Bearing Witness

by Peter Rees

  . . . The strong men lift him very tenderly from the stretcher. The congregation melts. A little figure whom we have all grown to love leads the way past the grave. And there we left him among those few little wooden crosses on the shrapnel swept point.

  The ‘little figure’ was Birdwood, who had joined those farewelling Villiers-Stuart at the beach service that had so moved Bean.

  The next day, Bridges died. Bean had witnessed death on a large scale for three weeks, but the loss of Bridges stunned him. He had only been able to sail to Gallipoli because of Bridges’ advice that he wire Sir George Reid in London urging him to lobby the War Office. Approval granted, Bean had been attached to Bridges’s staff. Bean knew that without Bridges he would not have been there for the landing and everything that followed. Their friendship, forged on the Orvieto on the voyage from Australia to Egypt, was close; Bean looked up to Bridges as a mentor and clearly agreed with Brudenell White’s later assessment that he stood ‘by head and shoulders bigger than any soldier Australia has produced.’ To Bean, this ‘greatest of Australia’s soldiers’ not only possessed a powerful mind and great knowledge but ‘outstanding moral and physical courage.’

  This may have been an overly generous assessment. Bridges was outwardly cold and possessed a difficult nature, which sometimes affected his relations with staff officers. Bean admitted as much, noting later that Bridges’ manner was gauche and on occasion rude. ‘Several members of his original staff were too nervous of him to make decisions of themselves or to advise him strongly and candidly. His grim attitude only made them more nervous; they lost confidence, and left more and more of the decisions to him, with the result that they were piling upon him a heavier responsibility for solutions and details than any man in his position could bear . . . If he quarrelled with an officer, he got rid of him.’ Indeed, Bean had felt a backlash from the men after writing, at Bridges’ request, the article explaining why certain offenders from the AIF were being sent home from Egypt.

  Nonetheless Bridges—and White—formed the yardstick by which Bean judged the Australian officers. With White, this high regard would remain for the duration of the war, and beyond. Evident from their early contact in Australia, it had grown in Cairo, where Bean soon came to regard White as ‘the ideal staff officer. He never forgets anything . . . White is a soldier above everything . . . He is the only man I know to whom there is never any necessity to mention a thing twice.’

  Not least among the officers Bean compared with Bridges and White, of course, was John Monash—and their relationship had already got off to a tricky start. Unlike Bean’s opinions of Bridges and White, his opinions of Monash were not influenced by friendship and personal indebtedness. Inevitably, Monash would suffer by comparison.

  But when Bridges died, Monash had other things on his mind. The Turks had brought in new divisions and a massive attack, with 42,000 troops against 17,300, was planned to drive the Anzac troops off the peninsula and into the sea. For Bean, 18 May was ‘unusually quiet—as quiet as a lazy holiday afternoon in summer.’ That evening, he was suspicious and went to bed thinking ‘we shall probably be attacked tonight.’ His instinct was right: on 19 May, in the hour before dawn, the Turkish attack went in all along the Anzac line. Bean thought the fire at Quinn’s Post, defended by Monash’s 15th Battalion aided by the 2nd Light Horse Regiment, was the most furious rifle fire Australian troops had so far endured. For six hours the Turkish infantry attacked, in long, slow-moving waves, chanting their rhythmic ‘Ul-lah! Ul-lah!’ as they jogged up the slopes to be cut down by Anzac fire.

  By 5 a.m. large bodies of Turkish troops began massing near Quinn’s and Courtney’s posts. Turkish fire and then attacks began to press heavily against Quinn’s, the lines soon so close that the Australians resorted to bombs and revolvers. When it was over, five major attacks had been made against Quinn’s, and all had been repulsed.

  At Courtney’s Post, which a small squad of the 14th Battalion held, the Turks had rushed the post at 4 a.m. After throwing hand grenades and killing some of the defenders, they occupied part of the post as the Australians retreated. By midday, the attack had become a slaughter. The weight of the Australian fire left 10,000 Turkish casualties, 3000 of them dead. Australian casualties were 160 men dead and 468 wounded. This was the last time that the Turkish forces would attempt a major counteroffensive in an effort to force the Anzac troops off the peninsula.

  When Bean made his way to Quinn’s later in the day hundreds, indeed thousands, of bodies lay everywhere. The stench of death was already noticeable. Bean saw that some of the Turks ‘had frightful wounds in the head—half the head blown away.’ He saw one head wound that was ‘like a star, or pane of broken glass; another more or less circular—you could have put your hand into either.’ Until this momentous effort by the Turks, the Anzacs had thought the enemy was using so-called ‘dum-dum’ or explosive bullets, which caused terrible wounds. After the Turkish attack, the Australians realised, as they looked out on the enemy dead in front of their trenches, that their own machine guns and rifles also caused dreadful wounds.

  Bean detected a changed attitude among the Anzacs towards the Turkish soldiers following the attack. ‘After the terrible punishment inflicted upon the brave but futile assaults all bitterness faded . . . The Turks displayed an admirable manliness . . . From that morning onwards the attitude of the Anzac troops towards the individual Turks was rather that of opponents in a friendly game.’

  Something else brought them closer together: the thousands of dead who lay rotting on the battlefield. The smell from the decomposing corpses was soon overpowering for both sides. Flies swarmed and a plague of maggots crawled from the bodies, infesting the trenches. A truce was arranged, as Bean noted, to last from 7 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. on 24 May to allow each side to bury the dead who lay in their half of No Man’s Land. There would be no movements of troops. Digging, or reconnaissance such as sketching, mapping and photography, was banned. ‘What we wanted was to have their dead buried so as to improve life in the trenches,’ Bean wrote. With the burial parties well into their gruesome work by 8.30 a.m., Bean accompanied White to the trenches, where he saw the results of the horror. ‘Our men were shoveling Turkish dead into a short abandoned Turk trench and the Turks were dragging their men to the edge of the gully opposite Courtneys and shoveling them over—where they lay as we saw them 20 or 30 together in a crevice.’

  In correspondence in the days after the battle, John Monash wrote that despite the numbers against them, ‘we did not give an inch of ground.’ His brigade, he wrote, had borne the brunt of the fighting and had suffered more than 2300 casualties, with at least 300 men killed. By late May, Quinn’s had become a horror for his men. Even after the truce to bury the Turkish dead, the smell of decomposing bodies hung heavily. But the Turks had not given up on taking the crucial post. In the early morning of 29 May the ground under the sector erupted, killing men in the front trench. The sound of the blast from the mine woke Bean, who had written late into the night. Told that it was a dummy attack, he went back to sleep only to find several hours later when he awoke that the men at Quinn’s were fighting to hold the post. He hurried up the track towards the firing line to face a stream of walking wounded making their way down.

  As men of the 15th Battalion waited to counterattack, Bean photographed them. In the bitter action that followed, Major Hugh Quinn—after whom the post was named—was among the dead. But they held the post. Bean was there again, photographing the dazed prisoners as they were led away down the main sap. When it was all over, thirty-three men from the 4th Brigade were dead and 178 wounded.

  Later that morning Bean sat just below the crest with Lieutenant Colonel Harold Pope, of the 16th Battalion, watching men pull corpses out of the trenches, when suddenly they scattered, dropping one of the bodies. A bomb—which Bean, naturally, compared with a cricket ball—came bouncing down the path and exploded against a dead Turk’s body. The blast severed a leg from the body less than 2 metres
from where the two men sat. Bean likened the sound to a big Chinese cracker. ‘There was a blue smoke and a bit of dust, something hit me on the hip—don’t know what—and the dead Turk was lying there with his leg blown off. I expect it would have been mine if it hadn’t been his. I was spattered over with bits of dead Turk—fortunately not very thickly,’ he noted in his diary.

  Bean’s matter-of-fact description of the incident is noteworthy, for it implies a level of dissociation from the carnage. Perhaps unconsciously, he was developing a defence against the bloodshed around him that was essential if he was to capture the reality of the war. Even at this early stage Bean was no ordinary onlooker; his mind was working all the time, walking the fine line between objectivity and closeness to the men fighting the battles. Already, he had shown he was able to take in the brutality of what he was witnessing while still operating with professional detachment. This may well have given him further immunity in what today would be the role of an embedded journalist. The difference was, of course, that he was often in the trenches and the firing line in ways that would not be countenanced today. In this sense he was a trailblazer, but in trying to carry out his journalistic role he necessarily ran the risk of antagonising some—not least John Monash.

  Monash was proud of his troops’ performance, and thought that although his men were exhausted by five weeks of trench warfare, they had ‘behaved like heroes.’ Their battle discipline was perfect and they neither flinched nor hesitated. That day, after helping defeat the Turkish attacks, the 4th Brigade was withdrawn into reserve.

  All of this heightened Monash’s determination to ensure that the deeds of the men he led were made known to Australians. He was conscious that the brigade could be neglected in publicity because it was part of a mixed division. His focus settled on Bean, whose early despatches he believed failed to properly acknowledge the brigade’s role at the landing. For Bean, the landing meant the events of the first day. This was a justifiable journalistic decision, as he knew that those first-day events would not only capture the imagination of Australians but be of great historical importance. As he wrote in his first cable about the landing: ‘There has been hard fighting since, which I will report later . . . When all is said, however, the feat which will go down to history is that first Sunday’s fighting, when three Australian brigades stormed, in the face of fire, tier after tier of cliffs and mountains apparently as impregnable as Govett’s Leap.’ Bean covered the fighting over the next four days in his second cable, but he did not mention the 4th Brigade. By then the tired Australians went for a swim at Anzac Cove, and, he noted, ‘for a time the beach in the midst of the fiercest battle ever fought in the Dardanelles looked more like Manly on a bank holiday.’ Perhaps his tendency to liken Anzac settings to places in his home state grated with the Victorian Monash, adding to his vexation.

  In a historical sense, it was Monash’s misfortune that his brigade was not chosen in the vanguard of the landing, as the 4th Brigade troops were not among the early men ashore by many hours. The brigade’s landing was delayed by confusion, with the 16th Battalion going ashore about 6 p.m., the 15th between 10.30 p.m. and 9 a.m. the next day, the 13th at 3.30 a.m. on the 26th, and the bulk of the 14th not until the morning of the 26th. Bean would later note that part of the 15th Battalion was put in at Steele’s Post not long after landing on the night of the 25th and early the next morning to dig in on part of the front line.

  To Monash, the Anzac ‘landing’ appears to have included landings on the days immediately following 25 April. Even before the first Australian papers arrived at Gallipoli carrying Bean’s reports of the landing and the action over the following days, Monash had decided on a strategy to bypass him as official correspondent. This is clear from a letter on 31 May to his wife, Hannah Victoria (Vic), in Melbourne. Monash drew her into a plan to pass on news he would send her for The Argus journalist C.P. Smith, who had sailed with him to Egypt before returning to Melbourne. Monash told his wife that he did not believe any of his letters would be the subject of censorship in Australia because he was writing about events that would be long past by the time his letters reached her.

  I think there is no reason at all why, if you wish and opportunity presents itself you shouldn’t let people know freely about our happenings or about the special honors we are winning.

  The public is not likely to hear of them otherwise, because Charley Bean seldom comes our way, nor is he allowed to write anything of a personal bearing. But C.P. Smith, whom I hope you have seen and treated well, would at all times be most glad to get titbits about my Brigade or me to make a news paragraph of and he would also understand the spirit in which these matters were given to him to use.

  After just a month at Gallipoli, Monash also clearly thought this strategy could boost his own reputation: ‘One ought not to hide one’s light under a bushel, nor fail to have an eye to the future, and any little discreet publicity may weigh heavily in the scale when later on it becomes a question for those in authority to decide on recommendations for the War Honours list.’

  Clearly, Monash—like fellow Australian officers such as Harry Chauvel—had his eye on a knighthood. Perhaps he shared the widely held belief that the war would not be a long one. It is evident that Monash did not believe Bean was paying enough attention to his brigade’s exploits. At the same time, he acknowledged that Bean was not permitted to write ‘anything of a personal bearing’—in other words, reports that could affect people’s careers. Just three days later, he again wrote to Vic. With the letter to his wife was enclosed another letter:

  Please lose no time in ensuring that enclosed letter reaches Mr Smith at The Argus office personally, and if you see him, urge him to have the account published in full.

  It is due to this fine Brigade that the fullest publicity should be given to its historic doings, and that Australia should know what the Army thinks of us.

  This was a reference to the remarks General Godley had made praising the 4th Brigade on 2 June. Their record was a fine one, Godley said, and one of which they and the whole of Australia had reason to be proud. As Godley spoke, Monash ordered one of his staff to take down his speech in shorthand. He added an introduction and conclusion and included it in the letter to Smith, which gave a not entirely accurate summary of the brigade’s actions on the first three days.

  Bean would later describe the 4th Brigade’s defence of Monash Valley as one of the AIF’s four finest feats in the war. But that same day relations between the two worsened when Monash accused Bean of neglecting the exploits of his men. Bean did not refer to any of this in his diary entry for 2 June, but while his contact with the 4th Brigade at this early stage had not been lengthy, he did observe in this same entry that Monash’s men were ‘a fine brigade—rather easier and freer with their officers and not so neat or rigid as our division but fine free brave chaps with some good officers.’ He also defended Monash, noting that ‘some fool’ had approached a 1st Division officer ‘with a criminal bit of gossip about their commander, Col Monash, being a spy in the pay of Germany.’ He had no doubt that the rumour-monger ‘deserved to have been cashiered.’

  On this issue Bean took a different—and more generous—line than John Gellibrand, who, years later, recalled an incident at Mena camp in Cairo when General Bridges showed him a bundle of letters that branded Monash as ‘an alien Jew’ and accused his wife of ‘open disloyalty’. Asked if he would recommend Monash’s discharge, Gellibrand told Bridges: ‘Yes—if the men distrust him he should go.’ In light of this, Gellibrand was amused to hear rumours in Egypt that Monash had been ‘shot for treachery at Anzac.’

  In a letter to his wife on 30 June 1915, Monash wrote that since C.P. Smith had returned to Egypt, he no longer cared whether the article was published in The Argus, The Age ‘or even Punch as I want the 4th Brigade to get its share of Kudos.’ He expressed irritation with Bean:

  Bean seems to write nothing but about the Australian Division; his boosting of the 3rd Brigade on the fir
st two days is simply ridiculous. My Brigade had a far worse time (see the casualty lists) and made more ground than any other Brigade—but then you see our identity is lost with the ‘New Zealanders’, in whom none in Australia is interested. I gave Bean a good talking to about it, perhaps he will mend his ways. I do hope Godley’s speech reached you, and that you have succeeded in getting it published.

  A 3500-word article under Smith’s byline appeared in The Argus on 16 July. Painting a glowing portrait of the deeds of Monash’s troops—and, by extension, his leadership—it was a gripping account of war. But in briefing Smith, Monash had not only effectively written his own press release but given it as an exclusive to a commercial competitor of the official correspondent.

  Six days earlier, on 10 July 1915, three letters from Monash, dated 13, 16 and 20 May, appeared in The Argus with a note that Vic Monash had sent them in for publication. Rather paternalistically, he said the men were ‘as docile and patient, and obedient and manageable as children’ and ‘full of the finest spirit of self-devotion. For the most perilous enterprises whence volunteers are called for, every man offers instantly, although often it means certain death to many of them.’

  While acknowledging that war was ‘not a nice thing at all, but one has to see it through,’ Monash also appeared to minimise the ordeal. ‘We are all of us certain that we shall no longer be able to sleep amid perfect quiet, and the only way to induce sleep will be to get someone to rattle an empty tin outside one’s bedroom door. If it were not so tragic it would be absolutely laughable to see men sleeping soundly and peacefully amid the awful clatter and confusion of sound,’ he wrote.

  In a further letter, he noted the arrival of sixty mailbags, and the pleasure his letters gave him: