by Mark Baker
Whatever has happened to you? I have not heard of you for ages. I do hope you are fit and well and have passed unscathed through all these terrible times. Just send me a line to tell me you are still in the land of the living and I shall feel happier about you.6
As the hearings of the Dardanelles Commission continued in London, Hamilton, who had appeared to give his evidence in January, revealed both his burning ambition to return to a field command and the reality that his military career was almost certainly over:
I myself am going strong and the truth about the Dardanelles and the realisation of what a misfortune the evacuation proved itself to be are coming out more and more strongly, although they may not be in time to help me into the saddle again before the end of the war.
Schuler was also figuring in Major General Monash’s calculations. In late March Monash nominated the young second lieutenant for a position as an intelligence officer for the 3rd Division based at General Plumer’s headquarters. Schuler travelled the 16 miles to the 2nd Army GHQ, near Cassel, for an interview but then heard nothing more of the job. A proposal for him to be sent to London for further training also fell through, to his great disappointment. The man who had been happy to enlist as a driver a year earlier, now wanted a bigger role in the war. It was not unique that Monash sometimes failed to get his preferred candidates for appointments. When he was promoted to run the Australian Army Corps, Monash believed his successor in command of the 3rd Division should be Schuler’s friend Brigadier General Walter Ramsay McNicoll, but the post instead went to Major General John Gellibrand.
As early as March 1916, Plumer and his senior staff, including Monash, began planning a major offensive to drive the Germans from the coast of the North Sea. Codenamed ‘Magnum Opus’, the plan involved an attack by three corps on the German positions along a ridge that began several miles south of Ypres. Monash’s 3rd Division was to be the southern prong of the attack. The Battle of Messines would be the first and last great engagement of Phillip Schuler’s war.
Monash, the meticulous engineer, was forensic in his attention to detail in planning for the battle and the work of his Divisional Train was a crucial part of that planning. At his divisional conferences, the heads of all branches were required to attend and almost no detail was regarded as too small for discussion. Circulars were issued covering matters as diverse as water supply, burial of the dead, anti-aircraft measures and tanks.7 Immediately before the battle, supplies were moved into forward positions through a network of light rail and trench tramways—and teams of mules. Schuler’s close friend Captain Richard Dewson of the 3rd Divisional Train was put in charge of twelve pack transport troops, each with seven men and twelve mules. These teams ferried ammunition, water and rations, including hot meals, to positions right up to the front lines. The supply of ammunition was an operation of staggering proportions. The 3rd Division machine-gunners fired 264,000 rounds in the lead-up to the battle, 656,000 during the main barrage and a further 920,000 as the battle unfolded—close to 2 million rounds in all.
Despite the heavy workload, Schuler made time, three weeks before the battle, to pen a long letter to Hamilton in response to the general’s concerns about his welfare. He wrote with sarcasm that Keith Murdoch had just been on a ‘flying visit’ to the Somme and the 3rd Division’s position at Messines but had not bothered to make contact with him, ‘though being within a few hundred yards of my billet’. He noted that Murdoch, now building a formidable political power base in London, remained a voice of negativity towards the conduct of the war:
He is, I hear, no more optimistic with the state of affairs on this side than he was at Gallipoli. It seems to me that if he was forming some little cog in the big wheel he would understand the position better, and be able afterwards to write with more authority.8
Schuler was missing the journalist’s ability to report on the battlefield events he was witnessing, as well as the curious episodes of daily life in and behind the forward lines. He had visited the Somme and the town of Bapaume just days after it was taken, arriving in a snowstorm. He marvelled at the French farmer, his wife and children tilling the land to plant peas and corn just a few hundred metres from the firing line but seemingly oblivious to the conflict. The writer’s need to write produced a collection of thirteen stories sent to London ‘in the hope that a publisher might take them up’. None did, he told Hamilton:
You will realise how hard it is for me not to be able to record daily for ‘home consumption’ all the scenes of human interest, leaving out of the question the fighting episodes, after the freedom you gave me at Anzac and on the Peninsula. Bean, I fear me, is too busy elsewhere.
Charles Bean was to show up soon after that. Five days before the battle they met and had ‘a long yarn’ on a Saturday afternoon. Bean wrote later in his diary: ‘He is going to marry a little Russian countess in Egypt after the war. Well then Peter.’9 This was an embellishment by either the storyteller or the diarist. Nelly came from distinguished but not aristocratic Italian-Egyptian stock and her late husband, Alexis Rabinovitch, was the son of a middle-class merchant family in Odessa. Bean thought the marriage would be good for his friend, adding ‘constancy to his other good points’.
It is more of a molehill than a mountain. It stretches over 12 kilometres yet at its highest point rises to just 80 metres. From the southern end in front of Plug Street Wood, where the 3rd Australian Division was positioned in May 1917, the open farmland rises in a gentle sweep up to the township of Messines. From there the main ridge runs north through the sister township of Wytschaete to St. Eloi, south of Ypres. In the bland topography of Flanders, Messines Ridge is modestly distinctive. In wartime it offered a commanding strategic advantage and since late 1914 that advantage had been Germany’s.
Messines township already lay in ruins before the battle that would take its name began, after weeks of intensive preparatory bombardment. Wytschaete was soon to suffer the same fate. In mid-May Schuler described the scene in what would be his last letter to Hamilton, again evoking shared memories of Gallipoli:
I have been studying ‘the task’ from points of vantage which are very favourable, and it needs to be seen to quite realise what an attack against every manner of explosive means. There it lay spread out before me in a big sprawling hill not so prominent a feature as Achi Baba, but the approach not so unlike it: bare of all trees and farms but heaps of bricks. A river concealed from our view wound round the base of the hill which I suppose is some two miles across. But a ridge continues on and separates the low ground between the two great cities. You see the spires of the one in the Hun’s possession through the distant trees. On the side of the opposing hill there lies a city of sparking white, absolutely still, a heap of ruins. There are trenches all about it and wire, but not a vestige of life. I suppose that in this wilderness, and the knowledge of the mines, guns and grenades that form the basis of the attack in any battle, that stimulates the imagination and forms a comparison where no comparison exists. Dash, irresistible dash alone will not take it and each Anzac chap knows it.10
For once the British high command was not relying for success on dash alone. After almost three years of war, hard lessons were at last being learned about the cost of throwing unprepared men against vastly superior numbers and firepower. Plumer had assembled a forbidding arsenal that included more than 1500 heavy guns and howitzers, 72 of the new Mark IV tanks, and 300 operational aircraft from the Royal Flying Corps that controlled the skies along the ridge before and during the battle. The artillery preparation was meticulous, using advanced targeting methods involving new sound-ranging equipment, and a system of ‘creeping barrages’ that swept positions 640 metres ahead of advancing troops. Plumer also had a massive secret weapon in store—thanks to months of intense digging under the German positions along the ridge by teams including the men of the 1st and 2nd Australian Tunnelling Companies.
On the morning of 7 June, the battle was launched with an eruption of volcanic intensity.
It was the biggest manmade explosion in history; a series of bangs that bucked as far away as London. At 3.10 a.m. nineteen enormous mines containing more than one million pounds of explosives placed by the tunnelling companies were detonated along the length of Messines Ridge—including what would become the most famous position, Hill 60. Philip Gibbs of the Daily Chronicle was watching from Mount Kemmel, about 4 miles to the south-west of there:
The most diabolical splendour I have ever seen. Out of the dark ridges of Messines and Wytschaete and that ill-famed Hill 60, there gushed out and up enormous volumes of scarlet flame from the exploding mines and of earth and smoke all lighted by the flame spilling over into mountains of fierce colour, so that all the countryside was illuminated by red light. Where some of us stood watching, aghast and spellbound by this burning horror, the ground trembled and surged violently to and fro. Truly the earth quaked.11
As many as 10,000 German troops were killed in an instant. Those who survived in the forward positions, including many of the gunners, were immobilised by concussion. Large numbers of them were soon taken prisoner as British forces and Australian and New Zealand troops—fighting together for the first time since Gallipoli—surged through the German lines.
In the southernmost sector, below Messines, the Australian 3rd Division faced the 4th Bavarian Division. The division was commanded by Prince Franz Maria, the third son of King Ludwig III of Bavaria. The prince had earned a formidable reputation in the estimation of Allied intelligence and been highly decorated by the German command after a string of victories along the Western Front. Messines would mark the end of his good fortune. The first four mines to explode on the morning of 7 June were below Trench 122/Factory Farm and Trench 127 in front of the Australian lines—all of the men from the Bavarian 5th and 9th infantry regiments in those trenches perished. After the defeat at Messines, the remnants of the division suffered further heavy losses in the Third Battle of the Somme. Prince Franz and his men were then relegated to the Italian front on border protection duties for the remainder of the war.
An hour and a half after the Battle of Messines began, the Allied artillery barrage was halted for an hour to enable the battalions of reinforcements to move forward. The pause gave the Germans a chance to regroup and toughen their resistance, but they were unable to effectively counterattack until later in the day. By nightfall Plumer’s army had eliminated the German salient south of Ypres. Monash’s men had played a pivotal role in the first decisive Allied victory of the war. German resistance continued for another week but the Allies held the ground captured on day one, albeit at a substantial price. There were 26,000 Allied casualties. The losses were terrible but measured against what had come before and what soon would follow.
The 3rd Division lost 4122 men, almost twice as many as the 4th Division, which had been held in reserve during the early stages of the battle. Among those in the thick of the fighting was Phillip Schuler. Bean would note in his official history after the war that Schuler ‘had won much credit for his gallantry in the battle’12, although he was not mentioned in dispatches or recommended for a medal. Most importantly, he had survived his personal baptism of fire. But fate was stalking.
17
The Wreckage of Hopes
Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway’d,
Or wak’d to ecstasy the living lyre.
Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard1
After the intensity of the Battle of Messines and the euphoric aftermath of a major Allied advance, life for the companies of the 3rd Divisional Train soon returned to something like normal routine, even though the beasts of war continued to snarl along the front line. There was a little time before the next push to regroup and even snatch some much-needed relaxation. Schuler spent one afternoon chatting with Brigadier General Walter Ramsay McNicoll, head of Monash’s 10th Brigade. He’d served under the general in the Victorian militia while still at Melbourne Grammar. A school teacher in civilian life, McNicoll would father three famous sons—Ron, who became a major general, Alan, a vice admiral, and David, a controversial journalist and confidant of media baron Frank Packer. Schuler and McNicoll reminisced at length about their time together at Gallipoli. Recently promoted to full lieutenant, Schuler was now supply officer in charge of cooking facilities along the 3rd Division lines. He would make his last inspection tour on the afternoon of Saturday 23 June 1917.
Escorting an Australian army catering expert and his party in the forward area held by the 9th Brigade, Schuler was demonstrating a camp oven when ‘a chance salvo’ landed in the middle of them.2 Three high velocity shells landed in quick succession. The base plate of one of them fell behind the huts used by the Divisional Train.3 One man was killed outright and several others were wounded. The most severely injured was Phillip Schuler.
Colonel Richard Dowse had also been close to Schuler since their militia days in Victoria. They were ‘Brother Savages’, fellow members of the Melbourne Savage Club. Dickie Dowse, a gentlemanly former bank clerk and public servant back in Australia, had also been Schuler’s commanding officer in the 3rd Divisional Train before his transfer, in March, to a more senior post with the 4th Division. The 51-year-old Dowse would describe ‘Young Schuler’ to Sir Ian Hamilton as a very dear friend despite the disparity in their ages; ‘more like a good pally younger brother or son to me than a mere friend’.4 It had been Dowse who recommended Schuler’s commission as an officer. As soon as he was phoned with news of the shelling, Dowse scrambled to find the dressing station where Schuler was being treated:
I don’t think I ever appreciated the speed of a motor car as much before. In about an hour and a half I found him at a main dressing station where he had just been fixed up. The poor chap was frightfully knocked about in the face, throat, left arm and right thigh. Thank God, he was quite conscious and able to gasp out a few words of appreciation of the fact that I was with him.5
Schuler was transferred to the 2nd Australian Casualty Clearing Station at Trois Arbres, near Steenwerck. Dowse followed him there and they were able to talk briefly:
His head was all bandaged up but he had use of one eye and when he saw me remarked, ‘Dick, well I ask you,’ a favourite saying of his. He knew he was for it and gave me a few messages and instructions before I left.
Phillip Schuler died at 11.15 p.m. It was a week shy of his 28th birthday. Knowing how close the two men were, as Schuler had shared some of their correspondence with him, Dowse wrote a few days later to Sir Ian Hamilton in London:
The doctors only gave him a fighting chance from the first, but we all hoped that his magnificent physique, good constitution and clean life would help him, but the shock and loss of blood was too much. Poor chap, he quite appreciated the incongruity of the whole business, being knocked out while giving a cooking lesson. I mourn the loss of my dear young pal, not in self pity, but at the removal of a bright young life which promised great things, and for the sorrow it will cause his family, who I know well, and his fiancé in Egypt.
One of Schuler’s final instructions to Dowse was to send word to Nelly in Cairo—along with the silver cigarette case that had been a treasured memento since they had last been together, almost two years earlier. It now bore the scars of the shrapnel that had claimed him.
Phillip Schuler was buried the next day in the small cemetery behind the field hospital. About 40 officers and men attended the ceremony. The pall bearers included Dowse, Edgar Wickham, the 3rd Division’s Gloucestershire-born Quartermaster Sergeant Major, and Captain Richard Dewson, one of Schuler’s closest friends among the staff of the Divisional Train since they had embarked for England together aboard the Persic a year earlier. Dewson, a Boer War veteran seriously wounded at Gallipoli and repatriated to Australia before returning to fight on the Western Front, had just been recommended for the Military Cross for his bravery during the Battle of Messines�
�driving an ammunition convoy to supply the forward troops under intense gas shelling. He too would be killed, in May 1918, just weeks before the 4th Division’s celebrated victory in the Battle of Hamel.
A week after Schuler’s burial, the little cemetery at Trois Arbres would host a much bigger funeral. Major General William Holmes, commanding officer of the 4th Division, had been mortally wounded by a stray shell in almost identical circumstances to Schuler. Holmes, a former clerk who had won the Distinguished Service Order in the Boer War and led the expeditionary force that captured German New Guinea in 1914, was hit while leading New South Wales Premier William Holman on a tour of the Messines battlefield. He would be the most senior Australian officer to die on the Western Front in four years of war.
The death of Phillip Schuler would leave a trail a grief across three continents—and many more than Richard Dowse would wonder aloud where this brilliant young life might have led. Ian Hamilton was one of them. He replied immediately on receiving the grim news from Dowse: ‘I am more sad than I can say to hear of this accursed fatality. From the first moment I met Phillip Schuler I was attracted by his personality and instinctively made friends with him.’6 In response to another letter reporting Schuler’s death, from General Ramsay McNicoll, Hamilton wrote: ‘He meant to write another big work on the Dardanelles after the war was over, and I feel the world has been a loser by his death in this respect as well as so many others.’7