by Peter Rees
But Murdoch also wanted to know what was really happening with the Gallipoli campaign, as did the Australian Government, unhappy with inadequate briefing by the British. Prime Minister Andrew Fisher had not been informed in advance of the Anzac landing, and little substantive information had reached him since then. Military censorship had effectively masked unpleasant news, leaving Australians with the impression that while Gallipoli was a difficult campaign, the Allies would ultimately triumph. In July, General Sir Ian Hamilton had decided that, despite the military censorship, the reports of war correspondents were not sufficiently positive. With the August offensive, he began releasing his own brief but optimistic reports for publication; phrases such as ‘a successful attack’ and ‘additional gains and further progress’ described the operations of Anzac troops as the ‘Turks beat a hasty retreat.’
Bean’s reports were the most influential in shaping Australian public understanding of the campaign’s progress. But his cables, while providing great detail on the nature of fighting and the ‘bravery under fire’ by the Anzacs, were also guarded as to the progress of the campaign. When Bean’s story of the battle for Lone Pine appeared in the Australian afternoon papers in late August 1915, his discursiveness softened the reality of the failures during the month’s offensives:
Our troops have taken the main Turkish trenches . . . Lower down our ships are placing shells into the trench. . . . The Turks have counter-attacked on the main ridge . . . The beach for two days has been almost quiet. For a time only one Turkish gun appeared to be shelling the Australian position at all. On the others a mysterious silence has fallen . . . The position at the moment of writing is that we have given the Turks a heavy blow. Opposite part of the Australian line the battle is still raging.
Such reports made for less than compelling reading. Bean knew that while he was free to write as he saw fit and to criticise the military hierarchy without any suggestion of disloyalty, he was still under military control. He therefore had to be careful about inadvertently revealing operational information. This necessarily restricted what he was able to write. Everything he wrote had to be sent through the censor. Inevitably this encouraged self-censorship. Murdoch was not subject to the same controls, and his visit immediately after the failure of the August offensive came at a crucial time. Frustrations were running high, and people were ready to talk.
Murdoch’s sense of patriotism had been galvanised by the outbreak of war. He had friends in high places, including Prime Minister Fisher. In a letter to Fisher on 21 June 1915, Murdoch convinced him that his journalism would be valuable to the war effort. He emphasised that with his London appointment, he would have ‘sole control and responsibility for the cable service.’ He wanted to do more. ‘I turn to you for guidance in this matter, and I want you to know that I have always felt that I could joyfully perform any task you set me in the service of my country.’
For Murdoch, journalistic values of impartiality and accuracy were secondary considerations. He was more concerned with the effect he could produce on readers. He loved the power he could wield through writing, and in war such power was great indeed.
Letters of introduction from Fisher and Pearce, together with a ‘wheedling’ letter from Murdoch himself, convinced Hamilton to allow him to visit the Australian troops at Gallipoli on condition that he agree to abide by censorship rules. Murdoch agreed, pledging not to attempt to correspond by any means not officially sanctioned. (Later, Hamilton remembered Murdoch as ‘a sensible, well-spoken man with dark eyes, who said his mind was a blank about soldiers and soldiering, and made me uncomfortable by an elaborate explanation of why his duty to Australia could be better done with a pen than with a rifle.’)
His stopover in Egypt left Murdoch well primed when he arrived at Gallipoli. Although ill, Bean took him to view the battle-torn landscape from the hilltop. Over the next two days Murdoch moved about Gallipoli by himself, meeting senior officers and also General Birdwood. Bean took Murdoch up to Quinn’s Post before he left on 6 September. The visit convinced Murdoch that life at Anzac was ‘spiritual, mental and physical pain.’ His conversations with officers confirmed that a costly and hopeless stalemate had developed. As he would tell the Dardanelles Commission in 1917: ‘I became strongly impressed with the fact that the expedition had wholly failed, that the armies were in a parlous position, and that the situation was not receiving due consideration in London.’
Murdoch sailed to the war correspondents’ camp on Imbros, where he met Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. The pair got on well, and it was not long before Ashmead-Bartlett confirmed Murdoch’s assessment that the campaign was doomed and that no one in London, or at Gallipoli, seemed to have given a thought to this. In his diary, Ashmead-Bartlett noted Murdoch’s visit and his alarm over the state of the army and the prospects of a winter campaign:
He tells me that the Australians dread it above all else, and that many of their positions will be quite untenable. He declares, and I think quite rightly, that unless someone lets the truth be known at home we are likely to suffer a great disaster. He is about to leave for London but he says as he has only been here a short time, and has only acquired a local knowledge of Anzac, he does not feel that his word will carry sufficient weight with the authorities.
Ashmead-Bartlett had serious concerns about accepting an offer from Murdoch to take a letter from him to the British government ‘telling the plain truth,’ but he realised it was most likely his last chance before it was too late ‘to let the truth be known.’ He rationalised his decision in his diary: ‘Even if I am breaking the censorship, that is beside the point: the issue now is to try and save what is left of the army.’ He decided to write a letter to the British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and resigned himself to the potential consequences. Additionally, he gave Murdoch his thoughts before handing him the letter addressed to Asquith.
As Murdoch sailed via Marseilles for London, the war correspondents’ censor, Captain William Maxwell, a former war correspondent himself, arranged for the war correspondents to have a ten-day Greek island holiday at Mytilene. After the hardships of Gallipoli, the town’s cafes and hot baths were a welcome break. Staying at the Hotel Grande Bretagne, however, Ashmead-Bartlett thought it a ‘vile hole’ and complained of the fleas. Bean told him he had experienced no such problem, prompting Ashmead-Bartlett to respond to his tall, lean colleague, ‘Well, you know, Bean, even a flea won’t bite a bone.’
As his few days away ended, Bean reflected on the task of reporting war, concluding that the war correspondent was responsible for most of the ideas of battle that the public possessed. He did not spare himself self-criticism but was critical of the cant produced by other correspondents wrote:
. . . that is why I can’t write about bayonet charges like some of the correspondents do. Ashmead-Bartlett makes it a little difficult for one by his exaggerations, and yet he’s a lover of the truth. He gives the spirit of the thing: but if he were asked: ‘Did a shout really go up from a thousand throats that the hill was ours?’, he’d have to say, ‘No, it didn’t.’ Or if they said, ‘Did the New Zealanders really club their rifles and kill three men at once?’ or ‘Did the first battle of Anzac really end with the flash of bayonets all along the line, a charge, and the rolling back of the Turkish attack,’ he’d have to say, ‘Well—no, as a matter of fact that didn’t occur.’ Well, I can’t write that it occurred if I know it did not, even if by painting it that way I could rouse the blood and make the pulse beat faster—and undoubtedly these men here deserve that people’s pulses shall beat for them. But war correspondents have so habitually exaggerated the heroism of battles that people don’t realise produced by the real actions are heroic.
Bean’s frustration at the constraints on his reporting of the war began to show as he focused on ‘the nonsense about wounded soldiers wanting to get back from hospital to the front’ that correspondents in Egypt had written. He had asked the nurses and the men, and they all had said what everyone at Gallipoli k
new—there was not a soldier in fifty that wanted to go back to the front. They dreaded it—and he was aware of the lengths to which some men would go to avoid going back. ‘Not very many will actually shoot their fingers off to escape from the front, but even this is not uncommon even among Australians, and it is probably less common with them than with most. There are men who want to get back to the front, great stalwart, true Australians—but there are not many like them in any army.’ War teemed with heroism, Bean wrote, but it had been so overwritten that in the public’s mind it had been devalued:
You come here and see the job and understand it and get out of your head the nonsense that is written about it. There is horror and beastliness and cowardice and treachery, over all of which the writer, anxious to please the public, has to throw his cloak—but the man who does his job is a hero. And the actual truth is that though not all Australians, by any means, do their job, there is a bigger proportion of men in the Australian Army that try to do it cheerfully and without the least show of fear, than in any force or army that I have seen in Gallipoli. The man who knows war knows that this is magnificent praise. The public can never know it.
Although tinged with a bitterness born of his frustration, Bean knew that this was ‘the true side of war.’ He wondered, however, if anyone would believe him outside the army:
I’ve never written higher praise of Australians than is on this page, but the probability is that if I were to put it into print tomorrow the tender Australian public, which only tolerates flattery and that in its cheapest form, would howl me out of existence.
One has some satisfaction in sticking to the truth in spite of the prejudice against it—the satisfaction of putting up a sort of fight. But I have a suspicion that I’ve spoilt my chances forever of being some day tolerably well off.
Murdoch, having lost out to Bean for the official correspondent’s job, now relished the freedom that Bean longed for. If Bean was the steady, reliable and thorough workhorse, then Murdoch was the gadfly. Just two days later, two officers returned from general headquarters, bringing the news that Ashmead-Bartlett was going home. ‘Lucky beggar,’ Bean said, wondering when he would return, and was stunned by the response: ‘Well, as a matter of fact, he’s not returning,’ the officers told him. ‘He’s got the sack!’ Ashmead-Bartlett confirmed to Bean that he had been ordered out and told him the details of the letter he had sent with Murdoch to deliver to Asquith.
Bean thought it was a ‘brilliantly written letter.’ While it overstated the case, as was Ashmead-Bartlett’s style, much of it was ‘absolutely unanswerable’ and badly needed saying. Ashmead-Bartlett had made two assumptions in the letter: first, that the Suvla–Sari Bair plan in April could not have succeeded, and would have accomplished nothing if it had. Bean disagreed, believing that although the operation was difficult there had been a chance of success. Ashmead-Bartlett’s second point was that a landing at nearby Bulair would have succeeded, and would still succeed. Bean thought Ashmead-Bartlett did not have sufficient military and naval knowledge to give an opinion of any value on this.
He had no doubt, though, that the British Government would consider the letter in time. ‘Several members of the Cabinet asked him to write to them privately which was not a very loyal thing of them to do, but then politicians are not loyal,’ Bean wrote. He thought Ashmead-Bartlett had made one mistake: ‘He ought to have taken the letter home himself after he had written all he wanted to about the battles of August. It was difficult. It would have been scarcely loyal to his employers to go home and leave the work here, and I don’t know if he would have been allowed to return; unless he went I don’t think the letter could have been got through—the censors would not have passed it. So he decided that the object was worth any means.’
There has long been argument over who betrayed Ashmead-Bartlett, a widely held belief being that it was Henry Nevinson who reported to GHQ that Murdoch was carrying an uncensored letter (which British intelligence dramatically confiscated on his arrival in Marseilles). This was Arthur Bazley’s view, which he revealed in an interview many years later. While Nevinson was a friend of Hamilton, Bean laid the blame squarely on British Major Delmé Radcliffe—‘the little worm of a Press Officer who I think keeps a spy in our camp in the shape of one of the servants.’ He thought Radcliffe was a ‘most objectionable person’ who had the backing of the chief of intelligence, Colonel Gerald Tyrrell, who typified ‘the attitude of an obsolete class of British Military officer’ towards democracy. Bean had played by the rules, and this had inhibited his reporting. His frustration leapt from his diary:
I have been so loyal as I could possibly be—have brought myself into constant trouble in Australia by being loyal to military rules; my own Australian staff knows that it can trust me to the uttermost—but this little whippersnapper the British War Office has put over us is trying to put every difficulty he can in my way along with that of the others: sends us orders by the private soldier from whom he gets 2 reports every week about our camp and who is almost certainly acting as his spy.
. . . The War Office puts this sort of difficulty in the way of men who are doing their work as carefully, loyally and scrupulously as Nevinson and I (for example); and yet allows any swindler, or at any rate rule-breaker, of an officer, who gets a film or photo, smuggled home past the censor, to have it published in the London Press—which has perfect impunity in publishing it, in advertising requesting officers in flat defiance of orders to send similar photos in, and in booming £1000 prizes for them. It censors rigorously all the names of officers and regiments out of my letters—written by one who actually saw them; and allows them to be picked and forwarded second-hand in a bundle of exaggerations and untruths quite uncensored from Cairo.
We don’t deserve to win wars. When this happens in my department, what happens in others! Ye gods, don’t we know too well!
By now Bean had seen enough of the narrowness of the British officer class to regard them and their methods with contempt. Many displayed arrogance and haughty superiority towards Australians despite their own incompetence. There were a few exceptions, like ‘Hooky’ Walker, and while Bean liked Hamilton and Birdwood he saw flaws in their leadership abilities. The mood at Gallipoli had become poisonous, and Bean’s querulous tone showed just how much this had affected him.
His mood did not improve the next day when a letter arrived from the Department of Defence in Melbourne telling him that the Argus and Age proprietors had decided to stop publishing his reports ‘because they are of insufficient interest to them.’ Two of Australia’s major newspapers had effectively sacked him. Bean was annoyed. ‘I suppose the Age and Argus think them uninteresting because they have their own correspondents in Cairo who can send them stuff which is bound to arrive weeks before mine and is not subject to censorship.’ He was also now aware that Australian newspaper politics had played a role in his struggle to win authorisation to report the landing in April:
The Age and Argus . . . did not like the Government service from the first and I believe that the Argus people in London expressed a preference for having their news from Reuter’s Agency in Cairo and said they did not desire to have a man with the Australian forces at all. The Empire Press Union which represents them is said to have put that view, anyway; and that was the main reason why there was a delay in authorising me to write letters or cables at all and why the Australian people went without any letter or cable from me at the time when we landed. The Argus is getting this special stuff from Reuter’s Agency [in] Cairo and beautiful stuff it is. Not one event in every five of those which he relates are true and most are wild, sensational inventions like the famous one about Germans enlisted in Australia shooting officers here from behind. This stuff has plenty of ‘interest’ for The Argus. Mine has merely the interest that I risk my life hundreds of times over on the spot itself in order that they may know that every word is as true as it can be.
If risking his life was the standard that he had set for himself, then
he was surprised when, the next day, intelligence chief Tyrrell bluntly told him that war correspondents were a dying profession. Bean told him that on the contrary, he believed he represented a new profession. Since people had to have news of their troops abroad, was it not better, allowing for necessary military secrecy, ‘to have somebody to do it who can tell them the sort of things they want to know than to leave it to some officer who only sees the military importance of events and not the public interest in them.’ Bean argued that it did no harm to any conceivable military interest to tell the people how their sons and brothers lived, how they fought and what a battle looked like. A journalist could do that a thousand times better than a staff officer. ‘The little important news—the outline which is permissible—the journalist can make interesting,’ he said. ‘The staff officer makes it stodgy. Where is the benefit in the staff officer? In the next war every important staff will have one trusted journalist attached—as a staff officer, if you like.’
Tyrrell thought ‘authorities need not tell [the people] anything at all.’ He believed that in a properly organised nation the government did not need war correspondents—‘it simply tells the people what it thinks will conduce towards winning the war. If truth is good for the war it tells them truth; if a lie is likely to win the war it tells them lies.’ At the present moment he believed the truth would do good. This gave Bean pause for thought. ‘I must say I shift my ground also on hearing that argument. If the winning of a war were the end of all things it would be sound. But it isn’t the end of a nation’s existence.’ He accepted that there were many ways in which victory in a war did far more harm to a nation than defeat. Ultimately, though, he thought the nation ‘must have as true an account of the war as military necessity can possibly permit’:
I quite agree you can’t have the war correspondent running a modern war; but I do think the people of any modern state worth living in will require some sort of information at least partly independent of their generals and general staffs as to what is happening; and they are not getting that in this war. I can’t see any way out except for the correspondent to be allowed to be an independent pressman, and free to see what he likes.