by Peter Rees
Bean was also critical of the new Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir William Robertson, who had turned down a push for a distinct Australian Army. ‘He didn’t see that it served a useful purpose—and the fact that we were a nation and wanted to fight and carve our history as a nation didn’t go for anything with him,’ Bean wrote, explaining that Robertson’s attitude was, ‘What’s the use of a separate staff for 120,000 men?’ Bean saw that the AIF had ‘grown into an army and it has become a very big job indeed.’ The AIF had to be handled differently; Australia was a nation in its own right and the British did not understand Australians had their own ideals and character. To Bean’s relief the Australian government refused to budge over its desire for an Australian Army, forcing Robertson to give a commitment that it would happen—at some unspecified time in the future.
Bean clearly wanted to see the AIF operating with greater independence—and, not surprisingly, he had no doubt that White should be playing a senior leadership role and promoted to major-general. ‘White is the big Australian soldier,’ he asserted, the only man on Birdwood’s staff with a ‘creative brain’. If he had a fault it was ‘trying to keep his finger on everyone’s business.’ He fancied this would wear White out; nonetheless, it would be ‘the British Empire’s loss and Australia’s more than his if they fail to put him to his full use before the war is over.’
Bean sailed with the AIF from Egypt, complete with a kapok lifebelt in case of U-boat attack. Drama, though, came not from an enemy submarine. On deck one morning, Bean was jolted when the ‘man overboard!’ cry went up, and shortly after thought he saw something khaki coloured in the water as the ship was laboriously swung around. A lifeboat was lowered to search. ‘Everybody was sinking in spirits—the idea of leaving him out there, perhaps watching us turn to leave him fighting for life was more than anyone could contemplate,’ Bean wrote. Shortly after, someone shouted, ‘There ’e is,’ and pointed to a figure in the water. The crew in the lifeboat eventually dragged him aboard, one of the sailors attempting artificial respiration on the lifeless shape in the bow. ‘The white bundle showed no sign of movement,’ Bean wrote. ‘The man was dead. He had been a prisoner—for drunkenness on the ship; he asked his guard for leave to go to the latrine and as he went deliberately jumped overboard.’ It was just one of many suicides, but it left its mark on Bean.
There were 3500 men on board Bean’s transport—mostly ‘strong rough-tanned Australian faces, some of them fresh, many of them battered and all of them frank’—and they were all angry with the soldier who jumped. He had endangered them all. For Bean, the death was a reminder that not all casualties of war were on the battlefield. While such a death was just one more tragic statistic, it underlined a clear reality: that the trauma of war was indeed affecting soldiers. This was what Bean and the men on the ship sensed with the drowning suicide of one of their comrades. In reality, he was just as much a victim of war as those who died of physical wounds. While Bean put it simply that the dead man ‘probably was half mad at the time,’ it indicated that he was beginning to comprehend the toll that war takes on the mind.
And how could he not? With more than 8000 Australians dead because of Gallipoli, he knew how vulnerable men were to bullets, shrapnel and bombs, and debilitating disease. He had been shot himself and narrowly missed death or serious injury on several other occasions. He may have been a non-combatant but he understood just how deadly the front line was. And now he would be encountering a new and different enemy that in many respects would prove to be even more lethal.
22
Counting the bullets
Bean knew Flanders well. He had come to know every inch of the battleground of Waterloo as a boy. Now, on 25 April 1916, he was there, reflecting on where he had been one year earlier. He knew that this was a day that would long resonate in Australia’s history. His memory was of ‘churning slowly along through the half moonlight and just nearing the coast of Imbros’ on the way to Gallipoli. This first anniversary of the Anzac landing was being marked everywhere in Australia and New Zealand, and everywhere there were Australian and New Zealand troops engaged in the war.
Bean had gone with the 1st Division to Sailly, near Armentières, in northern France. The focus of the campaign facing I Anzac Corps would involve a thrust near Amiens where the French and British sectors met on the banks of the Somme River. The Australians Bean was with marked the first Anzac Day with an extra issue of rations and cake, while he and the New Zealand correspondent Malcolm Ross strolled along a canal to an estaminet where they bought two bottles of champagne. Surprised at their good fortune in finding the wine, they ‘drank the health of all Anzacs at dinner.’ They did so against the backdrop of distant guns that, from nine o’clock that night, boomed continuously near Richelbourg or Neuve Chapelle. But there was a contrasting sound that also captured Bean’s attention: ‘As I stood in the open doorway just now I heard above it all the first nightingale—her perfect single repeated piped note simply filling the woodland. It was answered from every side through the woods. Today, also, for the first time this year I heard the cuckoo.’ These were sounds of nature that would become increasingly rare along the Western Front in the coming months and years.
But for Bean, such occasions were integral to the way he recorded the daily life of men at war. He was nothing if not methodical and meticulous. Ashmead-Bartlett had him pegged: ‘Oh—Bean—I think he almost counts the bullets.’ This was truer than he realised, for at Anzac Cove Bean admitted to trying to count the number of rifle shots he heard per minute as he compared one night’s activity with another’s. By the time he arrived in France Bean had honed his skills as a war correspondent. His main concern was to observe as widely and accurately as possible all aspects of the AIF’s operations. To preserve his observations he kept a careful diary, filled with details of operational plans, notes and sketches of operations. He had quickly realised that drawing sketches and discussing them with men who had seen action was an aid to getting accurate information. To further ensure accuracy, he interviewed commanders and troops after engagements, and surveyed the ground both before and after battles. But in doing this he knew he had to be cautious about what men said immediately after battle. He also sought to make his own observations as objective as possible.
Bean still took care not to breach military censorship. One of his methods was to use a technique he had developed in books such as On the Wool Track. This involved blurring elements of the story, as he explained in his diary on 11 May 1916 shortly after arriving in France and sending off two articles. His approach with cables such as these was to keep ‘the details perfectly true, but alter and mix up the place names and dates of ‘left’ and ‘right’ so that it is perfectly impossible for anyone (even myself after a short while) to identify the real trench or section of line and yet the story is perfectly true.’
With his diary entries, however, Bean felt no such caution. He was withering in his assessment of the Anglican clergyman and chaplain Walter Dexter, an Englishman who had fought with distinction in the South African war. Dexter had been a master mariner before he turned to the church, and had served in the diocese of Melbourne since 1910. He was one of the first Anglicans to seek appointment as an AIF chaplain and his background fitted him superbly for the task. On Gallipoli he proved himself brave and practical; he was well liked by the troops, although, it would seem, they were at best largely indifferent to religion. Bean, however, saw him as ‘a good regimental padre perhaps but quite unfitted for the job of senior chaplain.’ He was ‘full of gossip and scandal—and how White is so misled in him I don’t know.’
No Australian politicians had ventured to Gallipoli, but in London and on the Western Front a visit was not an uncommon occurrence. Among the early visitors were Prime Minister Billy Hughes and the man he had replaced as Australia’s leader, the new High Commissioner to London, Andrew Fisher. They both visited the Australians at Sailly on 1 June 1916. Immediately he saw Bean, Hughes chided him for not ha
ving written to him when he was in London. ‘Goodness knows I was rushed enough, but I ought to have done it—and he is clearly hurt,’ Bean wrote. Fisher chimed in, wanting to know if he had the camera that the War Office had assured him would be sent. That it hadn’t arrived prompted an outburst from Fisher: ‘Well it’s disgusting, disgusting—they’re just fooling us—it’s disgusting that they can’t treat us the same way as Canada.’
Fisher knew the Canadians were allowed to take their own photos in France. The War Office had been fobbing off Bean. Because of pressure from the Anglo-Canadian newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Daily Express, the Sunday Express and the London Evening Standard, a Canadian staff captain was allowed to take photos. Bean, on the other hand, had to rely on the borrowed services of British official photographers. It had been different on Gallipoli, where he had taken more than 700 photos. Bean was happy to have Fisher on his side in this argument with the British. In his diary, he wrote:
He’s a real straight good friend, is Fisher—and a sincere friend of mine now. But he is too hot-headed—and it makes him tackle his objections in the wrong way. He becomes indignant at the first obstacle and gets people’s backs up. He feels strongly, too, that he has not the power which he had as Prime Minister; that Hughes is the power—and people will not act for the High Commissioner.
Bean noted that Fisher’s predecessor as high commissioner, Sir George Reid, ‘was always a humbug but a rather wise one,’ who nonetheless had far more influence than Fisher: ‘And then there comes this little genius Hughes; a man of stronger morals than Reid, and less than Fisher; a statesman of some foresight, I think; perhaps a man of one idea.’
Such observations made Bean pause to reflect: ‘It seems to me that I take away a lot of people’s characters in this diary—and leave my own. God knows it’s weak enough—jealous, self centred, only moderately clean—and sometimes I think that if it is clean this is more because it fears public opinion than for any love of healthiness.’
Bean’s relationship with Hughes went back to his early days on The Sydney Morning Herald, and it was clear that it remained strong. Just how strong was underlined that night at dinner with divisional staff, when Hughes treated Bean as an old friend, going up to him again and again, taking him by the lapels and talking of ‘books or anything’. Bean took immediate advantage of this, urging Hughes to write to the Commander-in-Chief, Douglas Haig, to support his request to take photographs. ‘I told Hughes he could help me in one way by writing to General Haig that I was the trusted servant of the Australian Government, that I was charged by them with writing the history of the Australian part in this war; and that the government would be glad if I were permitted to take photos for the purposes of that record under any safeguard thought proper—in the same way as had been permitted to the Canadians.’ When Bean heard that Hughes had done as he requested and written to Haig, he wondered if he could be accused of pulling political strings. ‘I don’t think so, if Australia wants the photos she has to ask for them,’ he reasoned.
Bean had already begun to think as a historian, seeing his main task as the collection of material for the history of the AIF he would write when the war was over. Photographs would be essential, but with the Western Front much closer to Britain than Gallipoli, censorship was much more restrictive there. For the first year of the war correspondents were barely allowed to visit the battlefields, and photographs were initially banned outright. With new commanders and pressure for more recruits, the British policy began to change in 1916. Because of Beaverbrook’s influence, the Canadians were early beneficiaries, but until the British agreed to the appointment of Australian official photographers Bean was dependent on the intermittent services of the British official photographers.
Among them was Ernest Brooks, an experienced newspaper photographer who had been the Admiralty’s official photographer on Gallipoli. With no official photographer present when Hughes arrived at Sailly, Brooks was sent urgently to cover the visit. He did so with a cine cameraman, Edward Tong. Bean took Brooks and Tong to photograph Hughes with General Birdwood, but spending a week with them was an unpleasant experience: he and Brooks clashed repeatedly over Brooks’ practice of faking photographs.
For Brooks, ‘faking’ was a legitimate way to maximise visual impact, but Bean—who knew him on Gallipoli—was critical of the way he had staged photographs there, including a picture of a Turkish sniper dressed up in branches like a tree. ‘He got a Turkish prisoner on Imbros with two Australians from the field bakery standing on either side of him with bayonets fixed. His picture has been printed everywhere and is taken as a proof of the wild stories about “men as trees moving”; it half convinced me when first I saw it,’ Bean wrote. And he faked a second picture of a ‘charge of the Royal Naval division at the Dardanelles,’ showing an officer leading men out of a trench up into the Gallipoli hills. Bean recognised the hill as not being on Gallipoli but at the back of the war correspondents’ camp on Imbros. Despite being a proven fake, the photograph would continue to be used in the decades ahead.
Bean watched Brooks closely ‘to prevent him getting up somewhere where he would be sure to be killed and to prevent him from faking.’ Somehow, though, Brooks persuaded one major to get all his men lined up behind the parapet—at imminent risk to their lives if the Germans had seen them—with bayonets fixed, looking as if they were going to charge over shoulder to shoulder. Bean told him afterwards that he would have to speak to the staff about that photo. ‘It is an absurd fake,’ Bean wrote, ‘no-one in his senses would ever get men packed behind the line like that.’ Brooks argued disingenously that ‘It can’t be a fake until it’s developed.’ Bean believed that Brooks had got the job through being a friend of the King and Queen, as their private photographer. ‘And this is the sort of rubbish the government sends us as its “official” photographer who may be trusted,’ he wrote, adding that he also had to help carry photographic gear. ‘I shall get through my five days with him pleasantly if I can but never again.’ As the week went on, the tension between Bean and Brooks escalated:
Brooks was grumbling this morning at only being allowed to take ‘cushy’ stuff and not the sort of pictures that editors want. ‘They won’t print a picture of a sentry looking over a trench,’ he said. Of course they won’t, so long as he supplies them with faked charges and sham battles . . . this ‘official’ British photographer. I told him straight we won’t have faked pictures—and he objected to that word and there was a row. Since then I have been dragging him round much as you might lead a bad-tempered bull by the nose. I don’t know how long I shall be able to stand it—only two days more.
Bean even considered the extraordinary step of resigning. ‘I cannot carry out the work in the manner in which I believe the Australian recorder ought to,’ he wrote. The implication that he and Malcolm Ross could not be trusted to take photos left him frustrated.
Brooks, however, did confirm to Bean the double standards of the War Office: while it was denying Bean permission to take photos, it had Brooks instructing the Canadian staff officer on the art of photography.
As he ruminated on the problem of organising the photographic record, Bean faced his own reportorial challenges. On 7 June, he was sitting in an anteroom at 1st Division headquarters at Sailly when a chuffed Brudenell White commented to him: ‘Well that was a very successful little raid last night, Bean.’ This was the first Bean had heard of it. White continued: ‘. . . our 7th Brigade raided their trenches and brought back three prisoners and killed twelve.’ This was the first Australian raid on German trenches on the Western Front, and Bean was intrigued to hear the story. The raid involved the 7th Brigade’s 25th, 26th, 27th and 28th Battalions and, while successful, had involved tough fighting. After killing soldiers from a Prussian infantry regiment and taking prisoners, the Australians came under shellfire as they returned. Two of them were killed and four wounded. Bean recorded what happened next:
One of the prisoners, when the scouts wanted
him to move, would not face the German shrapnel. He lay down and squealed and struggled—so, as they had no means of keeping him quiet, and did not want to shoot, they cut his throat. Two more of the six men who were originally taken prisoner did not seem to understand what was required of them—at any rate they didn’t do instantly what was required of them—and were shot on the spot.
Bean noted that the Australians brought ‘one little fellow’ back because, as they said, ‘He was too young to kill.’ Such morally charged incidents would always be contentious. Indeed, on Gallipoli Bean had refused to publish unsubstantiated claims of Turkish atrocities—something for which he was criticised. He knew that allegations without proof were worthless. When his report of the Western Front raid was published in Australia a week later, there was no mention that the Australians had cut the throat of a German soldier or summarily shot two others.