by Peter Rees
That night Bean told Ashmead-Bartlett about his discussion with Tyrrell. The intelligence chief ’s arguments prompted a pithy response from the British correspondent as he packed his bags in preparation for leaving the next morning: ‘He thinks we’re dyin’, does he? Well, I’m glad we’re dyin’ game!’ Bean could not help but like Ashmead-Bartlett, whom he thought ‘extraordinarily brilliant’, not least for his unexpected retort. ‘He thinks very straight and his written despatches are full of life and colour, hit hard, and give a brilliant idea which is remarkably true. He exaggerates a bit to make his points but the general result is a pretty accurate description of what has happened, and always vivid. He’s perhaps not quite so accurate in detail as the English papers think him, but he is most honest in giving the real outline and trend of events.’
Around the time of Ashmead-Bartlett’s departure, Henry Nevinson was hit on the head by a shell fragment, and Bean noted that much was made of it. He wondered if he should mention his own wound to his publisher, Alston Rivers, to use it to advertise a new edition of his book, Flagships Three. ‘In the end I couldn’t do it. After all I can’t advertise—I haven’t done it and I won’t do it.’ Self-promotion was not in Bean’s make-up.
As the correspondents moved into a new house on Imbros—a rough stone building that Bean had leased from a Greek peasant and facetiously dubbed ‘Chateau Pericles’—Bean also assessed the performance of The Age correspondent, Phillip Schuler, and John Monash’s favoured journalist from The Argus, C.P. Smith. Whether it was because of his friendship with Monash is not clear, but Bean did not rank Smith highly. Schuler was ‘a more truthful war correspondent than Charlie Smith, i.e. he does see things. I don’t fancy Charlie always does.’
Meanwhile, on arrival in London, and having memorised much of Ashmead-Bartlett’s letter, Keith Murdoch met with Asquith government ministers, including David Lloyd George, the Minister for Munitions, who noted: ‘I saw Murdoch the Australian yesterday. He struck me as being exceptionally intelligent and sane. This made the account he gave me of his visit to the Dardanelles much more disquieting.’ As they took in the ramifications of his explosive claims, Murdoch wrote an 8000-word letter to Andrew Fisher, outlining to the Prime Minister the casualty lists, the terrible conditions under which the men were living and fighting, and their courage in the impossible task of pushing back the firmly entrenched Turks. Murdoch wrote that winter was approaching and it brought grave dangers to the 105,000 troops on the peninsula. ‘We are faced with serious dangers from cold, rain, and snow on land. All our engineering work has been done with the idea that our positions would be evacuated by winter . . . And I fear that the decision has been left too late for such work to be thoroughly undertaken before the winter is upon us. No structural material had reached Anzac when I left. . . .’
Murdoch’s ‘Gallipoli letter’ galvanised the critics. Lloyd George arranged for Murdoch to send a copy of his letter to Asquith, who had it printed and circulated as a state paper. An immediate review of the campaign by Lord Kitchener followed, and ten days later the government abandoned the campaign. Kitchener cabled Hamilton next day relieving him of command.
When word reached Imbros on 17 October that Hamilton had been sacked, Charles Bean was staggered. After Hamilton visited the correspondents’ camp before he left, Bean wrote that he looked ‘very haggard—almost broken up.’ He believed Hamilton’s failing was that he was not strong enough to command his staff; as a result, they commanded him. ‘It is rather fault of character than of intellect that has caused him to fail . . . He has an unlucky ability for gilding the pill . . . and, with his beautiful style in literature and kind gentlemanly manners, is hopelessly weakened by it—poor old chap.’ Bean’s analysis was that the campaign had failed after operations on 6, 7 and 8 May when the plan of going straight ahead over Achi Baba was ‘clearly proved impossible, or possible only to a very much greater force.’ Yet Hamilton ‘had not the strength either to give that plan up, or to tell the War Office that the plan must be given up.’
Years later, Bean was asked for his assessment of the Murdoch Gallipoli saga. Although he had disapproved of Murdoch carrying Ashmead-Bartlett’s uncensored letter to Asquith, he had no doubt of the importance of Murdoch’s own letter to Fisher:
Keith felt that the Australians were being sacrificed . . . and he wrote his letter with the sledgehammer phrases—often massive over-statements—which were typical of his writing in controversy. But there was much truth behind them—the troops had no great confidence in Hamilton; he had not the crude strength for such an enterprise . . . coming on top of lack of success in the great efforts of April–June and in August, and of the current division in the British Cabinet as to whether a thrust from Salonica did not offer better prospect than a continuance on Gallipoli, Murdoch’s letter was, I should say, the main agent in bringing about Hamilton’s fall.
Inevitably, this led to evacuation, with plans being drawn up over a month later under Hamilton’s successor, General Sir Charles Monro. Bean was informed on 14 December, as winter storms and wild seas began lashing the peninsula, uncovering bodies and washing away dugouts. Snow fell, and Bean tried to keep warm as best he could, even walking about all day in an attempt to keep his blood circulating. Gallipoli was desolate, and every bit as bad as Murdoch had foreseen.
The long months at Gallipoli had brought changes in Bean’s thinking. When he first arrived in Egypt his regard for the Australian troops was already high; the experience on the peninsula had taken this regard to another level while tarnishing his view of the British army. As well, his politics were now changing. He discussed the issues one night with Brudenell White:
We both notice that the Australians here can be picked out on the instant by their faces—a little hard, but the strong, lined individual faces which men get who stand and think by themselves. The Australian discipline is for orderliness—to get an operation through in an organised manner. The British discipline has a different reason—to make men go forward because they are told to do so. Our men we have to send forward trusting to quite a different principle—we rely on the strong, independent willed men carrying on the weak one . . .
The two men then turned to politics. White evidently wanted to discuss a comment by Bean to the effect that what he had seen since Suvla was ‘making a Socialist of me.’ White said: ‘It’s not making me that, but I’ll tell you what I should like to tell the people of Australia—what, if I get the chance, I shall tell them some day—and that is that they are right in the main thing: they may be wrong in the details . . . but I’m sure they’re right in this in giving every man a chance, a good, equal chance.’
Having celebrated his thirty-sixth birthday at Gallipoli, Bean, with the help of artists, worked towards compiling a book on Anzac for the troops. Men contributed drawings, stories and verse to what would become The Anzac Book, a collection of soldiers’ satirical and sombre accounts of their experiences at Gallipoli. Bean himself was so moved by having to leave Gallipoli and the graves of the Diggers who would stay there forever that he wrote a verse, ‘Non Nobis, Domine’, for the book.
Someone saw fit to burgle Bean’s dugout and steal his camera. ‘There will always be these prowlers—they are mostly men who would do just the same in peace time,’ Bean reasoned. Major Tom Blamey lent Bean his own camera, enabling him to capture the Light Horse playing cricket at Shell Green, and other troops enjoying a ‘smoking fatigue’.
On 19 December Bean marked his last day at Gallipoli, noting ‘incinerator fires going dreamily’ and a big fire still smoking. He saw a red glow in the sky from burning stores at Suvla. On board the Beagle, he steamed fast into Imbros, where he dictated a cable for the Australian newspapers describing the evacuation. ‘Now we must do one for Ross,’ he told Arthur Bazley, aware that Malcolm Ross was lying ill on a makeshift bed in the ‘Chateau Pericles’. Without further ado he began drafting a cable for the New Zealand papers that went off in Ross’s name.
Bean then left
for Lemnos, where, with a letter of introduction from Birdwood, he boarded the Aragon, the luxurious headquarters of the British high command. While he enjoyed the chance of a hot bath, good food and a sumptuous bed, Bean saw first-hand just why it was so hated by the troops. The staff were supercilious, and the officers were ‘brushed and polished gentlemen’ who seemed to look down their noses when the battered boots and worn gaiters of staff from Gallipoli ‘come along the decks on one of their rare (and not much relished) visits to this abode of luxury.’ He had no doubt that it did not make for good staff work to have the headquarters ‘in such luxurious surroundings . . . and so far from the scene of action.’
Having worked on Boxing Day on The Anzac Book, Bean packed his gear and, with Arthur Bazley, sailed on the Wahine on 31 December 1915. Zig-zagging to avoid enemy submarines, the ship headed to Malta and then Marseilles before going on to London. Bean took with him his all-important diaries—twenty-five of them, plus a dozen notebooks. They were, in many cases, the only records available dealing with the battles of Gallipoli. In his diary he noted:
These diaries have been a weight on my mind—and so have my photos—I shan’t be happy till I get them to a safe place, the diaries duplicated and the photos printed. A single shell or a submarine could destroy 9 months hard work and the best records we have of the Gallipoli campaign.
If Murdoch’s letter had helped bring a disastrous campaign to an end, then Bean’s diaries were the daily record of how the Australians had fought. The two men’s paths would continue to cross.
21
A question of discipline
The differences between Gallipoli and the Western Front struck Bean immediately. In January 1916, within weeks of leaving the Dardanelles, he made a preliminary tour of the French battlefields. What he noticed first was that the tension along the firing line did not compare with Gallipoli. There was little sniping, but German guns were bigger, shells seemed to contain more explosives and shell holes were more numerous. He noticed the strained look on the French women as they went about their business with shells exploding nearby. The sight of French soldiers walking through the towns with their families surprised him, as did seeing children with identity discs on their wrists. He noticed the guns hidden in straw haystacks and in bombed-out houses; the trenches were dug not amid the desolation of Gallipoli but in green fields. The British journalists he met told Bean about his mate Harry Gullett, who was already in France, working as a war correspondent. They greatly admired him, telling Bean that he had accompanied a sniper out in front of the Allied wire one night and taken cover in a crater, where he stayed all night. This would be a very different front—if this was where Bean and the AIF were to be posted next. Rumours abounded, but there was nothing official.
On the morning of 21 January, Bean drove through the bitter, driving wind to Boulogne to catch the boat for a rough crossing to England. The boat was crowded with officers and men going on leave. At Victoria Station in London, he noticed the faces of anxious wives, parents and sisters peering over wooden barriers, waiting. ‘Perhaps people when they met were a little extra tender with these men with their muddy boots and their rifles. But the country really took them to itself as part of itself. They were “home” for 7 days from the trenches.’
Bean found that his brother Jack had been transferred to a new job organising a temporary convalescent hospital for the 10,000 Australian troops recovering from wounds in London. The aim was to stop them being ‘at a loose end in London,’ and Jack was working on a paper warning them of the dangers of venereal disease.
Bean met up with Gullett and other colleagues in London. Meetings followed, including with the newspaper baron Lord Northcliffe, who damned the Asquith Government. ‘His mind is made up already that the men who lead this government can do nothing that is right,’ Bean noted, adding that Northcliffe clearly wanted ‘strongly expressed dissatisfaction to come from Australia at this time because that is the one thing that would overthrow the government.’ He thought Northcliffe displayed the ‘decisiveness of the man who is ignorant.’
Keith Murdoch had arranged that meeting, and he, too, earned a character assessment from Bean, who saw him as ‘simple in his way.’ Murdoch was a young Australian of ‘the aggressively patriotic type’ who made ‘a religion of his Australianism’ and boasted of it everywhere. ‘He is wholly Australian and nothing except Australian.’ Bean believed that this new breed would make Australia and Australian ideas a great force in the world. ‘Old Murdoch is a little slow footed like myself, heavy in his ideas. But he simply lives for Australia.’
Murdoch’s role figured prominently in Bean’s talks with the Colonial Secretary, Bonar Law, with whom he also discussed Gallipoli. He concluded after this meeting that the Murdoch letter had given ‘a very powerful statement of one side of the case,’ albeit an overstated one. ‘But Murdoch believes in impressing people by overstatement. I don’t. His idea is if you don’t overstate a case, your punch won’t go home and you might as well not have spoken,’ Bean concluded.
After meeting Bonar Law, Bean had no doubt that Murdoch’s visit was far more important than a visit by Lord Kitchener to Gallipoli on 13 November 1915 amid the furor that the letter sparked. ‘The Cabinet could not get a definite opinion out of Kitchener, one way or the other. During his visit to Gallipoli—one day he would cable in favour of withdrawing—the next day he would cable the other way. There seems no doubt, also, that he does not tell Cabinet the whole truth about the war.’ A few months later Murdoch wrote to Bean about the affair, saying he had been rather hurt to hear that Brudenell White and, he presumed, Birdwood believed he had been wrong to write the letter. He urged Bean to tell White, ‘Lloyd George and Bonar Law have both told Hughes that Hamilton’s recall and the evacuation both resulted from my letter.’
As he observed London, both its people and its politicians, Bean was pondering how best to raise reinforcements to fight the war. He had noticed a sense in France that every healthy man who wasn’t at the front had something to explain. ‘One can’t help contrasting the agonised call for recruits which stares you in the face wherever you look in England with the quiet absence of any such effort, or the need for it, wherever you go in France,’ he noted. Until now, Bean had not supported conscription, but with Asquith’s Coalition Government in danger of collapsing over the issue he had a change of heart. ‘What I’ve seen in England as compared with France this time has settled me as far as this war is concerned. There’s only one way. Why a man should have the right to refuse to fight for his country any more than the right of refusing to pay taxes I’m blest (sic) if I can see.’
With the AIF’s future movements still unclear, Bean returned to Egypt, where the two battle-worn infantry divisions had returned to camp. There they were joined by large numbers of fresh reinforcements from Australia. The two divisions were expanded to four, while a further division (the 3rd Australian Division) was raised in Australia and sent straight on to Britain. No sooner had Bean returned than he got an eye infection, and then a poisoned leg, after being bitten by a flea. He was hospitalised for more than a week, in which time he finalised The Anzac Book.
Out of hospital, he was in for a surprise: ‘In Cairo, who should come up the street but Bazley—fresh from London with emu feathers in his hat! It was a great blessing to have the kid back to do all one’s typing.’ Arthur Bazley may have been captured by the image of Light Horsemen with emu feathers in their hats, but he remained Bean’s much-valued sidekick. Bean was so impressed by the work Bazley did in the distribution of The Anzac Book that he suggested he consider applying for a clerk’s job, with a sergeant’s stripes and pay. But Bazley wasn’t interested, telling Bean: ‘No thank you Sir. I’ve begun this war with you and I want to end it with you if possible.’ Bean thought Bazley ‘a splendid boy.’
In early March the Australians learned that they were to leave Egypt for France. Bean noted that Birdwood had issued a letter to the men, to be read on the transports taking them
to their new battlefields, cautioning them that bad behaviour ‘can ruin a country’s good name.’ Bean saw the letter as symptomatic of the failure of the British staff to understand the Australians. It was clear he believed the fault lay with them:
There is no doubt the British staff here hate the Australians pretty badly—it is the English common people who like us; with the exception of those British officers who have fought with us, the British officer does not generally like us. The Australian doesn’t salute him . . . also he is jealous of the praise we get as soldiers; and he probably quite honestly fails to understand our discipline. The New Zealander is much more like the Englishman . . . and is less of a child of nature than the Australian, and more given to . . . saluting. Therefore it is the custom of the British to contrast the New Zealander’s discipline and appearance with ours.
Bean thought saluting was much overdone, but as an honorary captain he couldn’t escape it himself. ‘I also suffer because tho’ many of the men salute me through courtesy (and one is particularly anxious not to offend them by not answering it) many do not and there is no earthly reason why they should.’ He was conscious of not appearing to look for a salute from troops he passed in the street. ‘I hate it—but you must look at them to see if they salute—and with a chap as self conscious and sensitive as I am this makes walking up the street rather a thing to be dreaded.’
Birdwood could see trouble brewing for the Australians on another level: he was keen to get to London to try and convince the War Office that the Australian Light Horse troops remaining in Egypt should be administered by their own staff. The new commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, General Sir Archibald Murray, wanted control. Murray, who had had a physical breakdown in the retreat from Mons, loathed Australians. Bean noted that he had criticised ‘not only their extreme indiscipline’ but their ‘inordinate vanity.’ Bean thought it was true they were vain—but they had some reason to be. ‘Some of the more ignorant men suggested in all seriousness the other day that the reason why everyone was talking so openly of the Australians going to France was in order that the Germans might hear that the Australians were coming and might throw up the sponge or at any rate be intimidated,’ Bean wrote. Murray, though he would prove incompetent, won control. Bean’s sarcasm reflected deep contempt for Murray. ‘The truth is, I expect, that though Murray dislikes us he wants us there in Egypt for Egypt’s sake. Well, they needn’t waste these troops over there. Let them send a few of their English terriers from the big towns to Egypt. This force is too good for that—too high spirited for a sink of a place like Cairo.’