Phillip Schuler

by Mark Baker

  Then, amidst the flash of the bayonet and a sudden charge by the Colonials, before which the Turks broke and fled amidst a perfect tornado of shells from the ships, they fell back, sullen and checked. They kept up an incessant fire throughout the day, but the Colonials had now dug themselves in. Some prisoners were captured, including officers who said that the Turks were becoming demoralised by our gunfire, and that the Germans had difficulty getting them to attack.11

  Ashmead-Bartlett had finished writing his dispatch on 28 April—four days after the landing. By then he knew full well how perilous the military situation was, how close the commanders had come to abandoning Anzac Cove on the first night, how massive the casualties had been, and how far from being safely ‘dug in’ the troops were, clinging desperately to the hillsides under relentless Turkish fire. The Anzacs had indeed fought heroically but they had little to show for the huge sacrifices made. Their failure to dislodge the Turks from the heights in those first days proved how gravely the Allies had miscalculated the strength and determination of the Turkish forces and what a fantasy the predictions of a quick and easy victory had been. Censorship would have prevented the unvarnished facts from being reported by any correspondent at that point, but in his inaccurate and overblown account of the landings, Ashmead-Bartlett did a greater disservice to the truth.

  Charles Bean had good reason to dislike and resent Ashmead-Bartlett who had scooped him on the biggest story of his career. Bean’s own account of the landings was delayed due to continuing complications with his accreditation. His original press licence had been valid only for the voyage to England, before the first convoy was diverted to Egypt. While he was allowed to go ashore with some of the first Australians who landed at Anzac Cove on 25 April, he was not permitted to file any dispatches until his licence was renewed by officials in London. His account of the first day was not published in The Sydney Morning Herald until 15 May—a week after Ashmead-Bartlett’s dispatch had appeared. The lionising of Ashmead-Bartlett that had already begun in Australia must have been especially galling for Bean given that he had gone ashore under fire at the landing and witnessed firsthand the early fighting. Ashmead-Bartlett had watched from the relative safety of warships standing off the coast, preparing his accounts from reports released by Hamilton’s headquarters and interviews with wounded soldiers who had been evacuated. Ashmead-Bartlett did not go ashore until late on the first day, when the situation had stabilised. But Bean, like most of the other correspondents, was seduced by the British journalist’s charm, his wit and his dazzling flair as a storyteller. The Australian correspondent was ready to forgive the exaggeration and excess that he would never countenance in his own work:

  Ashmead-Bartlett makes it a little difficult for one by his exaggerations, and yet he is a lover of the truth. He gives the spirit of the thing: but if he were asked: ‘Did a shout really go up from a thousand throats that the hills were ours?’ he’d have to say ‘No, it didn’t’. Or if they said ‘Did the New Zealanders really club their rifles and kill three men at once?’ or ‘Did the first battle of Anzac really end with the flash of bayonets all along the line, a charge, and the rolling back of the Turkish attack,’ he’d have to say ‘Well—no, as a matter of fact that didn’t occur’. Well, I can’t write that it occurred if I know it did not, even if by painting it that way I could rouse the blood and make the pulse beat faster—and undoubtedly these men deserve the people’s pulses shall beat for them. But War Correspondents have so habitually exaggerated the heroism of battles that people don’t realise that the real actions are heroic.12

  Ashmead-Bartlett’s own landing at the Dardanelles was a shock which he would never get over. Australian journalist and author Philip Knightley has described the 70 years from the Crimean War to the outbreak of World War I as the golden age of war correspondents. They had big expense accounts and egos and appetites to match. They lived lives of high adventure, often travelled freely and with an extraordinary degree of immunity between opposing armies and political camps. And they wielded great power through the pages of their newspapers—unchallenged or constrained by the advent of radio, television or the 24-hour news cycle.

  For years Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett had populated and personified that era of journalism as he flitted between native skirmishes, colonial land grabs and a string of minor regional conflicts. He was in Morocco in 1907 when the French captured Casablanca, later riding on a stallion to Fez wearing Moorish headdress in pursuit of various get-rich-quick schemes involving gun-running and mining concessions. After covering the brutal Italian invasion of Tripoli in 1911, he was dispatched to cover the first Balkan War, travelling between Germany and Vienna with so much baggage that it filled an entire first-class train cabin. He witnessed the major battle in which the Turks lost 20,000 men in ten days and were driven back to the outskirts of Constantinople by Bulgarian forces, struggling to get out to file his story with no cash but ‘two hundred pounds in gold strapped around my waist’. As soon as he was done, he made plans to rush back to his ‘beloved Paris’ and the delights of its courtesans and casinos: ‘Here I am separated from all my beautiful ladies, and can only console myself by writing to them on this old Remington as no one had ever touched my meandering heart sufficiently to cause me to attempt a hand-written epistle.’13 That golden age of journalistic excess came crashing down in the early stages of World War I and Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett could not cope with the change.

  The British government had begun developing measures to rein in the freewheeling activities of war correspondents long before the outbreak of World War I. With so much at stake, it was inconceivable that any of the opposing armies would allow the unchecked flow of information from journalists able to roam freely through their lines. Britain’s press barons had been persuaded of the need to accept the registration of war correspondents and the censorship of their copy. Field service regulations adopted by the War Office in 1913 required the licensing of war correspondents who would be under the direction of a chief field censor. The censor would define where they could work, brief them on military operations and vet what they wrote. But there were also perks to sweeten the control pill. The official correspondents held honorary officer rank, were entitled to rations and were assigned a soldier to serve as their batman. In addition to his batman, Private Arthur Bazley, Bean was voted an annual salary of 600 pounds by the Australian parliament.

  As soon as war was declared on 4 August 1914, a press bureau was hastily established in Whitehall to oversee the brave new world of censorship. In the early weeks of the fighting, many British correspondents were still able to push the boundaries, travelling independently into northern France. But by September the War Office had advised the French military to arrest any reporters found roaming without accreditation. The publishers, enjoying a massive boost in their circulations as they fed the public’s insatiable appetite for news from the front, screamed their outrage as Ashmead-Bartlett and his colleagues were corralled. Churchill then resurrected an earlier proposal to send an official war reporter who would supply news to all the papers. Ernest Swinton, a lieutenant colonel serving with the British Expeditionary Force as deputy director of railways, was chosen for the job. Swinton was not a journalist although he had gained minor celebrity as a writer of popular stories. He was regarded immediately by British commander Sir John French as Kitchener’s spy, while the sidelined correspondents mocked his ‘eye witness’ accounts as ‘eye wash’. Ashmead-Bartlett was at his acerbic best when saying that Swinton’s duty was to write ‘charming stories of how our soldiers lived when they were not fighting, of their humanity towards women and children, and to relate those funny anecdotes about armies which have changed but little since the days of Julius Caesar’.14 When it was confirmed that he was the choice to represent the London papers at Gallipoli, Ashmead-Bartlett relished what he thought would be a chance to escape the difficulties of reporting from the Western Front. But the British censorship regime was now universal and Ashmead-Bartlett’s bitter f
rustration on discovering that it extended to the Dardanelles would find its focus in Ian Hamilton.

  When he arrived at Imbros at the beginning of April with Lester Lawrence—the amiable Reuters correspondent chosen to represent the English provincial press—Ashmead-Bartlett immediately assumed de facto leadership of the small contingent of correspondents. The role was reinforced not only by his talent as a wit and raconteur at dinner, but also by the lengths to which he went to ensure he and his journalist colleagues dined as well as possible at that table. Their circumstances could never match those to which he had become accustomed in London and Paris, but Ashmead-Bartlett did his best. When a correspondents’ camp was established at K Beach, a well-shaded enclave along the shore from GHQ on Imbros, a chef was imported from Malta to join the restaurant manager from Paris and the retinue of soldiers assigned as servants. Ashmead-Bartlett sourced a regular supply of champagne to augment the local wines and produce. While the senior correspondent used his lavish expense account and substantial salary to underwrite much of the camp largesse, his publishers baulked at a request that they supply a ‘well provisioned’ yacht to enable him to more comfortably carry out his work. Henry Nevinson would marvel at Ashmead-Bartlett’s style:

