by Peter Rees
It was Leo. I was awfully thankful to see him, because I knew how wild the night had been. He told me then that he had not been over with troops who attacked . . . We stayed yarning in the half dark on the lower steps of the narrow low stairway into the dugout, and then Leo had to go off and see about getting rations to his platoon. When we left some time later I passed him sitting under the parapet of the trench nearby with a line of six or eight others, squatting with their backs against the front of the trench, talking . . . They were to come out that night. The battalion had got a little more than its objective, and one felt very happy about them, especially to have seen Leo safe after that night. ‘See you in a day or two,’ we said as I left.
This was Leo Butler’s first experience of action at Pozières, but he and his men penetrated the farm and bombed the dugouts. Late the next day, they went into action again, only to immediately face a ferocious German barrage. Just before nightfall, as shells rained down, Leo gathered his platoon to lead them out to relieve men digging in the front line at Mouquet Farm. He never made it: a piece of high-explosive shell came scything in, severing his left leg below the knee and mangling toes on his right foot. By the time he was carried back to the safety of a trench, Leo’s stretcher was saturated with blood. He told one of the officers that all day he had felt that something was going to happen to him.
The battalion’s doctor arrived about midnight and gave Leo an opiate to send him to sleep. At dawn on 23 August, two stretcher bearers carried him the 3 kilometres back to a horse ambulance, which took him to the dressing station further back, and then to hospital. Leo’s good friend from Hobart, Dr Guy Bailey, was in charge of the hospital but did not recognise him until after he read the patient’s ticket. Leo’s left leg was amputated at the hip, and he lost two toes from his right foot. When Jack Bean saw Leo after surgery he was not in pain and his voice was strong, but he was restless from the severe loss of blood. Jack realised his cousin’s condition was critical, not least because circulation in his right leg had stopped. It too might need amputation. Jack saw Leo later that night and thought he was doing well. Yet just an hour later, twenty-six hours after being wounded, he died.
Next morning a devastated Jack drove over to his brother, bringing the news: ‘Leo is gone,’ Bean wrote in his diary. ‘It is too sad and dreadful for words.’ Leo’s funeral took place at the Puchevillers hospital cemetery at 3 p.m. the next day. Jack and Charles were in the small party of mourners at the graveside, in the corner of a wheatfield overlooking wide, undulating country, as Bean noted, ‘far away from the guns, with rows of great trees topping the distant hills and the peaceful cultivated country between’:
As the service was proceeding, the rough wooden coffin clearly covering the frame of a splendid man (for it was bigger even than most solders’ coffins) lying there under the Union Jack—the sun shining on the wheatfields and three aeroplanes wheeling through the sky in the distance near the aerodrome, two French farming people came by; a middle-aged woman in a blue Holland dress carrying some sort of big pewter can on her arm, and a man, over the middle age, with his scythe fresh from the mowing. The man took off his cap and leaned on his scythe, and the woman stood there on the road while the chaplain read. Then I saw her going away, dabbing her eyes, and the man went too, to his work.
Leo’s younger brother Angus had just arrived in France, and they had planned to meet. Instead, Bean sent him a telegram with the news and then drove over to Beauval, about 30 kilometres north of Amiens, where Angus was based with his field company. He took with him Leo’s possessions. Leo’s battalion, fresh from the fight at Mouquet Farm, was also there. Bean saw that they were ‘holding as much drink as they could with reasonable orderliness. Indeed there was no disorder but a big percentage of the men were very full. I don’t blame them. I should have felt inclined to get drunk myself.’
As summer ended and the autumn rains set in, turning the Somme battlefields to mud and the roads to crater-riddled bogs, there was little light on the Western Front for Charles Bean.
27
No way out
‘A chance scrap of iron flung at random on the hillside in front of Mouquet drives a course right through to the furthest end of the world.’ Bean included such details in his letters to his family in Hobart about Leo Butler’s death. He wanted to soften the blow and give a more personal account than the formal notification ever could. His father, Edwin, replied, ‘Your letters about Leo were a great treasure to his parents—and they appreciate the thoughtful care with which you give them all essential particulars. How few of the bereaved are able to learn so much of their departed ones!’ Edwin’s letter continued on a different subject:
Over here, as you probably know, we are on the verge of a tremendous crisis—next Saturday is Referendum Day, and things look very black. The Labor leaders, those at least who favour compulsory foreign service, have been cast out by their various union collaborators.
Mob orators are working on the emotions of the crowds in the Domains and public parks, and if returned soldiers attempted to speak they were hustled—even wounded men. New South Wales and Queensland seem to be terrorised by rowdies, and the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] have been causing fires in the Sydney shops and warehouses. The weak spot seems to be the women’s vote, for the agitators appeal to their emotions.
The letter reflected Edwin’s stance as a middle-class patriot to whom nothing was more important than the defence of the Empire. The issue of conscription had sparked the most divisive debate in Australian history. There was no doubting where the Bean family stood—just as there was no doubting Charles Bean’s own sentiments. After the immense number of casualties at Fromelles and Pozières, he fervently believed in conscription. The voluntary system had broken down as the war dragged on. Germany already had conscription, as did France and Britain, which had introduced it in January 1916. Six months later, New Zealand had followed suit.
