Phillip Schuler

by Mark Baker

  Murdoch: To some slight extent, yes.

  Pickford: From Mr Ashmead-Bartlett?

  Murdoch: Well yes, I certainly talked it over with Ashmead-Bartlett.

  During further intense questioning from the chairman, Murdoch asserted that despite his written undertaking to observe the strict rules of censorship, he was completely within his rights to carry Ashmead-Bartlett’s letter and, after that was confiscated, to draft his own. He insisted that the rules did not preclude a correspondent from communicating with a minister of the Crown—a supposed exemption not even Ashmead-Bartlett had claimed. As Pickford pressed the point that Murdoch had broken the censorship rules and the journalist’s discomfort intensified, Andrew Fisher, who to that point had listened in silence, sprang to the defence of his friend. In doing so he completely recast the simple commission he had given Murdoch twenty months earlier to take a quick look at the soldiers’ mail services on his way to London. Murdoch’s letter of engagement from the defence department had specified only that he visit Egypt and made no reference to him visiting Gallipoli, although he did have an official letter of introduction to Hamilton. Now Fisher claimed Murdoch carried ‘a letter from me to the Commander-in-Chief for leave for you to visit the Dardanelles in order to make a communication to me of your impressions’. And Murdoch’s 25-pound postal round was now stamped by the former prime minister as ‘a mandate from one self-governing Dominion which was directly concerned with the operation of their forces in Gallipoli and elsewhere’.

  Fisher claimed Murdoch had been ‘peremptorily’ summoned to give evidence with less than three days notice and had been warned of the commission’s coercive powers if he failed to attend. Adopting the tone of a barrister for the defence, Fisher then handed a series of rhetorical lifelines to his drowning compatriot:

  Fisher: You are Australian born?

  Murdoch: Yes.

  Fisher: And you naturally felt that you would like to do the best not only for your own particular country but the Empire’s forces now and always?

  Murdoch: I think I risked my whole career. I am always prepared to offer everything I have to Australia.

  Fisher: You have held senior positions on the most important journals in Australia and have had the confidence of your employers?

  Murdoch: Yes, I think so.

  Fisher: And you felt that you were not exceeding the expectations of myself and others in making a true report of what you considered the situation in Gallipoli at the time you visited it?

  Murdoch: No, I thought I was fulfilling your wishes in the matter and also carrying out my duty.

  Fisher: You had no thought of casting a reflection upon anyone or doing anything but giving a non-soldier opinion on the situation. You had no wish to cast reflections nor did you know any of the parties personally or otherwise?

  Murdoch: No, I was absolutely unprejudiced.

  But the cloak of patriotic rectitude that Fisher had so deftly wrapped around the embattled journalist soon fell away. When he resumed his examination, the chairman pressed Murdoch on one of the most sensational—and unsubstantiated—allegations in his letter: that ‘an order had to be issued to officers to shoot without mercy any soldier who lagged behind or loitered in advance’ during the August offensive.

  Pickford: Did you get that information from any responsible person?

  Murdoch: I forget where I got it.

  Pickford: It is a very serious allegation?

  Murdoch: I do not think it is so serious. It was the diary of a

  British officer which I saw on the spot.

  Pickford: Do you mean a living officer or a dead officer?

  Murdoch: A living officer.

  Pickford: I should like to know who it was.

  Murdoch: I do not know his name. I cannot inform you. All

  I know is that Mr Nevinson [British correspondent Henry Nevinson] had that diary and it was confirmed, I remember, by an officer from Suvla who I met on the transport returning from Mudros. I do not know his name. He was an artillery officer who had been through Suvla.

  Pickford: It is unfortunate you do not remember his name.

  Murdoch: It is very hard to remember names. It is a long time ago.

