by Mark Baker
While his son’s enlistment vouched for his patriotism, Frederick Schuler’s commitment to his adopted land was under challenge. During the war many native-born Germans living in Australia were declared to be ‘enemy aliens’ and sent to internment camps, 7000 in New South Wales alone. Many others of German and Austrian descent lost their jobs or saw their businesses collapse. Across the country German schools, churches and clubs were forced to close, German music was banned and 42 German place names were changed. Despite episodes of public and private antagonism towards his German heritage, the proprietors of The Age stood by their editor. Frederick Schuler might have been ‘Made in Germany’, as an article published in the Melbourne Punch in May 1914 put it, but he was as deeply committed to Australia as anyone born in the country:
There is a good deal of irony in the fact that the editor and controlling genius of The Age, which is the most ultra-Australian of all Australian morning papers, should be a German. Gottlieb (Frederick) Schuler, however, is just German, and no more . . . For nearly sixty years he has been an Australian, and how good and thorough an Australian he has been his work on The Age bears witness.5
The gushing character reference from another publication was welcome but would not be the last word on the matter. In March 1916, Frederick was forced to distance himself from his German past by writing to seek an exemption to a regulation that prohibited even naturalised Germans from dealing in shares. In the letter to the Commonwealth attorney-general, he said that since arriving in Australia as a six-year-old child he had never left the country and had lived continuously in Victoria. He further declared that he had no surviving relatives in Germany or any connections whatever with Germany. He said he had never engaged in any business or other correspondence or communication with anyone about German national interests. He requested that the share rule under the War Precautions Regulations Act 1915 be waived on account of the oath he had taken when naturalised in May 1887:
I ask for exemption . . . on the grounds of my oath of allegiance to the British Crown; and of my entire severance from and renunciation of German national aims and ideals; and my close identification during the whole of my 56 years continuous residence in Victoria with Australian national ideals; and for the no small part I have taken, during my lifetime in my work as a journalist and editor in the formation and achievement of these ideals.6
A week after he had enlisted, Phillip Schuler wrote to Sir Ian Hamilton in London and sent a copy of The Battlefields of Anzac. He told Hamilton that he had instructed his London publisher, T. Fisher Unwin, to deliver the general an early proof of Australia in Arms, and asked whether he would pen a short introduction to the book ‘regarding the Australian army of fighters as you found them at Anzac’.7 Just days before embarking, Schuler received a letter back from Hamilton in which he politely declined the invitation.
Hamilton said he had recently contributed a brief foreword to a book of ‘Anzac sketches’ published in London and ‘although they were quite outside any contentious question I gathered it was not considered quite the thing for a general to do whilst a war was going on’. Hamilton did not say who had delivered the implied rebuke or name the book in question. It was almost certainly Crusading at Anzac, AD 1915 by Ellis Silas, a signaller with the 16th Battalion who was at the first landings at Gallipoli and was later evacuated to England suffering shell shock. Silas was a talented artist and his book reproduced a collection of pencil sketches and paintings of scenes at Anzac. In a foreword to the book, Hamilton said he had been the first to adopt the term Anzac—a distinction later claimed by several others—after abbreviating the title of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps: ‘As the man who, first seeking to save himself the trouble, omitted the five full stops and brazenly coined the word “Anzac”, I am glad to write a line or two in preface to sketches which may help to give currency to that token throughout the realms of glory.’
In his reply to Schuler, Hamilton lavished praise on the Anzac soldiers: ‘A more magnificent body of troops have never before been handled by a British general.’8 He also forcefully reaffirmed his view that the Gallipoli campaign was assured success had the British government stayed the course—and that had they done so it would certainly have transformed the course of the war:
Had our rulers only, like you, had the chance to talk to the men and see what they had already achieved I do not think they would so easily have chucked up the sponge. For as things seem shaping now we would, had we hung on to the Peninsula, have made good our point at the latest when the Grand Duke defeated the Turks at Erzerum. The Turks did not have sufficient troops at the same time to destroy General Townsend in Mesopotamia, to hold us up on the Peninsula and to stem the advancing tide of Russians pouring out of the Caucasus.
Instead, Hamilton lamented, the decision to abandon Gallipoli had enabled the Turks to divert five army divisions to Mesopotamia where British forces were besieged at Kut-al-Amara from December 1915 to April 1916 before Major General Charles Townshend and survivors of the 8000-strong British garrison were taken prisoner. In addition, at least nine more divisions had been sent from the Dardanelles to reinforce their Russian front, where the Turks were being beaten by the forces of the Grand Duke Nicholas. It was an argument against the evacuation that would find growing favour in the years that followed. Too late, however, for the reputation of the most senior casualty of the Gallipoli campaign.
Four days before he sailed for Europe, Schuler signed a will that appointed his father as executor. Nelly was prominent in his thoughts as he considered the division of his estate in the event of his death. He bequeathed to ‘my friend Madame Rabinovitch of Helouan Egypt’ the copyright and royalties from Australia in Arms (noting that the book also had the somewhat racier alternative title of The Australian on the Warpath). Nelly was also to receive ‘all properties goods effects and chattels whatsoever acquired by me during my Egyptian tour in the years one thousand nine hundred and fourteen and fifteen’. The Savage Club was to be given his collection of books in the hope that they would form the nucleus of a club library. Frederick Schuler was given rights to all of the photographs. The remainder of the estate was bequeathed to his mother, Deborah Schuler, and, in the event of her earlier death, it was to be divided equally between his sisters, Dorothy and Minna.
Schuler spent one of his last nights in Melbourne out on the town with his old friend Roy Bridges. They had dinner at Denat’s Cafe in Exhibition Street, one of the city’s best restaurants and a favourite of theirs. Later they saw a play at the King’s Theatre in Russell Street—Guy Hastings in The Straw Man—and ended the night at the Savage Club. ‘We shook hands and said goodbye,’ Bridges wrote, 30 years later. ‘We had promised to write, and we wrote to each other. His last letter came to me by the last English mail of June 1917. It ended, “Keep on remembering”.’9
14
Larkhill
If Phillip Schuler had any expectation that enlistment and a return to the war in Europe would bring him back into the cherished orbit of Nelly Rabinovitch, it was quickly dispelled. The troops of the new 3rd Division, to be commanded by Major General John Monash, left Melbourne in June 1916. The Divisional Train, including Lance Corporal P.F.E. Schuler, embarked aboard HMAT Persic on 3 June. After passing through Port Phillip Heads at sunset the Persic set course, not for Egypt and the Suez Canal, as Schuler had done aboard the first AIF convoy in late 1914, but for Cape Town and the long route to Britain around the Cape of Good Hope.
The job of the Divisional Train, administratively part of the Army Service Corps, would be to supply the division’s forces with ammunition, food, water and other essentials. While such units were often regarded as less glamorous or less important than the fighting battalions, their work was vital to the success of military operations and their men often faced as much danger as the front-line infantry as they ferried crucial supplies to the forward positions under machine-gun attack, shellfire and aerial bombardment. More than 100 men from the 3rd Divisional Train would b
e killed in action or die of wounds between the end of 1916 and 1918.
Schuler’s three-week voyage to South Africa was beset by bad weather, rough seas and outbreaks of meningitis and measles. The journey paused for three days in Cape Town, during which the men were allowed ashore each day for sight-seeing marches to the gardens, the zoo and the Cecil Rhodes memorial. After leaving South Africa, there were round-the-clock shifts to watch for German submarines. Six days into the last leg of the voyage, the Persic recorded its first death at sea—a soldier in Schuler’s unit who succumbed to meningitis.1 The ship reached Devonport at noon on Tuesday 25 July. The men were taken ashore in light steamers, boarded a train for Salisbury and then marched out at midnight to the camp that would be their home for the next four months.
Even in the English summer Larkhill Camp, set on the windswept Salisbury Plain, was a tough place to be billeted; in winter it became an endurance test for Spartans. In September 1916 one soldier wrote home: ‘It has been raining like fun here and things about Larkhill are pretty sloppy. It’s a rotten place when it rains and a jolly sight worse if it keeps fine for any length of time. The dust is that fine that it will get in anywhere; do what you will you can’t get away from it.’ A wartime postcard summed it up:
There’s an isolated, desolated spot I’d like to mention Where all you hear is ‘Squad eyes right, eyes front, attention’.
As with the camps outside Cairo before the Gallipoli landings, it was at Larkhill, and the nearby camps of Perham Downs, Parkhouse and Tidworth, that the raw recruits from Australia were trained, drilled and exercised into a force ready to face the horrors of trench warfare on the Western Front. Larkhill was just 2 miles from the magnificent ruins of Stonehenge. It was, in fact, a complex of 34 camps that housed close to 20,000 men towards the end of the war. The discomfort and monotony was eased by occasional leave during which the men would tour the surrounding countryside or take a train to marvel at the sights of London—The Tower, the Houses of Parliament, and the guards at Buckingham Palace. Private Albert Muston of the 37th Battalion visited the Royal Chambers in Westminster Abbey: ‘All the important monuments are covered with sand bags in case a Zepp drops bombs on the Cathedral.’2
Phillip Schuler also visited London for the first time on some of his weekend leave days. He called on Sir Ian Hamilton at his residence at 1 Hyde Park Gardens. It was a grand old house with a large hall decorated like an Egyptian temple and a drawing room with walls painted black with a bright green frieze. They discussed the impending hearings of the commission of inquiry into the failure of the Dardanelles campaign, and the possibility that Schuler would be called to give evidence challenging the allegations in Keith Murdoch’s letter. There were also meetings with publisher T. Fisher Unwin on the final editing of Australia in Arms. On another visit to the city, Schuler called at the Australian High Commission to argue, presumably with high commissioner and former prime minister Andrew Fisher, for an official correspondent to be sent to cover the work of the Light Horse Division in Egypt and Palestine. His efforts drew a blank. He later complained to Hamilton: ‘The Minister of Defence for some reason did not deem the deeds of these our national guardsmen worthy of record first hand.’3
General Monash had travelled from London for his first encounter with the men of his new division three days before Schuler and his unit arrived in late July. Four brigade commanders and 7000 of his troops were already encamped and more were arriving each day. After riding around on horseback to review his twelve battalions and associated units, including the companies of the Divisional Train, the general wrote to his wife on July 30: ‘I am in a state of ecstacy about the men of the Third Division. They are the finest Australians I have seen.’ This was praise indeed from an officer who had been in the thick of the fighting at Gallipoli where the Australian soldiers had achieved great distinction. While acknowledging that the new arrivals were almost totally untrained, Monash predicted his men would acquit themselves even more notably in France than the earlier contingents had done at the Dardanelles: ‘If they give us time and equip us speedily, we are going to have some division, far and away better than [Major General William] Bridges took away with him from Australia two years ago, because now that we have had 20 months’ experience of war there will not be a minute wasted in teaching things the men will afterwards have to unlearn.’
Schuler would miss the first days that Monash spent with his men at Salisbury Plain. On July 27 he was sent to hospital in Devonport. The medical records would describe his mystery ailment as ‘slight’ but it was serious enough to keep him there for two weeks. Soon after his return to camp, the final proofs of Australia in Arms arrived. He showed them to Monash and the general was impressed. ‘It will be quite the best and fullest story yet published of the whole Anzac campaign and is remarkably accurate in details,’ Monash wrote to his wife, adding in parenthesis a backhander to his former commanding officer—‘more so than Ian Hamilton’s dispatches’.4
In late August, Lance Corporal Phillip Schuler wrote to General Sir Ian Hamilton: ‘You will, I hope sir, pardon this reply from the lowest ranker to the highest commander in the Empire army.’5 He noted that the gulf between them in the military pecking order ‘is not without its whimsical aspect’. Schuler made plans to revisit Hamilton at his Hyde Park home on the next weekend’s leave in London. He took with him a set of the proofs of Australia in Arms and Hamilton shared Monash’s enthusiasm for the book. In a subsequent letter, Hamilton wrote:
I thoroughly mean what I say when I tell you that I think your work will endure and will deserve to endure. The story of the Light Horse Charge alone ensures that it will be read for many years to come. I hope you may manage to find time to use your talent so as to be able to give us something some day about Australia in France.6
At the end of September, the king came calling. George V took his train from London to survey the Australians in training on Salisbury Plain. The spectacle would astound and move him, and capture a place in the royal imagination for the general who orchestrated the day with typical precision. It was, Monash would tell his wife Vic, ‘the biggest, most splendid . . . most successful review I have ever been present at’. More than 27,000 soldiers turned out. The parade formation stretched in a continuous line for more than 2 miles and the subsequent march past in closed columns—100 men every ten paces—took almost two hours. For all of that time and more, the major general and the monarch sat side by side on horseback ‘talking for the whole time on a footing of perfect freedom and equality’. The king was effusive, Monash recalled:
He made one remark commencing ‘If we win this war . . .’ and I smiled and said ‘If we win?’ and he threw back his head and laughed a full laugh and said ‘Oh, yes! We will win, right enough, and nobody need make any mistake about that’—and then ‘Those stupid Germans! They started out to smash the British Empire!—smash it to pieces!—and look—just look’—with a sweep of his arm up the marching column—‘See what they’ve really done; they’ve made an Empire of us’.7
As the royal entourage prepared to leave, troops thronged the fields around Bulford station, cheering wildly, waving their slouch hats high in the air on the tips of their bayonets. The king fell silent for a while then turned to Monash: ‘It makes a lump in my throat to think of all these splendid fellows coming many thousands of miles; and what they have come for.’
A special correspondent was on hand to record the day’s events for The Age, but this time it was not Phillip Schuler. The now twice-promoted Corporal Schuler was marching to a different beat, proudly among the ranks turning on a show for the king and their country. Instead, a dispatch was filed to Melbourne by Lieutenant Colonel John Springthorpe, a doctor in the Australian Army Medical Corps who had become an occasional writer and newspaper contributor. Springthorpe had travelled out from London where he was on sick leave, recovering from a bout of kidney stones. He, along with Schuler, had spoken out about the scandal of inadequate medical facilities at Gallipoli the year be
fore. Like Schuler he had returned home to Melbourne for a few months in early 1916 and written a booklet about the campaign, The Great Withdrawal, to raise funds for the Lady Mayoress’ Patriotic Fund for Our Fighting Men.
Three weeks after the grand review on Salisbury Plain, Monash was at Buckingham Palace to be invested as a Commander of the Order of the Bath. Two years later, after Monash, then commander of the Anzac Corps, masterminded the spectacular victory of the Battle of Hamel, the king paid a return visit—in France—to elevate one of his favourite generals to be a Knight of the Order of the Bath. It was the first time in more than 200 years that a soldier had been so honoured in the field by a reigning monarch. Sweet victory indeed.
In late October, Schuler took a few days leave to travel north to Glasgow to visit his Aunt Laura, his mother’s youngest sister. Laura had scandalised the family by eloping from Melbourne with a Scottish sea captain when she was 24. Phillip and Laura had first met when she had made a return trip to Melbourne to see her relatives. They had struck up a warm friendship, as kindred adventurous spirits. Laura’s letters and food parcels would sustain him through the long months in France.
The trip to Scotland had almost not happened as Schuler kept postponing while he tried desperately to arrange for Nelly Rabinovitch to come to London from Cairo before he left for France. He wrote to Laura on October 12 saying there were signs that his unit’s embarkation was imminent and that he had saved four days leave that was owing to him in the hope that the reunion with his lover might come off: ‘I am loath to take this hoping still that Nell may be able to get across in time, but if we are going there is no use keeping it and I am longing to see the bairns and have a yarn to you.’ On his return from Glasgow, Schuler wrote back to Laura sending some pictures he had taken of the children—and informing her of his promotion: ‘I am corporal of the guard, a devil of a job. It is freezing cold and I am thinking of you, a warm hearthside, and a white-sheeted bed. Alas for such vain dearies.’