Having returned from London to Melbourne in mid-1916, Prime Minister Billy Hughes was also convinced of the need for conscription—and the press and Liberal Opposition agreed. In April, Defence Minister George Pearce had said the 233,000 volunteers to date had been a good effort, but he changed his mind after Hughes’ return. He told the senate that voluntarism was no longer adequate. Hughes committed himself to the cause with his usual passion. But in the months he had been in England large sections of the Australian trade union movement and members of the Labor Party had hardened their attitude against conscription. Securing a bare majority in the Labor caucus, Hughes announced that a plebiscite would be held on 28 October 1916 to decide whether single men without dependents should be called up.
Hughes framed his plea for conscription in terms of a compact between citizen and state. In his ‘Manifesto on Conscription’ of August 1916, he argued that the citizen had a duty to serve the nation in times of war. Unwisely, Hughes used the Government’s powers under the Defence Act at the start of October to call up men between twenty-one and thirty-five for service inside Australia. This stoked fears of a creeping militarism and also antagonised those in the target age bracket.
While Bean favoured conscription, he saw the politics surrounding it as anything but simple. In early September 1916 he was critical of suggestions to break up the Australian 3rd Division and farm out its members to other, under-strength divisions. He argued that a division was ‘a living unit—a body with hands and limbs, all of which have to be moved by nerves just as a human body has to be; and therefore to break it up is like carving up a living tree.’ He could see the political charade involved: ‘Mr Hughes is very anxious to have conscription adopted in Australia against the wishes of his party and a tremendous argument would be: “Look, recruiting is so bad that we have had to do away with the 3rd Australian Division—and split it up amongst the others.”’
Bean had no doubt that Hughes was ‘working hand in glove with [the British Prime Minister, David] Lloyd George who is also a politician and therefore crooked.’ Llo
yd George was ‘as anxious to force conscription in Australia’ as Hughes. Bean believed the two Welshmen had engaged in a conspiracy—possibly before Hughes returned to Australia, or by subsequent cables—to have the 3rd Division broken up. While the War Council had decided this, the AIF hierarchy in France had been wondering why their divisions could not get their full reinforcements. As Bean saw it, there were 13,000 reinforcements in England after all the drafts sent up to that point. Brudenell White made it clear to Bean that he was strongly opposed to the division’s break-up. ‘He is very angry because it is not a straight thing to do,’ Bean wrote.
A day later, Bean left France for England on a fortnight’s leave, White having asked him not to mention the issue in his cables. In London he sought out Keith Murdoch, who told him Bonar Law had confirmed to him that the break-up of the division was intentional. Bean was outraged, thundering in his diary: ‘It is crooked, crooked, crooked—it is a deceit on the Australian people and I believe they would see the need for conscription without it. What a foul mess this politics is!’
On the boat to Boulogne, Murdoch told Bean that Hughes was anxious to know how the conscription vote would go in France. They discussed the Labor Party’s split over the issue. Bean was in disbelief: ‘How a socialist man who believes in preference to trade unionists can put it to his soul to oppose conscription I cannot see.’ He even thought the Opposition leader and former Prime Minister Joseph Cook would help the outcome by pressing the pro-conscription case, even though his advocacy was only making trouble for Hughes. Such was Bean’s failure to read the divisiveness of the political debate that he ruminated in his diary:
I should have said that the vote on conscription here would be 95 per cent in favour of it. It means some relief to the men here—and others doing their bit. I told Murdoch so. He was rather doubtful. He had heard in England from Australian soldiers of a certain undercurrent of feeling against it. The argument used was: ‘We have been fighting England’s battles for her; we don’t see why we should ask more of our people to come over here and fight them.’
Following the furor over the Gallipoli letter, Murdoch had developed strong connections to the British political and military elite. His mentor was Lord Northcliffe, proprietor of The Times and the Daily Mail, who had been impressed with the Gallipoli letter, which chimed with his own views and which he could use for his own political ends. Northcliffe soon became a major influence on Murdoch’s developing ideas about journalism, politics and the exercise of power.
Murdoch set himself an ambitious program in London. He spent ten hours a day running the cable operation, for which he also wrote. After September 1915, he wrote a weekly, and sometimes bi-weekly, column, ‘Diary of the War’, in which he described the conflict’s current state as best he could from London and analysed the British and international politics of the war. Foremost in Murdoch’s mind was to present positive reports of Australian achievements on the Western Front. He persuaded Lord Northcliffe to visit Australian troops in France in 1916 and write about their achievements. A month after Pozières, Murdoch lobbied Birdwood to dictate a letter to him about the successes of Australian troops in the battle so he could cable it to the Australian press. Birdwood was sympathetic but declined. Murdoch also made further use of his Gallipoli experiences by writing, anonymously, the Anzac number of the Times History of the War, using the occasion to firmly implant the Anzac legend in the British mind.
Murdoch was an astute judge of public sentiment, including among the troops. He asked Bean if he had heard any grumbling against Birdwood lately. Bean thought it curious that several people had asked him the same question. He took this to be an indication of a ‘certain feeling at the moment.’ He concluded that Birdwood’s popularity had suffered through the belief that he had too readily offered to undertake impossible tasks.
At the end of August and beginning of September the Australians were withdrawn from the killing fields of the Somme to take over from the Canadians the southern half of the Ypres salient. In normal times the salient had been by far the most difficult and dangerous sector of the British front. Bean would later write that the decision to send them there for a ‘rest’ after Pozières added to the sense of grievance among the troops.
It was clear to Bean that the men were exhausted and were still recovering. As September drew to a close, there had been nearly 300 cases of absence without leave in the previous fortnight. Bean knew why: ‘The truth is that the men are tired after the Pozières fighting.’ In less than seven weeks, I Anzac Corps had lost 23,000 officers and men. Added to this were the 5th Division’s 5500 casualties at Fromelles. He noticed how the attrition generated a marked philosophical change among the Australians, many of whom had resigned themselves to accepting their fate on the battlefield:
This new force of ours is just realising . . . that there is only one way out of this war for an infantryman and that is on his back; either sick, wounded or dead. There is no going back to cheering crowds—no marching through the London streets and ovations in the Australian ports. They will be put at it to fight and fight again—until if not in this battle then in the next each man gets his bullet. There is no way out. They are looking down the long road straight to the end—they can see it plain enough now; and they know that there is no turning. It is a big shock to a man when he realises that.
. . . every man on this front at present knows that a single bullet wound through the shoulder is considered a prize which you could not buy for money: a ‘cushy’ one—a ‘Blighty’—every infantryman envies the man who goes home to a wound like that.
After visiting the battlefields with Bean, Murdoch cabled Hughes convinced that great numbers of soldiers were against conscription and that a majority would vote no. Bean by then also acknowledged the lack of support for conscription among the troops.
Brudenell White sought an urgent meeting with Bean. Hughes had sent Birdwood a cable from Tasmania alleging that the opposition to conscription was due to the ‘formidable intrigues of the ultra-socialists and the Fenians.’ The British suppression earlier in 1916 of the Easter Rising in Dublin had inflamed Irish Australians against Britain.
With the debate now febrile, Hughes believed that the Irish and the socialist Industrial Workers of the World were against him and, indeed, that Sinn Fein had sent agents to Australia. He concluded that everything depended on the vote among the troops in France. White told Bean that Hughes wanted Birdwood to put aside precedent and encourage the troops to vote for conscription. A big majority would help sway opinion in Australia. As Bean saw it:
White wanted me to see Birdwood and urge him to do a really big thing for the Empire, and take this step. At the moment we both took it that what Hughes wanted was a message to the Australian people. I hesitated a moment. Perhaps I am weak, I knew that White’s decision, whichever way it went, would have settled me in mine. But I have a very great fear of anyone in Birdwood’s position—a military servant of the state using his influence in a big question at the polls.
Bean clearly recognised the fundamental importance of the separation of powers in a democracy, but according to his diary, White told him he wanted Birdwood to ‘play the man,’ and to use the opportunity of doing a ‘great thing for the Empire.’ While disillusioned with British leaders and politics, Bean nonetheless was still an imperialist. He feared that defeat of conscription ‘would be a terrible smack in the face of the Empire.’ He thought that if Birdwood, as Australia’s chief military adviser, told Australians of the military necessity for reinforcements, it would have an enormous effect. White agreed, adding: ‘And get him to point out that every effort that we have made up to the present would go for nothing—would be utterly wasted—if this were lost.’ Bean assumed he was referring to Australia’s good name and new-found reputation.
When Bean reached London, Arthur Bazley had just engaged a taxi when a British officer tried to pull rank. As Bean recounted: ‘The driver wanted Bazley to turn out—but the kid said he wouldn’t. The
officer spoke to the driver and the driver ordered Bazley off again. Bazley at once offered to fight him—and he came away victorious with the cab and without the fight.’
In the meeting that followed, Birdwood pointed out to Bean that what Hughes really wanted was for him to give a lead to the soldiers:
He never hesitated for a moment. I too could see at once a reason for this. If the soldiers voted NO, that would kill the question; the people at home would never vote YES if their army here voted NO. The Australian vote was to be later, after the result of the AIF’s vote was known. I fancy Hughes had arranged this thinking that the AIF would be certain to vote YES. Any way, it was no use Birdie sending a message to Australia if the AIF voted NO. The thing to do would be to get the army to vote YES.
Birdwood said there had been some high-level discussion about whether a pro-conscription message should be sent to the Australian people or troops. In the end, Bean recorded:
He got me to sit down and write, to his dictation, a message to the men saying that he wanted them to vote by their consciences and not to influence them in any way. But he added that he probably knew, better than they did, the need for reinforcements. He was sure they would not like to see any of the units—with all their traditions and history—broken up. There was a need for men. If the effort of Australia were relaxed now, all the brave lives sacrificed before would have been sacrificed in vain.