  When Welsh MP Walter Roch picked up the questioning, Murdoch would then reveal not only that many of the most damaging allegations he had made in his letter were wrong or unsubstantiated but, much more seriously, that he had deliberately lied to ensure his objective ‘to startle the government’ into abandoning the Dardanelles campaign. Amid the sweeping condemnation of senior British officers in his letter, Murdoch had belittled the capabilities of the Anzac Corps commander, Lieutenant General William Birdwood. The general, who would be venerated by a generation of Australian soldiers as a strong and compassionate leader and who would end the war commanding the Fifth Army on the Western Front, was declared unfit for such a role by the 31-year-old reporter from Melbourne who had not even spoken to the man during his Gallipoli stopover: ‘Birdwood struck me as a good army corps commander, but nothing more. He has not the fighting quality, nor the big brain, of a great general.’ In response to a question from Roch, Murdoch conceded that he had deliberately maligned Birdwood because he was concerned that the general would be seen in London as the natural successor to Hamilton and that he too would resist pressure to abandon Gallipoli:

  It was what you might call a highly-coloured document written with a set purpose of producing one effect only, and I was afraid it would lead to certain injustices such as the statement about General Birdwood which I deliberately made. I think it was essential to make it as I knew he would probably be appointed to the command if Sir Ian Hamilton were removed, and I thought it was absolutely essential to get a fresh mind out there, and that was the reason I put in a sentence about General Birdwood which possibly is an injustice.14

  For Sir Ian Hamilton, Murdoch’s startling admission was both an outrage and further vindication of his case that the journalist was prepared to write and say whatever it took to achieve his political objective. On hearing of the evidence, Hamilton wrote to Birdwood: ‘In its way this retraction of Murdoch’s is a good weather gauge of your steady rise in prestige and popularity. Murdoch felt he had to back out of that particular lie at all costs.’15 Hamilton wrote to the commission asking them to request that cabinet secretary Maurice Hankey circulate Murdoch’s ‘tardy retraction’ to everyone who had seen the Murdoch letter. ‘As to the evidence of Mr Murdoch as a whole,’ he added. ‘All I can say is I hope generals more fortunate than myself will be protected against the possibility of this kind of backstairs influence being used against them. Unless in the full tide of victory no soldier can stand up against it for long.’16

  At the end of his appearance before the commission, Murdoch repeated an earlier request that he be given a copy of a memorandum from Hamilton in which the general had delivered a detailed rebuttal of the allegations in the Murdoch letter. Seemingly oblivious to the irony, Murdoch argued that the document amounted to ‘a violent personal attack’ on him and expressed his concern that, without him being given a right of reply, the commissioners might be unfairly influenced. ‘I assure you we shall not,’ said Sir William Pickford, in final rebuke before dismissing the witness. ‘Any more than we shall be influenced, if I may say so, by a good many hearsay statements, which are in your statement, and as to which you have not given us any evidence.’

  Sir Ian Hamilton later wrote to Phillip Schuler briefing him on the proceedings. Hamilton said he had twice ‘begged’ the commission to call Schuler to give evidence and blamed Andrew Fisher for blocking approval, implying that the Australian high commissioner had been protecting Murdoch from contradiction by another Australian journalist: ‘I think Mr F may have thought it wiser not.’ Hamilton said Murdoch had had ‘a shocking time’ during his appearance before the commissioners:

  He had to acknowledge that all he said was hearsay and Ashmead-Bartlett, in his evidence given since, has with perfect brazen cheek described exactl
y how he coached Murdoch as to his facts. You can imagine what sort of facts they were!17

  Hamilton wrote that he hoped the hearings would soon be over, saying it had been ‘an arduous campaign’ for him extending over nine months. But he told Schuler he was sanguine about the eventual outcome of the commission: ‘Whatever happens I shall be conscious of having fought every inch of the way, just as hard as I tried to fight the Turks.’

  16

  Flanders

  The third and hardest winter of the war. It froze the feet and souls of the men on both sides of the wire.

  Ian Passingham, Pillars of Fire: The Battle of Messines Ridge

  June 1917

  Four days before the Australian 3rd Division arrived in France, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, called an ignominious halt to one of the most wasteful and ultimately futile military offensives in history. The Battle of the Somme had begun on the first day of July with a wholesale massacre. A force of 100,000 British soldiers had surged from their trenches near the Somme River into the teeth of six German divisions that had been alerted but not broken by an intense but ineffectual, week-long artillery barrage. By day’s end 20,000 British soldiers were dead and another 40,000 wounded—many of them mown down by German heavy machine guns.

  The Battle of the Somme had been envisaged by Haig as a masterstroke that would finally drive a wedge through the German lines after almost two years of enervating confrontation along the length of the Western Front. It was also hoped that the offensive would relieve the pressure at Verdun, about 100 kilometres to the south-west, where the bulk of the French forces had been under siege since the previous February. In the end, the offensive proved a massively costly gamble that failed to turn the tide against the Germans. In the course of four and a half months of fighting, the Allies advanced only a few miles at a cost of more than 600,000 men killed, wounded or missing in action. The war of attrition might have resulted in 650,000 German casualties and decimated their ranks of experienced junior officers and non-commissioned officers, but it also broke the back of Britain’s volunteer army. In the end, the two sides had fought each other to a standstill, exhausted and immobilised by the mud of an impossibly wet autumn. David Lloyd George would brand the losses as appalling and condemn Haig for his ‘bullheaded’ tactics.

  The Australians played a significant part in the Somme campaign—and shouldered their share of the slaughter. From late July, the Australian 1st, 2nd and 4th Divisions were involved in intense fighting that saw them capture the village of Pozières and a key ridge 500 kilometres east of the village before driving the Germans back to Mouquet Farm. Their achievements would add to the legend of heroism built at Gallipoli, but the cost would be enormous. In less than seven weeks fighting the three divisions suffered 23,000 casualties, including 6800 killed in action or who had died of wounds. These losses were roughly equivalent to the Australian casualities during the entire eight-month campaign at Gallipoli. Just days before the fighting began at Pozières, Australia had endured the biggest disaster in its history when the AIF suffered 5533 casualties in a single day’s fighting at Fromelles. And the toll would continue to rise as the war ground on.

  After the disasters of late 1916, the Allies were in desperate need of a success. The Australian 3rd Division would play its part in delivering one. Assigned to the British 2nd Army under General Sir Herbert Plumer, the new division was based at Steenwerck, just across the Belgian border north-west of Armentières. Major General John Monash set up his headquarters at the local chateau. He had arrived there on 24 November 1916, soon after most of his men, including Phillip Schuler, had completed their journey from Salisbury Plain.

  It was a hard landing for the men of the 3rd Division, whom the battle-weary veterans of the other Australian divisions initially viewed as a bunch of soft interlopers. The freezing temperatures, the rain and the mud that had tormented the lives and fortunes of those fighting further south on the Somme, greeted the division’s arrival on the outskirts of Armentières, a gritty industrial town much less exotic than the famous wartime song parodying its mademoiselle implied. The so-called ‘nursery sector’, where most of the units were first deployed, was away from the heavier fighting, but the men were soon given a taste of trench warfare, patrols into no-man’s land and minor raids against the German front lines. For Corporal Schuler, it was a world away from the comforts and privileges of his previous life as a war correspondent, and from the pleasures of the Grand Continental and Nelly Rabinovitch in Cairo.

  The work of the Divisional Train and its drivers, including Schuler, was arduous and often dangerous, even during relatively quiet periods along the forward lines. The Divisional Train companies were required to supply food, forage, water and ammunition to the fighting units—much of it hauled by columns of pack horses. Tasks included carting road-making materials and fuel, operating snow ploughs, using sleds to evacuate casualties through the mud and sometimes coordinating emergency medical mass evacuations. The work was tough and relentless, often mundane but at times terrifying in the face of gunfire, bombardment and gas attacks. And when the daily tasks were done, the vehicles and animals required constant attention.

  Inspecting British officers were less than enthusiastic about the spit and polish of driver, wagon and lorry, but noted the good conditions of the horses. However these horses were often the indirect cause of their drivers becoming casualties as they had to stand at their animals’ heads under shellfire to quiet and control them.1

  A month after arriving in France, Schuler wrote to Hamilton thanking him for his praise of Australia in Arms: ‘For the most part the critics have been kind so far as it has been given me to see the various views. The Pall Mall Gazette alone, for some reason, being bitterly antagonistic—probably due, I recognise, to their noted objection to the campaign as a whole.’2 The reviews back home in Australia were warmly positive. The Sydney Morning Herald’s critic declared: ‘Mr Schuler’s account of the operations on the peninsula is extremely interesting, and, one is convinced, possesses permanent historical value. Its outstanding feature is its comprehensiveness and the close attention to detail which other versions of the affair have lacked.’3 The book would also be praised by some of Schuler’s former colleagues at Gallipoli. Henry Nevinson rated its description of the landings as the best published account after Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett’s cable and Sir Ian Hamilton’s dispatch. ‘Mr Schuler was not present, but he had the advantage of going over the ground and discussing the action thoroughly,’ Nevinson wrote in his own book on the campaign.4

  In response to Hamilton’s suggestion that he should prepare also to tell the story of the Australians in France, Schuler said it was a project he would dearly love to undertake but that it would have to be from the starkly different perspective of a soldier rather than a journalist: ‘It would be a very different view point—a more human, more dramatic and unhistoric one as I am tied down here in Flanders and we work sometimes by day and sometimes by night and, to vary that, occasionally throughout the whole twenty four hours.’

  Schuler recounted a brief meeting with General Birdwood ‘in our horse lines’ a few days earlier. Birdwood, the Anzac Corps commander, was showing signs of strain but appeared ‘the same cheerful delightful soldier that has endeared him to our corps’. Schuler gave Hamilton a glowing account of the calibre of the troops in France, tinged with nostalgia for their time at Gallipoli:

  What I have seen of our own—the last Australian division—shows me that the army increases in vigour and punch as it grows: and I say that having in mind the valorous deeds on the Peninsula. I often compare the two situations here at—a spot you know but I cannot tell—and the wild romantic shores of the Aegean. As you have said, that Peninsular war stands quite alone and apart, an ineffaceable memory.5

  In February Schuler was commissioned as a second lieutenant and appointed to a new role inspecting cooking facilities near the front lines. ‘Not at all a bad job. I roam from t
he trenches to the back areas where we linger,’ he wrote to his Aunt Laura in Glasgow in early March while thanking her for a parcel including food and cigarettes. The letter was written as he recuperated in bed from a bout of fever: ‘Yes, I can write about beds now for I have been made an officer and frequent small farm houses where the excellent French bed is available with some degree of comfort.’ He advises that the cake has been demolished during a visit that evening by his good friend Charles Howitt, a quartermaster sergeant with the 37th Battalion who was with him on the voyage from Melbourne on the Persic. ‘Other treats are being saved for when the push starts in a few days.’ Egypt and Nelly Rabinovitch were a constant in his thoughts amid the harshest winter in France in 40 years. In January the temperature had dropped as low as minus 10 degrees Celsius, as he lamented to his aunt:

  We have snow storms and the temperature again below freezing point—a deplorable country indeed. I don’t wonder you wish for the sun of Australia as I do the sun and colour of Egypt. My experiences grow every day. I only wish I was able to tell you all about them but unfortunately that would involve military secrets so I will have to wait until I see you again.

  Schuler worries about the disruption in mail services and his struggle to maintain contact with Nelly in Cairo and his family back in Australia. It is implicit that he sees his future in the old world, not the new, as he talks of his sisters back in Melbourne: ‘I am trying to arrange that Minna shall come over to here after the war. I wish she could come now. Dorothy, I’m afraid, is a wee bit hurt because her letters have not been answered quickly. But until now I have had poor chance of keeping up my correspondence.’

  The friendship with Sir Ian Hamilton grew stronger and more personal through a regular exchange of letters that clearly transcended Hamilton’s determination to rally what support he could to help clear his name—and Schuler’s eagerness to give what help he could. The correspondence between one of the most senior officers in the British army and one of the most junior became more like that between a father and son. At the beginning of May, Hamilton became alarmed when the letters from France stopped coming and he sent Schuler a short, poignant plea for news: