Phillip Schuler

by Mark Baker

  The battle opened at 4.17 a.m. The racket of rifles reached the ears of the other brigades, locked still in the transports . . . the men jumped from the boats into the icy Aegean, up to their armpits sometimes, their rifles held above their heads, and slowly facing the stream of lead, waded to the shore. Eager to be free of action, they at once dropped their packs and charged. Some Turks were running along the beach to oppose them. These were killed or wounded. At other places around the northern extremity of the cove the boats were drifting in, and along the broader shore were grounding on the beach, only to be shattered and the whole parties in them decimated by the machine guns.7

  Schuler would not learn of the terrible news until weeks later but among the casualties in those first hours at Gallipoli was one of his closest friends and earliest journalist colleagues at The Age. Neville Ussher, who had moved to The Argus two years earlier, enlisted within days of the outbreak of war. He embarked from Melbourne the same day as Schuler, 19 October 1914, but aboard another of the transports, HMAT Hororata. By April 1915 Ussher was a sergeant with the 7th Battalion. At first reported wounded, then missing, it would eventually be confirmed that the 22-year-old had been killed in action on the first day of the landings after performing some remarkable feats of bravery.

  That would be no comfort for his widowed mother. Edith Ussher’s grief, like that of so many families, was compounded by a military bureaucracy overwhelmed with managing the reporting of the sudden tide of dead and wounded young men from Gallipoli. On 9 June—six weeks after Ussher’s death—a telegram from the Secretary of Defence arrived at the family home in Malmsbury Street, Kew, with the perfunctory news that Sergeant Ussher had been ‘wounded not reported seriously’. There would not be formal confirmation of his death until 16 August. A later letter from Colonel Harold ‘Pompey’ Elliott, the commander of the 7th Battalion who was shot in the foot during the landings, revealed the heroic circumstances in which Ussher had died:

  Being wounded myself, I had not the opportunity of observing him. I am informed however that on the day of landing he with others captured a Turkish machine gun and brought it into action against the enemy and I understand had he lived he was to have been recommended for a V.C. for his gallantry. On the date of his death he volunteered to lead a party to capture another Turkish Gun but none of them returned.8

  In November 1915 Edith Ussher was granted a war pension of 13 pounds per annum in recognition of her son’s sacrifice. The grant was listed on the pink form of the Deputy Commissioner of Pensions immediately above the award of a 131 pound pension to Myrtle White, widow of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander White of the 8th Light Horse, whose selfless bravery during the Battle of the Nek would become one of the most celebrated episodes of the Anzac story.

  The intense fighting of 25 April 1915 and the flood of wounded and dying men it unleashed would become one of the biggest stories of Phillip Schuler’s war. His dispatches would have powerful impact and cement Schuler’s reputation as a war correspondent.

  The massive casualty rate in the first hours and days of fighting overwhelmed medical services. The wounded could be offered only the most rudimentary first-aid, if any, as the Allied forces clung desperately to a narrow strip of coast and cliff face under constant fire from the entrenched Turkish positions in the heights above them. Hundreds of wounded waited hours on the beach before being transferred by small boats to the Gascon and the Sicilia, the two hospital ships holding off the coast, just beyond reach of the Turkish artillery. Soon those two ships were crowded beyond capacity. Many among the overflow of casualties, including gravely wounded men, were packed together on the open decks of transport ships for the two-hour passage to the field hospitals on Lemnos. Even when they reached the tents of the 3rd Australian General Hospital and the 2nd Australian Stationary Hospital on the island, many men faced further long delays before being treated by the exhausted teams of doctors and nurses.

  Lieutenant Colonel George Syme was surgeon consultant aboard the Gascon. Short, thickset and with the same earnest, reserved nature as his uncle, Age publisher David Syme, George was known as ‘Silent Syme’. In late 1914, at the age of 54, he had left his successful surgical practice in Melbourne to enlist with the Australian Army Medical Corps, hoping to encourage other doctors to do the same. He would contract septicaemia while operating at Gallipoli and be invalided back to Australia in 1916. After the war, Syme became a founder of the Australian Medical Association and earned a knighthood for his pioneering work in the teaching of surgery. On the morning of 25 April, he and his medical team on the Gascon had a ringside seat for the landings, but there was little time to take in the spectacle:

  We anchored about half a mile from the shore, between and close to two large battleships. These were firing their big guns at the shore, where their bursting shells caused brilliant flashes. The troops, landed and landing, were all Australians and New Zealanders. They landed from boats and waded ashore, and many were wounded and killed in the boats and in the water, chiefly by bullets from machine guns on their left . . . We had no time to watch, however, as the wounded began to pour on board, first from a transport, then from lighters, launches and torpedo boats.9

  The Gascon, a passenger and cargo ship of the British Union Castle line working the coast of East Africa, had been requisitioned and converted into a hospital ship in November 1914. Its capacity was 434 patients. By 4 p.m. on 25 April the ship had 560 wounded men on board and was turning away hundreds more. She headed to Lemnos then, two days later, the decision was made to steam back to Egypt. Another fourteen men died on the 600-mile passage to Alexandria. But those wounded soldiers who made it aboard the Gascon had the best of it. The rest of the 1700 men who, according to the official and probably understated account, were evacuated from Anzac Cove in the first 24 hours after the landings—and the thousands more taken off in the following days—stood little chance of survival if their wounds were serious.

  Despite not having official accreditation, Schuler managed to move freely between the hospital ships and the transports that carried many of the wounded between them and on to Imbros during the first hours after the landings. He was shocked and angered by much of what he saw as he walked about the crowded decks:

  Not half an hour after the first troops had touched land at Anzac Cove the boats began to be towed back filled with wounded. Such cheerful wounded have never been seen. What did they come back to? The very best attention and comfort that medical skill could provide? No! The bare iron clad decks of the transports, to the troop decks where they had been living for the last three weeks, and that had not had a chance of being aired or cleaned. To medical comforts? No, to the old grey blankets they had just discarded and the decks. To milk and soft food for those unable to take the iron rations and bully beef? No, to their ordinary rations. And who attended to these heroes who, without a murmur had faced death, and who came back with a smile on their faces, in many cases severely wounded and maimed? Just a few willing doctors, not more than three to each transport, four at the outside, and a nurse or two and some orderlies.10

  Aboard the Gascon Schuler was deeply impressed by the way the Australian medical teams, including George Syme, worked under intense pressure with meagre resources. The ship had been filled from early in the day of the 25th with ‘all manner of cases, from men with a slight scratch to those whose life just hung by a slender silver thread’. Schuler was also moved by the stoic and selfless attitude of many of the men aboard the transports over the following days:

  There were men still with their first field dressings on their wounds after four or five days, whom the doctors had been unable to treat. No man minded. It was always, ‘He’s worse than I; take him first.’ Such unselfishness often cost a man his arm or hand, but it meant the saving of his mate’s life. Their comrades helped all they could. They dragged tired limbs to assist those unable to help themselves into a sitting position. The saloons had been turned into dressing stations—only the barest treatment being possible.
11

  Schuler was further outraged by what he saw of the mismanagement of the wounded when he returned to Alexandria. He wrote of two transports working as hospital ships that had arrived at the port but could not unload the hundreds of wounded they were carrying because the disembarkation staff had refused to start work and had gone to a race meeting. When other ships ferrying the wounded arrived, there were trains waiting to move them to hospitals but not enough stretcher-bearers to transfer patients to the trains. Men, some of whom had already had to wait more than a week for proper medical attention, were forced to wait even longer in the sweltering summer heat. The main Australian hospital at Heliopolis became dangerously congested: ‘Very soon the crowding at the main building rendered the place septic, a statement I make on the authority of the doctors resident in it. They were afraid to operate.’ Another 800 patients had to be sent to a makeshift facility at a skating rink, a galvanised iron building with a glass roof that became an oven when the temperature in Cairo reached 49 degrees Celcius.

  Even members of the army medical teams were angered by the neglect and incompetence. Lieutenant Colonel John Springthorpe, a senior physician at the No 2 Australian General Hospital in Mena, spoke out strongly about the conditions and was reprimanded for attacking the work of the Australian Red Cross Society. A distinguished Melbourne physician, medical teacher and celebrated arts patron who had enlisted at the age of 59, Springthorpe would later become an expert on treating victims of shell shock.

  Schuler was direct and passionate in his dispatches as he detailed what he witnessed: ‘The blame, if any, rests more on Imperial than Australian shoulders, but to the people of the Commonwealth many revelations will come as a great shock, and they may well ask what were our high medical officers doing not to safeguard the troops from the catastrophe.’ He said no excuse could be given ‘for the attitude of the medical authorities and their dilatoriness in the execution of the warning given by the commander-in-chief’. It had been known six weeks before the landings that provision would need to be made for a potential casualty rate of about 30 per cent—about 25,000 men. Such warning should have been sufficient for more hospitals to be opened up, for more ambulances to be collected and for more stretchers, stores and hospital ships to be sent.

  The most shocking and detailed of Schuler’s reports had been filed from Alexandria on 15 July but did not appear in The Age until three months later, on 16 October. Another report sent on 25 July was published on 15 October. The military censors were alive to the potential political fallout. As historian Eric Andrews would observe: ‘The British authorities used censorship to suppress the story for a long while, till the continuing slaughter on the Western Front weakened its impact. If it had come out immediately it might have seriously strained Anglo-Australian relations.’12 The Australian government, which had shown no real independence in the provision of medical services to that point and had been content to leave things to the British, was forced to act. Lieutenant Colonel Richard Fetherston, the army’s Director General of Medical Services in Melbourne, was promptly sent on a fact-finding mission to Egypt, the Dardanelles and London. Fetherston urged a major shake-up to put management and responsibility for the provision of medical services to Australian troops back into the hands of Australians. As a result, Colonel Neville Howse, who had won the Victoria Cross during the Boer War, was given charge of all Australian medical services in the field.

  The scandal would be revisited when the Dardanelles Commission began its inquiry into the failings of the campaign in London in 1916. In his evidence, Howse would describe the initial arrangements for dealing with the wounded at Gallipoli as inadequate to the point of ‘criminal negligence’. He told the commissioners: ‘I intend to recommend to Australia that she never again trust to the Imperial authorities the medical arrangements for Australian sick and wounded.’13

  Phillip Schuler might have missed out on the role of Australia’s official war correspondent and might still have been struggling to win permission to go ashore with the troops at Anzac Cove, but already his reporting on the Gallipoli campaign was powerful and making a difference. The listless youth who dropped out of university had found his feet and his voice. Soon he would be tested, as a journalist and a man, on the front lines of battle—and the impact on his character, and future, would be profound.

  8

  Schuler’s Landing

  In mid-July Schuler received the news he had hoped and agitated for since embarking from Australia, nine months earlier. Sir Ian Hamilton had made good on his promise to ‘do all in his power’ to assist the young Australian correspondent: both Schuler and Charles Smith of The Argus had permission to come to Gallipoli and report first-hand on the campaign. Within hours, Schuler was on his way to the Dardanelles aboard a transport ship. On reaching Imbros, where the expeditionary force was headquartered, he went immediately to visit Hamilton at his camp on the shores of Kephalos Bay.

  The cordiality of General Hamilton will ever linger in my memory. I remember he was seated at a deal table in a small wooden hut with a pile of papers before him. He spoke of the Australians in terms of the highest praise. They were, he said, at present ‘a thorn in the side of the Turks,’ and when the time came he intended that that thorn should be pressed deeper. He advised me to see all I could, as quickly as I could.1

  That night Hamilton recorded the arrival of Schuler—‘a highly intelligent young fellow’—in his diary: ‘Gave him leave to go anywhere and see everything. The staff shake their heads, but the future is locked away in our heads, and the more the past is known the better for us.’2 Hamilton’s willingness to give an unofficial journalist the same freedom of movement and access as the accredited correspondents would further contradict later assertions that the general was determined to hide the truth of the campaign’s failings behind a wall of censorship. But it was also evident that Hamilton was keen to see an expansion of the press coverage as a means of blunting the increasingly strident criticism of the campaign and his leadership by the official British correspondent, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett.

  With a passport to travel through the British and French lines, as well as move freely around the Anzac positions, Schuler was quick to catch up on lost time. Reaching Anzac Cove on 20 July, he was soon reunited with Charles Bean, who offered to share his dugout beside the headquarters of the 1st Division on the terraces overlooking the beach. It was spartan accommodation: a desk and chair built of packing cases, a spirit lamp and a camp bed—with a distinctive plaid rug draped over the entrance. After a dinner rustled together by Bean’s batman, Private Arthur Bazley, they took a swim. ‘I do hope we all get through this all right—it will be something to talk and think of afterwards between us,’ Bean wrote in his diary that night with underscored emphasis.

  Next morning the official correspondent gave his unofficial guest a detailed briefing on the state of the fighting and showed him around the positions of the Victorians of the 5th Battalion. He then organised a meeting with Lieutenant Colonel Charles Brand, brigade major of the 3rd Infantry Brigade who, Bean noted, ‘knows as much about the first day as anyone’.3 Indeed he did. The 3rd Brigade had been the first ashore on 25 April and Brand had been in the thick of the fighting, leading an attack that took out three Turkish guns.

  Schuler returned Bean’s hospitality a couple of weeks later when his colleague was wounded in the right leg by a stray bullet. Colonel Neville Howse, the senior medical officer, strongly recommended that Bean be evacuated to avoid the danger of tetanus infection, but the correspondent refused. While Bean was incapacitated and confined to his dugout for four days, Schuler would visit regularly to brief his friend on his observations from the trenches. Bean was impressed with Schuler’s work, as he would write later: ‘He climbed the hills daily as active as a young panther. His power of taking in the whole situation by a survey of the movements on the hills would have made him a brilliant intelligence officer. The reports which he brought back from his rambles were fuller than the official
news and truer.’4 Schuler would return the compliment, describing Bean as ‘the most enthusiastic, painstaking and conscientious worker that I have ever met’.

  As soon as his old friend Padre Walter Dexter learned of Schuler’s arrival, he took the newcomer under his ample wing and insisted he join him on a tour of some of the front lines. As he had in Egypt the previous Christmas, the knockabout chaplain delighted in exposing the young correspondent to unfamiliar discomfort, as he noted in his diary:

  P. Schuler came up today. He has got around the general’s affections and has come over . . . to ‘write up’ the place. I had him through the trenches. Poor Peter! He did not feel at all comfortable with the bullets flying overhead, but that is to be expected on his first big day here.5

  The next morning Dexter took Schuler to inspect the Anzac artillery positions. Their lunch was interrupted by heavy Turkish shelling. Later Schuler made his way to Pope’s Hill to stay overnight with the troops there. His true baptism of live fire came a week later when Dexter took him to visit the positions held by the Victorian 7th and 8th Battalions.

  Down in the crater we were only about five yards from the Turks . . . Just after we got out of the 8th trenches, the shelling began. Whilst I was yarning with some of the 7th, two men came tearing down the road yelling ‘the football is coming’ and dived into the place where we were. We got up close against the wall but the football went off about 50 yards away.