Bearing Witness

by Peter Rees

  The noise of battle had subsided. In the distance the German cavalry was ‘hacking, slashing and hewing’ at the retreating Belgians, mowing them down with machine guns:

  The German army has passed like some irresistible engine over nearly a hundred miles of the most innocent, industrious, closely-settled country in Europe. Thousands upon thousands have writhed beneath its feet. If in the villages the peaceful farmers and bakers and confectioners of the week before, the innkeeper and the people that kept the sweet shop, have been exasperated to the point of firing upon the advancing troops from their windows, they have been hanged or tried and shot at daybreak quite regularly and frankly according to the laws of war. The villages of a week ago have been burned, the pretty farm houses stand smoking. The German army has crushed the main defence of this small nation before its friends could get to the help of it, and is placing its booted heel upon the national capital.

  As Bean pored over cables writing War Notes and editorials, the British government suggested that an official correspondent might be sent with the AIF, on much the same basis as the ‘official eyewitnesses’ with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France. A special Australian Journalists’ Association (AJA) committee meeting in Melbourne on 24 August passed the request on to the AJA’s central executive in Sydney, together with the names of those who had already announced themselves candidates, the prominent Melbourne journalist Keith Murdoch among them. When applications for the post closed, twenty nominations had been received. These were finally balloted down to two contenders: Murdoch and Bean. In the final nationwide vote of journalists Bean had a narrow majority, and the AJA submitted his name to Senator George Pearce, the Defence Minister in the new Labor government of Andrew Fisher, which had been elected on 5 September.

  Bean attributed his victory largely to the lobbying of his Herald mentor Archie Whyte, who had been posted to Melbourne as the Herald correspondent. Murdoch was deeply disappointed, but was generous in his congratulations to Bean. As one of Murdoch’s biographers later wrote, the right choice was undoubtedly made, for Murdoch, with his idealism and independence of spirit, almost certainly would have found irksome the restrictions imposed on an official correspondent.

  In resigning from the Herald to take the new job, Bean walked away to an unknown future. The Herald’s general manager, W.G. Conley, thought him foolish, adding: ‘You don’t think the Australians will ever be used at the front, do you? They will never be further than the lines of communication,’ and even if Australian troops were used, ‘they would never let you get near the front anyway.’

  Undeterred, on 20 September 1914, Bean caught the express to Melbourne to report to Major General William Throsby Bridges, commander of the AIF. Entering the corridors of the grim Victoria Barracks overlooking St Kilda Road, Bean first met Bridges’ Chief of Staff, Lieutenant Colonel Cyril Brudenell White. He was immediately struck by White’s warmth and personal charm. White hurried to put Bean at ease: ‘From his first word I felt he was my friend.’ Indeed, Bean immediately ‘came under White’s spell.’ White introduced him to Bridges—‘a tall, thin, professor-like figure’ who ‘had the stoop of a student and a cold manner. He spoke few words.’

  Bridges and White explained that he would be graded as a captain but would retain his civilian status. Bean would later learn that the main reason for this was that though bound by military control, as the correspondent he should be free to see as much as he could and to write as he thought fit. This freedom would remain throughout the war, with White, and later the Australian Corps commander Lieutenant General William Birdwood, both holding that Bean ‘should preserve his independence and be free, in emergency, to criticise the conduct of themselves and others without any breach of loyalty.’ The only basic rule was that no cable should be sent except through the censor; for the immediate future, White or a subordinate would fulfil that role. Theoretically, at least, Bean would have more freedom to report than his British counterparts, who quickly faced highly restrictive censorship under the new Defence of the Realm Act. Australia would introduce its own version, the War Precautions Act, which, among its various controls, also introduced censorship of publications and letters. This meant Australian newspapers were brought into the net restricting what they could publish on the war.

  Bean also spoke to Defence Minister Pearce to discuss how his reports would be printed in the Commonwealth Gazette and distributed free to the morning and evening newspapers. Eight days later the Defence Department formally ratified Bean’s appointment to the headquarters of the 1st Australian Division, with his pay set at £600 annually and a field allowance of 10 shillings a day. He would remain a civilian but wear a close copy of an officer’s uniform, without buttons or badges of rank. At times he would be ‘horribly uncomfortable’ in his ‘enigmatic uniform’.

  From the St Kilda boarding house where his brother Monty and his new wife, Mabel, were living, Bean wrote to his mother at the end of September, optimistic about the coming experience, joking about his marital prospects and making it clear he did not believe the war would last long. ‘I do believe that I shall come back from this expedition after 12 months or so in the open air far stronger and healthier than I have ever been in my life,’ he wrote. ‘But I don’t think I shall bring back a German fraulein . . . the family breakfast table would be too argumentative.’ He told her he had bought two dictionaries, French and German, and a Rhine guidebook. He clearly expected a short war.

  The Sydney press representatives in Melbourne honoured Bean with a lunch on 28 September, and forty Melbourne journalists did the same five days later. George Pearce, the principal speaker, hoped that Bean would go to the front but realised that he might not be allowed to do so. Pearce made it clear that he saw Bean writing the history of Australia’s involvement:

  He will have to write part of the history of Australia . . . I have read Flagships Three [and] I am satisfied that the man who wrote that book is just the man to write about the scenes that he will witness abroad. We are hoping that nothing will be lost of what he writes. I am endeavouring to make arrangements so that if the Censor does wield a too vigorous pen, the original will be kept so that what was written will be known by future generations.

  The after-dinner speeches impressed Bean, but in a letter to his parents he was less complimentary about his own. ‘I had practically learnt mine by heart, and, as it was short and I forgot only a little bit, it didn’t go so badly.’ His preparations were almost complete, and he was going with a ‘plentiful supply of notebooks, copying paper, blue pencils, knife fork and spoon, [and] wristwatch.’

  Bean was allowed to choose his own batman—as he put it, ‘a sort of personal servant who is at the same time enlisted and carries a rifle.’ Archie Whyte thought a junior clerk from The Argus office, Arthur Bazley, would be ideal. As Bazley later recalled, Whyte introduced him to Bean, who was wearing ‘gold-rimmed pince-nez and a straw hat’, as they stood on the front steps of the Argus building. Whyte fired a series of questions at Bazley, from Boy Scouts badges he had been awarded to his abilities as a cook and his knowledge of first aid. Bazley only had time to nod his head. Facing Bean, Whyte said: ‘There you are, Charlie, Didn’t I tell you so?’

  Bean quietly asked Bazley if he would like to join him as his batman. The eighteen-year-old Bazley wanted to join the AIF, but the age for enlistment was nineteen. In a letter to his parents, Bean described Bazley as ‘a youngster who is awfully keen to go’, but added that he had been ‘held up on his chest measurement, but I think we can get him through.’ If not, there were several others who were anxious for the job, he said. As Bazley confirmed, the issue was not his chest measurement but his age. After his meeting with Bean, Bazley applied to enlist again:

  By the following afternoon I had got into the AIF—by the old but simple expedient, followed by numbers of others in those days, of overstating my age. The officer at Victoria Barracks who attested me was General Bridges’ junior ADC, Lieut. E.C.P. Plant . . . While waitin
g in the corridor—his door was ajar—I heard Plant say: ‘Well, Bean, if he is 18 when he comes in here we can’t take him.’ He need not have worried on that score—the only one who showed any sign of worry was C.E.W. who, being the man that he was, realised that he was condoning something that he knew was not altogether right.

  With his legal background, Bean would have known that he was participating in a noble lie. But in the heady atmosphere of the early days of the war, many ‘blind eyes’ were turned to under-age men wanting to enlist. Bazley was soon—and would remain—Bean’s devoted and loyal servant, clerk and typist. For the next ten months, though, a cloud hung over his enlistment. In the event of his death, uncomfortable questions might have been asked.

