by Mark Baker
Hamilton’s most heartfelt response was distilled in the long letter he sent to Frederick Schuler in Melbourne, enclosing a copy of the final letter he had received from Phillip in May. Hamilton said his friendship with Phillip, formed in many encounters during the general’s tour of Australia in early 1914, had grown over the weeks in Egypt before the Gallipoli landings and had strengthened on the peninsula:
Whilst there, he saw much and learned much, some of which things I am glad to think are embodied in his work Australia in Arms, but I know he meant to write a deeper and bigger book on the subject, untrammelled by censorship, etc., and I am confident he would have made a wonderful success of it. He meant to do full justice to the difficulties and to the want of drafts and ammunition in a manner which he could not possibly do while the war lasted. And I believe he was convinced of the certain success that would have crowned the wholehearted backing of our enterprise by the British Government. In fact, he saw eye to eye with me on the point that Constantinople was the key city of the world from the strategic standpoint of a world war. So man proposes but, alas, now we shall never get this work from his pen.8
Hamilton mused that had his, and Schuler’s, wish that he appear before the Dardanelles Commission been granted, then Phillip might well have been in the safety of London giving evidence as ‘a singularly clear sighted and unprejudiced Australian’ instead of being in the firing line in Flanders on the day he died. The poet general invoked a line from Jacobean playwright John Fletcher’s poem ‘Weep No More’ to lament the vagaries of fate:
Had my last recommendations that he should attend [the commission] borne fruit, it is improbable that he would have been exactly where he was on the fatal date. On the other hand, ‘Fate’s hid ends, eyes cannot see’, and something else might have happened.
Frederick Schuler was devastated by the loss of his only son, a grief compounded by the warmth of the reconciliation they had enjoyed since the conflicts of Phillip’s youth. Frederick had been immensely and rightly proud of his son’s achievements in journalism—both as his editor and parent—and of the success of Australia in Arms. They had corresponded regularly through the course of the war and discussed finding a quiet place where they both might write once it was over. In response to Hamilton’s letter, Frederick said his condolences had given him a glimpse of Phillip’s ‘blithe spirit, his sincerity and honour’. Phillip’s death had ‘laid to dust’ his ambitions to pass on much of his own work to his son. Perhaps his editorship, or more:
He was full of ideas military, and what he intended to write upon his return to Australia. Indeed he begged me to pick up a country cottage and a bit of land where he and I should seclude ourselves for work. Of course his work would have been all military criticism, while my own labours are all on the political, social and civic side.9
Frederick Schuler was scathing in his criticism of Keith Murdoch, the man whose start in journalism owed much to the Age editor’s indulgence. He was furious that the Dardanelles Commission had been willing to take evidence from Murdoch but refused leave for Phillip to appear—and he laid much of the blame for that at the door of Andrew Fisher, the former prime minister who sat on the commission. He told Hamilton that Fisher had been a long-time adversary of The Age:
I think Mr Murdoch has found in Mr Fisher a patron and friend and has been consequently given preference—unjustly and unmerited, I believe. Indeed politics are at the bottom of these preferences. The Age has always been a candid critic of Mr Fisher. I am not sure, but the littleness of the political mind is quite equal to visit the resentment towards me for political opposition to the banalities of Mr Fisher and his party upon my son.
Deborah Schuler was equally heartbroken by her son’s death. Frederick told Hamilton that his wife was ‘torn with anxiety’, compounded by the fact that a letter from Richard Dowse describing Phillip’s last moments had never arrived and was presumed lost at sea. There was, however, some relief in other mail: ‘The army chaplain has sent a note that the last hours of the dear lad were peaceful and that his grave is identifiable, and so I await the close of war for my pilgrimage.’ Dowse’s missing letter turned up a few days later, but brought no comfort to the family, as Frederick wrote in a further letter to Hamilton: ‘The reopening of the wounds is terrible, and the wreckage of our hopes is hardly less awful.’10 In the old German family Bible, Frederick recorded the date of Phillip’s death—beside the place where, in the same hand, he had written the day of his son’s birth.
The family’s private grief would be sustained over the following years by the convulsions of a war bureaucracy that struggled to cope with the consequences of hundreds of thousands of deaths. Colonel Dowse had written to Frederick Schuler telling him that a case containing Phillip’s personal effects had reached London in August 1917, a few weeks after his death, and had been forwarded to Thomas Cook & Sons for dispatch to Australia. Months later, when nothing had arrived in Melbourne, Frederick wrote to the authorities seeking answers. Finally, in April 1918, a box containing Phillip’s typewriter and other items was delivered to the family. From a kit bag spilled the heart-breaking echoes of life lived and lost: clothes and shaving gear, a dictionary, a riding crop and spurs, a fountain pen and a watch damaged by the shrapnel that had felled its owner.
Over the following years the mail to 10 Lisson Grove, Hawthorn, would continue to bring the Schulers a string of cruel reminders of their loss. In March 1921 there was a letter with a photograph of the grave at Trois Arbres Cemetery in France. The following February a parchment scroll embossed with the coat of arms of George the Fifth and named to Lieutenant P.F.E. Schuler arrived. It carried a message sent to every grieving family across the British Empire, perhaps the grimmest chain-letter in human history:
He whom this scroll commemorates was numbered among those who, at the call of King and Country, left all that was dear to them, endured hardness, faced danger and finally passed out of the sight of men by the path of duty and self-sacrifice, giving up their own lives that others might live in freedom. Let those who come after see to it that his name not be forgotten.
Then came the two service medals issued to every Australian who served overseas in the war after Gallipoli. The silver British War Medal arrived in March 1922. The Victory Medal, with its rainbow-coloured silk ribbon, came a year later. Finally, in June 1923, a named circular bronze memorial plaque was delivered—the ‘dead man’s penny’. The British government struck one of these plaques for the next-of-kin of each of the more than 1.3 million servicemen and women who died during the war—using 450 tons of metal in the process. Many families, still torn by grief and needing no token of their sacrifice, would discard them or return them to the government.
The first news of Phillip Schuler’s death drew glowing tributes to him in the British and Australian press. Not least was a generous obituary penned by Charles Bean that was widely republished after it first appeared in the Anzac Bulletin, a newsletter produced by the Australian High Commission in London and circulated among the troops in France and Belgium:
He worked harder than almost any war correspondent I ever knew. He wrote only what he saw. His letters were true, and only those who know what oceans of false stuff have been poured out onto the world in this war can appreciate what that means. Phillip Schuler came to Gallipoli during the summer as correspondent for The Age and his stay there covered all the heaviest fighting of August. He followed that fighting quite fearlessly, and more closely than I think any war correspondent in this war . . . The reports he brought back from his rambles were fuller than the official news and truer, and his history of Anzac will always remain the classic for that period on that account . . . His bravery and energy crowded his short stay at Anzac with such experience as has rarely been gained by journalists and he held the honour of Australian journalism very high.11
News of Schuler’s death was also met with great sadness at the Savage Club in Melbourne. A Savage member who felt the loss most keenly was Roy Bridges. A portrait
of Phillip Schuler was still hanging on the wall of his home at Sorell in Tasmania 40 years later—alongside a picture of their mutual friend and journalist colleague Neville Ussher, who died on the first day at Gallipoli. ‘Phillip’s portrait . . . Neville’s . . . in their youth, which the First World War took and flung away,’ Bridges would write in his memoirs.12 At a dinner in November 1919, the four Savage Club members killed in the war—including Phillip F.E. Schuler—were honoured. The name of the once youngest Savage still stands on a brass plaque beside the front entrance of the club’s new premises in Bank Place. The club’s first history remembers ‘one of the brightest spirits in Club life’:
Perhaps the most poignant news ever received in the old Club rooms in Queen’s Walk was when members learnt that ‘The Club Baby’ had been killed in action. On the wall of an Anglican Church in Cairo there is a plaque inscribed to the memory of Lieutenant Phillip F.E. Schuler. So ended the life of the loveable ‘Peter’, author of a book containing certain passages which encouraged a belief that, had he lived, he would have attained marked distinction as an Australian writer.13
But the grief at the death of Phillip Schuler was no more profound than in the house in Cairo of the woman who placed that plaque, not on a church wall but in a cemetery of the faith she now embraced in a desperate effort to cope with her loss.
18
Love’s Lost
Nelly Rabinovitch had been deeply in love with Phillip Schuler. His sudden arrival in her life at the start of the war had swept aside the anguish of her husband’s decline and death. They were to be married. A future beckoned for her and her daughters with him in Egypt or perhaps in Australia, that land on the other side of the world which had beguiled them all through Schuler’s stories of his exotic home.
In her grief, Nelly renounced her Jewish heritage and embraced the religion of her lost love. She had a tablet erected to Phillip’s memory in the Christian cemetery in Helwan, and then had Chickie and Sacha baptised—to the horror of their grandparents. The brand of Christianity that Nelly signed up for was the best fire and brimstone that Anglicanism could offer. She became very close to a Church of England missionary, Sister Margaret Clare, who wore a habit and a large silver crucifix. One day shortly before their baptism, the girls were called into the sitting room of the Helwan house. Their mother and Sister Margaret were waiting. ‘Sister Margaret is going to tell you a story,’ said Nelly. When the story was finished, Sister Margaret paused and asked the two little girls: ‘So, which would you rather be, the good people who followed Jesus or the bad people who killed him?’1 Sacha was disturbed by the whole experience and later, as a young woman, would reconnect with Judaism. But she kept the little leather-bound Bible inscribed, ‘Alexandra Rabinovitch, from her Godmother, Sister Margaret Clare’. Chickie embraced Christianity with enthusiam. She would later convert to Roman Catholicism and considered becoming a nun, spending time in a convent before concluding it was not the life for her.
As she wrestled with her loss, Nelly wrote many letters to Schuler’s mother, Deborah, in Melbourne. But she kept until the end of her own life a trunk that he had left behind in Egypt in late 1915, never to return to collect. It contained some personal effects and some of his photographs. ‘Mummy had fallen so deeply in love with Phillip Schuler,’ Chickie would remember, 80 years on.2
In 1918, Nelly remarried. Her daughters believed her heart was still with Phillip Schuler but she had decided the girls, who were still only eight and nine years old, needed to grow up in a household with a father figure. However, according to Chickie, it was the last thing the girls wanted:
The second event which must have marked us even more deeply than the death of Phillip Schuler was my mother’s remarriage to Max Debbane. First we were angry with her for disobeying our wishes—we both—and Nanny too—strongly disapproved of Max. We called him ‘Mr Scented’ and made up a nasty little song with a refrain which went ‘He’s a silly scented Syrian’.3
Max Debbane, a wealthy businessman of Syrian-Lebanese heritage, had been educated by Jesuit missionaries and studied law in Paris before the war. He was a major benefactor of the cultural institutions of Alexandria, including the Conservatoire and the Greco-Roman Museum. He was also secretary of the Archaeological Society and editor of its bulletin. Debbane was a close associate of artists, including Andre Gide, Jean Cocteau and Madame Hassia, one of Egypt’s first female photographers. He would also build, with the help of his new wife, the finest library of rare and antiquarian books in Alexandria, a vast collection later acquired by the American University in Cairo.
Nelly’s remarriage meant leaving the house in Helwan that her daughters loved and moving to Alexandria and the forbidding grandeur of Debbane’s residence in Villa Ambron, with its lavish spaces, gilded bedrooms and gardens adorned with Greco-Roman marble statues. The house was so large it had been partitioned in two by the Ambron family. Max, Nelly, Chickie and Sacha occupied the upper floor which had a tower with a flagpole. ‘Outside my step-father’s library, just as you entered the yellow dining room stood the grand piano half covered by my mother’s Spanish shawl,’ Chickie recalled.4 Years later, tourists would come to gawk at the decaying grandeur of Villa Ambron for its connections with a later resident—the English writer Lawrence Durrell spent two years there after fleeing the Nazi invasion of Greece in 1941 and wrote in the tower.
Marriage to Debbane meant stability and security for Nelly after a period of great upheaval and uncertainty in her life. It would also deliver another daughter and a stepsister for her girls, Charlotte Debbane. Like Alexis Rabinovitch and Phillip Schuler before him, Max Debbane was besotted with Nelly. And, as it had with them, the relationship would end in heartbreak.
In another of her poems, Sacha would recount their arrival in Alexandria and the further shocking loss it would presage:
‘This is your new home,’
our mother said with tenderness and pride,
her arms about our shoulders
and her new husband by her side.
Here she lived two years
and here, in her prime, she died.5
In 1920 an epidemic of typhus swept Egypt. That August, Nelly became one of its many victims and Sacha Rabinovitch was almost another. Nelly was 35. To the tragedies that had overwhelmed her life over the previous six years was now added her own. The loss drove Max Debbane into a state of deep depression. He retired to a room below the tower at Villa Ambron which he draped entirely in black. For Chickie and Sacha, it was almost too much to bear. Their childhood had been consumed by loss and grief. First their father, then Phillip Schuler and now their beloved mother had been taken from them. If that were not an intolerable burden, there would soon be further grief when Miss Ward, their eccentric but endearing nanny, died. ‘We probably loved her more than Mummy,’ Sacha would tell her son, Gabriel. ‘Certainly her death, the year after Mummy’s, was the final shattering blow.’ The girls were eleven and twelve and still couldn’t brush their own hair. ‘Nanny had always done it for us.’6
Before she died, Nelly made Max Debbane promise that he would look after her two girls whatever happened. But Nelly’s parents were equally adamant that their granddaughters should not be left in the care of a man they had never accepted and who was a not Jewish but a Syrian Christian. Theophile Rossi demanded custody of the girls but Debbane, mindful of his vow to Nelly, refused. Sister Margaret Clare shared with the Rossis a common dislike of Syrian Christians and pushed for a legal guardian to be appointed. She failed. The girls were stranded with a stepfather they disliked and who was himself struggling to cope with the loss of his young wife.
In the end, the grandparents hatched a plan to capture the children. While away on business, Debbane left his stepdaughters in the care of the former Russian vice-consul, a Mr Vinogradoff, who had lingered in Cairo long after the revolution at home ended his tenure. It had been agreed that the Rossis could visit the girls at the Vinogradoff residence. When they discovered the former vice-consul wa
s out, Theophile Rossi invented a story that he had broken his leg and couldn’t move so the girls would instead need to come to his house for lunch. An unsuspecting Mrs Vinogradoff agreed. As soon as the girls arrived, Rossi ordered the doors to be locked. After a state of siege that would last for several months, the grandparents secured custody.
Chickie got on well with her grandfather, despite his overbearing and sometimes violent personality. They shared a love of books and he was fluent in Latin, Greek and Italian. But Sacha hated the way he bullied his own children, his servants and his wife, Rachel, who was not permitted to wear lipstick and could not take any decisions without her husband’s approval. Chickie watched as the battle of wills with their grandfather compounded the misery of what remained of Sacha’s childhood:
The typhoid fever from which she recovered only to learn that her mother was dead inaugurated a period of wretchedness punctuated by other, often very serious illnesses—scarlet fever, pleurisy, pneumonia, bronchitis—which lasted all through her adolescence and affected her lungs for ever. I think that in those years she simply wanted to die, that the sorrow at her mother’s death and the misery of living with her grandparents made her feel that the sooner her life came to an end the better.7
But life would go on, with many joyous and enriching moments, for both of Nelly’s eldest daughters. Chickie would live to be 91 and see the dawn of the 21st century. She would have two daughters of her own and become renowned for her radical politics and love of cats, befriending hundreds of strays in the Cairo suburb of Maadi where she settled. Sacha would marry a Frenchman, survive the traumas of being a Jewish refugee during World War II and finally settle in England, becoming an accomplished translator and poet. Her son Gabriel would study at Oxford, become a university professor and achieve great distinction as an author, playwright and literary critic. And he, too, would often wonder what might have been had Phillip Schuler survived World War I and been reunited with Nelly Rabinovitch.