by Mark Baker
Just before the First World War you could buy, outside the Continental-Savoy Hotel, anything from a boa constrictor to a fully-grown leopard in a cage, as well as the New York Tribune or a Daily Mail which were not too old. Outside the Continental there also used to be a performing baboon who did somersaults while riding on a donkey. His act was decorously modified by a pair of red flannel trousers which an outraged American woman missionary had given him to cover his raw red nakedness.2
During Schuler’s first weeks at the Grand Continental, his fellow guests included Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence, a then junior officer on the British intelligence staff, was less than impressed. ‘It’s a bad life this, living in close quarters with a khaki crowd very intent on “Banker” and parades and lunch,’ he wrote in his dairy. ‘I am a total abstainer from all of these and so a snob.’3
Phillip Schuler had no such qualms. The 25-year-old correspondent brought to Egypt a well-developed taste for the good life. As Bean would note: ‘He was a boy of delicate almost fastidious tastes, fond of flowers, scrupulously neat even under conditions of discomfort.’4 Schuler enjoyed good food and wine, good company and was renowned for his stylish dress.
Cairo on the cusp of war was a city made for a man of Schuler’s tastes—opulent, exotic, raw and intruiging. A cotton boom in the 1860s, fuelled by the Civil War in the United States, and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 had driven an economic revival that saw Cairo reclaim its place as one of the world’s most fabulous cities. The French-educated Ismael Pasha, who was khedive from 1863 to 1879, declared Egypt to be ‘no longer in Africa; we are now part of Europe’ and encouraged an influx of wealthy Europeans—and their money and manners. During Ismael’s reformist—and wildly profligate—rule, the old quarters of Cairo were refurbished and new suburbs with grand boulevards, public buildings and private mansions were created as he strove to turn Cairo into ‘a Paris on the Nile’. After Britain occupied Egypt in 1882, Ismael’s vision was thoroughly Anglicised. Soon there were three English department stores and in the new shopping districts of the Ismailia quarter where, according to Aldridge, you could find English ‘booksellers, cigar importers, religious libraries, sanitary engineers, confectioners, dressmakers, florists, glovers, gunsmiths, hairdressers, hatters, livery stables, milliners, outfitters, photographers, saddlers, solicitors, tourist agencies and tailors’. The British colonial administrators created a parody of refined English life along the Nile that reached its apotheosis in the years before the war:
Cairo for them was all comings and goings, good company, intellectual exercise, public-schoolboy classicism; and if you spoke Arabic, which many of these young men now did, Cairo life was full of exquisite ‘Oriental’ titillations. Men like (Oriental Secretary Ronald) Storrs did their day’s work from eight to one, then would hop on a bicycle and ride to the Turf Club, and after lunch play tennis or golf all afternoon until dark, then back to the Turf Club or to their houses or to somebody else’s for dinner. The night was spent at the French or Italian theatre (the English had none of their own) or at one of the endless soirees which went on around the fringes of the court.5
Among the titillations on offer was the oldest. The influx of 40,000 British troops during the occupation had boosted a sex industry that catered to all levels of society and drew women from across Africa, the Middle East and Europe, securing Cairo’s notoriety as capital of the ‘white slave trade’. The city’s flamboyant ‘King of Vice’ was Ibrahim el-Gharbi, a corpulent Nubian transvestite who was the son of a slave trader. El-Gharbi opened his first brothel in 1896 and by 1914 he operated, with impunity, fifteen of them across the city, to the disgust of senior British police officer Thomas Russell:
He could be seen every evening sitting cross-legged on a bench outside one of his houses. Dressed as a woman and veiled in white, this repulsive pervert sat like a silent, ebony idol, occasionally holding out a bejewelled hand to be kissed by some passing admirer, or giving a silent order to one of his attendant servants. This man had an amazing power in the country; his influence extended not only into the world of prostitution, but was also felt in the sphere of politics and high society. The buying and selling of women for the trade both in Cairo and the provinces was entirely in el-Gharbi’s hands and no decision of his as to price was ever questioned.6
One of the less likely but firmest friendships Schuler would form on the journey out from Australia was with a stocky, English-born padre of irreverent manners and a fighting pedigree that would cement the affection in which he was held by ordinary soldiers. Walter Dexter had started his life as boy on English sailing ships, rising through the ranks to earn a captain’s ticket. He fought in the Boer War and won the Distinguished Conduct Medal for bravery. He then returned to England, studied theology and was ordained as an Anglican priest. Soon after, he was sent to Australia to minister to the miners in the new Victorian coalmining settlement of Wonthaggi. Dexter was one of the first clergymen to enlist in the AIF and by the end of the war he was the senior Anglican chaplain for all Australian and New Zealand forces. He also became the most highly decorated Australian chaplain, adding the Distinguished Service Order and the Military Cross to his DCM. At Gallipoli, Dexter would be dubbed ‘The Pinching Padre’ for his brazen exploits in commandeering whatever supplies and materials he considered necessary to meet the needs of the men in his spiritual and temporal care. Dexter’s earthy empathy with the ranks would offend Charles Bean’s sensibilities. The official correspondent conceded that the padre had ‘a good way with the troops’ but described him as a ‘stout button-nosed, rather red-faced sea captain’:
He practices buffoonery of a rather crude type and plays for popularity by joining in every questionable joke—and talking something in the same style if he thinks the company stands it. He is a brave man and hardy and I daresay unselfish really but a very crude, ordinary type of man.7
Bean’s sanctimonious appraisal of Dexter would mellow during the course of the war, and as the padre rose from captain to colonel and took charge of all the chaplains on the Western Front. In 1921 Dexter officiated when Bean married nursing sister Ethel Young at St Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney.
Schuler warmed to Dexter from the outset. The two would often dine together in Cairo and occasionally Schuler would share his room at the Grand Continental with the amiable chaplain. Like Schuler, Dexter was an enthusiastic amateur photographer who would also bequeath a substantial cache of images to the Australian War Memorial. One picture in the collection shows the two men standing outside the padre’s tent at Mena with pyramids in the distance. A beaming Dexter is wearing a slouch hat and a baggy khaki uniform, its belt straining around his ample girth. An earnest-looking Schuler wears a tailored suit and tie and a fancy Homburg hat. He carries a smart leather briefcase that seems better suited to a day at the office than a trip to the desert. The padre clearly is about to have some fun.
On Christmas Eve Schuler had travelled back out to Mena Camp to prepare a dispatch for The Age about how the men were celebrating their first Christmas away from home. Dexter had spent a night with Schuler at the Grand Continental on 7 December. Two days later the journalist had helped organise a special tent to be used as a chapel for the 5th Battalion, whose commanding officer, Colonel David Wanliss, and fellow officers, had invited Schuler to join their mess. Now the padre was returning some hospitality—and enjoying the relative discomfort that the meagre accommodation offered his young guest. After a late evening spent at a party in the officers’ mess, Christmas Day began with the band of the 12th Battalion playing carols down in their lines at 4.50 a.m. Dexter insisted his guest take in the moment:
I gave The Age correspondent Mr Schuler a kick to waken him for it was such a lovely time and I didn’t wish him to miss it. He had come out for the special reason of writing up Christmas Day in Camp. He had half my blankets and his overcoat for bedclothes and the hard sand for a bed. He felt it a bit because he was used to the soft beds of the Continental. However, I don’t think there
was an extra quality of flints mixed in the sand where he slept, just the usual quantity.8
On New Year’s Eve, Schuler and Charles Bean climbed to the top of the Great Pyramid of Cheops and took photographs of each other with the tent city of the Mena camp stretching into the distance below. Schuler would develop important contacts during the first weeks and months in Egypt, and build partnerships with other journalists arriving to report on the military preparations. He would feature in the special dispatches that Bean sent back for publication in the Australian Journalists Association magazine every month, at least in the early stages of the war. One, penned on 24 January 1915, revealed that even after two months in Egypt the Australians still believed their final destination was France:
Schuler is still here—he’s a keen little chap and a good pressman. Charlie Smith arrives for The Argus in a few days. I like the life, and prefer the life in camp to the life in Cairo. We are hoping to get a smack at the Turks before we go to the front, although I dare say it will rather break up the training.9
Charles Patrick Smith of The Argus turned up during December with the 4th Brigade, led by the then Brigadier General John Monash. The Canadian-born Smith had worked for a decade as a printing room compositor before breaking into journalism. After witnessing an explosion in the inner Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy in 1910, he rushed back to the Argus office and set his own copy in type.10 Smith later secured a position on the paper’s political staff where he would excel. He and Schuler had travelled together reporting on Sir Ian Hamilton’s Australian tour in early 1914. While The Argus and The Age were great rivals, their two correspondents would support each other while covering the war. Bean would rate Schuler’s work more highly than that of Smith. ‘I fancy Peter Schuler is a far more truthful war correspondent than Charlie Smith, i.e. he does see the things. I don’t fancy Charlie always does . . .’ Bean would note in his diary, late in 1915.11 Without official accreditation, both Schuler and Smith, at least in the early stages of the conflict, would need to rely on official military dispatches and information gleaned from senior military personnel and returning wounded soldiers to inform their news reports.
Schuler’s closest journalistic friendships would be with William Thomas Massey of London’s Daily Telegraph and George Renwick of the Daily Chronicle: ‘We would become a council of three for the four months we were together in Egypt.’12 Massey was appointed the official British correspondent covering Middle East operations and would write a bestselling trilogy detailing the great battles in Palestine. After covering the entire war and reporting the defeat of Germany in 1918, Renwick would move to Berlin as correspondent for The New York Times. The three journalists mixed work with pleasure while in Egypt, taking journeys together to see the ruins of Luxor and the engineering marvels of the Aswan Dam. They would attend the grand ceremony for the installation of Hussein Kamel as Sultan of Egypt, after the British declared the country a protectorate and toppled the khedive, Hussein’s nephew. The foreign correspondents became firm friends with local journalists, including the staff of al Muqattam, a pro-British Arabic newspaper that promoted free enterprise and science, including the controversial evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin. They dined regularly at the home of the paper’s editor, Dr Shahin Makarius, a Syrian who kept a private menagerie that included an infant gazelle.
In late January 1915, the calm of the first weeks of training for the Australian and New Zealand soldiers in Egypt, and the 70,000 British troops also assembled there, came to an abrupt end. On 28 January British observers confirmed that a column of about 20,000 Ottoman troops was crossing the Sinai Peninsula towards the Suez Canal. British and French warships moved into the canal zone as the 30,000 British troops deployed along the canal reinforced their defensive positions. The attack came in the early hours of 3 February as the Turks, carrying pontoons and rafts, stormed the waterway from the east bank near the township of Serapeum. Indian machine-gunners slaughtered hundreds of the attackers as they struggled in the water. The Age’s man was witnessing his first battle: ‘As daylight came, the Turks who were still in the water or struggling up the banks were shot down, while some few . . . managed to dig themselves in on the West Bank.’13
At dawn the attack was rejoined with further assaults by the Turkish, Syrian and Armenian soldiers between Ismailia and El Kantara. By late afternoon the attackers, unable to pierce the solid British resistance, withdrew back across the Sinai. They had lost more than 1500 men. Perhaps their one achievement had been to sow in the minds of Allied military commanders the idea that the Ottoman army was a pushover—a seriously mistaken view that would cost them dearly in the months ahead.
While nothing had been said officially to the troops, it was now beyond doubt that they were preparing not for the battlefields of the Western Front but for war with the Turks. And soon. The conflict in France had degenerated into a deadly stalemate. By the end of November 1914, after little more than three months of fighting, the Allies had suffered about one million casualties. The trenches stretched over 350 miles from the Belgian coast to the Alps. Britain began to search for a way through the appalling impasse.
In late December, Lieutenant Colonel Maurice Hankey, the influential Secretary of the War Council, circulated a secret paper that proposed a bold move to outflank the Germans on the Western Front, perhaps via Turkey and the Balkans. Others had already been mulling similar ideas, particularly Winston Churchill. In August, Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, requisitioned two new Turkish warships that had been built in Britain and already paid for largely by patriotic donations in Turkish towns and villages. It was a move that cemented the decision of the Young Turks in power in Constantinople to side with Germany. In December, the British Embassy in Petrograd reported that Russia was struggling to withstand German pressure on the Eastern Front. The Russians pleaded for ‘a demonstration of some kind against the Turks elsewhere, either naval or military’ that would force the Turkish to withdraw some of the forces adding to the pressure on them in the Caucasus. The appeal was picked up immediately by Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, who had earlier considered a scheme to try to persuade Greece to send its army to attack the Gallipoli Peninsula. He wrote to Churchill on 2 January 1915: ‘The only place that a demonstration might have some effect in stopping reinforcements going east would be the Dardanelles.’ A telegram was sent to Petrograd promising that ‘steps will be taken to make a demonstration against the Turks’. The die was now cast. The Gallipoli operation was now underway. And it would soon become much more than a demonstration.
What began as a somewhat tentative plan gathered rapid momentum—driven by the youthful enthusiasm of the 40-year-old Churchill and secured by the power of Kitchener, the great war hero who still held the British people and most of their leaders in his thrall. Sir John Fisher, the First Sea Lord—the highest ranking officer in the Royal Navy—was enthusiastic, although his ardour would later wane. ‘Jacky’ Fisher, then 74, had been lured out of retirement four years earlier by Churchill. He immediately urged landing a force including 75,000 of the British troops deployed in France on the Asian side of the Dardanelles. While the Greeks were to attack the Gallipoli Peninsula and the Bulgarians to march on Constantinople, a squadron of old and expendable British battleships would force their way through the Dardanelles straits. Kitchener flatly rejected any diversion of troops from France, but Churchill seized on the idea of sending the naval squadron to force the Dardanelles. There was a precedent for capturing the straits, as Alan Moorehead would later write:
It was an exploit which had captivated British naval strategists for at least a century, and in fact it had once been done, and in very similar circumstances to those that now prevailed. In 1807 when Napoleon was advancing to the east, the Russians had asked for assistance against Turkey, and the British had sent a naval squadron to the Dardanelles.14
Vice Admiral Sackville Carden, who commanded the Royal Navy fleet deployed in the eastern Mediterranean, agreed that an a
ssault on the Dardanelles was feasible, but cautioned that it could not be rushed and would require a large number of ships. Carden sent a plan to London in early January that proposed an operation involving 35 warships plus submarines, minesweepers and sea planes to knock out the network of Turkish forts that guarded the straits. The War Council met on 13 January and, with minimal discussion, ordered the admiralty to ‘prepare for a naval expedition in February to bombard and take the Gallipoli Peninsula with Constantinople as its objective’.
The first attack was launched on 17 February when an Anglo-French task force, backed by the powerful British battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth, began a long-range bombardment of the Turkish forts. Bad weather then intervened to slow operations, but by 25 February the forts and artillery positions closest to the entrance to the straits had been largely neutralised and the immediate area cleared of mines. After further problems with bad weather, logistics and dithering by Admiral Carden—who suffered a breakdown and had to be relieved of his command—the main attack did not get underway until 18 March, a full month after the commencement of the operation. The delays reinforced the growing view in London that even if the navy succeeded in breaking through the Dardanelles, a substantial land force would also needed. The matter was resolved after Birdwood, the commander of the Australian and New Zealand forces in Egypt, who had been sent across in the first week of March to report on the military position, reported back to Kitchener. Birdwood did not believe the navy could get through the straits on its own and the army would have to come in. On the morning of 12 March, the man chosen to lead that new army was summoned to Kitchener’s office to be told of his appointment as commander of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force.