Phillip Schuler

by Mark Baker

  He almost pulled it off. At meetings with Arthur Balfour, First Lord of the Admiralty, and the most senior admirals, Keyes pushed for a fresh frontal assault on The Narrows using the fleet of battleships and cruisers that had been lying idle at anchor in Mudros Harbour since May. He argued persuasively that many of the Turkish guns guarding the straits had been removed and that the minefields had been fully surveyed, neutralising the earlier deadly menace. Keyes was convinced a new attack would this time be completely unexpected and catch the enemy off guard.

  Keyes won the admiralty’s backing—with the proviso that the army would support the new offensive—and the promise of reinforcements: four battleships, four destroyers and 24 trawlers. Then the French offered six more warships. Moves were initiated to replace de Robeck, who remained strongly opposed to a fresh naval action. His successor would be Rear Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss, who had led the landings at Helles and Suvla and shared Keyes’s enthusiasm. Both Kitchener and Birdwood, who had been acting commander at Gallipoli after Hamilton’s recall, supported the push. But after weeks of argument and intrigue—and a fierce storm at the end of November in which 200 Allied soldiers drowned and another 5000 suffered frostbite—Munro prevailed. ‘France is the only place in which Germany can be beaten,’ he told Keyes in one of their many heated exchanges. ‘Every man not employed in killing Germans in France and Flanders is wasted.’9

  In a spectacularly executed operation in the week before Christmas 1915, 105,000 men and 300 guns were evacuated at night from Anzac Cove and Suvla Bay. By January 9, the last of the 35,000 men at Cape Helles were gone. Not one life was lost in the retreat. The landings at Gallipoli had been a fiasco; the leaving was a triumph that would live long in military legend. Roger Keyes was far from alone in lamenting what might have been: ‘The greatest amphibious campaign in the history of the world . . . petered out in a well-conducted evacuation when victory was really within our reach the whole time.’10 Phillip Schuler shared that same conviction but fate would deny him the chance to add his postscript to the judgement of history.

  As the last Australians left Gallipoli, they carried with them the legend of heroic defeat. It had already become an article of faith across the young nation of Australia—and also in Britain. Asked by Keith Murdoch in December 1915 to write a message to Australia about the achievements of the Australian Imperial Force, Rudyard Kipling was sent into a rhetorical paroxysm:

  You ask me for a message to Australia. Is there any need of a message to a nation whose sons touched the summits of valour when they stormed the Gallipoli beaches months ago, and who, since then, have joined valour to endurance and a high heart beyond praise and almost beyond belief?11

  In eight months the Allied toll had been about 110,000 casualties which, as Maurice Hankey noted, was equivalent to the losses incurred in about three weeks heavy fighting on the Western Front.12 The Australians headed not for the safety that Keith Murdoch presumed was the certain dividend of his agitation to end the Dardanelles campaign, but mostly for the more ghastly killing fields of Flanders. The strategic fallout was dramatic, as Hankey would later write:

  The results of the evacuation are well known. Within a few months the Turks were rioting all over the East, capturing our besieged army at Kut (April 29), attacking our vital communications through the Suez Canal (July) and penetrating far into Persia; in August they even sent a corps to help the Germans in Galacia while the Allies, with armies even larger in aggregate than had been employed on the Peninsula, were everywhere on the defensive.13

  13

  Dear Mrs Howard

  As the last of the Australians left Anzac Cove, Phillip Schuler was back at the family home in Lisson Grove, Hawthorn, writing ‘at lightning speed’ the first full account of the Gallipoli campaign. As he worked on the manuscript for Australia in Arms, Schuler took time out to complete another work for an Australian public that had an insatiable appetite for details of the remarkable events that had unfolded on the other side of the world over the previous year.

  The Battlefields of Anzac was published in March 1916. It carried the subtitle On Which the Australasians won Deathless Fame, proving that editorial hyberbole was alive and well in the early years of the 20th century. Melbourne publisher Osboldstone described the 34-page glossy picture booklet as ‘a deeply interesting and historical series of views depicting the heroism of our gallant Anzac boys on the field of battle’. Priced at two shillings, the booklet included more than 50 photographs, most of them taken by Schuler.

