Bearing Witness

by Peter Rees

  The government had told them what exemptions there were to be—they needn’t fear that the brother left at home to mind the business would be called to enlist; the men whom it would especially get were the shirkers who were at present filling all the nice fat billets which he wanted to see our men in on their return—or their relations at home.

  The soldiers’ poll was to be the next day, 16 October, and Bean urged that if possible the message should be wired to France that night. When AIF headquarters said this was impossible, Birdwood had the poll delayed for two days. Bean realised that these moves were ‘very risky I am sure,’ and reflected that he should have tried harder to get the wire across to France so as to avoid postponing the poll. ‘I didn’t put my reasons strongly, though Birdwood could see that I wanted it. There it is. I hope it does the business. For I am sure conscription is right.’

  With Haig’s imprimatur, Murdoch arranged for Australian representatives to address meetings of troops in France. One of them, the Agent-General for South Australia and former conservative politician Fred Young, asked the troops at a public meeting to send a resolution to Australia in favour of conscription. Young put it to them that the British held Australia in high regard and that they would lose that standing if the nation did not vote for compulsory service. Bean learned from Bazley the negative mood of the meeting:

  The attitude of the men was quite clear. They said that they did not care whether Australia came first in the opinion of the British people. They wanted enough Australians left to maintain Australia’s present character after the war. They did not want so many Australians killed off that the population of immigrants flowing in should alter the characteristics of the country. They could repopulate it by immigrants but they wanted it populated by Australians. They thought Australia had given enough to the war without forcing those who did not wish to come. They knew what the war was like, now, and they were not going to ask others to come into it against their will.

  Despite this, Bean remained confident that the plebiscite would be carried in Australia, predicting that support from women would be decisive. Still, he noted that ‘Birdwood’s circular to the troops did little good—rather the reverse . . . Hughes is getting as nervous as can be about it. Anything favourable from here will be telegraphed out to give Australia a lead. Anything unfavourable will be suppressed.’ Even Haig recognised the potential political and diplomatic dangers—he would only agree to send a message stating how much France and the Allies needed the Australian troops.

  Two days later, after the vote had been taken in the AIF camps in France, Bean realised how wrong he had been—there was a majority of 10 percentage points against conscription. The final AIF result was 72,399 for and 58,894 against, but these figures did not reflect the mood on the Western Front. According to Murdoch, the narrow ‘Yes’ majority stemmed from the Light Horse in Egypt, who were fighting the mounted campaign they had joined up for, and the 3rd Division, which was yet to see action. He estimated that those on the Western Front voted three to one against.

  ‘I honestly believe their vote on the conscription issue was an unselfish one,’ Bean concluded. Nonetheless, he agreed with White that, with volunteer numbers falling in Australia, it was sad that men who were willing had to ‘come and bear all the brunt of it while the straw-hatted holiday makers, and coal strikers stay at home and enrich themselves.’

  Bean soon realised that White believed he had messed up his ‘errand’ to Birdwood. ‘He thinks I ought to have got a message to the people of Australia and not to the troops; that the message to the troops may be interpreted as an attempt at exercising a dangerous influence and that the putting off of voting for two days was a dangerous matter . . . perhaps I ought to have told him plainly the dangers I saw in it.’ However, Bean believed Birdwood had done ‘nothing which was not perfectly defensible,’ and asserted his ‘perfect right to tell the men his opinion on a point so important—and he had no control whatsoever over the voting.’ Still, he believed Birdwood’s message ‘lost votes rather than gained them.’

  Four days later Bean knew the plebiscite had failed in Australia—1,160,033 votes against to 1,087,557 in favour. His efforts to influence the outcome had been in vain; but after the slaughter he had seen over the previous eighteen months, he clearly believed conscription was an egalitarian solution to sharing the burden. As he now realised, mateship meant different things to different people, civilians or soldiers. And prime ministers who played with such sensitive issues risked not only splitting the government but also dividing the nation.

  Labor expelled Hughes, who took Pearce and twenty-four other members with him and joined with the Liberals to form a National Labor Party government with himself as Prime Minister. Murdoch had seen the problem with Hughes’ zealotry, but Bean did not: he was just too close to the issue. Times such as this made it difficult for Bean to be an impartial observer. He may have been a noncombatant, but he was closer to the experience of war than any other correspondent. Admirable though this was, it had clouded his judgement. To underline that, opponents of conscription were now paying close attention to what he wrote about the war in Australian papers. With the conscription debate far from over, Bean was in a firing line of a different kind—being sniped at from 16,000 kilometres away.

  28

  Good will not come of it

  The seeds of an idea that had come to Bean at Gallipoli began to take root: he wanted to find a way to honour the memory of the men lost in war. Gallipoli had been bad, but what he had seen the men of the AIF endure in the few weeks they had been on the Western Front was altogether different. The effect on Bean was profound. A sense of responsibility to these men had grown with time and experience. Beyond the official history he would write, he started to plan a national museum—but he wanted something more than just a building that housed the war souvenirs he and others were collecting.

  Just what he had in mind became clear in a letter he wrote to George Pearce in November 1916. The letter concerned a ‘set of most remarkable air photographs’ that Brudenell White had just sent to the Minister. They were the daily record of the AIF’s actions at Pozières. Bean told Pearce that the photos were supposed to be handed on by 1 Anzac Corps to the corps that was replacing it in the line. However, if the AIF had followed that course with these particular photos they would have been lost and, Bean explained, there were plenty of similar photos anyway for the new corps to have. He added that when he wrote the history of the fighting at Pozières, and the photos would be most helpful. They established the exact position reached by Australian troops after every attack. He wanted to go over the photos minutely with operation orders, the reports of scouts and of brigade and battalion staffs, in order to make a precise diagram of each attack. The photos also showed the effect of each bombardment. He explained further to Pearce:

  These photos will no doubt eventually find a place in some national museum, when a national museum exists. The museum will at the same time be welcome to any little relics that I have gathered, and no doubt to many interesting exhibits which others have collected. But these photos will be the most visible record which that museum will contain.

  Bean advised Pearce that it was essential that maps from the war be preserved. They needed to be classified, indexed and stored in their original form. Even the most rough-and-ready little sketch was often important. If any of these maps and documents were lost they could never be replaced.

  If you do establish a national museum at Canberra it would give me great pleasure, if you would care, to help to classify and describe on labels or in catalogues for the public the war exhibits there. I think such a museum would add a great deal to the attractions of the Federal capital, and would ensure a certain number of pilgrims even from the very start.

  Bean’s references to “relics” and “pilgrims” had a spiritual/religious connotation that he probably intended. His vision was of a memorial not just to the Australians who had died but to their spirit. It is clear that Bean sa
w the memorial as both a shrine and a museum that would attract ‘pilgrims’. There was another element in Bean’s thinking: he had seen the AlF become highly professional and effective. The level of selflessness, discipline and cooperation that he observed in the Army, so raw and rowdy in 1915, left him in no doubt that the Australian nation owed a debt to these men. He wanted them remembered.

  On Gallipoli, Bean had noticed many others collecting curios from the outset. He watched the Anzacs assiduously collect shells, in the process practically clearing the gullies of shell cases. The troops quickly understood the Gallipoli campaign’s historical significance for Australia, and by the time they left the peninsula most carried their own personal souvenirs.

  In Australia, the pressure mounted on Pearce and his colleagues to do more to claim the history that the Australian troops were making in France. The Canadians again took the lead, establishing their own War Records Office to collect unit war diaries and to copy relevant British material that threw light on Canadian actions. They were also collecting a wide range of other material including films, paintings, photographs, memorabilia, maps and private accounts. Aware of this, Bean began urging that Australian records should also be systematically collected.

  Bean’s letter to George Pearce emphasised the importance of a photographic record of the war, but from the time of his arrival in France the issue of photographs had been a continual irritant. By mid-1916, Bean saw the need for two separate photographers—one for press work, another for the official record. In his fight with the British over the right to take photographs from an Australian perspective, he was dogged. The chief of intelligence, the unpopular Brigadier General John Charteris, tried to fob Bean off, telling him in mid-1916 that the War Office had decided that no one connected with press work should carry a camera. As he was a correspondent, he came under that rule. Bean argued the principle to the extent that Charteris began to have doubts about the order’s justification.

  With Bean already thinking more as the official historian, his relationship with the official British photographer, Ernest Brooks, had begun badly. The photos Brooks took—often staged—were useless for the official record. However, over time he learned from Bean who, in turn, warmed to the little Englishman, particularly his work at Pozières, where Brooks was attracted by the ‘sheer desert look’ of the country. Taking these photos took their toll, and by October 1916 Brooks was suffering from shell shock.

  Bean could see that Brooks had not recovered when he arrived to take photos amid some light shelling at Mouquet Farm. ‘I’m getting quite like the rest. I don’t know what’s up with me,’ he grimly told Bean. Despite this, Bean was impressed when ‘like the good little beggar he really is he stuck to it and trudged after me to Mouquet . . . poked around the ruins and picked up souvenirs and took all the photos I wanted. Really he did come out of this a little brick. I am sorry that I have said some of the things that I have said about him. He has one qualification, anyway—a very fine pluck.’

  Towards the end of 1916, the group surrounding Bean began to expand and take on a distinctly professional look. Australian artists were added to the staff, among them Fred Leist and Will Dyson. Despite Leist’s impressive reputation as a ‘plein air’ painter in Sydney and London, where he worked in the War Office and designing recruitment posters in 1915–16, Bean didn’t like his pushiness. He was protective of Frank Crozier, an artist who had enlisted with the AIF in March 1915 and served on Gallipoli as a stretcher bearer. In November 1915, when Bean called for contributions to The Anzac Book, Crozier worked on illustrations and the book’s design. In France, Crozier served under Brigadier General John Gellibrand, who, after realising his artistic ability, asked him to make sketches of Pozières. Crozier served as Gellibrand’s runner, partly so he could see a wide variety of subjects for paintings. Thus he was one of the few official artists who had experienced heavy fighting, and this experience helped him capture the human dimension of warfare—something Bean appreciated. Bean held him in high regard, writing in his diary:

  Fred Leist is coming over here as draughtsman—I must say I feel a little jealous for The Anzac Book artists. They have been through the turmoil. They began at the beginning—old Crozier enlisted as a private in the infantry; and here is this bumptious chap coming straight into a job which they have asked for for ages. White is putting Crozier on Corps HQ also. Leist wrote to Birdwood that he presumed he would be promoted very rapidly. Birdwood wrote back that he could hold out no hope at all of his promotion. He may turn out a great picture; but it is the others who have seen the events.

  Bean also initially had misgivings about Will Dyson, the Ballarat-born and internationally acclaimed satirical artist who had been working on London newspapers since leaving Australia six years earlier. Dyson was a strong nationalist and inquired in London about enlisting in the AIF, but found it was not feasible. With Pozières still raging, he applied to High Commissioner Andrew Fisher for permission to cross to France and draw Australian soldiers. He also wrote to Birdwood, explaining that his aim ‘would be to interpret in a series of drawings, for national preservation, the sentiments and special Australian characteristics of our Army.’ Dyson volunteered his skills, sought no pay save a slender allowance for expenses, and was prepared to hand over all his work to the Government. Fisher cabled Defence Minister Pearce, who agreed, provided the War Office approved. Birdwood approved, but it took more than two months for the War Office to do so. On 10 December 1916 Dyson was officially granted an honorary AIF commission as a lieutenant and appointed the first Australian war artist.

  Crossing to France, he met Bean, who took him to the village of Montauban-de-Picardie, seized from the Germans on the opening day of the Somme in one of the few British successes on that day of carnage. Dyson’s motivation stemmed from the awe in which he held the deeds of his countrymen. As his biographer has written, observing and recording their experience was something he felt driven to do despite the obvious dangers.

  Dyson’s talent was soon obvious. As Bean talked to a German prisoner, the artist sketched him. ‘Dyson is an able man at his game, I can see. He has got hold of the weary detached way in which men come out of these trenches. Anyway he has a pretty acute sympathy.’ Dyson’s drawings captured in the gloom ‘those ghosts of young men treading their pale way,’ and ‘moving like chain gangs dragging invisible chains.’ They carried with them ‘the eternal mystery of no man’s land’ as they came out of the line. Dyson wanted to capture the character of the Australian troops, and he drew them having breakfast, on sentry duty, writing letters home to Australia, and conversing with civilians in villages behind the lines.

  A firm friendship quickly developed between the quiet, patrician Bean and the sardonic Dyson. Bean appreciated his new friend’s ‘magnificent intellect’. Dyson was committed to guild socialism—a political movement advocating workers’ control of industry through trade-related guilds. The controversial German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche also fascinated him. He believed Nietzsche was misunderstood. Often, as Bean and Dyson drove from one part of the front to another, with the sound of shellfire close by, they would discuss Nietzsche. Wherever he travelled with Bean, Dyson would try to get as close to the men in the front line as possible to study their characters even more than their faces. Bean enjoyed Dyson’s wit, quickly rating him as the equal of, but ‘deeper’ than, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. Importantly, they both wanted to ensure that ordinary Australians would not forget the AIF’s’ story.

  In a coup for Bean, the British press photographer Herbert Baldwin was appointed as Australia’s first official war photographer. Bean set him the task of preserving pictorially the movements and actions of Australian soldiers, and the landscapes over which they fought. Baldwin was already one of Britain’s most significant war photographers, having covered the 1912–13 Balkan war and published an important book of photos of the conflict.

  From the outset, Bean’s relationship with Baldwin was harmonious and productive. Baldwin be
gan producing natural and relaxed portraits of the Anzacs and all aspects of their day. Bean soon thought him ‘a game little bird,’ whose sense of humour endeared him to the Australians. Out in the field one day Baldwin, lugging his heavy equipment, became stuck in the winter mud. Bean was amused on hearing ‘some idiot’ ask him: ‘What—are you taking photographs?’ To which Baldwin quipped, ‘No, I’m catching rabbits.’ Bean commented, ‘I’m sure he’ll do well.’

  Mud was everywhere. Craters and trenches turned into freezing quagmires of deadly, energy-sapping slime. Boots and socks were sucked off in the mud, and troops dug themselves little shelters in the trenches, scooping out the banks in their search for dry earth. But, as Bean wrote, the orange clay became saturated and fell ‘like thick cream, in slabs and layers—slopped off of itself onto the floor of the trench. Men were buried like this. I heard of a man who was going through his shirt picking out the lice or their eggs from the seams unconscious of the fact that the dugout had slipped in and buried all the clothes he had taken off.’ Then there were the bloated rats scurrying along the trenches, gorging on the bodies of dead men.

  In the trenches, being wet was worse than being cold. Colonel Ewen Sinclair-MacLagan, the 3rd Brigade commander, told Bean that from 21 October, when his men went into the line, until 14 November, when they came out to Dernancourt, they were never once in dry clothes or boots. When they reached their billets they could get no fuel and for days had to wear wet clothes and socks. Worse was trench foot, in which constant damp caused flesh to rot. ‘There are poor chaps coming in who will lose both feet,’ Bean wrote. A 2nd Division officer was stuck in a shell hole for four days before he was found. ‘They tried to pull him out by fastening a rope around him,’ Bean wrote. ‘In tugging it they broke his back and he shortly after died.’ One of Bean’s friends had found an Australian in the trenches, ‘standing in mud nearly to his waist, shivering in his arms and every body muscle, leaning back against the trench side, fast asleep.’ As Christmas 1916 approached, Bean could see that morale was at its lowest ebb. He did not know how anyone could live through such conditions without their spirit breaking—and these were men who only a few months before had been adding up figures in the office of an insurance company or a shipping firm, gulping down their midday coffee and roll in a tea shop in King or Collins Street. Now they were out of doors in the ‘thick of a dirty European winter,’ marching miles and miles through a bitter cold wind and driving rain, coping with knee- and waist-high mud in country that was nothing but broken tree stumps and endless shell holes—holes into which, if a man were to fall, he might lie for days before he was found, if he was found at all. Bean continued: