by Peter Rees
You will scarcely believe it, but I read the greater part of above mail during a severe battle. The firing line at one point was not more than 100 yards from my headquarters, and I kept on reading my letter in the interval between the long stream of inward and outward dispatches, messengers and orderlies. The action was by the 15th and 16th Battalions, in defence of an important position, and although I suffered 180 casualties I disposed of at least 2000 of the enemy, and took several prisoners including one German officer. The brigade is continuing to win undying glory.
With the role of his men on 25 April clearly uppermost in Monash’s mind, he asserted: ‘The 14th Battalion on the day of landing were sent to seize a hill and did so with the loss of 12 officers and 200 men, without faltering or wavering.’ Among those killed, he said, was ‘Captain Hogarth’. This was a reference to Captain William Hoggart, who was in fact killed on 27 April at Quinn’s Post. Monash conflated the two dates. The effect was to imply that Hoggart was killed on the day of the first landings. Monash also wrote: ‘The 16th Battalion on day 1 at dusk charged the Razor Ridge singing “Tipperary”’ and “Australia will be There”.’ However, the action involving the 16th Battalion occurred on the night of 2–3 May.
At the time there was little Bean could do that was right in Monash’s eyes. In a letter to his sister, Mat, on 18 July, Monash referred to two articles published a month earlier: ‘The one by Bean is stupid tosh, and spoils a really fine story of my Brigade’s earlier fight.’ Monash was entitled to want the story of his men’s deeds published, but the manner in which he achieved this was never going to sit well with an unpretentious character like Bean.
Bridges and White had assured Bean when he took the job that though under military control, as the correspondent he should be free to see as much as he could and to write as he thought fit. Thus to Bean the notion of journalistic independence was paramount. Monash could influence C.P. Smith to write favourable articles, but not Bean. Conflict between them was inevitable. In going behind Bean’s back to get his version of the story out Monash had acted unethically. On the other hand, his perception that Bean had spent more time with the battalions of the 1st Division may have been correct.
Ultimately, Bean and Monash needed each other, however, and both would come to admit it. But their relationship would be far from easy for the rest of the war and beyond.
17
The non-combatant
Anzac Cove was awash with newspapers from Australia. Monash saw the great excitement among the men on 8 June as they read the reports of their exploits. However, reading the papers for 9 May, Monash noticed that the casualty lists to that point included none of those killed in action during 25–27 April. ‘I am afraid Australia will get a terrible shock when it gets the full later lists,’ he wrote.
Bean thought the same. The Australian papers were several weeks old by the time they reached the peninsula, and he wondered about the mood back home. The latest reports showed that Australians were shocked when the names of fifty casualties were published. The actual number at that date had been more like 5000 for the 1st Division alone. He worried about the reaction when people saw the real figures. He turned to thoughts of his brother, Jack, who was recovering well from his wound but ambivalent about having the bullet removed. Jack’s shooting made the war seem all the more personal. In an almost casual note in his diary, Bean said that he had been ‘sniped at twice today whilst looking over parapets.’
Among the papers that had arrived, Bean saw an article by C.P. Smith in The Argus. He was incredulous as he read the claim that the troops in Egypt were catching pneumonia because they had to spend almost all their pay in making up for the starvation rations on which they were kept, while the officers lived well. He dismissed the article as ‘hopelessly misleading’, concluding that ‘some bitter doctor has got at’ Smith and ‘pulled his leg a bit’ in Alexandria. Clearly, Bean was feeling frustration—he may have been the only Australian journalist with the troops at Gallipoli, but the other correspondents were able to get their cables out far earlier from their bases in Egypt. And they were not bound by the same demands of accuracy. A few days later, on 21 June, another bundle of papers arrived from Britain. What Bean saw rankled:
The picture agencies ought really to be shown up—they are a disgrace to English journalism. There is never a bundle of these cuttings comes in but it contains a barefaced fraud upon the public. A photo of our men jumping out of boats without packs and without overcoats rolled is given as ‘the first Australians on Turkish soil.’ The men here take it as obviously a picture of one of our practice landings in Lemnos Harbour. It was far too dark when the first lot landed to take any instantaneous photo. Photos taken around camp at Mena, or on the old drain along the road, are given as views of active service on the Suez Canal. This is the sort of stuff which the picture papers are supplied with—and dish it up to the public. There really ought to be a law against it.
Bean’s attitude to the use of photos to illustrate the war was unbending; there was no room for manipulation. To say a photo represented something it did not was unacceptable. His mood was not helped five days later when he opened another bundle of papers. ‘My first reports arrived in papers from Australia today and see that they didn’t all take the 1st cable—The Argus didn’t—considered it late I suppose.’ Those words hardly masked his intense disappointment, for the first cable dealt with the landing—and he alone among the correspondents had been there all that first day.
Bean felt the need to explain to Australians—and by extension, newspaper editors—the situation in which he was operating. That same day he wrote a cable to the Commonwealth Gazette acknowledging that Australians might have wondered about the comparative lateness of some cables from him, their press representative. This, he wrote, was because when the troops landed he was not authorised to communicate anything to the press. British correspondents had already been given permission, but he had had to wait until the eighth day before he was given the official go-ahead. He said the news that Australians really wanted ‘can only be obtained by living in the thick of things.’ He then turned to his position in relation to the work of other war correspondents who, from the outset, had provided Australians with ‘splendid accounts’ of general events. ‘I decided to subordinate all other considerations to giving Australians a detailed accounting of the doings of their force upon which they could rely as certainly as if seen with their own eyes, even if it came a few days late. This account could be obtained by no other means. The Censor is helping me get these despatches away by the quickest possible method. I intend to continue the same principle.’
Bean suggested that Australians would by then have realised that cablegrams sent from Imbros, which were generally the earliest to arrive, were seldom true. Despite his own private diary entries questioning Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett’s accuracy, he added diplomatically that the Englishman’s cables were ‘needless to say thoroughly reliable.’
Monash still had the matter of press coverage on his mind. A few days earlier, on 22 June, he noted in another letter home that the men’s greatest wish was for news and general reading matter. All newspapers were greedily seized and passed from hand to hand, even though the news they contained was generally a month or more old. He added that although a fine account, Ashmead-Bartlett’s coverage had omitted ‘some of the best parts’:
Now this journalist did not land at all, and what he has written relates only to what he could see from the warship London and what he was told by the wounded. He, therefore, dilates only on the first landing under shell- and rifle-fire, the rush up the cliffs, and the gradual occupation of a defensive line. But this was only the beginning of things, and much the best work was done afterwards in gaining fresh ground, and in properly establishing ourselves and in beating off the constant fierce Turkish attacks which lasted for the first three weeks without cessation, night and day.
This, of course, was also at the core of Monash’s criticism of Bean: that he had not writ
ten about what he considered ‘much the best work’—the work by his own brigade.
If Monash was dissatisfied with Bean, the troops did not necessarily share his view. They had read Ashmead-Bartlett’s vivid account of the landing, and gradually their reactions filtered back to Australia. One army private wrote to his mother in early July: ‘I have been reading some Sunday Mails to hand with the pictorial honour lists and account of our doings in Gallipoli. They are fairly accurate. Bean’s is more accurate if not so graphic as Ashmead-Bartlett.’
As Private John Sloan wrote this letter to his mother, Bean was fighting to stay at Anzac Cove. Having returned from Pope’s Hill at 7.30 a.m. on 26 June and sent the cable to the Commonwealth Gazette, Bean tried to get some sleep. However, Arthur Bazley woke him urgently to hand over a letter that contained ‘something of a shock.’ The letter came from army headquarters and informed Bean that it had been decided to establish a war correspondents’ camp at Imbros. He was ordered to present himself there as soon as possible. Bean thought this was ‘all very well’ for the European correspondents who wanted general news of how the campaign was going. ‘For me—it would be just as good to be in Australia.’ And headquarters needed Bean’s skills in a variety of ways. Earlier in the month Major Blamey, concerned by frequent rumours he suspected had been spread by spies, asked Bean to arrange a ‘Furfies Gazette’, with the rumours ‘so exaggerated as to laugh them out of court.’ Thus was born the Dinkum Oil, which was soon circulated to the troops.
Angered by the order to move, Bean protested to Blamey and Brudenell White, who then took the matter to the new AIF commander, Major General Gordon Legge. An unpopular appointment among the senior Australian staff, Legge had taken over after the death of Bridges. He discussed Bean’s complaint with Birdwood, the result of which was a request that he set out his case in a memorandum.
Bean argued that it would be ‘quite impossible’ for him to do at Imbros the work for which the Australian Government had appointed him. His instructions from the Defence Minister, George Pearce, required him to ‘satisfy the poignant anxiety of Australians for news of their own men—their daily life, behaviour in action, their peculiar Australian interest which could only be given by an Australian.’ The Government had also given him instructions to write a history of Australia’s role in the war, as a permanent record for the nation. Bean pointed out that in their speeches at the dinner given to him in Melbourne before he left, Pearce and other ministers laid special stress upon this:
The category of news which my duties require me to obtain has no relation to that required by correspondents responsible to newspapers. I am paid and employed by my Government for the above duties. I have not attempted to sum up the general trend of the campaign, except in one, or possibly two small references to events already long since published in England. I do not know, I do not want to know, and, needless to say, have not attempted even remotely to touch on any future plans.
In an earlier diary entry, Bean saw the job of official war correspondent as consisting partly of propaganda work for the AIF, aimed at building morale at home: ‘the bright side has to be written up in one’s letters [despatches], and that leaves a great deal more than the due proportion of criticism for the diary.’ And in his memo to headquarters, he made it clear that he was seeking to present ‘scenes that will stir Australian pride—which is what the nation I represent wants to hear.’ He pointed out that news from Anzac would still get into the press in Australia, from letters, returned soldiers and third-hand exaggerations from Cairo. As was already the case, this would be ‘false news’ that was often distressing and sometimes alarming. ‘My duty to my Government has been to steadily correct these, distinguishing most carefully, falsehood from truth.’ Bean reminded headquarters that he had no competitor and the censor saw every word he wrote. He pointed out that the British had constant news about their troops:
Our nation has not one observer with its army, 8000 miles from home, to see and record similar things of its men, except myself . . . I would submit that my case is really quite distinct from that of private correspondents or of British correspondents, and trust the authorities will see their way to let me remain with the Australian Force.
Bean did not see it as his job to criticise military practices. While his attitude would change dramatically later in the war, at this stage he did not want to make waves. General Hamilton well knew this, and although he told Bean in his letter of response that no exception could be made, he nonetheless conceded the points that the Australian correspondent had made. Accordingly, he was promised ‘every facility to visit the Australian Division as often as he wishes to do so,’ and would be permitted to remain at Anzac for three or four days at a time. This, said Hamilton, recognised the desire of Dominion correspondents to practise their profession. Bean thought otherwise, noting that he had been prevented from covering the landing which Ashmead-Bartlett—and Reuters correspondent Lester Lawrence—had reported. Hamilton was even more generous in private, telling Bean and the New Zealand correspondent Malcolm Ross that he did not mind how long they stayed at Anzac Cove on their ‘visits’. ‘We caught his meaning,’ Bean said, ‘and thenceforth lived happily at Anzac, but with the inestimable privilege of being able to visit Imbros for a day or two holiday whenever we wished.’
Bean had been granted an important concession—something he recognised—though he was far from happy with the outcome: ‘It is probable we shall be able to carry on—the only drawback being waste of time and the moral certainty of being shelled almost every time we come in and out—which is quite unnecessary seeing our business gets no benefit and the State no security.’
Arriving at Imbros on 6 July, Bean soon saw just why the decision had been made to group all the correspondents together there in tents at ‘K Beach’—Kephalos Bay—on the south-eastern tip of the island. Bean didn’t often drink beer, but the press censor, Captain William Maxwell, invited him in for a drink and a long yarn. Bean had rarely troubled the censors, and Maxwell began by praising his work as ‘much the most complete that had been done here.’ He then explained just why Bean now found himself on the island. ‘The reason for rounding the rest of us up was in order to round up Ashmead-Bartlett. They weren’t at all satisfied with his proceedings, and wanted to have him thoroughly under control—and so made the rule to apply to the lot of us,’ Bean noted in his diary.
He soon found out that Ashmead-Bartlett had been doing more than reporting the war. Over breakfast, the Englishman talked about how he had seen the campaign go wrong. He had been forced to return to Britain in June after all his kit went down with the battleship Majestic, sunk by a German U-boat, and while there, he had lobbied the War Office, explaining exactly how he saw the situation at Gallipoli. To Bean, this seemed to be ‘typically and exactly the thing that a war correspondent ought not to do.’ Nonetheless, he thought Ashmead-Bartlett ‘a competent man, though certainly inaccurate.’
Assigned the job of setting up the new correspondents’ camp, Ashmead-Bartlett likened the proposed site to being ‘stranded on an inhospitable shore like Robinson Crusoe.’ Beside an army rest camp, it was ‘unsuitable for anyone who has to concentrate their mind and endeavour to write an intelligible account of what was passing at the Dardanelles.’ He chose another location a kilometre away amid a grove of shady trees and pegged out a central area among grape vines. He had tents pitched with little paths separating them, and soon had the Army erect a large hospital marquee as a mess tent. A cook was acquired, local wine was purchased and Ashmead-Bartlett managed to find some champagne supplies.
No one was in any doubt that it was Ashmead-Bartlett’s camp, and while some officers grumbled about the cost, they nonetheless went along with it. As Bean noted,‘Things always go his way when he’s about.’ Bean found the camp entertaining as Ashmead-Bartlett the raconteur held court. ‘We could not have had better entertainment in London. He was the cleverest conversationalist I have ever known, and for two hours after dinner he would s
cintillate.’ Bean noted that Malcolm Ross and another British journalist who had joined the camp, the older and highly experienced war correspondent Henry Nevinson, would urge Ashmead-Bartlett on, seeming ‘to know exactly how to apply the necessary leverage to keep that wheel turning.’ The tension between Hamilton and Ashmead-Bartlett was barely hidden, but the flamboyant correspondent showed little sign of resentment at Hamilton’s not so subtle attempts to control him.
Bean was in a contemplative mood when The Age’s correspondent, his friend Phillip Schuler, arrived on Imbros. Hamilton had given Schuler permission to join the camp—a welcome breakthrough for the Melbourne journalist who, enterprisingly, had watched the Gallipoli operations in April and May from a small launch before British destroyers banished him and two other correspondents from the zone. Schuler returned to Alexandria, from where he reported on the war as best he could.
As Bean welcomed Schuler, his brother Jack—now sufficiently recovered to resume his medical duties—also arrived. Along with Arthur Bazley, the four had dinner. Bean acknowledged the role that his batman was playing. ‘I’m afraid all my hospitality really is Bazley’s hospitality—all the work falls on him.’ Dinner finished, they all went for a swim. Later, Bean wrote in his diary: ‘I do hope we all get through this all right—it will be something to talk and think of afterwards between us all.’
Taking Schuler to the New Zealand No. 2 Post, which the Anzacs had held since May, Bean found the position now fortified and entrenched. The visit had another side for Bean. They saw a ‘Turk with his black head and shoulders over the trench top.’ One of the New Zealanders, Captain Cecil Paddon, of the Otago Mounted Rifles, had three shots at the Turk, who was about a mile away. Bean saw that the second shot made him move his head. He was momentarily taken aback by what happened next. ‘Paddon asked me if I would like a shot any time—but my job is not to shoot—I am not a combatant—and I will not do so.’