had signalled in return that they did not understand the message. ‘What was I able to do?’ the captain asked rhetorically. ‘If they were able to flag-wag in Morse they were surely able to haul a flag down. We understood there was another German warship about and I couldn’t have the Emden firing at me from the beach while I was fighting her mate.’
The captain finished his discussion with Paterson and Massie, with recollections of the blood that was shed on the Emden. He told how the survivors had been driven all but mad by the flesh-tearing blasts of the Sydney’s guns, of the stench of explosives and the torment of the German sailors who were fly-blown with wounds and dying from drinking salt water. ‘I have seen my first naval engagement, Massie,’ said the captain, ‘and all I can say is, thank God we didn’t start the war.’
*
Paterson arrived in London in December to find a city in chaos. It was, he wrote in his diary, a ‘stricken city, cut off from all reliable news, with everybody working feverishly to organise an army overnight’. The opposing armies had already become deadlocked in France and Paterson was keen to get there so he could report firsthand on the war. He hoped his successful reporting en route to London, combined with his proven track record as a war correspondent in South Africa, would be enough to get to the front. The problem was that everybody else wanted to get there, too, and the British authorities had little interest in letting reporters get anywhere near the fighting.
On 14 December, Paterson visited the War Office where he found lots of people trying to do their bit for the war but achieving very little. The place was packed with old soldiers and civilians who all wanted to get to the front but were struggling to progress beyond the waiting rooms. Everybody was snagged in an impenetrable, overwhelmed bureaucracy. Whether it was a civilian who wanted to donate a car to the army (provided he could drive it to the front), a retired colonel who wanted to give £1000 worth of gifts to the troops (only if he could distribute them at the front) or an entertainer who wanted to sing comical songs to the soldiers (at the front), their efforts to join the war were blocked in London. All of these well-intentioned people were passengers in a war, Paterson wrote, and ‘in a war like this there is no room for passengers’.