by Peter Rees
A renewed attack on Krithia and Achi Baba was planned for 8 May. Bean, carrying his telescope and camera case, moved with the Australians and New Zealanders after the order to begin the advance at 5.30 p.m. and as an Allied bombardment shelled the Turkish lines. He had gone less than 250 metres when the Turks opened fire. Salvo after salvo of shrapnel burst in fleecy little clouds over the 7th Battalion. A haze of dust whipped up by shrapnel and gunfire striking the dry plain sometimes obscured the hurrying platoons. Bean thought advancing as the thick curtain of bullets whistled past was ‘like walking against a dust storm in Sydney.’ He sheltered in a trench and focused his telescope on the Turkish bombardment, occasionally diving for cover, a shrapnel pellet at one point rolling onto his arm. As Bean did his best to protect himself, all hell broke loose:
The uproar was tremendous. You could not hear the bullets whizz—but I was never in the midst of such an uproar—bang, bang-a-bang, bang-whang-bang-a-whang . . . It was as if the universe was a tin-lined packing case, and squads of giants with sledge-hammers were banging both ends of it, and we tiny beings were somewhere in between . . . We were stumbling over the low gorse, tramping ahead. One boy to the left of me carried his spade, shovel end upwards like a fan in front of his head with his left hand, I wonder if it was a sort of instinct because I think the greater number of bullets were coming from there.
About half a kilometre up the plateau, Bean and the men suddenly found a trench—and were relieved to find it was full of Lancashire Fusiliers. The Anzacs joined them, flinging themselves down to recover their breath. Bean kept his head down most of the time but couldn’t resist peering over the edge. Before him, he saw many casualties on the ground. Most were motionless, but he noticed that about 20 metres away to his right one of the men was moving. He was alarmed for the soldier’s safety:
I thought he would probably be hit again if he stayed out there, but the prospect of getting out and helping him in was not nice. However, I thought, if one gets into these positions in the firing line one must accept the consequences. I waited a bit, and presently the youngster rolled over and began to painfully crawl in. One couldn’t stay any longer, so I nipped out of the trench and ran out to him and helped him back—with my help he could get along on both legs. We were back in the trench very quickly. I don’t think I did much good, but one’s conscience wouldn’t let one stay any longer—that was my only reason.
Despite Bean’s selfless effort to save the soldier, Colonel James McCay, commander of the 2nd Brigade, was unimpressed. ‘Look here, Bean, if you do any more of these damn fool actions I’ll send you straight back to H.Q. I’ve power to you know,’ Bean recorded him saying. But just a few minutes later Bean heard McCay say, ‘Well Bean I suppose this is where I have to do the damned heroic act.’ He jumped up on the parapet of the trench, waving his periscope to urge a hundred or so of his men on into the teeth of murderous fire. ‘Now then, Australians! Which of you men are Australians? Come on, Australians!’ McCay would later write home that he had in effect said to his men, ‘Come and die,’ and they had done so ‘with a laugh and a cheer.’ Bean thought the Australians went on ‘like a whirlwind’ and reached for his camera—but he had only brought the case; the camera was back at headquarters. He was aghast. ‘So I missed the finest war photograph that has never been taken,’ he noted ruefully.
A second batch of troops from the 6th Battalion, led by Lieutenant Colonel Walter McNicoll, came up. McCay ordered him to take the men forward, whereupon McNicoll jumped up on the parapet. The moment he did so, a bullet hit him and he collapsed against a tree next to the trench. ‘Only slightly,’ McNicoll ventured when someone asked him if he had been wounded. Bean watched as two men tore open his tunic to find a flesh wound. McNicoll jumped up again, blew his whistle and led the men on. Men began to drop fast. One man jumped back into the trench, bleeding heavily from the throat. A signaller was hit in the neck, while another man threw himself on the parapet of the trench and was dragged in. Bean saw that he looked frightened and haggard. ‘He was losing blood from a wound in the upper leg,’ Bean wrote. ‘A man behind the trench must have made some sign, poor chap, that he wanted help; for a Lancashire Fusilier ran out, sat beside him for quite a long time lying in front of him so as partly to protect him; and then lifted him on his back and brought him in. A good number of men, of course, lay out there and never moved.’ Others limped back, sometimes crawling on all fours.
Bean heard the officers urging the men on. ‘Come on chaps,’ one said. ‘We’ve got to get it sometime. We can’t stay here always!’ Bean thought that ‘was the spirit—that and the feeling that being Australian they must get on.’ The men were ‘absolutely unaffected by the bullets’:
I never saw one man whose manner was changed by them except in that moment when they got up and faced them and rushed over the trench; then their faces were set, their eyebrows bent, they looked into it for a moment as men would into a dazzling flame. I never saw so many determined faces at once. Oh what a photograph I missed.
Along the trench came a scrap of paper from Lieutenant Tom Hastie, whom McCay had sent back to hurry forward the 8th Battalion. ‘Shot through both hands. Please inform brigadier,’ the note said. Bean immediately thought over the ethics of doing this, and concluded that there was no rule against war correspondents carrying such a message. ‘Whatever the message said, I should have felt forced to take it,’ he later explained. He got up and followed the telephone line that the signaller and the volunteer from the 8th, marching behind McCay, had unrolled as they went forward. He knew it must lead to the brigadier. Here and there he passed a dead or wounded man. About 250 metres out, he was surprised to hear his name called again. ‘Hallo, old man; you up here?’ He saw nearby Colonel McNicoll lying badly wounded behind a couple of packs placed there by his men. He had been shot in the abdomen, the machine-gun bullet lodging in his hip joint, ‘after a number of forward rushes.’ McNicoll later recalled that he had heard Bean’s voice in the dark calling his name. ‘He found me, and though the ground was being peppered with [machine-gun] fire, collected a couple of packs to put in front of my head as some sort of protection, and something to put under the hip, then went off in search of a stretcher party,’ McNicoll recalled nearly twenty years later. ‘I remember protesting to Bean that he should get out of that area before he was hit, but he took his time and made me comparatively comfortable.’
Bean went on another 150 metres to the new brigade headquarters trench. As ‘three or four shots snapped about my ears,’ McCay called him a fool. Bean realised that ‘things were a bit close—they seemed to think so there,’ for of the seven men who started with the brigade headquarters, only McCay and a signaller had got through. McCay told him it was impossible to reach the ridge behind Krithia and that his men had been set ‘an impossible task.’
About an hour later Bean left the headquarters and once more passed McNicoll, assuring him again that he would get stretcher bearers. Shortly after, when it was nearly dark, he came across stretcher bearers and told them about McNicoll. Two of the men followed Bean, who carefully scanned every wounded man he passed. Finally he came across the three packs, behind which lay McNicoll. Holding a lantern, Bean watched as McNicoll was loaded onto a stretcher and carried back to the dressing station. McNicoll later recalled that all this happened under steady machine-gun fire. ‘There is no doubt that if it had not been for his efforts I should have been there till morning, or perhaps till now,’ he wrote.
Returning to headquarters, Bean came across a member of the 8th Battalion, shot through the intestines and in terrible pain. At times Bean heard him crying like a child, asking for ‘Doctor! Doctor!’ Bean reached for the opium tablets Jack had given him. One of the lozenges fell to the ground, but the second gave the soldier temporary relief. He was soon in pain again, however, writhing on the ground, rolling over the leg of a signaller whose leg was broken. Men in the trench urged him to be still, and when he cried out for water they moistened his lips. Away in
the darkness to his right Bean could hear many other distressed men crying out for stretcher bearers; some were coherent, others not.
Later that night, Bean took water in kerosene tins out to the wounded lying on the ground where they had fallen. He stopped at the Tommies’ trench to give the wounded a drink, telling them there was little to spare. Each man took a couple of sips and handed the tin back. Bean was touched. ‘Really you could have cried to see how unselfish they were.’ One of the men had been hit in the head, or back, and was lying face down. ‘I moistened his lips first and then we managed to get his head into a position from which he could suck at the tin.’
Out on the plateau, one of the hundreds of wounded who were lying there caught his eye. ‘Poor devil,’ Bean thought. He was trying to get back to cover. ‘I asked if I could help him—he was hit through the leg, high up, and was crawling. We went some way together, limping. He was in great pain, when he fell saying: “Oh God—Oh Christ—oh it’s awful.” He had been hit a second time through the same leg, or the other leg. I asked if he could still come on. “Oh, no—no I can’t,” he said. The plateau was very exposed, so I simply dragged him by both legs—he consented—into the nearest thing to a dimple in the ground that I could find.’ Bean found two packs and put them round him, and left him. ‘He had torn open his trousers, as they generally do, to see the wound, and was bleeding pretty freely. I don’t fancy he can have lived poor chap.’
Around 4 a.m. Bean returned to headquarters. ‘I stumbled through the gorse, falling heavily once or twice.’ On the way he passed someone who was groaning, a man he had spoken to earlier. He told Bean he was in agony.
I told him what I had told them all, that the stretcher-bearers would be along soon to take him away. It was most unlikely, but it was the one thing they clung on to; so did the men in the Tommies’ trench; so did those around the firing line. It made you mad to think of the dull, stupid, cruel, bungling that was mismanaging the medical arrangements. The men in the firing line would gladly have gone without a day’s rations if only the carts could have been used in carrying the wounded down from the dressing station to the beach, and the stretcher-bearers left free for taking the men from the firing line. One knew now that there was no earthly chance of many of the men near the firing line being taken in before daylight, and that meant that they must lie unattended, sometimes exposed to heavy fire, for a whole 15 or 16 hours more.
Bean realised that the British medical arrangements were a mess—a ‘sheer scandal’. This was in keeping with the mismanagement by the British staff of the campaign so far: everything was a muddle, and late. He had seen ‘no evidence of brains.’ Indeed, before leaving for Gallipoli, Bean had written that the Australian doctors expected a 30 per cent casualty rate. In his first few days at Gallipoli, he had soon worked out that he should always have water and cigarettes with him when he was going among the men, especially if he came across the wounded.
But nothing at Gallipoli compared with the agony he witnessed first-hand at Krithia. An attack that had been unnecessarily staged in daylight could easily have waited until that night. McCay had soon realised that the attack was hopeless, for the rest of the line had been held up. They may have made the only worthwhile advance in the entire battle of Krithia, but nearly half the brigade’s men—more than 1000—were killed or wounded. McCay had his leg broken by a bullet and suffered unjust blame for the failed attack. It was not his responsibility, but he lost the respect of the men under his command and would never regain it.
In his diary, Bean noted both the patriotism and the practicality of the troops. Importantly, this mirrored virtues he had recorded in On the Wool Track and The Dreadnought of the Darling before the war. These were the connections that were developing in his mind about how the war was defining the Australian character. And then there was Bean himself: he had shown the men that he would take great risks to tell their story. Maybe it was bravado, maybe it was foolhardiness, yet he had placed his personal safety behind helping the wounded and gathering information.
For Bean, the sight and sounds of wounded men imploring him for help as they writhed in pain could have been nothing other than traumatic. And it was an experience for which nothing could have prepared him. This was just the start of a four-year journey in which the pain of the wounded and the cries of the dying would never be far away.
Bean was modest about his valour in rescuing the wounded soldier, and would never refer to it again in writing. ‘I didn’t incur any more danger than any poor private even in this one attack. No! Not so much. I have no right to the credit of the lowest simplest soldiers—and I am not as brave as most of them,’ he wrote in his diary. Yet he was recommended for a Military Cross for his effort. As a civilian he was not eligible; nonetheless he was mentioned in despatches. A Digger at Krithia afterwards wrote of Bean in the Sydney Bulletin:
The advance was made in short rushes . . . It was after the third rush and we were about 1000 yards from the Turks. My left-hand neighbour (we were in support about 100 yards behind the firing line) had a shovel arranged as an armour plate before his head. We were both pancaked out as flat as possible . . . A tall, gaunt figure stalked over our line, and strode away ahead towards the firing line. We were so ashamed that we leaned up to watch. Only once his head suddenly swung aside, probably a bullet had droned past rather close. Then we remembered the dangerous posture we were in and, cursing ourselves for our carelessness, we flattened out again, and saw no more of the gaunt officer till we spotted him sitting under a tree at the rear, writing up his notes after the show was over.
Bean’s bravery had not gone unnoticed among the men. Whatever hostility remained from his story about the soldiers’ behaviour in Cairo was erased. His relationship with John Monash, however, was another issue altogether.
16
Boosting a reputation
The news stunned Bean as he stood on the deck of the fleet sweeper taking him back from Cape Helles to Anzac Cove: General Bridges had been severely—indeed mortally—wounded. Bean thought Bridges had led a charmed life during the previous three weeks as he went among the men on daily inspections in open and dangerous positions, careless of his personal safety ‘almost to the point of recklessness.’ He would stand in full view of the enemy, often laughing down at his staff when they took cover and asking ‘what they were getting down there for?’
But Bridges had apparently begun to realise that this boldness—indeed, foolhardiness—could not continue. On 15 May 1915 he took heed of warnings from the men as he walked the perilous track along Monash Valley on his morning inspection. Bullets were coming thick and fast. As he passed wounded men at dressing stations, they told him, ‘Better run across here, Sir.’ Soon he reached another dressing station, where he yarned as he smoked a cigarette before turning to the staff and saying, ‘Well, must make another run for it.’ Bridges sprinted around a corner through the scrub towards the next cover some metres away. He never made it—a sniper’s bullet smashed through his right thigh, severing the femoral artery.
A doctor ran forward and, stooping down, hurriedly staunched the gushing wound, saving Bridges from immediate death from loss of blood. Bean reported that Bridges’ first words, when he was brought in very white and weak, were, ‘Don’t carry me down. I don’t want any your fellows run into danger.’ Stretcher bearers carried him back to the beach, from where he was evacuated to the hospital ship Gascon. Doctors decided against amputating his leg because he was too old to withstand the operation. When Bean landed at Anzac Cove he was told the wound had become gangrenous and there was little hope. Brudenell White and Birdwood had been two of Bridges’ last visitors. On 17 May, after urgent representations from Birdwood, King George V knighted him.
Bridges had been 200 metres below the headquarters of Colonel Harry Chauvel, commander of the 1st Light Horse Brigade, when he fell. Chauvel, an old friend of Bridges, had landed on 12 May with two regiments of dismounted Light Horse troops to bolster the Anzac force, which had shrun
k badly since the landing. Chauvel was senior to Monash and took over command of the vital No. 3 Sector, though most of its troops belonged to Monash’s command. While relations between the two were outwardly harmonious, Monash was displeased at being outranked. He observed that Chauvel was ‘fidgety’ and ‘rather annoys me’ by his interference. Relations between them would continue to be uneasy throughout the war.
As Bridges lay dying, Bean was shocked to hear that Birdwood’s chief intelligence officer, Major Charles Villiers-Stuart, had been killed while out sketching maps. Bean held him in great respect. ‘He was a quiet able fellow—an exceptionally nice man and good officer . . . he was shot through the heart by a shrapnel pellet,’ Bean wrote. On the night of the 17th, Bean was present when Villiers-Stuart was buried:
At 7.30 the staff gathered on beach and at 8, when too dark for enemy’s guns, all walked along the beach to the corner which the enemy’s guns have made dangerous. There we buried him. It was almost too dark to see—the exquisite last lights of sunset were just fading over Imbros—the old volcano cone showing dark grey against them. Above, along the path, mules were going past in the half-dark, clanking, Indians leading. New moon hanging over Imbros—ships out there floating like toy things on the sea—flash on men’s backs as of distant lightning—then r-roll-r-roll as warships fired away behind us. Continual whistle of bullets overhead—occasional whine of ricochets. Constant crack crack crack crack up above. Man passes below along beach path whistling—whistling suddenly stops when he hears the service. Strong gravediggers of the A.M.C., brown knotted muscles on forearms showing below grey flannel shirt cut short near shoulder.