by Peter Rees
Bean wrote that the Australians were unimpressed with the quality of the Prussian prisoners they captured. ‘Only one of the enemy dashed for his rifle and he was immediately shot.’ When he came to write the Official History, Bean did not mention these details. While no wartime censor would have allowed through reports that might cast the actions of Allied soldiers in a questionable light—something Bean well knew—it was Bean’s decision alone to self-censor the Official History. Such were the challenges and contradictions of pursuing truth in a war that was rapidly changing every notion of what that meant.
In this whirlpool Bean was not surprised when many Anzac officers and men sought him out to ask that he not exaggerate what they had achieved. ‘As if I ever did—but I know what they mean.’ Nor could he put the Murdoch letter behind him. In mid-June he raised the letter with White, and discussed the role of the media in war. White said he believed in the right of the press to criticise. As Bean noted in his diary:
. . . he thought that if Murdoch got Hamilton removed he might also have tried to get Asquith and his friends removed. ‘You know my opinion, Bean,’ said White. ‘I think they ought to have been put on their trial for undertaking that expedition—I do honestly,’ and he grew red with warmth as he said it. ‘Hamilton may not have been a success but we know that if he had had the help which these generals here have—the ammunition and guns and so on—if they had backed him up as they backed up other generals he would have got through.’
When the British raised the idea of Bean being commissioned, to make him an official photographer, White opposed it. If he had accepted, Bean would have to give up writing about the war—he could be photographer or reporter, but not both. Bean loathed being in a ‘half false position’ as an honorary captain and thought about quitting his correspondent role, but White believed it was important for Bean to have the freedom to criticise when the war ended:
He agrees that the best thing I can do afterwards is to tell the people the truth. At the same time he thinks it important that I should take photos. I too, would not like my freedom hampered. I rather like, also, feeling that I get nothing out of this war—neither pay nor promotion nor decorations nor even fame (for the Australian government won’t have my letters published in England until they have appeared in Australia—which of course means never).
It was not in Bean’s nature to chase fame or, for that matter, fortune; nevertheless, he was as keen as any journalist to see his work published. To some extent, circumstances had conspired against him at Gallipoli, particularly with the delay in approval to write and send despatches. Then, some Australian papers had stopped taking his copy. There was also his personality: he had little of Ashmead-Bartlett’s knack of seizing the reader’s imagination, nor was he as active and ambitious as Keith Murdoch. His strengths lay, in recording facts and events accurately and in detail.
Driving Bean was his commitment to the men of the AIF. A few days later, a delayed Anzac honours list was gazetted in London that said Bean had ‘greatly distinguished himself by carrying in wounded under fire on several occasions.’ In his ‘half false position,’ Bean was not eligible for a medal but his courage was nonetheless recognised by a mention in despatches.
Within days Bean’s diary would take a very different turn.
23
A new prism
A messenger woke Bean urgently on the morning of 30 June 1916. He and Malcolm Ross were to go immediately to the Hotel Belfort at Amiens, a four-hour drive to the south. Their driver took them through the colliery district of Lillers and then up into rolling hills and through towns and villages that were all under military occupation. British police controlled the traffic everywhere, just as they might in Piccadilly. A policeman slipped them through the first gap in the line of traffic. Approaching Amiens on a long, straight road dating back to Roman times, Bean saw that all the side lanes were packed with ‘strings of waiting motor lorries,’ and then streams of transports heading east.
Arriving at the hotel, he and Ross found correspondents from Britain already there. Among them was John Buchan, a director of the publishing house Thomas Nelson and Sons, who would gain fame as a novelist. Bean thought him ‘a natty little chap of the British civil servant type.’ Lieutenant C.R. Cadge was appointed as press officer to Bean and Ross for the events that were about to unfold. Hell was about to break loose on the Somme. Their destination was a communications trench near the village of Bray, not far from the Somme and about 1000 metres from the firing line, from which they could witness the Allied advance. ‘I was looking forward to it and so was Ross,’ Bean wrote. They headed off to watch the preliminary bombardment.
Since 25 June the bombardment, which Bean noted involved two siege batteries formed from the regular Australian garrison artillery, had methodically smashed the German defences. At one time, he wrote, every gun and howitzer would fire rapidly with high explosive for twelve minutes on all the villages, following this fire with shrapnel to catch any German troops trying to flee.
Accompanied by Cadge, Bean and Ross came to a valley below which was the town of Albert, dominated by a church tower with a broken statue of the Virgin Mary. To the right of Albert was a village that Bean could see clearly—Mametz—which the Germans held. They returned to Amiens for dinner before going out again that night. ‘It was a weird drive out—we could have no bright lights,’ Bean wrote.
They came upon infantry moving up through the dark, and threaded their way slowly alongside them. Bean could hear the strains of ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’. Not all the men were singing; others remained silent. Bean could not help wondering what the officers were thinking. ‘They would, for a certainty, lose half their numbers within the next week—unless it was all a big bluff; and it was too far gone for that.’
From their position behind Albert, Bean saw continuous flashes on the horizon, between four and six per second. It seemed ‘a somewhat diffuse bombardment,’ which he thought was mostly shelling rather than shrapnel fire. ‘Our sense of proportion had been disturbed by the bombardments we had lately seen from underneath the projectiles—here we were far behind them.’ The bombardment was the opening phase of a plan to destroy Germany’s manpower reserves from the next day, 1 July. At the same time, the aim was to draw German forces away from the French fortress of Verdun, which had been under siege since February in a battle that would claim up to a million casualties by the end of the year.
At 5.30 a.m. Bean was left in no doubt that the main attack was on. He grabbed a cup of coffee and a bun at a small cafe opposite the hotel and waited for the car that was to take him and Ross to their observation trench. Bean heard the first of three or four big guns fire—‘and then in came the others with the banging as of a hundred packing cases all being bundled along at once . . . It was as though four men with two huge drumsticks each were banging as hard as they could the sides of some huge iron tanks.’ Bean wanted to watch the infantry go over, but it was not possible from their location. He was full of admiration for the photographers who were in the front trench—one of whom had the leg of his camera tripod shot away. ‘By Jove they did their duty,’ he noted. ‘I wouldn’t have liked to try it, personally.’
Bean and Ross returned to the hotel for breakfast and a briefing from the press censor, who said: ‘Well, everything is going well. We have attacked the Germans on a front of 25 miles, ourselves and the French. We have captured the German frontline on that front, north and south of the Somme. Many prisoners have been taken and so far we have had only slight casualties.’ They went out again later that morning, and could see the bombardment continuing. Bean described ‘huge shell clouds on various distant parts of the horizon, some white, some pink, some black.’
Later in the day Bean talked to one of the 150 German prisoners who had been captured. Bean, who did not smoke but always carried cigarettes to hand to soldiers, gave the Germans some smokes. ‘They seemed terribly glad of them. Our men were standing round looking at them rather as if they were
animals—but not spitefully.’ Bean’s party drove to a casualty clearing station near Querrieu, passing ambulance after ambulance, all moving at the same even pace—‘gliding along through the country quietly, smoothly, such as a moving staircase glides. Each has four bunks like a ship’s cabin and from behind the car you can see the men’s feet sticking out. It is surprising what a very great number of men are wounded in the feet or in the left arm. Of course the really serious cases you don’t see. They lie out there in No Man’s Land and die.’
Unknown numbers of the men Bean had passed during the previous night were likely among the 60,000 British casualties from that first day of the Somme offensive, a third of whom were killed. By day’s end, 1 July 1916 would enter history books as the most disastrous day in the history of the British Army. There were some successes, though. On 2 July Bean walked along a trench until he reached Fricourt Wood, about 5 kilometres east of Albert, which had been captured that day. ‘One’s heart was lightened as it is when one arrives at a cricket match and finds that your own team has got a real good start on the other side—180 on the board and only one wicket down. Clearly we had taken Fricourt.’ The next day Bean went into the ruined town to be greeted by the sight of live bombs, tangled wire, abandoned trenches, blankets, helmets and dead soldiers:
Before we realised it we found ourselves passing through our own wire and across what was once No Man’s Land—then on through the shattered remnants of the German wire to the dust heap of what once was Fricourt. It reminded one more of a municipal dump than anything else—heaps of tumbled bricks and mortar with big craters all through them, some about as big as a fair sized room.
Nearby, Bean saw that the village of La Boiselle ‘was smoking gently’ and German shells were falling on the northern part of it. From this he judged that British forces had taken the village. Scanning the area through his field glasses, he could see bodies lying there. The Somme offensive was in full swing, but while there were big gains in some sectors there were virtually none in others. The cities, towns and villages of northern France that Bean had known in childhood were being destroyed before his eyes for little gain.
To Bean, the role of the Australians seemed to be lost on British officers, who could not see past their hidebound prejudices. What irritated him most was criticism of his batman, Arthur Bazley. An Anglo-New Zealand officer disapproved of Bazley’s performance as a waiter in the mess. Bean thought it inconsequential that he didn’t ‘shine’ as a waiter. Bazley, he knew, had ‘the better brains’ of the two. But the officer continued his complaints, leading Bean to quip, ‘Well in fact the Anzac Corps is so putrid that I wonder some of you fellows belong to it.’ The officer would not be swayed from his criticism of Australian discipline, prompting Bean to assert that the Australian would never be trained to matters they regarded as unessential:
Of course the Englishman will because he is afraid of his officer—stands in awe of him as an acknowledged superior being of a different class. But the Australian doesn’t stand in that sort of awe of his officer because he is of the same class as his officer—there is no social difference, therefore that motive doesn’t work with him to the same extent, but in place of it you get the intelligence of the whole force (and the whole nation) at work, and not only of the officer class.
Bean agreed that there was merit in smartness and cleanness but had no doubt that, at Gallipoli, there was no comparison between the personal cleanliness of the Australians and that of the Tommies. Bean hammered the point that in Australia, public opinion was ‘against great care being devoted to a man’s personal appearance.’ It was regarded as unessential. To Bean, the British soldier was ‘apt to carry the regard for dress and unessentials to a most vicious extreme.’ He had become so fed up with the criticism and condescension of the British officer class that he wrote in his diary, ‘if this sort of attitude keeps up I shall leave the mess.’
Bean was critical of the British decision to use the Australian troops in piecemeal fashion. ‘They will never understand that we fight twice as well as a nation—all together with Australians or NZ round us,’ he wrote. His disillusionment had been building for several weeks, especially after hearing vague talk of ‘some future offensive.’ He had wondered in late May if the British people had any idea of the difficulties that this would involve. The public’s attitude seemed to be that if a big offensive failed to break through, then the Russians or the French would succeed next time. There was ‘a tendency to look elsewhere for success’ and not to organise properly when the Germans were doing just that. ‘The only efforts at economy one hears of are a Daylight Saving Act only because Germany adopted it first,’ he mocked. What particularly angered him was the amorality of the merchant class, whose only interest in the war was the effect it could have on their businesses and personal fortunes. The risks they took were insignificant compared with all those in the trenches ‘offering their lives for an ideal.’ The contrast for Bean was stark:
I think of a fair head which I had seen matted in red mud, of young nerves of steel shattered beyond repair, of a wild night at Helles, when I found, stumbling beside me in the first bitterness of realisation, a young officer who a few yards back had been shot through both eyes.
. . . if the British nation, or the Australian nation, because it shirks interference with its normal life, because it is afraid of State enterprise, because of any personal or individual consideration whatever, lets this struggle go by default, and by an inconclusive peace, to the people which is organised body and soul in support of the grey tunics behind the opposite parapet, then it is a betrayal of every gallant heart now sleeping under the crosses on Gallipoli, and of every boyish head that has reddened the furrows of France.
After the heartbreaking deaths he had witnessed, Bean was bitter that the troops were being let down on the home fronts. ‘In Heaven’s name, if you wish to win, if you have in you any of the ideals for which those boys have died, cast your old prejudices to the winds, and organise your staying power. Organise! Organise! Organise!’
A few months earlier as Gallipoli drew to a close, Bean had told White that what he had seen there was turning him into a socialist. Now, in France, the organised strength of the German forces had convinced him that Britain and Australia could not afford to let the fear of ‘state enterprise’ hobble the ability to strike back effectively. The deaths he had witnessed were affecting the philosophical and political prism through which he was seeing the war. Victory would require everyone to contribute their fair share. He was determined to ensure that the contribution, the sacrifice and, ultimately, the memory of the dead should not be obscured by individual selfishness or greed.
Bean was in a unique position to record the effect of the war on Australia and on the way its people saw themselves. Key elements of these profound changes were already appparent. But for the moment, he had to focus on the Australian role on the Somme. Nothing could have prepared him for what was about to happen.
24
A monumental folly
The first Bean heard of Fromelles was a casual remark by an officer at breakfast on the morning of 20 July 1916. He had been up writing late into the night at his billet in the village of Contay and was a little late sitting down to eat. ‘The 5th Division had their little show last night,’ the officer said. Bean was to have focused on the 1st Division that morning as it prepared for battle at the Somme, but immediately decided that he should go to the 5th Division, 100 kilometres to the north. He would ‘run up there for the day.’ General Birdwood had assured him that nothing would be happening with the 1st Division ‘for 24 hours at any rate.’ Brudenell White lent Bean his car and told him the last news he had heard out of Fromelles was that ‘our men were all in the German trenches and holding on there.’ Another officer chipped in, ‘I think they’ll keep them.’
The 5th Division had been the last of the four Australian divisions to leave Egypt. It had been formed there under the command of Major General James McCay, who had returned
to active duty after being wounded at Gallipoli. McCay, who had commanded the 2nd Infantry Brigade at the landing at Gallipoli, had again proved himself to be a martinet and an unpopular leader—partly thanks to a march he ordered the 5th to undertake across open desert to the Suez Canal. When the division arrived in France in July, it had gone straight to the front line in Flanders after the three Australian divisions of I Anzac Corps—1, 2 and 4—had been sent to the Somme. More troops were needed for the looming battle at Pozières, a small village in the Somme Valley. When the 5th Division replaced the 4th at Armentières on 12 July, it was the most inexperienced of the Australian divisions in France. The area it occupied, the sector from south of Armentières to Bois-Grenier, was commonly called ‘The Nursery’, as it was used for training new arrivals in trench warfare while holding the line. It was comparatively quiet, however, because both sides seemed to recognise that advance either way was impossible at that point.
At nearby Fromelles, the Germans held their front line far more lightly than elsewhere. British troops had fought there fourteen months earlier, taking 10,000 casualties, but it seems little had been learned from that disaster by generals who were inclined to see soldiers as expendable. On 8 July General Sir Charles Monro ordered Lieutenant General Sir Richard Haking’s XI Corps to prepare a scheme to break the enemy line so as to distract German attention from Pozières. Haking, often described as an ambitious ‘thruster’ and bully, proposed the capture of Aubers Ridge, including the villages of Aubers and Fromelles, rating the chance of success as ‘favourable’. What veteran divisions under their command had been unable to achieve the previous year Monro and Haking now expected two inexperienced divisions to manage with virtually no warning and under vastly more difficult circumstances. However, as Bean wrote, McCay was gratified that his division, the last of the AIF to arrive in France, would be the first to face serious action.