  On 20 October, Bean and Bazley boarded RMS Orvieto, the ship that had brought Bean back to Australia 18 months earlier. Already, the crowds were cheering and breaking through the barrier at the wharf. ‘I saw one excited sentry chasing a man off with a bayonet but there were about 2000 others behind,’ he wrote to his mother.

  Also on board Orvieto were General Bridges and his staff of the 1st Australian Division, and another journalist, Phillip Schuler from the Melbourne Age, whose involvement had been approved by the previous government before George Pearce, as the new Defence Minister, decided that one journalist should represent all Australian papers. Schuler and Bean were soon good friends.

  Because the German warships Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Königsberg and Emden were known to be cruising somewhere in the waters around Australia, departure of the troopships was postponed until adequate naval escort vessels were available. The thirty-six-ship convoy carrying 20,000 Australians and 8000 New Zealanders was to rendezvous in King George’s Sound, off Albany, Western Australia, on its way to Europe under the escort of the RAN light cruisers Sydney and Melbourne, the Royal Navy cruiser Minotaur, and the Japanese cruiser Ibuki.

  Bean’s brother Jack was also sailing in the convoy, on the Euripides. On 21 October the Governor-General, Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson, boarded the ship as thousands of wellwishers cheered themselves hoarse. At 3 p.m. Orvieto pulled away from the pier in Port Melbourne and the band of the 5th Battalion played the national anthem as streamers tossed to those on the pier snapped. As Orvieto got under way, Bean noted in his diary that he thought he saw his parents waving a white handkerchief. He would not see them again for nearly five years.

  It is doubtful that they would have been mollified by the knowledge that the Government had authorised their son to arrange a life and accident insurance policy for £2000. And they might have raised an eyebrow at Pearce’s reassurance that if he were blinded or otherwise disabled, the Government ‘would see that I was fairly treated.’ Bean, at least, was satisfied as he headed off, suggesting that the Government merely take over the payments for the £500 life policy he already held. Being a war reporter was never going to make him a rich man.

  12

  A hell of a time

  Sensing the momentous events that were about to occur, Charles Bean wondered what his role would be. As the Orvieto left Australian waters on 1 November 1914, he mused, ‘One can hardly realise that we are off now on a really huge, hazardous experiment.’ What gave him heart were the words of one newspaper: ‘No journalist in Australia, or, one may venture to say, elsewhere, has a more picturesque and graphic style in describing scenes of peace, and the spirit animating his fine book, Flagships Three . . . is sufficient assurance that he will be equally at home in writing of war.’

  The passage to the Middle East was eventful. In the previous two months, the German raider Emden had sunk or captured seventeen ships, and only two days earlier had torpedoed a French destroyer and a Russian cruiser in the seas off Malaya, then vanished. Sleeping on the deck, just eight days out from Australia, Bean noted that the air was mild and the only sound was the ‘fist fist’ from the engine room. But the tranquillity of the night gave way the next morning, 9 November, to news from the Cocos Islands that Emden had been sighted some 80 kilometres west of the convoy, and HMAS Sydney was ordered off in pursuit. Messages came through at intervals updating events.

  Immediately Sydney spotted Emden, at 9.15 a.m., both ships prepared for combat. Emden fought a gallant running battle for more than an hour, but its four-inch guns could not match Sydney’s six-inch guns. At 11.20 a.m., after 134 German crew had been killed and another sixty-nine wounded, the Germans beached the wrecked and twisted Emden on a coral reef at North Keeling Island. Sydney got off lightly, with only four killed and sixteen wounded. Meanwhile, Bean and those on the Orvieto conjectured about what was happening:

  We lounged over the rail like spectators in the gallery looking down over the glassy sea—the transports steaming steadily on their course at their usual snail’s pace. Just over the horizon someone was being done to death, in the midst of crashing steel work, burning decks, sudden flashes of flame . . . About 11.15 we heard that the fight was practically over. The enemy had been stopped before she even came within sight of us. ‘Enemy run ashore to save sinking,’ said the message . . . It was all very sudden, this fight in the morning—the Sydney had raced off, killed them, and was ready to return as swiftly as a terrier would kill a cat. It had taken just twenty-five minutes for the Sydney to finish ‘her business’.

  The sinking of the Emden ended Bean’s plan to use the voyage to write his long-planned novel about ancient Rome. He had spent each morning dictating half a dozen pages to Arthur Bazley, but as his batman later recorded, ‘Things started to move too quickly.’

  Reaching Colombo, Bean took a launch over to Sydney and interviewed the ship’s captain, Captain John Glossop, and other officers. He needed the facts from those directly involved. ‘I stayed up dictating to Bazley until 3.30 and then turned in.’ He posted the story back to Australia, with two further articles later in the day.

  This had begun his coverage of the war, but the AIF’s officers didn’t know quite what to make of him. One of them, John Gellibrand, who would become one of the 1st AIF’s five divisional commanders in 1918 and a good friend of Bean, later wrote: ‘We wondered what could and ought to be done to help unobtrusively towards a sufficiency of knowledge of men, manners and methods military so that the poor bloke’s stuff should be of value as well of interest.’

  Having the honorary rank of captain gave Bean ready access to the senior staff from the outset. In the mess he sat at a table with not just Gellibrand but the likes of Colonel Neville Howse, VC, Lieutenant Colonel William Paterson, Major Walter Cass, Major Duncan Glasfurd and Major Charles Brand. For Bean, the voyage was a chance to build trust and connections with the leaders he would have to deal with daily. Moreover, dining with General Bridges gave Bean a unique opportunity to forge relationships at the highest level.

  As a journalist he was in unknown territory. A special niche had been created for him in the AIF, but no one could know just how this would actually function. Since he answered to no senior commander, Bean knew that the execution of his duties would depend entirely on his judgement.

  A traditional hostility had existed between the press and military ever since the London Times journalist William Howard Russell revealed the barbarity of the Crimean War in the mid-1850s. Bean’s early mentor Banjo Paterson noted after his stint as a correspondent during the Boer War, the Boxer Rebellion and the Great War: ‘A war correspondent, in army eyes, is an evil to be tolerated, in fact he is distinctly nah-poo . . .’ The Australian military staff could not avoid inheriting this attitude, but Bean was fortunate to have had an early opportunity to make his transparent honesty and discreet patriotism clearly evident. He was beginning to see that he needed the officers’ trust much as they needed his honesty.

  The voyage gave Bean time to contemplate how he would collect information for his war reports: ‘What to write, and where to write it, were the main problems a war correspondent had to solve.’ As they neared Egypt on 27 November, he decided to make his diary his chief personal record of the war:

  A classification of
items under subjects—such as I generally make—is not suitable for this job—not yet at any rate. The diary has drawbacks; but after all, where the events are mainly historical, and later events put the nose of earlier events out of joint, the diary form is useful . . . There are strong points against a diary. It is not always easy to find from it the facts you want when you are afterwards writing up some particular subject . . . It would be easier to write these things up if at the time when the points are noted they were noted under that heading (as I have usually done). I try to do this too. But the main record, I can see, will be most conveniently kept in diary form.

  Writing or acquiring information took so much of his time he had almost stopped reading. He had been writing virtually since the Orvieto left Aden, and the next day he would have to start gathering facts to be written up in the following days and posted at Suez. While his reading had suffered, he realised his experience was unique. ‘It is a great life and after all one is learning half the time even if not from books.’

  Bean’s other concern was keeping a balance between articles for the evening and morning newspapers and making the two equally interesting. Events soon gave him plenty of material. On 28 November he heard that the AIF and the New Zealanders would not be going to England but would stay in Egypt. He thought the decision wise. The men would spend the worst of the winter in a climate they were accustomed to, and, importantly, given the high death rate among horses during the voyage, at least 300 horses would be saved. ‘Above all we shall begin to count as of value from the day we reach Egypt . . . if the Turks do come along we are there with the Indian troops, a pretty considerable army, to defend the [Suez] canal, which the Turks would have to reach across 100 miles of desert.’