  Two of those photos would a century later be among the best-known images of the Gallipoli campaign. One showed a group of battle-weary soldiers in one of the Turkish trenches captured at Lone Pine on the afternoon of 6 August 1915. Among them is a young soldier staring vacantly, hauntingly, at the camera. He is believed to be Private Joseph Clark, of the 7th Battalion, an eighteen-year-old bootmaker from Maldon in Victoria, who had enlisted in late April with his older brother Robert. Clark was badly wounded three days after the photograph was taken and eventually repatriated to Australia. The other famous Schuler photo showed a weary Captain Leslie Morshead looking up from another Lone Pine trench, Australian and Turkish dead lying on the parapets. A quarter century and another war later, Lieutenant General Sir Leslie Morshead would lead with distinction Australian forces in the siege of Tobruk, the Second Battle of El Alamein and the campaigns in New Guinea and Borneo. Morshead had taught briefly at Melbourne Grammar, Schuler’s old school, before the war.

  Schuler’s preface to The Battlefields of Anzac was tinged with the jingoism of the era, but his admiration for the achievements of the Anzac troops at the landings and beyond was informed by months living alongside the men and witnessing their conduct in battle. And he did not gild the extent of the death and injury as the campaign unfolded: ‘A steady stream of men, broken by the stress of war, wounded and sick, left the peninsula, and were placed on the white hospital ships. Men, stern and fit, came in from gray transports and took their place in the firing line.’ Schuler would revisit the words of Thomas Gray’s masterpiece Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard in tribute to those men whose hearts were ‘once pregnant with celestial fire’.

  The booklet would take its place among the earliest detailed depictions of Gallipoli as a noble failure, one that had demonstrated the singular quality of the Australian soldier and the calibre of the new nation. In that, it was one of the foundation stones of the Gallipoli mythology.

  By the fame of her army, Australia won in a day, a position which a century of peace couldn’t have bought her. The 25th April 1915, will ever be recorded as the day on which she became a nation—the nation of the Southern Seas. Whatever were the results of the Gallipoli campaign, whatever the criticism offered as to its commencement, continuance, and final abandonment, the deeds of the Australian army there will stand out as one of the most stirring chapters of the great war.1

  Now a well-known figure for his dispatches from Gallipoli, Schuler was invited to give a series of public lectures around Melbourne on his battlefield experiences. One of them was to the senior boys and their families at Melbourne Grammar. ‘The lecture was illustrated by numerous excellent lantern slides, and gave a vivid picture of life on the Peninsula,’ the school magazine noted. ‘There was a good audience, and the entrance money formed a substantial contribution to the School Patriotic Funds.’2

  The summer of 1915–16 was for Phillip Schuler a sweet interregnum after the hardships of Gallipoli. Those months were crowded with his writing deadlines, but there also was time to relax after more than a year away, to reconnect with family and to renew old friendships. One, in particular, would have a dramatic conclusion.

  In January 1916, Schuler escaped the heat of suburban Melbourne to spend a weekend at the exotic country retreat of Frederick Emil Thonemann, a leading businessman and one of the founders of the Australian Stock Exchange. Set high in the hills behind Yarra Junction and surrounded by state forest and stands of mountain ash trees, Merriyula was an o
asis in the raw Australian bush. The grand, seventeen-room house had extensive gardens, fish ponds and a croquet lawn. It was ringed by a 20-foot high holly hedge. Visitors from Melbourne took the train to Yarra Junction then transferred to a narrow-gauge private railway that carried them higher up the valley to the settlement of Williamstown. On the return leg, the train carried down timber from the logging camps. The last 3 miles of the journey to the property was along narrow and often muddy forest tracks aboard a Chevrolet van. The house was lit by kerosene lamps. There was no electricity or running water. But while the facilities were basic, Merriyula was renowned for lavish hospitality and entertainment.

  The Thonemanns were good friends of the Schulers. They shared German ancestry and a prominent place in Melbourne society. Fred Thonemann’s father, Julius, had migrated to Australia in 1854, four years before Jacob Schuler arrived in Melbourne. Both families had strong ties to Melbourne Grammar. Fred Thonemann was an Old Melburnian and his three sons attended the school. Eric Thonemann, the second eldest of the boys, was in the same class as Phillip Schuler. The Thonemanns were also seriously rich. Beyond their stockbroking empire, they built the first international-standard ice-skating rinks in Melbourne and Sydney, were leading wool brokers, and owned vast cattle stations in the Northern Territory and Queensland. One of the properties, Elsey Station on the Roper River south of Darwin, had been the home of Jeannie Gunn, the first white woman to settle in the area. Gunn’s autobiography We of the Never Never became an Australian literary classic.

  Another of the guests of the Thonemanns that January weekend was a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty. Polly Howard was a talented artist and a free spirit who often came to Merriyula without her husband and leaving her three children in the care of their nanny. Born Colleen Mary Pym in New Zealand, Polly also had a distinguished pedigree. Her mother, Francis Clayton, was the daughter of colonial architect William Henry Clayton, who designed many notable public buildings in New Zealand and Tasmania. Her father, Charles Lamb Pym, was a stockbroker and auctioneer whose grandfather had been a prominent British MP in the early 1800s and High Sheriff of Bedfordshire. Polly’s uncle was Sir Julius Vogel, New Zealand’s prime minister between 1873 and 1886. In February 1901, Polly had married Charles Howard, a business manager with the rural supply company Dalgety. She was just 21 and Charles was eleven years her senior, a mild-mannered but devoted husband. His grandfather had been a British army officer who was appointed to the colonial administration soon after Melbourne was founded in 1835. His father, Edward Howard, was a prominent banker and freelance journalist.

  Polly Howard was a vivacious and gregarious woman who often attended parties around Melbourne and balls at Government House and the Werribee Park mansion, west of the city. Her brother Jack, a flamboyant character who was also well known on the Melbourne social scene, managed the Mount Ophir vineyard near Rutherglen for the English wine merchants, Burgoynes. Polly and Charles lived in the first house in Victoria built of jarrah timbers—in Stanley Street, Kew—and she filled it with art and antiques. An accomplished wood carver, she was also an enthusiastic collector with a keen eye. In the 1930s she purchased from a private Melbourne home a pair of imperial Chinese vases. One was a yellow ‘Phoenix’ vase from the Qianlong period. Inside was a note claiming that it had been taken from the Summer Palace in Peking during the Opium War of 1860 by Major C.J. Weir of the 2nd Queen’s Own Regiment. Polly’s family, who later inherited the piece, thought it pretty but unexceptional. For years the vase gathered dust above a rickety bookcase in her grandson’s living room. When he sent it to have a chipped edge restored, the conservator at the National Gallery of Victoria advised that it was an important piece. The following year it was sold at auction in London by Sothebys for 120,000 pounds. Had it not been for the seamless repair, the family was told, it would have fetched more than 400,000 pounds.

  The Howards of Kew were good friends of the Schulers of Hawthorn and the two families regularly socialised together and exchanged gifts. Deborah Schuler, Phillip’s mother, gave Polly’s eldest daughter, Noel, a copy of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women at Christmas 1912. But perhaps the strongest friendship between the families was that of Polly and Phillip, despite the ten-year difference in their ages. At Christmas 1910 Phillip gave Polly a handsome edition of the poems of Robert Browning, inscribed ‘To My Dear Mrs Howard’ and signed with his nickname, Peter. Three years later his gift was a brooding portrait of himself by the popular Melbourne photographers May and Mina Moore. This time it was addressed to ‘My Dear Friend, Mrs Howard’ and signed Phillip. Polly had kept in contact with the young journalist in the year that he had been in Egypt and Gallipoli, sending him letters, cigarettes and birthday greetings. In late September 1915, soon after his return to Egypt from Gallipoli, he wrote back to her from the Grand Continental Hotel in Cairo. ‘My Dear Mrs Howard’, he began with suitable formality, but soon there were intimations of the depth of a long friendship between an older woman and a youth now grown to manhood:

  When you remember my birthday I often wonder if it is with a touch of sorrow or sweetness in your mind. It is so long ago now that one begins to look back on all one’s life in Melbourne as something filmy and misty. This year has just simply flown by and yet it has made us all more than one single year older—I know it has me: so the Peter Pan as my friends used to delight in calling me to annoy me, is fast evaporating.3

  Schuler wrote that his mother had told him Polly was worried about him, which he was sorry to hear. He hoped her children were well. He said how accustomed he had grown to life in Egypt—‘though sometimes you do long for a clean row of white faces and women who are not demi-mondaines’. Yet he relished experiences that would ‘make the background for magnificent stories when I get my leisure again after the war’. The day before he wrote, he had watched a caravan of camels setting off from Cairo for Mecca, bearing gifts from the sultan and the government as the excited crowd beat their hands and breasts. But the richest times, he said, had been those spent with the Anzacs:

  I have had a magnificent experience with the troops and of course the crowning joy of my life has been the time I spent at the Front. Six weeks round those Anzac trenches convinces one of the horribleness of war to a degree that cannot be conceived from afar. I was lucky enough to be in the biggest battle of the peninsula so far—an experience in which the element of risk was a hundred percent and still thousands of us got through unscratched.

  Schuler apologised for typing rather than writing his letter, and asked to be remembered kindly to Polly’s husband, before signing off with a flourish of fountain pen, ‘I remain very truly yours, Phillip F.E. Schuler.’

  The weekend at Merriyula four months later would take the intimacy between Phillip Schuler and Polly Howard to a new level. Whatever course their friendship had taken during the previous few years, Polly was now deeply in love. Nine months later she gave birth to a boy who would never know his father and whose father would never know him. It was a secret that Polly would not fully reveal until long after the war and near the end of her life.

  When the writing of Australia in Arms was finished and the manuscript on its way to London, Schuler made an announcement that astonished his friends and family. He had decided to return to the war—not as a journalist but as an ordinary soldier. The horror and heroism of Gallipoli had transformed him. The gregarious, flamboyant youth who had sailed from Melbourne in October 1914 had returned a man with a new sense of purpose and duty. After his conspicuous success as a correspondent at Gallipoli, an achievement that would soon be reinforced by critical acclaim for his book, Schuler could have chosen to return Europe and further journalistic glory reporting the fighting on the Western Front. Instead he had resolved to throw in his lot with the ordinary men whose lives, and deaths, he had chronicled over most of the previous two years. As he would explain to Sir Ian Hamilton later in the year, he was driven by a growing sense of obligation to fight rather than remain an observer of the sacrifices of others: ‘Once t
he story of Anzac had been told there seemed no reason for my remaining while others died fighting.’4

  Schuler enlisted in the 1st AIF on 7 April 1916 in the inner Melbourne suburb of Prahran. The independent nation of Australia was already fifteen years old, but like everyone else born in the former colonies he was registered as a ‘natural born British subject’. He listed his previous military service as two years in the militia, 5th Battalion, and another year in the Army Service Corps in 1912. He weighed in at 140 pounds and stood 5 feet and 10-and-a-half inches. Complexion: Medium. Eyes: Hazel. Hair: Brown. He was determined by the army doctor to be free of syphilis, defective intelligence, traces of corporal punishment, haemorrhoids and a dozen other peculiarities that would have rendered him ‘unfit for the duties of a soldier’.

  As a correspondent in Egypt and Turkey, Schuler and the other Australian journalists had enjoyed the privileges and access of the officer class (Charles Bean was an honorary captain). In the pre-war militia Schuler had held the rank of lieutenant and, given his education, connections and experience at Gallipoli, he would have been a candidate for an immediate commission. Instead, he began his army career on the bottom rung—as a driver in the Army Service Corps attached to the 3rd Division. Schuler did not seek preferment; he did not want it. He had chosen to go to war to share the burden of the ordinary fighting men who had so impressed him at Gallipoli. He wanted to be counted as one of them—and was willing to face the same danger and discomfort they did.