  He would issue from his elabourately-furnished tent dressed in a flowing robe of yellow silk shot with crimson and call for breakfast as though the Carlton were still his corporeal home. Always careful of food and drink, he liked everything fine and highly civilised about him, both for his own sake and for the notable guests whom he loved to entertain.15

  The high life at Imbros was not for the Australians. Bean insisted on staying put in his dugout above Anzac Cove, close to the action. Schuler, after his arrival in late July, did the same. But they would often dine with their colleagues at Imbros where they were subjected to the increasingly pessimistic tone of Ashmead-Bartlett’s after-dinner oratory. Along with most of the British correspondents, neither Bean nor Schuler shared Ashmead-Bartlett’s obsessive opposition to official censorship—a truth that would be a recurrent casualty in the work of later generations of Australian film and documentary makers as they massaged the mythology of Gallipoli and the Anzacs.

  Both Bean and Schuler accepted censorship as an unwelcome but necessary impediment to their work, and both appreciated the extent to which Hamilton sought to stretch, on their behalf, the boundaries imposed by the War Office on the work of correspondents. Bean, in particular, regarded it as his duty to cooperate with the military authorities and not to attempt to critique the conduct of the campaign in his dispatches. ‘It is strictly against the regulations for me to criticise and I have not been asked by the Authorities to do so,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘My job is to tell the people in Australia all I can about their troops here and I should be sent back if I tried to do anything else—that I know only too well.’16 He believed his responsibility was to inform the Australian public about what the men and officers were doing and what was happening in the war as long as it didn’t reveal strategic information to the enemy and would not be ‘needlessly distressing’ to families back home.17 Bean had drafted his own code of self-censorship. Sometimes, however, the Puritan’s faith was tested. ‘One has some satisfaction sticking to the truth in spite of the prejudice against it—the satisfaction of putting up a sort of fight,’ he would lament to his diary, aware some of the papers back home thought his writing too bland and that the unhappy editors of The Argus had stopped running his copy. ‘But I have a suspicion that I’ve spoilt my chances of ever being some day tolerably well off.’18 He may not have known but surely suspected that Ashmead-Bartlett was beating him both financially and professionally. The London papers were paying their man 2000 pounds a year—more than triple Bean’s salary.

  As he fumed against the shackles of official censorship and laid much of the blame at the feet of Sir Ian Hamilton, Ashmead-Bartlett might have been surprised to learn that the general shared very similar frustrations about the handling of his own dispatches. Hamilton poured out his own grievances in correspondence with his friend Winston Churchill. While railing about the War Office’s ‘hideous mistake’ in allowing only the pessimistic Ashmead-Bartlett rather than ‘a dozen good newspaper correspondents’ to inform the British public about the course of the campaign, he also griped about the handling of his own words in London:

  I write cables, of which I may at least say they are descriptive as far as official phraseology will admit, and they are turned by some miserable people somewhere into horrible bureaucratic cliches or dead language, such as—‘we have made an appreciable advance; the situation remains unchanged’; and similar God-damned phrases. Enough of themselves to turn the most interesting news into soporifics.19

  Hamilton also mocked the London censors’ obsessive fear about revealing information to the enemy through the work of war correspondents. He said the censors’ fixation with words describing battlefield details was ‘too puerile altogether’ when, at the same time, they were not stopping the publication of graphic illustrations:

  To think that it matters to the Turks whether a certain trench was taken by the 7th Royal Scots or the Warwicks is just really like children playing at secrets. The censors who are by way of keeping everyone in England in darkness allow extremely accurate outline panoramas of the Australian positions at the back; trenches, communication tracks etc., all to scale; a true military sketch to appear in the Illustrated London News of 5th June. The wildest indiscretions in words could not equal this.

  The conflict between Ashmead-Bartlett and Hamilton came to a head in late May after the correspondent was aboard the naval command ship HMS Majestic when she was hit by a torpedo and sunk off Cape Helles. Ashmead-Bartlett was rescued from the water with just a wet pair of pyjamas, his silver cigarette case and 30 pounds in cash. Having lost everything else—including his diary and typewriter—he was given permission by the naval commander, Vice Admiral John de Robeck, to travel to Malta to obtain a fresh set of kit. The condition was that he agree not to write anything for the papers. Two days after reaching Malta, Ashmead-Bartlett decided to head back to London, in breach of his undertaking to the admiral and the strict conditions of his appointment as an official correspondent. After reacquainting himself with girlfriend Gina in a suite at London’s Carlton Hotel, he lost no time in promoting his pessimistic views of the Dardanelles campaign to anyone who would listen. Over the following days he would meet with Attorney-General Edward Carson, Churchill, Kitchener and Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, whose government was under mounting pressure over the course of the war. Asquith invited the correspondent to write a memo detailing his assessment of the position at Gallipoli and to brief a meeting of the Cabinet. This was both an astonishing act of disloyalty to Hamilton, the government’s commander on the ground at Gallipoli, and an astounding boost for Ashmead-Bartlett’s already overblown ego. The VIP reception would embolden his later defiant actions.

  Hamilton was furious but largely unaware of how dangerous for his command Ashmead-Bartlett had become. At first he knew little of the extent of the correspondent’s political intrigues in London, and the far greater attention that his political and military masters had given to the views of his nemesis than to his own entreaties for more men and munitions to carry out his orders. But he had no doubt that Ashmead-Bartlett was a ‘Jeremiah’ who had been poisoning morale among his officers and would inevitably be propagating his defeatist point of view back home. During the three weeks that the correspondent was in London, Hamilton sought to have him replaced. He appointed Compton Mackenzie as acting correspondent for the London papers and wrote to Kitchener suggesting that the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association be asked to agree to replacing Ashmead-Bartlett with Mackenzie. Hamilton was unaware that Kitchener, his old friend and mentor, had been among those leaders indulging Ashmead-Bartlett’s lobbying in London. Kitchener dismissed the idea of seeking the correspondent’s recall, claiming it would be too hard to get the agreement of all the newspapers taking his work wit
hout a ‘definite objection’ from Hamilton. The general would have to wear it.

  Hamilton was not alone in regarding Ashmead-Bartlett’s conduct as being out of line and in breach of his undertakings to observe the rules of censorship. On his return to Imbros, Ashmead-Bartlett regaled his colleagues with a detailed account of what he had done. Charles Bean, for one, was not amused:

  Ashmead-Bartlett told us how he had seen this campaign going all wrong, and he had been home to tell people he knew there . . . exactly how things were going. It seemed to be typically and exactly the thing that a War Correspondent ought not to do; but I am bound to say that I think he’s a competent man, though certainly inaccurate.20

  As soon as he appeared at GHQ, Ashmead-Bartlett was formally reprimanded by Hamilton’s chief of staff, Major General Walter Braithwaite. Braithwaite accused him of publicly speaking out against the campaign and, according to Ashmead-Bartlett, threatened to expel him if he continued to do so. In a letter to Churchill, Hamilton said the correspondent was spreading ‘despondency and alarm’ and declared: ‘I am going to give him just one warning and, if he disobeys it, Press or no Press he goes right home.’21 At the same time Hamilton accepted a War Office proposal to grant several more correspondents accreditation to cover the campaign. It fitted with his liberal views about press access to the conflict, but he also saw it as a useful means of diluting the influence of Ashmead-Bartlett, as he confided in his diary when the newcomers turned up in mid-July: ‘Some newspaper correspondents have arrived. I have told them they may do whatever they d ---- d well please. Ashmead-Bartlett is vexed at his monopoly being spoiled.’22 The new arrivals were Henry Nevinson of the Manchester Guardian, Herbert Russell of Reuters and Sydney Moseley of the Central News Agency. Malcolm Ross, New Zealand’s official correspondent, had arrived on 24 June. Phillip Schuler and Charles Smith, of the Melbourne Argus, would follow a few weeks later.