by Mark Baker
She would take them out to tea, pose for photographs with them, come up to kiss them in bed, and then be off for the evening with one or other of her admirers. By her lights she was a good mother, and indeed they loved her dearly; but, whether consciously or unconsciously, she must have felt that she still had much to look forward to.6
The arrival of Phillip Schuler proved that optimism was well placed. Within a few months they were engaged to be married. But a wedding must await the war’s end, whenever that might be.
Sir Ian Hamilton’s arrival in Egypt in late March to begin preparations for the Gallipoli landings gave Schuler his first opportunity to lobby for an easing of the restrictions imposed by his status as an unofficial correspondent. While no one knew when the landings would take place, it was clear that under the rules adopted by the British and Australian governments, only the official correspondents would be permitted to go ashore with the troops. In the case of Australia, that meant Bean was in and Schuler and Smith were out.
Schuler wrote to Hamilton from the Grand Continental on 25 March. It was the first instalment in what would become an increasingly warm and personal correspondence between the two men over the following two years. Schuler asked the general whether he remembered their time together during Hamilton’s Australian tour, then cut to the chase:
Naturally I am anxious to continue with the forces as long as it is possible or at least gain means of having something after they have been in the firing line. For this reason I am asking if you could spare me a few minutes of your time to see if you might be able to hold out any prospect to me of achieving that object in the rapidly developing situation.7
Hamilton responded promptly, surprisingly so for a man with an invasion to launch and precious little time to do it. He warmly recalled meeting Schuler in Australia, saying he had ‘very pleasant memories’ of their association. While not acceding to the journalist’s request for accreditation and politely insisting he was too busy to meet, Hamilton gave Schuler some reasons for hope:
As far as I understand the question, the censorship and granting of permits to the Press outside Egypt is at present entirely vested in the hands of the Navy. I know that the whole matter is under consideration, and that it is not yet decided whether it will, or will not, be necessary to maintain the same secrecy as on the Continent. Meanwhile, I will file your letter, and will be glad to bear your ambitions personally in mind. As to an interview, that I fear is clean out of the question. I arrived here late last night and, at latest, I shall be leaving by midday tomorrow. In this brief period I have to crowd a vast deal of work.8
Hamilton liked journalists and might have made a fine one himself. He loved words and had a stylish way with them. He was fluent in German, French and Hindi and would publish a dozen books in his lifetime, including a volume of poetry and a novel. ‘I’d rather write one really sweet and famous sonnet than be Q.M.G. [Quartermaster General] in India, or even C-in-C himself,’ Hamilton wrote in 1884. His two-volume Staff Officer’s Scrap Book—an account of the Russo-Japanese War where he served as an official British observer with the Japanese forces—deftly mixed reportage and travelogue with military analysis and became a best-seller. His field dispatches were woven with literary flourishes and keen observations that would often delight, and sometimes exasperate, those who received them. Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, who liked and respected Hamilton, would still be driven to remark that he had ‘too much feather in his brain’.9 Others, including most journalists, admired his style and substance. Charles Bean thought he had ‘a breadth of mind which the army in general does not possess’. Henry Nevinson, a friend and admirer of Hamilton since they had met during the Boer War, said the general had ‘that glamour of mind and courtesy of behaviour which create suspicion among people who have neither’.10
Hamilton had dreamed of a career as a writer of fiction. His novel Icarus was described at the time of its publication in 1886 as ‘risque’. Florid might have been more apposite. The tale of Ernest Errington’s amorous adventures in search of the perfect lover quite stretched the boundaries of Victorian rectitude. It began with Mrs Bellair in London (‘Ten days to a smart lady of her convictions mean one fresh lover at least, especially when their favourite happens to be backward, absent or indisposed’) and continued at the masked ball in Paris with an apparition in a black ballet dress:
His friend was a perfect mover, with a supple 18-year-old figure. Her hair was the colour of ripe corn, as Rosetti would have put it, and her little hand looked so dainty as it reposed in his that he felt mortally jealous of the glove which interposed its dead medium between the closeness of their touch. Her lips were delicious, pouting cushions of carmine, just parting to disclose the very whitest and most even set of teeth a woman ever bit with, or a man ever admired. Ah, that was dancing! What a singularly free and airy partner is a ballet girl!11
At the time the finishing touches were being made to the novel, Hamilton was in the thick of the action in the Sudan, battling Dervishes in the campaign driven by the death of General Charles Gordon in Khartoum. There might have been time for lascivious literary reveries between the fighting, but Hamilton was not distracted from his day job. His courageous leadership along the Nile would be rewarded with the Distinguished Service Order.
Hamilton’s wide circle of literary friends included Rudyard Kipling, whom he helped search for his first publisher in Britain, and the poet Rupert Brooke, who served as an officer with the Royal Naval Division and died of sepsis from an infected mosquito bite two days before the Gallipoli landings. In early April, Hamilton visited Brooke at the camp in Port Said where the handsome ‘princely genius’ was resting in his tent. The general later claimed to have sensed the impending tragedy:
While speaking to him my previous fears crystallised into a sudden clear and strong premonition that he was one of those whom the envious gods love too well. So I made my futile effort and begged him to come on my personal staff where I would see to it he should get serious work to do. I knew the temper of his spirit, and I promised him a fair share of danger . . . He would have loved to come, he said, but he loved better the thought of going through with the first landing, and the first and worst fighting, shoulder to shoulder with his comrades. He was right. There was nothing more to be said.12
Hamilton would later be condemned by the official British correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett and by Keith Murdoch as the architect of an intolerable regime of censorship designed to hide from the public and the politicians the truth of what was happening in the Dardanelles. That view was given fresh currency by some later Australian historians and by various documentary makers. In fact, the policy of controlling what the war correspondents wrote and what their newspapers published was fixed by the British and Australian governments long before Hamilton was given his command. As far as the main Australian correspondents and most of the British were concerned, the general was an engaging and friendly commander who supported their work to the extent that he could within the boundaries of censorship imposed on all news organisations and their staff covering the war across Europe. Indeed, Hamilton would later cheer the prospect of Schuler writing a fuller account of the campaign after the war, ‘untrammelled by censorship’.13
Hamilton’s liberal personal views were reinforced during further meetings with Schuler and other correspondents in the days before he left Egypt to oversee the landings at Gallipoli. With his friend William Massey of The Daily Telegraph, who was also agitating for permission to get ashore with the first troops, Schuler called on the general at his headquarters in the centre of Alexandria. As he paced up and down a bare room furnished with just a writing desk, Hamilton was cordial and apologetic about his inability to extend full accreditation to the correspondents. He then encouraged them to push the boundaries that had been imposed by London and Melbourne, the then Australian capital:
I believe that the press should have representatives with the forces to tell the people what is being done. If the war is to succeed, you must i
nterest the democracy first, for it is the democracy’s war. By all means have censorship, but let your articles be written by a journalist, and not literary men who think they are journalists. The trained man knows how to interest people in things that cannot matter to the army is the fellow needed. However, it has been decreed otherwise, and I can do nothing. You are free British subjects nevertheless, and can always take a ticket to the nearest railway station. If it is possible, I shall do all I can to help you.14
Hamilton’s affection for the Fourth Estate was not universal. Two notable exceptions among the ranks of journalists he would befriend during the Gallipoli campaign would be players in the sequence of events that cost him his command and ended his active military career.
7
The Landing
By the beginning of April 1915, the scrambled preparations for a land invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula—a task no less than the biggest amphibious assault in the history of warfare—had reached a semblance of shape. Hamilton might still be awaiting the arrival of his headquarters staff from England, still have no proper maps of the place he was tasked with conquering and still have no hand grenades or trench mortars, but he now had a force of about 75,000 men at his disposal. As well as the 30,000 Australian and New Zealand troops formed into two divisions in Egypt, he had the 17,000 men of the 29th British Division, 16,000 French troops and the 10,000-strong Royal Naval Division. Before they could be launched at the Turkish forces and their German leaders—all of them thoroughly forewarned and well prepared for what was coming—another immense logistical exercise was required. The army had to be shipped to the staging point on the Greek island of Lemnos, about 40 miles west of the peninsula, along with 1600 horses, donkeys and mules and all the other paraphernalia of war.
Hamilton departed Egypt and arrived at Mudros, the harbour of Lemnos, on 10 April aboard the liner Arcadian which would be his headquarters for the initial stages of the campaign. He would soon move to a tent on the neighbouring island of Imbros, just 10 miles off the Gallipoli coast, to direct the landings. Two days after Hamilton’s arrival, the transport Minnewaska steamed into Mudros carrying the commanders of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps—soon and for ever after to be known and revered as the ‘Anzacs’.
Among those left behind by the first Gallipoli contingents were Phillip Schuler and the other unofficial correspondents. While there were no trains available to this battle, as Hamilton had prosaically suggested back in Alexandria, there were other transport options for resourceful journalists. Schuler headed off from Alexandria alone aboard a 500-ton Greek trading steamer in search of a vantage point to witness the preparations for war. In addition to the newsman, the steamer carried a cargo of onions, garlic, oil and fish. For two days of the journey, Schuler weathered a fierce storm during which the ship was ‘tossed about like a cockleshell’. As they steamed past the entrance to the Dardanelles they heard the first sounds of the impending conflict as British warships and Turkish artillery traded fire, a crude orchestral prelude to the tragic opera on which the curtain would soon be raised.
In the distance I could hear the boom of the guns—a solemn, stately knell it seemed at the time, as of a Nation knocking at the door of another Nation, a kind of threat, behind which I knew lay the power of the army.1
Schuler headed to Imbros. On disembarking at Castro, a township on the island’s north-east coast, he was promptly arrested for entering a zone under naval control and accused of being a spy. After telling the British officer that he was a friend of General Hamilton and had merely come for a ‘look around’, the unauthorised correspondent was handed over to the local police who took into custody the intruder with the German name. He was detained under observation until the next morning when, after promising not to visit Mudros, he was allowed to leave. He told his captors that he would head to the hot springs at Thermia to bathe. As soon as he was freed, Schuler proceeded to act exactly like a spy. He did not head for the fabled hots springs on Lemnos but, with a telescope in his kit bag, climbed Mount Elias—at 1859 feet the highest point on Imbros—for a panoramic view across the sparkling waters of the Aegean to the west where the Allied forces were preparing for war:
Marvelling at the sea power of Great Britain, I looked down on to the wonderful crowded harbour of Mudros. I saw the vast fleet lying placidly at anchor. With powerful glasses I could detect the small boats and the men landing on the slopes and dashing up the shore for practice. How far the real from this make-believe! Reluctantly, after hours of watching, I left this grandstand, having seen trawlers, warships, transports, coming and going along the tortuous channel to the harbour, which was protected by skilfully placed nets and guarded by active little patrol boats.2
While Schuler was no spy, his experience convinced him how easy a job it was for those that were. The Turks, he was sure, had comprehensive intelligence on the Allies’ military plans. Back in Egypt, Hamilton had been exasperated by how transparent the preparations had been. The newspapers in Cairo freely reported the arrival of every new contingent and debated the prospects of an attack on the Dardanelles. Now Schuler saw how easily Greek traders travelled to and from the islands and the Turkish mainland, and how many Turkish nationals hung about gossiping in the cafes of Castro. ‘The plans were ripe . . . the day was close at hand for the landing,’ he would write. ‘The whole island knew it, and I have no doubt . . . that the Turks gained the same information as well, if indeed, the actual plans had not been already betrayed by the Queen of Greece into the hands of her august and Germanic brother, William.’3 The British officer who had arrested Schuler on his arrival at Imbros brushed aside the correspondent’s concerns that vital information about the impending attack was being smuggled off the island. The officer simply smiled when Schuler passed on his conviction that a wine merchant visiting Castro was likely to be spying. After four days, Schuler decided it was time to move on. Fearing that he might be re-arrested and interned along with some of the other unofficial correspondents hanging around the islands, he took a boat to Lesbos.
The pretty island hugging the coast of Asia Minor would a century later find fame as a tourist resort. In April 1915 the capital, Mitylene, was a favoured staging point for press correspondents; a place where ‘news was to be obtained and could be got away’. Here, Schuler was free to file his dispatches detailing all he had learned ‘on the undelectable island of Mudros’. Soon he was reunited with George Renwick of the Daily Chronicle and G.T. Stevens, who had taken over covering preparations for the Dardanelles campaign for the Daily Telegraph after William Massey was sent to cover operations in Palestine. Renwick and Stevens had already hired a motor launch and immediately invited the Australian to join them. For the next fortnight the trio cruised around the area observing the operations from the shores of Imbros and the decks of their launch. They were able to survey the entire western coastline of the peninsula and travel to the tip of Cape Helles, where the main British force would go ashore, and the entrance to the straits. They lived on what they could find in the small coastal villages. For the gourmand Schuler, it was basic fare, ‘a poor fish, goat’s milk, eggs and a very resinous native Greek wine’.4 Just days before the landings, the adventurers were finally banished from the area by the Royal Navy.
On 21 April—four days out from the landings—Hamilton authorised the printing of a ‘Force Order (Special)’ which was distributed to all units with instructions that it be read to the men before the attack. Addressed to the ‘soldiers of France and of the King’, it clearly was penned by the poet general himself. It was infused with both the hope and foreboding that gripped the commander and reflected his own orders that there could be no turning back:
Before us lies an adventure unprecedented in modern war. Together with our comrades of the Fleet we are about to force a landing upon an open beach in face of positions which have been vaunted by our enemies as impregnable. The landing will be made good, by the help of God and the Navy; the positions will be stormed, and the war
brought one step nearer to a glorious close. ‘Remember,’ said Lord Kitchener when bidding adieu to our commander, ‘Remember, once you set foot upon the Gallipoli Peninsula, you must fight the thing through to the finish.’ The whole world will be watching our progress. Let us prove ourselves worthy of the great feat of arms entrusted to us.5
It ought to have been signed ‘Amen’ rather than ‘Ian Hamilton, General’.
By the eve of the attack, Schuler had made his way back to Imbros. Without permission to travel with the Australian troops, he had to improvise by taking vantage points with his powerful field glasses on the hills of the islands or hitching rides aboard the trading boats that continued to move through the war zone. On the evening of April 24 he was near enough to the action to be swept up by the emotion of what was about to become the biggest moment in the life of the young Australian nation:
By dusk on that April evening, as calm as any spring night, as cool as the troops would know it in Melbourne, a long string of transports, battleships, torpedo boats, pinnacles, and row boats were slipping through the waters round the western headland of Imbros Island, where a lighthouse blinked its warning towards the mountainous shores of Gallipoli. In a bight in the land the ships lay awhile, their numbers increasing as the hours drifted on. Down on the troopships’ decks the men were quietly singing the sentimental ditties of ‘Home and Mother,’ or chatting in a final talk, yarning of the past—and the future, so imminent now, left to take care of itself—until they were borne within a distance where silence was essential to success. Then they clenched their teeth.6
At midnight the moon still hung obstinately above the horizon, denying the fleet of warships the cover of darkness essential for them to move to the positions 4 miles off the coast of Gallipoli from where the soldiers would be rowed ashore to storm the Turkish beaches. ‘Over the whole of that army, 30,000 men,’ Schuler wrote, ‘there hung a lifetime of suspense. Would the moon never go down!’ A little after 3 a.m. it did. The great mobilisation began and, about an hour later, the first companies were ashore at Anzac Cove.