Phillip Schuler

by Mark Baker

  The Orvieto’s departure had been delayed by almost a month. She was originally scheduled to embark on 29 September. But fears for the safety of her passage, and that of the many other ships carrying thousands of Victorian troops, forced a delay that strained nerves and discipline among troops chafing to get to war. The German cruisers Gneisenau and Scharnhorst were on the loose in the southern Pacific Ocean. Only one other ship in the region could match their speed and firepower, the battlecruiser Australia, pride of the fledgling Royal Australian Navy—now under British wartime command. Another contingent of ships carrying 10,000 troops from New Zealand was turned back to port under orders from the British admiralty until the whereabouts of the German raiders could be confirmed. Finally news arrived that the German cruisers had appeared in Tahiti where they launched a surprise bombardment of the French Polynesian capital, Papeete. This meant the biggest threat to the Anzac shipping was a full 2000 miles away from New Zealand in the central Pacific. The embarkations could resume.

  The Orvieto’s passenger manifest was an honour roll of soldiers who would make a heroic mark during the course of World War I and some who would become dominant figures in post-war Australian life. Lieutenant Colonel Cyril Brudenell Bingham White, an influential staff officer at Gallipoli and on the Western Front, would be appointed as the army’s Chief of the General Staff after the war. Colonel Harry Chauvel would command the Desert Mounted Corps during the fabled charge at Beersheba in Palestine in 1917 and end the war as a lieutenant general. Lieutenant Richard Gardiner Casey would win the Distinguished Service Order and the Military Cross for bravery, join Churchill’s War Cabinet in the Second World War, serve as Governor-General of Australia and be made a life peer—Baron Casey of Berwick. Major Thomas Blamey would become deputy to Lieutenant General Sir John Monash on the Western Front, command Australian forces in World War II and be the only Australian to attain the rank of field marshal.

  The Orvieto carried five men who gave their occupation as journalist. Three had enlisted to fight and two were off to report the news—Charles Bean and Phillip Schuler, who quickly built a mutually supportive relationship. It was one of several firm friendships that Schuler would make on the voyage with men who would play important roles in his life over the following three years. Bean was ten years older than Schuler. He was a published author and a considerably more experienced journalist if not necessarily, as would soon be shown, a better reporter or writer. As with all journalists heading to cover a big story, they would initially have sized each other up with an eye to both opportunity and danger: to what extent could one benefit from the support and mateship of the other without being scooped along the way. Bean would be generous with his advice and information. He could afford to be. He had a clear head start on the brash young reporter from Melbourne: the sole official correspondent’s accreditation was tucked away in his knapsack. That accreditation guaranteed him front-line access to the fighting when the Australians went into battle and, most importantly, the right to use official cable channels to get his copy back to the newspapers in Australia. Schuler would have to beg and borrow to get close to the action, at least in the beginning, and mostly would have to rely on the unreliable mails to file his dispatches. He would soon prove skilful in surmounting both obstacles to best his compatriot, at least in the first stage of the Anzac story. But the reports coming back from the battlefields in France were already flagging a tough stance towards journalists who strayed from the official line. The union magazine, The Australasian Journalist, had reported a few days after the Orvieto left Melbourne: ‘Any journalist attempting to exercise his profession without special permit from the War Ministry will be liable to arrest and court martial for espionage.’2

  Schuler also carried in his luggage an extra piece of kit that would see him celebrated for more than his words. It was a small German folding camera with the latest in photographic technology—roll film, not sheet, that produced 75mm × 100mm negatives. Schuler and Bean, who carried a Kodak 3A roll film camera, would take a series of snaps of each other on the voyage and during the first months ashore (Schuler’s were in focus more often than Bean’s). Schuler used his camera methodically and skilfully to record as much as possible of what he saw in the tumultuous year ahead. More than 2000 of those images would find their way into the archives of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Along with the many pictures Bean took, they would comprise the most substantial Australian photographic trove from the first year of the war. Among Schuler’s pictures were a series of iconic images from the trenches at Gallipoli that would help define the campaign for generations of Australians.

  The naval operation transporting more than 30,000 Australian and New Zealand troops to war was the most formidable maritime exercise in Australian history. The staging point chosen for the largest convoy ever to assemble in the southern hemisphere was a remote harbour on the south-western tip of Western Australia. King George Sound is comprised of a large outer bay that leads into a small inner harbour beside the township of Albany. The Orvieto arrived there on 26 October. Eighteen other ships were already in the outer harbour, anchored in three lines. Each day many more arrived from around the continent and, on the 28th, the much-awaited convoy of fourteen ships from New Zealand appeared on the horizon. It was led by the powerful British cruiser HMS Minotaur—flagship of the China Station, the Royal Navy’s senior command in the Far East.

  With all ships present and final preparations completed, at 6 a.m. on 1 November the Orvieto slipped anchor and led the bulk of the fleet through the passage out into the Indian Ocean, half a mile behind the Minotaur. Schuler and Bean had been up late the night before. Schuler awoke first and roused his colleague. They rushed onto the deck to view the extraordinary spectacle. In all there were more than 40 warships and transports. In addition to the Anzac troops, they carried 7477 horses—only one of which, the mount of General Bridges, would ever come home. Guarding the convoy in support of the Minotaur—which would soon be diverted to South Africa—were the Australian cruisers Melbourne and Sydney, two New Zealand warships and the Japanese battlecruiser Ibuki. Schuler and Bean were on deck with a group of officers witnessing the scene that unfolded through the half-light of daybreak and a fog of coal smoke. While none could know the appalling truth of what lay in store for them at Gallipoli and on the Western Front, there was prescience in the young reporter’s thoughts:

  The coast faded to a dim blue, more distant once the sun rose over the hills, but soon vanishing over the swelling horizon. It was the last link with the Homeland, and who knew how many would see those shores again—and when! It was at last the real start.3

  While the threat posed by the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst had passed, another loomed as the convoy set course towards the equator, travelling far west of the main merchant shipping lanes for added safety. In the first few months of the war, a single German warship had created havoc in the waters of South-East and South Asia and was still at large, despite an intensive hunt involving the British, French, Russian, Japanese and Australian navies. The cruiser SMS Emden had been stationed in the Chinese port of Tsingtao, home port of Germany’s East Asiatic Squadron. Just days before war was declared, the Emden’s audacious commander, Karl von Muller, had slipped out of port, evading an Anglo-Japanese assault on the German colony. Over the following weeks, von Muller sunk, crippled or captured more than 30 Allied warships and transport vessels as he steamed unchallenged through Malaya, Singapore and on to India. After a raid on Penang in late October, in which a French cruiser and a Russian destroyer were torpedoed, the Emden headed for the Cocos Islands in the eastern Indian Ocean with plans to knock out the strategically vital British telegraph station.

  At dawn on 9 November the Emden anchored off remote Direction Island and a landing party was sent ashore with orders to topple the radio mast above the telegraph station. The German sailors quickly took control of the facility but not before a quick-thinking clerk of the Eastern Extension Telegraph Company sent out a short di
stress signal. Unfortunately for von Muller and his crew, the message was intercepted by the Australian convoy.

  HMAS Sydney, under the command of the Royal Navy’s Captain John Collings Taswell Glossop, immediately changed course and within three hours had reached the islands. Caught completely off guard, von Muller abandoned his landing party and engaged the Sydney as she closed in on his ship. The Emden inflected a series of damaging blows on the Sydney with her opening salvo, but was no match for the bigger, faster and more heavily armed Australian cruiser. In the space of about 90 minutes, the Emden was hit more than 100 times. Shortly before noon, with his main guns disabled and three of his funnels and the forward mast shot away, von Muller drove the Emden onto a sandbar to avoid the crippled vessel sinking. When the Germans finally raised the white flag, 134 of the Emden’s crew were dead. The Sydney had lost three men with another thirteen injured. The German survivors, including von Muller, were all taken prisoner, except for the 50 sailors of the shore party. They managed to commandeer a schooner and escape, embarking on an adventurous voyage over sea and land that would see them make it back home to Germany the following year. When the victorious Sydney rejoined the convoy, there was jubilation at Australia’s first great naval victory, as Phillip Schuler recorded:

  That tense two hours had bathed us all in perspiration. The troops had broken from their drill to look longingly in the direction of the battle which was raging 50 miles away . . . The victory seemed to draw us all closer together. A kind of general thaw set in. That night at mess, beside the toast of ‘The King’, General Bridges proposed, ‘The Navy, coupled with the name of the Sydney’.4

  A week later, when the convoy reached Colombo, Schuler would launch his career as a war photographer as cutters transferring some of the German prisoners from the Sydney came alongside the Orvieto. He captured a series of pictures of the prisoners being brought aboard three of the convoy ships that would carry them on the first leg of their journey to internment on the island of Malta. The officers, including von Muller and one of the Emden’s torpedo officers, Prince Franz Josef von Hohenzollern—the twenty-year-old nephew of the Kaiser—were taken by the Orvieto along with 45 of the crew. The German commander had been lauded in the British press for his dash and daring and for well treating Allied prisoners captured during his raids. The Times would editorialise: ‘Had all his countrymen fought as Captain von Muller has done, the German nation would not be execrated in the world today.’5 But General Bridges was not inclined to reciprocate the von Muller hospitality for his celebrity prisoner. The German commander had irritated Bridges by refusing ‘to give his full parole’—a convention under which a prisoner of war is released or treated leniently after undertaking not to bear arms again or attempt to escape. Charles Bean reported that von Muller had refused to give such undertakings as he ‘considered it might become his duty to attempt to escape’. Von Muller was kept under close guard for the rest of the voyage, Bean wrote:

  It was typical of Bridges that from first to last he exchanged no courtesies with his enemy, although the Empire was applauding the German captain’s chivalry . . . He did not invite his prisoner to dine with him. He fixed the terms of his captivity, and dismissed him from his mind. The two might have been in different ships.6

  While in Colombo Schuler and Bean were able to board the Sydney as she was being ‘patched up’ and inspected the extent of her damage. They saw how gamely the Emden had fought and how lucky the Sydney had been not to have sustained crippling injuries from what was reputed to be the best gunnery ship in the German fleet. Schuler was impressed:

  There were holes in the funnels and the engine room, and a clean cut hole in an officers’s cabin where a shell had passed through the legs of a desk and out the cruiser’s side without bursting. The hollows scooped out of the decks were filled with cement as a rough makeshift, while the gun nearby (a shell had burst on it) was chipped and splattered with bullets and pieces of shell. Up on the bow was a great cavern in the deck where a shell had struck the cruiser squarely . . . Mounting then to the top of the forward fire control, I saw where the range-finder had stood (it had been blown away), and where the petty officer had been sitting when the shell carried him and the instrument away—a shot, by the way, which nearly deprived the Sydney of her captain, her range-finding officer, and three others.7

  On the Sydney’s afterdeck the two journalists encountered Captain Glossop enjoying a stroll on a balmy tropical evening, and no doubt still savouring the victory that would earn him the insignia of a Commander of the Order of the Bath and smooth his later passage to the rank of vice admiral. The captain took the pair below to his stateroom where ‘in a beautifully clear and simple manner’ gave them a blow-by-blow account of the battle.

  After two days in port taking on coal, water and other provisions, the convoy resumed its voyage. They reached Aden a week later and there the grim reality of what lay ahead began to sink in. A number of Australian officers visited the Aden Club where members of two Indian battalions, each about a thousand strong, had called only a few weeks earlier on their journey to France. Bean reported that letters had come back from the officers with confirmation that one of the battalions had been annihilated, while only about 300 men survived from the other:

  To the few who heard it, this news came as a shock. The thirty thousand light-hearted men in the Australasian convoy were bound for the same dreadful distant mill that had pulverised those regiments. These letters brought home to some their first serious realisation of the huge ratio of the losses at that front.8

  Since the convoy left Australia it had been presumed the troops were heading for the training camps in England before joining the war in France. But soon after they left Aden, on the evening of 27 November, General Bridges received a message that confirmed what many had suspected after Turkey joined the war on Germany’s side. The Australian High Commissioner in London, Sir George Reid, advised that the War Office had ordered that the Anzac troops were now to disembark in Egypt ‘to complete their training for war purposes’. It was further announced that an Indian Army officer, Lieutenant General William Birdwood, would be taking command of the Australian and New Zealand troops. ‘That the voyage was going to end far sooner than had been expected brought some excitement to the troops,’ Schuler wrote. ‘Most had been looking forward to visiting England. None at this time believed that the stay in Egypt would be long.’9

  The Anzacs would be spared, for now, the horrors of the Western Front. Another, nearer killing field awaited them.

  5

  Rehearsals

  The Orvieto reached Suez early on the morning of 30 November 1914. The flagship had steamed ahead of the convoy to disembark some of the staff officers who were to be sent forward to Cairo to prepare for the arrival of the rest of the troops. By mid afternoon she began her passage through the canal. An armed party was posted on the deck, each man carrying 40 rounds of ammunition in his belt, alert to the possibility of raiding parties. As they moved through the 100-mile waterway, Schuler marvelled at the rich pastures and long rows of waving palm trees lining their passage as the sun began to disappear behind a purple ridge. A large searchlight positioned on the ship’s bow then began sweeping the banks for any sign of danger. Along the way they passed encampments of friendly forces:

  It was deathly still and calm, as the voices broke sharply on the air. ‘Where are you bound for,’ asked an officer, shouting through his hands to our lads. ‘We’re Australians going to Cairo,’ chorused the men eagerly, proud of their nationality. ‘Good God,’ commented the officer; and he seemed to be appalled or amazed, I could not tell which, at that prospect.1

  The next morning they arrived in Alexandria Harbour where three trains were waiting to carry the troops to Cairo. From Cairo it was 10-mile march, on a crisp moonlit night, out to the desert camp that would be their home for the next five months. The men from the world’s youngest nation would be prepared for war amid the burial grounds of one of the oldest civilisation
s. Mena Camp, which lay in the shadow of the pyramids, would grow into a sprawling tent city not far from the City of the Dead. But when Schuler arrived early on the morning of 4 December, most of the men were camped in the open. He saw ‘a score of tents scattered about in a square mile of desert, and perhaps a thousand men lying on their great-coats, asleep in the sand, their heads resting on their packs’. The Age’s ‘special representative’, as he would rather quaintly be described on his published dispatches, soon settled on more appealing accommodation in town.

  The Grand Continental Hotel, straddling an entire city block on Opera Square in the heart of Cairo, was everything its name implied. The lavish establishment was popular with Europe’s rich and famous and the Egyptian elite, and was a keen rival to its fabled sister hotel, Shepheards, nearby. Journalist Henry Morton Stanley stayed at the Grand Continental on his way to find Dr Livingstone. Lord Carnarvon, who bankrolled the expedition that unearthed the treasures of Tutankhamen’s tomb, would die in a room there in 1923—more likely from blood infection triggered by a mosquito bite than from the supposed pharaoh’s curse. And Major Orde Wingate, who would live to command the legendary British commando unit the Chindits in Burma in the World War II, stabbed himself twice in the neck with a Bowie knife in a bungled suicide attempt in his room. The hotel, later named the Continental-Savoy, sat at the centre of the seething, endlessly fascinating metropolis that Phillip Schuler stumbled into in November 1914. As Cairo biographer James Aldridge would write: