Bearing Witness

by Peter Rees

  •

  At the time Charles Bean was shot, John Monash was dealing with an unfolding disaster in what would later be described as ‘an extraordinarily difficult bit of country.’ This was the Aghyl Dere, a deep creek bed north of the main Anzac position, along which Monash’s 4th Brigade was to move to assault Hill 971. The route had not been properly explored beforehand, and the brigade became lost and delayed in the dark amid the wild tangle of ravines.

  By 5 a.m. on 7 August Monash’s battalion commanders were reporting that their men were ‘absolutely done and were lying panting instead of digging.’ Two hours later, with his plan wrecked and close to exhaustion after the exertion of the night march, Monash was a shaken man, his mood resembling that following the failure of the attack on the night of 2–3 May when he had complained to Bean. Ill-feeling began to emerge against Monash: while there had been heavy sacrifices at The Nek and Lone Pine, his troops had been unable to advance against light opposition in the Aghyl Dere.

  In his diary, Bean dwelt at length on what had happened to Monash: ‘He was held up by finding opposition (he was rather anxious about this because his track led him past or near their reserves) but opposition cannot have been great for his losses were small.’ Bean noted that Monash had failed to reach Abdel Rahman ridge—the northern spur of the Sari Bair Range, coming off Hill 971. With shrapnel pouring on them going up the valley to the ridge, and with his men deadly tired, Monash had not pushed on but dug in on the ridge. Bean ridiculed such an excuse: ‘It seems to me a decision which many weak commanders would make but utterly unjustifiable. That is to say instead of pushing on in spite of fatigue till he was actually stopped by the enemy, he stopped short of his objective without being stopped.’ The plan had been to try and ensure that there were few men in front of Monash for about twelve hours:

  The whole chance lay in avoiding the risk of this battle crystallising again into a trench battle and that could only be done by sacrificing everything to speed. We might not have succeeded even then. The point in which some of these Brigade commanders seem to me grievously to have failed was that they did not on the first advance find out whether they could have succeeded—they stopped before the enemy stopped them. I don’t believe General Walker, or Sinclair-MacLagan, or McLaurin, or McCay would have stopped . . .

  This was the strongest criticism Bean had levelled against any Australian officer. Bean, of course, was convalescing in his dugout when he penned the withering assessment and had gained most accounts of Monash’s operation second-hand. Moreover, he did not obtain Monash’s own account of what had happened until 20 August, on the eve of the first battle for Hill 60. This was hardly a convenient occasion, and Monash wrote testily, ‘Bean to tea and he lengthily and wearily cross-examines me on operations of August 6/7.’

  Although Bean’s tone in the Official History was more moderate, his criticism of Monash stood: ‘he was not a fighting commander of the type of Walker, McCay or Chauvel, and the enterprise in which he was now engaged was one calling for still more—the touch of a Stonewall Jackson, and the recklessness of a J.E.B. Stuart.’ However, Bean doubted whether Birdwood and his new Chief of Staff, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Skeen, grasped how difficult was the task they had set Monash’s brigade. He blamed their inexperience: ‘In France . . . we should have considered about half this task practicable and would never have dreamed of setting more with any hope of success.’ Thus Bean effectively recognised that the 4th Brigade could not have been pushed farther, regardless of who commanded it. Not having been present that night, he was unable to analyse the extent of the brigade’s disorganisation.

  Monash’s leadership was certainly far from faultless. But in that he was not alone. The operations had failed because of poor leadership at corps, brigade and divisional level. This would be true of all the operations of the August offensive.

  19

  General failure

  Raw troops from the 5th Brigade’s 18th and 19th Battalions had arrived at Gallipoli. Reinforcements they were, and desperately needed, with dysentery adding to the toll of battle. Most of the battalion were working class—labourers, bootmakers, miners, boundary riders—and Charles Bean observed that ‘everybody wanted these new Australians—great big cheery fellows whom it did your heart good to see—quite the biggest lot I have ever seen, and such a splendid cheery contrast to our tired old fellows.’ Indeed, the reinforcements arrived ‘like a fresh breeze from the Australian bush.’

  The 18th Battalion’s commanding officer was Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Ernest Chapman, a forty-six-year-old police magistrate and Boer War veteran from Sydney. There would be no time for him and his troops to ease their way into operations. Having arrived on Gallipoli on the night of 19–20 August, they were ordered to be ready for action just two nights later in a bid to capture Hill 60, a low knoll at the northern end of the Sari Bair range which dominated Suvla Bay. Capturing this hill, along with Scimitar Hill, would allow the Anzac and Suvla landings to be securely linked. The operation should have been unnecessary. Anzac troops had passed over the hill during the assault on Hill 971 but had not secured it. Now they would have to do it all over again in trying to wrest it from the Turks.

  The attacking force largely comprised Monash’s men, who had taken up positions in a gully known as Australia Valley, leading towards Hill 60. Among other units involved were the Canterbury Mounted Rifles and the Otago Mounted Rifles of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade. According to Bean, the British General Herbert Cox, commander of the 29th Indian Infantry Brigade, and Colonel Guy Russell, commander of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles, decided just before midnight on 21 August that ‘the [Turkish] communication trench on Hill 60 should be carried at dawn, and that a fresh battalion should be used for the task.’

  This was a questionable decision, as what was proposed was simply another frontal attack uphill, against an entrenched enemy who had protected supply lines and expected just such an action. Chapman’s 18th Battalion was chosen to be part of the operation. Bean admired both Cox and Russell, whom he described as careful and able officers. Chapman protested: his men were tired, and they had not been issued with rations nor supplied with bombs for an attack that required them. The New Zealand officer who gave the orders to Chapman, Major Charles Powles, merely replied, Bean wrote, that ‘They could do the best that was possible without them.’ Before the battle began, the battalion’s young officers ‘had spoken gravely to [the men] of their high duty in the tests they were about to face.’ Bean knew the family of one of them, Lieutenant Wilfred Addison, from his days in Sydney’s legal world. The young officer had said, ‘I daresay, I shall be one of the first to fall.’

  From his trench, Bean could see the glare of fires springing up in the tinder-dry scrub from exploding shells. He was concerned that a grass fire was burning in the place where Anzac wounded were lying. He calmly noted that a Turk had shot at his telescope from about 400 metres. ‘The earth flicked over me,’ he wrote with seeming unconcern. Later that night, as he came up a gully he ran across three saddles—all that remained of three mules that had been carrying bombs. One had started to kick, setting the explosives off—and killing two men.

  Bean was unimpressed by what he saw of Monash’s 4th Brigade that night. Describing one company’s reaction to enemy shellfire, he wrote: ‘Can’t help thinking the 4th Brigade hasn’t quite got the standard of the 1st and 3rd. The company I saw ought not to have run away when a high explosive shell or two burst in the gully.’

  Bean took aim at Monash’s ability to command his troops, identifying faulty communication that he attributed to inadequate training. ‘They don’t know where the other parts of their battalion or Brigade are.’ He considered that they were also apt to wander. ‘The Brigadier certainly knows less of the situation than any Brigadier I have seen—twice if not 3 times I have found that I know more about it than he does.’ Bean praised the men as excellent and rated the officers as very good. ‘But its want of success can’t be accidental ever
y time.’ He believed the units were left to themselves more than in any other brigade.

  Monash was not the only one in Bean’s sights during this operation. Observing from trenches where fifty men of the newly arrived but ill-prepared 18th Battalion remained in the front line, he was scathing about Chapman’s behaviour:

  I saw this Col. [Chapman]. He clearly had not the remotest idea of what [his men] had or hadn’t done. He was saying in front of the men that they had lost their confidence that it was wicked to put them in tired as they were . . . They didn’t know the look of a bomb . . . It would have been better to put them in and tell them nothing (which I rather suspected is just a bit what the Colonel did for he didn’t seem to understand his orders)—‘and now they’re blaming me for this!’ he said in front of them (his troops)—clearly the first thing to be done for the good of a good regiment like this one is to sack Col. Chapman. He said he wouldn’t act on his orders like those if he got them again.

  In Bean’s account, Major Powles directed the 18th Battalion to front-line trenches where they were told to fix bayonets, charge magazines and form two lines, then carry out the assault. Sent out through a gap in the scrub and into the open, they captured one trench before being sent on to another. As the Turks poured a ‘tremendous fire’ onto the positions, Powles sent out the next wave of the 18th. Lieutenant Addison was reported to have jumped up and shouted, ‘Come on, boys, the next one.’ Bean described how Addison ‘with dying and wounded around him, and machine-gun bullets tearing up the ground where he stood, steadied and waved forward the remnant of his platoon until he himself fell pierced with several bullets.’ As he had predicted, Addison died.

  The Australians were forced to withdraw to the first trench. Fewer than half of the 18th Battalion’s 750 men in the assault survived without injury. It had been a futile attack. Chapman, the second in command for the attack, was accused of huddling in a trench with his adjutant while the men ran ‘around like wild rabbits in the trenches, and the morale of the battalion was considerably shaken.’

  Chapman’s position continued to deteriorate, and he tried to resist his next order to attack, on 24 August. His superior officers took an increasingly dim view of his actions. But Chapman was furious with the way his battalion had been treated and wanted to protect them from another pointless attack—which, despite his protestations, went ahead. When it was over, there were 1100 casualties among the combined force of the 18th Battalion, the 9th and 10th Light Horse Regiments, the New Zealand Mounted Riflemen and the 5th Connaught Rangers.

  Three days later, the 18th Battalion went into action, again fruitlessly, at Hill 60. And again they were decimated, suffering another 256 casualties. After just two charges, barely 100 men remained of the original 750 from 21 August. Two days later, Chapman resigned in fury when his men were told they could have another go at the enemy. He was evacuated to Lemnos with ‘shock’ before being sent home as medically unfit.

  Bean’s reporting of the events shows how reluctant he was to publicly criticise soldiers—even when he did so in his diary. In his report of the attack, he wrote that ‘by a fine charge the 18th took one trench but, being unused to bomb warfare, were forced to retire before a bomb attack, which the Turks put up from a trench 20 yards distant.’ Bean did not mention Chapman. He wrote of the action again a few weeks later, describing how enthusiastic the men of the 18th Battalion were and how ‘Australians should be legitimately proud that there was an instantaneous demand for their services. Everybody seemed to want some of the “new Australians”.’

  In putting the operation in the best possible light, Bean acknowledged that the lack of bombs had been decisive. Thus was established the accepted, public, historical record. However, Bean failed to hold to account the officer directly responsible for issuing the orders that sent ill-prepared raw troops into battle and led to the massacre—Colonel Guy Russell, commander of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles. Perhaps he had become inured to the suffering of battle, while newcomers such as Chapman were not.

  Later, in his Official History, Bean did focus on Russell and his brigade major, Powles, saying they ‘lacked the realisation that the attack upon such a position required minute preparation, and that the unskilfulness of raw troops, however brave, was likely to involve them in heavy losses for the sake of results too small to justify the expense.’ Plainly, the 18th Battalion had been sent out under-equipped and ill-prepared.

  In a diary entry at the end of August, Bean returned to the failure of the first attacks of the month, ridiculing British use of older and inefficient men to command battalions and brigades. ‘Poor old things they are doing their best; it is really rather pathetic,’ he wrote, adding that no brigadier should be over forty-five and no colonel over forty. In particular, he had sixty-one-year-old Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Frederick Stopford in his sights. While waiting until the Turks had poured in reinforcements to surround the beachhead at Suvla, his troops had suffered heavy casualties. Once again a state of trench warfare set in. Stopford was sent home to London in disgrace a week later.

  Monash also thought Stopford’s leadership inept. In a letter to his wife on 25 August, Monash summarised the Dardanelles situation after the failure of the offensives. This was one letter he did not want published, and it would remain so for twenty years:

  At Suvla, while there was an open road to the Dardanelles and no opposition, a whole army corps sat down on the beach while its leaders [including Stopford] were quarrelling about questions of seniority and precedence . . . the delay of 48 hours enabled the Turks to bring up their last reserve and render futile this landing, which was to protect the left flank of the Anzac advance.

  Here at [GHQ on] Lemnos the watchword for everything and everybody is inefficiency and muddle, and red tape run mad. I only wish I dare to write without reserve about this and many other things.

  Bean remained critical of Monash’s performance on the night of August 6–7—a moment that he believed had required great energy. ‘Sleepy old John Monash—cautious if ever a man was—is one of the worst sort of men for such a move; but he’s probably brilliant compared to some others.’ Bean believed that British and Anzac commanders were responsible for the failure of the offensives—and Monash, though clearly not to the same degree as Stopford, had contributed to this.

  Monash no doubt would have disagreed with Bean’s assessment of his part in the offensives, but he agreed that the crux of the failure lay with the ‘poor quality’ of British troops and their commanders, who had allowed themselves to be driven out of positions hard won by Anzac troops and given over to them to hold. Monash had had a number of British soldiers under his command from time to time, and he claimed: ‘. . . they can’t soldier for sour apples. They have no grit, no stamina or endurance, poor physique, no gumption, and they muddle along and allow themselves to be shot down because they don’t even know how to take cover. It will be a poor lookout for the Empire if this is the class of soldier they are going to rely on in Flanders . . .’ Monash placed the fault squarely with the officers. They kept themselves aloof and did ‘not mix with the men as we do,’ and were ‘chiefly concerned in looking after themselves and making themselves comfortable.’

  If Bean was critical of the officers he believed too old or incompetent to command in war, he had nothing but praise for the Australian troops who had been prepared to sacrifice their lives during the August offensive. The Light Horsemen slaughtered at The Nek on 7 August were ‘single-minded, loyal Australian country lads—who left their trenches in the grey light of that morning with all their simple treasures on their backs to bivouac in the scrub that evening—the shades of evening found them lying in the scrub with God’s wide sky above them.’ Bean saw this as a deed of ‘self-sacrifice and bravery’ unsurpassed in military history.

  Such gallantry fitted the image of the hardy, bush-bred soldier who Bean believed formed the backbone of the AIF. The Australians and New Zealanders did ‘not trust the Tommy,’ he asserted, adding that they ha
d ‘not the slightest confidence in Kitchener’s army.’

  The truth is that after 100 years of breeding in slums, the British race is not the same, and can’t be expected to be the same, as in the days of Waterloo. It is breeding one fine class at the expense of all the rest. The only hope for it is that those puny narrow chested little men may, if they come out to Australia or N.Z. or Canada, within 2 generations breed men again. England herself, unless she does something heroic, cannot hope to.

  Bean clearly believed that the industrial revolution in Britain, which had forced people into unplanned and unhealthy cities, was now playing out adversely on the battlefield. Because of a failure to better plan towns and cities and thus improve the health of the people, Tommies were inferior to the troops from the Dominions. It was a theme he would return to again and again.

  Bean’s more immediate focus was the failure of the final operations in the August offensive. The Australians had captured trenches at the summit of Hill 60, but the Turks clung to the vital northern face that overlooked Suvla. The month-long operations had been a disaster, leaving the Allied forces still with just a toehold on the peninsula, and winter approaching. The prospects were bleak.

  20

  The workhorse and the gadfly

  When Keith Murdoch arrived at Gallipoli, Charles Bean was just managing to get around, despite the bullet in his leg, when dysentery sent him back to bed again. Arriving on 3 September 1915, Murdoch was on his way to London for the Sydney Sun and Melbourne Herald to manage their jointly operated United Cable Service from the Times office. He also had another task: the Australian government had commissioned him to stop off in Egypt to investigate alleged irregularities in the mail service to the troops.