Eureka to the Diggers

by Thomas Keneally

  Tom Roberts, in Britain when war began, served in the British army Medical Corps, as an enlisted man with the rank of corporal, at the 3rd London General Hospital in Wandsworth, where he became an orderly to the dentists and witnessed some of the work the dentists did with shrapnel and bullet wounds to the jaw. He would sketch an Australian soldier, his eyes full of pain, whose lower jaw had been shot right through, leaving the two sides working independently. Roberts explained that a splint was put in to hold the whole jaw firmly together while the chin was built up ‘and looks almost normal’, said Roberts, offering his sketch to prove it.

  In another Roberts drawing, a large part of a man’s lower jaw has been shot away, leaving an external wound ‘which was the size of a hen egg’. The remains of the jaw slewed away to the right side of the man’s face, said Roberts, but the dental surgeon slowly brought it back into position. ‘A case now being treated had the whole upper jaw and left eye carried away, leaving only one thing human looking, on a strange front to a man’s head, an eye—an eye that, through the pain, the operations, stayed bright.’ With what Roberts calls a queer voice, the man muttered, ‘It’ll be alright. I never was a Don Juan.’

  For some reason Roberts was not one of the official war artists appointed in 1918, but his fellow Wandsworth orderly Arthur Streeton was, and would paint grander mayhem on a grander scale.

  FLYING AS A WAY OF DEATH ON THE WESTERN FRONT

  As Monash and others had grasped, the airplane made this war a war of three dimensions. Where other wars had been a matter of back and forth, this one was increasingly a matter of back, forth and up. The Australian Flying Corps operated three squadrons over the Western Front. The purposes of the squadrons, as well as fighting enemy aircraft, were the mapping of trench systems, the directing of artillery and giving support to infantry operations. For the young fliers on the Western Front, death was almost assured. Sometimes it was a freakish matter, as in December 1917, when Lieutenant J.L. Sandy and Sergeant H.F. Hughes, observing fire from a battery of 8-inch Howitzers, were attacked from above by six Albatross fighters. Sandy turned to engage the enemy, and shot one of them down. Another Australian Number 3 Squadron plane came in to help, and to the other pilot Sandy and Hughes seemed to be unharmed. But they did not return to the airfield. An armour-piercing bullet had passed through Hughes’ left lung then buried itself in the base of Sandy’s skull. The plane flew itself in circles before crashing in a field.

  In another fatal incident, in mid-air over the British lines at Wytschaete in the winter of 1917–18, an RE-8 reconnaissance plane on its way to the German lines and flown by Lieutenants Streeter and F.J. Tarrant was obliterated by a British shell. On 16 August 1918, after the German front began to crumble, Lieutenant E.P.E. McCleery, a coach builder and engineer from Berrima, took off with eighty other Australian aircraft, two entire Australian squadrons, from their field at Bertangles north of Amiens to attack German airfields at Haubourdin and Lomme. Clearing the German hangars by only a few feet, they destroyed men and buildings and messes and aircraft. The mission was a complete success for the Australians and there were robust celebrations that evening in the mess at Bertangles. The next morning Lieutenant McCleery was still tired from the stress of the day before and the evening celebrations. Back for a second attack on the Germans, the low-flying Australians met fire from anti-aircraft guns and other weapons. McCleery’s plane was shot down by a German machine-gun post he attacked. His Sopwith Camel smashed into the airfield pavement and the twenty-five-year-old pilot was killed.

  Australian fliers were involved in the downing and death of the Red Baron, when two of their RE-8s, on a photographic reconnaissance mission, were intercepted by members of Captain von Richthofen’s squadron. The Canadian captain A.R. Brown is generally credited with this victory but in fact the Baron was shot down by Australian ground fire, since the fatal entry wound was eight centimetres lower than the exit wound and Brown was above or level with the Baron. Thus the aristocrat was buried with military honours by slouch-hatted Australians from the suburbs and the bush, representatives of the least aristocratic race on earth, in a field at Poulainville.

  During the German offensive in March 1918, Sopwith Camels of the Australian Flying Corps Number 4 Fighter Squadron flew below 450 feet (150 metres) in rain and fog, avoiding enemy fighters and the fire of German riflemen and machine gunners from the trenches, to attack enemy troops with machine guns and drop 25-pound Cooper bombs.

  When they moved to Villers-Bocage in France, Australian airmen instigated a number of technical and training innovations. (Arthur Streeton, the great painter of the gum tree, painted an excellent picture of the airfield there.) Captain L.J. Wackett had already modified the bomb racks so that ammuni-tion could be dropped to troops in action. This bombing had an element of intimacy between the plane and the victims below. It created terror in the victims, but it also meant that many fliers, amongst them Australians and the Baron, were brought down by small-calibre arms, as well as by the fledgling ‘Archies’—anti-aircraft guns.

  A CONSCRIPT NATION

  When Labor prime minister William Morris Hughes put the conscription issue to the Australian people, he was accused of being a moral coward by those who wanted conscription. They did not fully understand the difficulties he would have forcing it through the Senate, or the determination of many Labor members and the unions to oppose it. But by mid-1916, Hughes was not the only man in his cabinet to believe conscription necessary to make up for the Australian losses suffered on the Somme. Senator George Pearce, the war minister, former Coolgardie miner and carpenter, was simply one of the cabinet in favour. Their motives were subtle—they were under moral pressure from other Dominions, such as Canada and New Zealand, both of which had introduced conscription. They may even have felt that trade with Britain might be dependent upon Australia’s going this step further because distance from Britain put the country’s trade in a difficult situation. During his visit to Europe in 1916, Hughes had needed to chase up and purchase a flotilla of fifteen cargo ships to bring Australian wheat to the British market. But he also genuinely desired that more reluctant Australian youths should be sent to reinforce the remaining elite of volunteers, and thus increase the chances of survival of all Australian soldiers.

  The first referendum was on 28 October 1916. In most Protestant churches worshippers were urged to vote Yes, since the war was a holy conflict and thus the necessity of enlarging the army was depicted as a moral rather than a political issue. Not all of the Protestant community, however, voted as the pastors would have wished them to. The proposal was narrowly defeated, with a majority against it in three states. In a poll of over 2 500 000 voters, conscription was defeated by a mere 72 000. At a Labor conference in Melbourne in December 1916, Hughes and all those who had been in favour of conscription were expelled from the Labor Party. Hughes was both aggrieved and wistful, and never again quite at home in politics. He had not left the party, he declared. The party had left him. He had hoped to govern in his own right in a form of the Labor Party which would continue the campaign of nationalism and victory. In the end, he was forced to join the opposition in a combined National or ‘Win the War’ Party, of which he was elected head and thus became prime minister. He won an election in May 1917, even though Archbishop Mannix of Melbourne had declared from the pulpits of Melbourne that a vote for Hughes was a vote for conscription.

  Indeed, Hughes felt forced to revive the conscription issue now. He argued that Australia needed 16 500 recruits each month, but in the early months of 1917 there were not more than 5000, dropping to 2500 in the second half of the year. By the end of 1917, as the second referendum approached, Australians seemed emotionally exhausted. There was not only a sense that conscription would kill not save more boys, but also a fear that Australia, because of its losses and its class divisions, would never be the same again.

  The second referendum on 20 December 1917 was lost by a larger
majority than before. This time the No vote widened by a majority of 166 000. It was not such a majority, however, that it failed to show how split Australia was. There were all manner of reasons cited for the defeat, including rumours about the prevalence of venereal disease in the AIF, which voters thought conscription would further spread. But the campaign had aroused the most furious political and sectarian passions. A handbill produced by the Reinforcements Referendum Council to condemn the No voters read in part: ‘I believe in the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World or Wobblies], I believe in Sinn Fein, I believe that Britain should be crashed and humiliated, I believe in the massacre of Belgian priests, I believe in the murder of women, and baby-killing . . . I believe in burning Australian haystacks. I believe in German mine laying in Australian waters. I believe in handing Australia over to Germany. I believe I’m worm enough to vote NO.’

  In reply the Australian Worker declared that conscription ‘is the most immoral of all forms of gambling. It is fraught with tragedy; red with murder and foul with abomination.’

  To many Australian workers the priority was not to win campaigns in France, but to improve their wages in the face of ever rising prices for food. By August 1917, a strike would begin at the Randwick Tramway workshops, ostensibly over rosters, and would eventually enlist the state in a crisis involving fuel, food and transport workers. To middle-class men and women all this was a betrayal of their sons at the front, and the defeat of conscription soon after seemed to justify the suspicion that the Catholics, the unions and the Wobblies were all in it together.

  A tale of some of Billy Hughes’s frenetic campaigning for conscription will be related elsewhere, but the public rancour of the time was shown by a conscription rally held on the Melbourne Cricket Ground on 10 December. Anti-conscriptionists invaded the ground, and hurled eggs, road gravel and glass bottles at the speaker, including Hughes. A large stone came close to hitting the Prime Minister, and a witness claimed that a soldier knocked a knife out of the hand of a man attempting to throw it in the direction of the rostrum. Even as a rumour, this was a sign that the debate was poisonous.

  THOSE IRISH

  In regard to conscription and most other issues, the Irish and their children remained a source of unease, even though many soldiers of Irish ancestry had joined the ranks. The Easter weekend uprising in Dublin in 1916 was directly linked, in the minds of the suspicious, to the anti-conscription activities of the ‘Rasputin of Australia’, Daniel Mannix, the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne. Most Irish in Australia did not favour the Irish uprising when it first occurred. Britain had as good as guaranteed Irish Home Rule, a form of Irish independence akin to that of a self-governing Dominion, at war’s end. The Easter rebels were seen as having jumped the gun to a provocative extent. But when the British executed many of the captured Irish rebels in Dublin’s Kilmainham gaol, Irish opinion turned against Britain. William Butler Yeats put it best: a terrible beauty was born. And Irish people in Australia asked themselves was this an Empire worth sacrificing their sons for?

  Indeed, the St Patrick’s Day procession in Melbourne in 1918 would feature a float depicting the ‘martyrs’ of the Easter uprising. The Governor-General, Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson, a Scotsman who would have preferred to have been Viceroy of India, believed that, partly due to the defeat of conscription, the mob was now ruling Australia. Seven members of the Irish National Association, which was seen as a front for the Irish Republican Brotherhood and its political wing Sinn Fein (Ourselves Alone), were arrested under the War Precautions Act. The Irish National Association had in fact run a small camp in the Blue Mountains, a cluster of tents, to train men to infiltrate Ireland and fight for her independence. It produced not one Irish fighter, but when it was discovered the entire Irish Catholic community were depicted as subscribers to the darkest sedition and rebellion.

  To loyalists, one of the great Satans of anti-conscription and disloyal sentiment was Archbishop Daniel Mannix. Son of a County Cork tenant farmer, born in 1864, Mannix had been a turbulent figure in the politics of the Catholic Church in Ireland and some were pleased to see him hived off to Melbourne in 1913 as coadjutor (deputy) bishop. The Australian establishment saw him as a promoter of Sinn Fein, the political wing of Irish rebellion. But Mannix had not opposed the declaration of war in 1914, and in 1916 no Catholic bishop in Australia other than Mannix opposed conscription. When through the death of his predecessor Archbishop Carr he became Archbishop of Melbourne in May 1917, he became more vocal. He was the sort of Irishman who in opening new Catholic schools would announce that they were designed to lift the children of the Irish out of the impotence and ignorance to which Cromwell, and successive British administrations, had tried to consign them. He refused Hughes’ offer to support conscription—the execution of the Easter uprising martyrs, notably that of the leader Padraig Pearse, had made him weep and rendered Britain perfidious in his mind as well as that of others. Though he spoke only twice on the issue in the first conscription campaign, in the second he became a frequent speaker in condemnation of conscription, and said at a church fete that the war was ‘simply an ordinary trade war’. Hughes saw Mannix and the Industrial Workers of the World (a radical movement imported from Chicago with wide support among unionists), who were in their turn depicted as the major creators of the 1917 strike, as working in lock step.

  In the second conscription debate, Archbishop Michael Kelly in Sydney remained a pro-conscriptionist, even though he received chiding letters from Catholic labour men. Patrick Cunningham, a Catholic layman, complained that Kelly was on the side of the lord mayors, the Members of the Legislative Council and the judges. After the second referendum was lost by an even bigger majority, Mannix would thank the Catholics of New South Wales ‘for saving Australia’.When Mannix visited a working-class school in Balmain, the faithful rushed up to kiss his garments and do him homage.

  With some justice, Prime Minister Billy Hughes believed he had personally experienced the anti-British passion of the Irish. Campaigning for conscription in 1917 in towns along the railway network of Queensland, speaking briefly but furiously at railway stations during the 1917 conscription debate, Hughes was often pelted with rotten eggs and overripe fruit by anti-conscriptionists. Not all of them were Irish, though; having failed to legalise conscription in the referendum of 1916, his eloquent convictions ran wildly and even offensively against anyone who doubted conscription’s transparent necessity. Town by town in Queensland, he attacked the Labor state government ferociously and they, particularly Ted Theodore, struck back. Theodore, the Queensland Treasurer, declared that behind conscription lay not only slaughter on the Western Front but an attempt to destroy unionism by compelling its membership into the forces. At Warwick, Hughes was therefore ready to rant against the leftists and the Irish, and as he crossed the platform from the train to do so, one of the eggs thrown at him shattered on his hat. Sergeant H.B. Kenny of the Queensland police refused to arrest the marksman, Pat Brosnan. Kenny’s argument was that Hughes, who had by now jumped down into the crowd ready to take on anyone, would not lay a charge under Queensland law, which was the only law Kenny was authorised to enforce, but demanded instead that he arrest the violator under federal law. A constitutional argument took place right there in the crowd in the railway forecourt, with Hughes declaring that he represented the Commonwealth, that the laws of the Commonwealth overrode those of the state, and Kenny must now uphold the former. After thirteen minutes of insult and argument between Hughes and sections of the crowd, no arrest was made and, Hughes’ train continuing on its way, Kenny’s view was endorsed by the Queensland government. In a telegram on the incident addressed to the Governor-General, Hughes wrote that he was trying to make the Queensland government of T.J. Ryan ‘realise that this is not Ireland as Sinn Fein would have it.’

  One reaction to the egg and the disobedience of Sergeant Kenny was the prompt creation of a Commonwealth police force. For, as Hughes said in a letter
to the Governor-General urging he give assent to the new law creating the force, ‘The [state] police is honeycombed with Sinn Feiners and IWW . . . There are towns in North Queensland where the law, State or Federal, is openly ingnored and IWW and Sinn Fien run the show.’

  BRINGING THE FABRIC DOWN

  To radicals of all kinds, and there were many kinds, the war seemed the beginning of the end for capitalism. Capital was so grossly visible in the profits of companies and in the blood of workers-turned-soldiers that world revolution seemed close, and in 1917 began to manifest itself in Russia.

  During the war the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) had affrighted public opinion with their combination of strikes and sabotage. The Wobblies were anarchists and believed that the sole structure required to bring the peace and plenty to the earth was not corrupted government but One Big Union (OBU) involving all the workers of the earth in unconquerable combination. This objective was given the name syndicalism, and in the pubs where the few true Marxists drank, believers in a coming Marxist state which might not even need unions, the words ‘syndicalist bastard’ was an insult for Marxists did not believe that the Wobbly OBU would deliver the earthly paradise. This did not mean there were not plenty of conversions of Wobblies to Marxism and vice versa. A normal wharf labourer or Hunter Valley coal miner understood his own discontent, rising prices and fixed pay that meant that his wife and kids ate poorly a number of nights a week. But he was not up on either Wobbly or Marxist dogma and did not care which doctrine improved the conditions of his life. The Wobblies were, however, very visible and, during the height of the war, scared Australia not only by their involvement in strikes but by their anarchist appetite for arson.