Bearing Witness

by Peter Rees

  Bean admired these men, yet he was not one of them. Whether they would accept him he did not yet know. However he was determined to tell their story. The Cairo experience, as he would later recall, had been ‘a hell of a time.’

  13

  Play the game

  As he watched Indian troops pull dead Turks out of the Suez Canal, Charles Bean was unnerved ‘It gave me a bit of a shock,’ he noted. The further he went, the more confronting were the sights:

  There were dead Turks buried . . . and their cartridges lying about all over the place. The whole of this side of the canal for 2 miles or so had a very rank nasty smell. The burial parties had scarcely covered some of the Turks—you could see their legs sticking out—sometimes bare feet, sometimes boots, sometimes stockings with curious leather soles.

  On 3 February 1915, after crossing the Sinai Desert, an Ottoman force of 20,000 men had attacked the Suez Canal. Amid bitter fighting, the Turks were repulsed after losing more than 1500 men. Keen to see the results of the Turkish attack, Bean travelled to Ismailia ten days later, where he spoke to nurses from the Australian Army Nursing Service who had been sent there to set up a hospital for the wounded:

  One sister from Melbourne told me that she lay in bed listening to the sound in a dreamy sort of way without in the least realising that it was battle they were listening to—the firing of huge projectiles and the bursting of shell not so very far away. Later in the day some of them walked down to a position from which they could see some of our guns and the huge geysers of white spray shot up by the enemy’s projectiles as they fell in the water. They could not bring themselves to believe, as one Tasmanian sister told me, that the guns were being fired into the midst of bodies of men only a little way over the sandhills there.

  Such was Bean’s introduction to war. It had come after a decision by the War Council in mid-January 1915 for a naval attack on the forts guarding the Narrows in the Dardanelles, the nearly 50-kilometre-long strait separating the Aegean Sea from the Sea of Marmara. Control of the Dardanelles and conquest of the Turkish capital of Constantinople would break the stalemate that had developed in the war dramatically in the Allies’ favour, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, argued. Turkey would be cut off from the Germanic powers, and opening the Black Sea would give Russia easy communication with the Allies. Despite the strong reservations of the commander of the Eastern Mediterranean Squadron, Vice Admiral Sir Sackville Carden, the council gave the plan the go-ahead.

  The Turks, anticipating trouble, had constructed strong fortifications on the Gallipoli peninsula, and the naval attack was a failure. It would be necessary to land military forces to drive the Turks out of their fortified positions. A decision came in March to send an expeditionary force to the Gallipoli peninsula with the aim of destroying the Turkish batteries.

  In March, Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, appointed General Sir Ian Hamilton to command the operation. Aged sixty-two, Hamilton had been in charge of land defences for England, but although a senior and respected officer, he was considered too unconventional, too intellectual and too friendly with politicians to be given a command on the Western Front. The portents were not good from the start: Hamilton was not given a chance to take part in planning the campaign, and intelligence reports grossly underestimated the strength of the defending forces and their willingness to fight. It was thought that a force of 70,000 men would be adequate to rapidly overpower the Turks.

  The decision meant that rather than going on to France, the Australians and New Zealanders would now stay in Egypt—over which Britain had declared a protectorate on 18 December 1914—to play their part in the new strategy. They would also play a key role in defending the Suez Canal, which Britain had closed to all but Allied and neutral shipping.

  Now that he had witnessed the reality of battle, Bean set about undoing the damage his report about rowdy behaviour had done to his relations with the troops. He had to convince them he was not their critic but their supporter. He sent an article to the morning papers praising the progress of the AIF troops through the prism of the poet Henry Newbolt, who had preceded him at Clifton College. Newbolt had written the poem ‘Vitai Lampada’, which extolled the principle of playing the game in battle as in cricket.

  After ten weeks’ training in the desert, which was carried out in a spirit which one would have expected from Australians, the first Australian division is emerging into one of the finest fighting units any soldier could wish to see. Hard work, cheerfully undertaken day after day in toilsome sand and heat in the true spirit of ‘playing the game,’ has gradually manufactured a fighting force of which Australia may be intensely proud . . . the Australian force in Egypt deserves all the pride with which Australians will follow its progress.

  A month later he sent a long article that captured the disparate nature of the men of the AIF, and how they were developing a unity of purpose, indeed an esprit de corps, as their training progressed. With echoes of themes he touched on in On the Wool Track, Bean wrote sympathetically and with easy familiarity of the men whose stories he had learned and how they were coping in this new environment. The Sydney Morning Herald ran the story under the heading:

  A COMPACT BODY OF MEN. COMRADES TRIED AND TRUE.

  ‘I hope they won’t break up the division,’ said the Army Medical Corps corporal, removing his pipe for an instant and speaking over his shoulder. ‘It would be a pity to break it up now.’

  The Army Medical Corps corporal stuck his pipe in the other corner of his mouth and turned to look over his shoulder at a line of privates in khaki—the good old Australian ‘peasoup’ khaki, as distinctive among the brown khaki of the New Zealanders and the orange khaki drill of British troops in Egypt[—]as if it were light blue or pink or daffodil yellow.

  Down the dusty white road, between the crowded cheering rooms of ‘peasoup’ came a cheerful column of more ‘peasoup.’ The men smiling all over their faces, and striding past as fresh as paint, the white dust notwithstanding.

  ‘They’re in luck to get sent off like this to the canal,’ said the Army Medical Corps corporal, ‘but I hope they won’t keep them there when we go. It would be a shame to split up the division.’

  The Army Medical Corps man, Bean wrote, came from Queensland, and the man he was talking to came from Ballarat, while he came from Sydney. The men marching past them came from disparate parts of Australia and had been thrown together as one unit. Just a few months earlier they had been nothing to one another, yet the corporal was troubled by the notion of their being separated now:

  You could count about 1000 such fragments from the solid infantry battalions of Sydney and Melbourne down to the half-company from Bathurst, the squad from Wagga Wagga, not forgetting the three heroes from Dead Horse Flat, the local bruiser from Sandy Creek, and Sam Wayback, the solitary representative of Gumtree Gully.

  . . . All they knew was that they and hundreds of similar parties, after drilling for three or four weeks in big and small detachments, were shipped off in big barrack-room flats—rather like the flat of a wool store—which had been hastily prepared for them in the interior of a merchant steamer.

  With their arrival in Egypt a remarkable change had come over the force as the men assembled in three separate camps. Daily they met strangers in the camp streets, on fatigue duty and in the Cairo tram. Many officers and men scarcely knew the organisation of their own brigade. But all had been learning every day that the division was ‘arms all hanging together like limbs of a big body.’ Almost imperceptibly, the Australian division began to know it was a division—that it was all one body and not merely a collection of detachments from different states and townships. It began to realise it was a compact unit which might at any time be sent off anywhere. This was mateship.

  The Signal Company came to look upon itself as the nerves of that body which would have to carry the messages from the brain to the limbs. The field companies came to consider themselves the fingers which would have
to construct all the more intricate works that the body needed. The infantry brigades were the great heavy fists and arms which were to deliver the blows for which this body exists . . . It is difficult to describe it very clearly, but I am not speaking of any abstraction on my own mind. I am speaking of a perfectly definite change of the units which various parts of Australia have sent across the sea during the last five months. This mental change may seem vague, but its effects are quite concrete—one sees them every day.

  To Bean, the men were coming together to form not just an army but, symbolically, a nation. That aside, he still awaited British accreditation. On 8 February he met with Birdwood’s chief of staff, General Harold Walker. The outcome was unsatisfactory. Walker informed him that the staff of General John Maxwell, the General Officer Commanding (GOC) in Egypt, believed that his position was no different from that of other journalists in Egypt. To Bean this was ‘simply thick-headed.’ There were only three other journalists in his position in the British Empire, and none of them was in Egypt. ‘That is to say, [the] “Eyewitness” whom the British people is allowed to have with its soldiers; the Canadian “Eyewitness” appointed by the Government of Canada; the journalist who will be appointed by the Government of New Zealand; and myself who have been appointed by the Government of Australia.’

  The position of ‘Eyewitness’ was established by the British War Minister, Lord Kitchener, as a means to control reporting from the Western Front. Kitchener appointed Colonel Ernest Swinton to write reports on the war, which he then personally vetted before sending them on to the newspapers, where they appeared as ‘Eyewitness’ reports under Swinton’s byline.

  The British attitude meant Bean could not do the job the Australian Government had sent him to do in Egypt. This was unacceptable. ‘As my work could not by any possible flight of imagination be considered as doing the least vestige of harm to the minutest military interest, I don’t mean to accept the position without, if necessary, a reference to the Australian Government. I have to get the story of the war for them for subsequent publication and I can’t possibly do that without seeing something or hearing something more than I am at present allowed to do under these restrictions.’

  He could see by mid-March that action was imminent, and he would need to be on the spot when it began. Birdwood had ordered a cable to be sent to London asking whether Bean could go to the front. The answer came back: ‘Press correspondents are not to leave Cairo at present. The date when they can do so is not yet settled.’ Bean was angered by what he saw as the ignorance of War Office officials and their discrimination against Australia:

  The British Government or War Office is determined to treat me as any other Press Correspondent and of course it is a slight to Australia—though I don’t suppose they realise it—that the man the Australian Government chose to send with their force to give some sort of account of it should be treated by the War Office as if they couldn’t see any difference between him and the correspondent of any English newspaper. They make a big difference in the case of their own ‘Eyewitness’ and the Indian Eyewitness and I believe Canada had an Eyewitness too. [Brudenell] White who has more genuine sense in his little finger than many War Officials have in their small minds knows that I can do no harm and may do much good. There’s no question of my attempting to evade censorship. I’m the representative of my country and not of a newspaper. But the War Office is unlikely to grasp the difference.

  With White’s approval, Bean wired High Commissioner Sir George Reid in London, seeking the War Office’s consent for him to accompany the troops on condition that he write nothing until authorised. The troops were now on a war footing, with tens of thousands of British and French soldiers gathering on the island of Lemnos, just a few hours by troopship from the Dardanelles. These troops, along with the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps—by now known as the Anzacs—were to form the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (MEF) and launch a major amphibious assault.

  Bean travelled to Alexandria and, on 31 March, met Hamilton, who told him he believed a journalist could do ‘the necessary press work in war better than an Eyewitness.’ There were points a journalist would notice that were of great interest to the public and perfectly harmless in security terms which an Eyewitness was apt to miss. ‘He thought that as we had this Eastern show in English hands the Government would let the people have a little more information—or rather would give the journalist a little more scope,’ Bean noted. The two men got on well, and Bean told Hamilton of the history of the war the Australian Government wanted him to write. ‘Well, I’ll give you any help I can,’ Hamilton replied. ‘You can’t begin writing it too early. Do it now—write down everything in your diary.’ Hamilton also praised the Australians to Bean. ‘He thought our men had actually grown since they came to Egypt—plenty of work of a sort likely to develop them, open air and a glorious climate. Of course they’re trained troops now and their officers know how to give an order—they know that it doesn’t merely consist of making a suggestion.’ Hamilton urged Bean to quote these comments, which Bean did. He had no doubt that the Australians, in the shadow of imminent battle, were a changed body of men:

  It seems to me that the consummation which has overtaken these men shows the meaning of manliness in its first revelation and in its final proof. Some of them, no doubt, had their faults; but what we ought to remember first is their gallant conduct against the enemy in defence of their native land. They have blotted out evil with good, and done more service to the commonwealth than they ever did harm in their private lives.

  As he returned to Cairo, Bean remained hopeful of accompanying the men. With all leave stopped and the mood suddenly alive with expectation, he ran into his brother, Jack, and his cousin, Jack Butler, a signaller. Both would go to Gallipoli. That night a cable came through from Sir George Reid, saying the War Office had referred the question of his going to the front to the Admiralty ‘for early decision.’ Bean started packing in case approval came through. He decided to leave his diaries and notes for the book he was planning and copies of past articles with a doctor at the medical school. If the doctor left Cairo he would hand them to the British Consulate to keep for Bean. He believed this to be safer than sending them from Egypt to Sir George Reid in London. He added: ‘If ever it were used it would have to be used most carefully. For one reason, it contains a good deal of criticism; the bright side has to be written up in one’s letters and that leaves a great deal more than the due proportion of criticism for the diary—I can’t write everything here as well as in my letters.’

  As departure neared, Bean’s anxiety grew. With just two days to go, General Bridges called Bean in and advised him to wire Sir George Reid ‘to say you must have an answer within twenty-four hours.’ Bean was relieved. ‘That delighted me of course because I knew I should get an answer now.’ Bridges explained that Birdwood had agreed for Bean to come as an officer attached to the Australian leader’s staff but would ‘not write anything.’ Bean sent the wire immediately. A little later his batman, Arthur Bazley, handed him an envelope containing a message from the General Staff in Egypt telling him to report at once to the staff of the MEF for instructions ‘as to your further disposal.’ Brudenell White showed him a signal from the War Office confirming that he would be allowed to go attached as an officer to Bridges’ staff ‘on giving a written undertaking that I will write nothing until permitted.’ The outcome was not perfect but at least he would be there at the front line: ‘It is the chance of a lifetime. It means that I shall eventually be able to give the Australian people an account of one of the most interesting events in history from a position closer than that of any observer who has been allowed to write his impression in the present war.’

  He knew he owed thanks to White and Bridges. ‘White and the general have got me this privilege—it’s a great reward for all the restraint one has imposed on oneself to have got their confidence to this extent and it is very handsome of them to have supported me like this. White i
s clearly genuinely happy about it, and the general is glad too.’

  On the night of 9 April, Bean reported to divisional headquarters where Bridges confirmed the arrangements and sought a guarantee that he would not write until authorised. Bean readily gave it, agreeing that he would ‘not communicate anything to the press until I receive definite sanction.’ Bean was told to deal with the division’s intelligence officer, Major Thomas Blamey. He would later write of Blamey that he was ‘keenly interested in everything he sees—quite exceptionally interested, quick to grasp a matter, and independent in his judgments.’

  At 7 a.m. the next day, Bean sailed on the troopship Minnewaska. Excited, he confided to his diary: ‘As for me, I am in luck if ever any pressman was. This is perhaps the most interesting operation in the war—one of the most interesting in history; a business of this sort on this scale has never before been attempted. And I am nearer to it than [any] journalist has been to the actual firing line since the beginning of the war. Dear old [Jack] will I suppose be right in it. Well, if we come through all right, we shall have had an experience that will last us our lifetime.’

  With some difficulty, the two brothers managed to organise dinner together on the eve of departure. One officer had shouted them champagne, and another praised Jack to his brother. ‘I’ve never met a kinder man in my life than our old doctor. If anyone needs him nothing is ever too much trouble for him. It’s just the same at any hour, day or night.’ Bean thought Jack was looking very fit, ‘his head shaved like a round orange.’

  There was, however, another experience before Bean and the Australians left Cairo. Not all the ‘bad hats’ had been sent back to Australia and on the eve of departure, Australian and New Zealand troops had some scores to settle at Haret el Wasser Street, where they descended on Good Friday, 2 April 1915, for the infamous battle of the Wazzir. A riot began about 5 p.m. when some New Zealanders who had contracted venereal disease decided to ransack brothels. Mattresses and bedding were apparently torn up inside brothels and piled into a bonfire in the street. The Australian town picket—Light Horsemen on watch duty—was called up and attempted to stop the bonfires and clear the men out of the houses. Five men were arrested.