by Peter Rees
As the 7th Brigade attacked Lagnicourt, Bean went up to witness the fight. With the village taken, he sat down in a dugout to write his diary, then he left it there with his gear while he went outside and looked around. Not long after, a German mine with a delayed fuse blew up the dugout, burying two men—and Bean’s diary. Three days later he described what ensued:
The engineers dug for two days and nights until digging became very dangerous—when at last they had to give up. They had nearly reached the signal room in which the sergeant and runner were—but the roof was in imminent danger of collapsing and there was no hope of finding the men alive.
Last night, March 27/28, this diary and my sleeping bag and suitcase were dug out of the debris . . . I go to England tomorrow to get a new typewriter.
He may have needed a new typewriter to replace the smashed Corona, but at least he had his diary back. That night, according to Arthur Bazley, Bean looked a ‘little nervy’. Little wonder.
30
British impetuosity
Brudenell White thought poorly of the British General Hubert Gough—‘a bloody idiot,’ he bluntly told Bean. Both knew that Gough had cost the Australians dearly with his poor planning at Pozières. Even Gough’s fellow British generals thought him an excitable and aggressive commander. ‘Not a great general,’ White told Bean: ‘will always crab any man whose name is suggested to him,’ Bean noted.
Charged with taking the town of Bullecourt and breaching the Hindenburg Line in April 1917, Gough once more demonstrated his recklessness. He represented the worst of the British officer class to Bean, who watched as I Anzac Corps was thrust into attack with inadequate preparation. Bean recorded that on 8 April, White and Birdwood told Gough that the wire entanglements had been insufficiently cut and because of this, the attack would have to be postponed until at least 12 April.
However, on the 9th a British tank officer suggested that the company’s twelve tanks could break the wire in a surprise attack, seize the Hindenburg Line, and then signal to the infantry to advance. Told of this, Gough leapt at the opportunity, deciding to attack at dawn next day, as originally planned. Birdwood and White were full of doubts because of the lack of artillery, but when Gough pointed out that the wire should be cut before the infantry went in, they reluctantly agreed. A blizzard stopped the attack but Gough persisted, adamant that it would go ahead the next morning, 11 April. White and Birdwood again protested strongly, but Gough telephoned Haig at GHQ and won his support. This settled the fate of the Australian 4th Division.
Bean watched the whole attack. It was a disaster. The large and slow-moving tanks either broke down or were soon hit and left burning on the battlefield, leaving the Australian troops exposed and vulnerable against the half-cut wire. The Australians did not utter a murmur, and not a man moved until ordered. ‘When word was given they were up in an instant and forward at a quick step,’ Bean wrote. Trying to get through the wire, they were caught by murderous machine guns. One Australian officer from the 48th Battalion was shot in the spine getting back to the trench—‘crawled 800 yards, was picked up by the couriers. He was paralysed in both legs,’ Bean wrote. ‘One boy Lance Corporal William Woods was hit with shell fire through his steel helmet in the head in 2 places—penetrated into the skull. He refused to leave his work . . . in the lines until after the fight was over.’ Woods survived.
The men came back with ‘guns over shoulders, one sergeant standing there and rounding them up at a walk as if coming in from a football match.’ In the trenches there was hand-to-hand fighting. One Australian, armed with his rifle and bayonet as he bombed a trench, met ‘a big German’ coming round the traverse. The German had seized the bayonet and wrenched the rifle away. The Australian, who was also a big man, ‘went for him with his fists.’ An officer coming behind shot the German with his revolver. The Australians lost 3000 men killed or wounded.
Despite this, Gough ordered a further attack across the same ground for 3 May, when the Australian 2nd Division attacked with the British alongside. Charging into deadly machine-gun fire, the 6th Brigade got into German trenches and, despite heavy shellfire and counterattacks, held on. The 1st Division relieved the 2nd, and soon the 5th Division took its turn. Finally, after more than a week, the Germans gave up these fields soaked with blood. The depleted Australian battalions were withdrawn to recover. The furious fighting, which in the end advanced the line only a kilometre or so, had been at the heavy cost of another 7000 Australian casualties for no important strategic advantage.
Bean had no doubt about the effect of yet another example of gross British incompetence. Bullecourt, more than any other battle, ‘shook the confidence of Australian soldiers in the capacity of the British command; the errors, especially on April 10th and 11th, were obvious to almost everyone,’ he wrote. Gough’s judgement, he added, had shown itself ‘the plaything of an almost childish impetuosity.’ But Haig, who had overall responsibility for the operation and was protective of the increasingly friendless Gough, shared the blame. ‘With his many qualities of real greatness, his judgment of men was far from infallible, and, once his confidence had been gained, his trust was blind, not to say obstinate,’ Bean wrote damningly of Haig.
Bean was not alone. White, he said, was ‘very angry with the way in which Gough has messed up this corps.’ When the British general Neil Malcolm visited him on 8 May, White bluntly told him that though he was a strong imperialist he would ‘never again consent to an Australian force coming away without it having someone on the Army staff who could put its point of view definitely and clearly’ to the Commander-in-Chief without it being resented. Bean believed White thought that Birdwood had not put up a strong enough fight. This was because he was not ‘independent of the British Army, but dependent on it. It doesn’t matter twopence to White what they say or do to him, but it does to Birdwood.’ What also rankled Bean were the British communiqués, which failed to mention that it was Australians who entered the Hindenburg Line east of Bullecourt. ‘Although the communiqué every day has had very little to say on the whole battle front, except of our success, it simply calls us “Our troops” or “the British”. It is not so with the Canadians, and there is no military necessity for it.’
If Bullecourt dampened Australian morale, the attack at Messines a month later went some way to restoring it. And it brought Bean into contact again with John Monash, now commanding the 3rd Australian Division, which had been training in Britain under his guidance for several months. Bean dined with Monash on the night of 6 June, and learned from him that the attack would be launched at 3.10 a.m. the next day. Nineteen enormous mines under the German front lines were to be detonated, the aim being to force the Germans to withdraw from the main battlefront of Vimy–Arras. The task had been given to the 2nd Army of General Sir Hubert Plumer—an officer much more cautious and thorough than the impetuous Gough. Besides Monash’s Australians, New Zealand troops were also involved.
When Bean finished dinner, armed with the information from Monash, he arranged with the New Zealand correspondent Malcolm Ross to cover the attack. After a cup of tea with Ross at midnight, and accompanied by a photographer, they headed off in Bean’s car. They had not gone far when they ran into phosgene gas, which would claim more than 500 casualties among 3rd Division troops advancing through Ploegsteert Wood to the start line. Bean passed horses and mules gasping piteously in the poisonous air. ‘We put our helmet nozzles in mouths. It lightened but presently thickened again,’ Bean wrote. Further on, gas shells began to fall fast, all around the car:
We stopped and put on helmets—photographer tore his off presently—we were going too fast. I made him put it on again. We tried them off presently but Ross was sick at once. We got up without accident—trenches were fully well steeped in gas and some men came up them several times, gassed. Everything else normal. At 2.10 Germans threw a very heavy white flare on right but saw nothing. New Zealanders in trench were having breakfast.
Bean noted the countdown minu
te by minute, and then at 3.10 a.m. the detonator switches were triggered. The ground erupted into pillars of fire and earth, instantly obliterating an unknown number of German troops above the mines. Within a few minutes the dust, intermingling with the smoke and fog, made it impossible to see the start of the barrage, or the machine guns that Bean could hear chattering away. Flares piercing this thick cloak hanging over the battlefield added to the surreal atmosphere.
The operation was a success. Bean noted that the troops captured the heights of Messines Ridge in less than two hours. As the attack wound down that morning, he tried to write up his notes but was ‘Too Dead sleepy, what with gas and fatigue after this morning’s work. I can scarcely write sense—keep on dropping to sleep.’ As Bean slept, the Allies made strong gains, setting the scene for the looming Third Battle of Ypres, but he would later play down the impact of the operation, conceding that ‘much the greater part of the German front line garrison was outside the physical danger of the mines.’
Bean’s renewed contact with Monash soon showed that little had changed between them. Despite the 3rd Division’s role in the successful attack, Bean still did not see Monash as a good leader, believing that he did not spend enough time in the front lines. His certainty of this was reinforced after he had dinner at a cafe with some 3rd Division and 4th Division officers. He found the 3rd Division men initially wary of the more experienced 4th Division troops even though they were all from South Australia and Western Australia. He acknowledged that the 3rd Division was still finding its feet, but added: ‘The COs are a bit shy of fire in some cases and Monash is not the man to keep them up to it.’ He listed several officers who he believed did not visit the front lines enough. ‘Monash doesn’t and that makes a great difference,’ and this he was sure was ‘a great drawback.’
Bean’s thoughts about Monash’s leadership surfaced again just a few weeks later when the 4th Division’s commander, Major General William Holmes, was mortally wounded on 2 July 1917, at Messines. Holmes was escorting the Premier of New South Wales, William Holman, on a tour of the battlefield when a high-explosive shell burst on the road as they stood alongside their car. A shell fragment tore through Holmes’ ribs, leaving a gaping wound through to his neck. He died shortly after. In a brief obituary for Australian newspapers, Bean wrote that there was a natural tendency to question whether citizen soldiers, who had been more or less complete amateurs until the war plunged them into soldiering, were really equipped for high command. ‘None will grudge it to General Holmes that he was, of all others, the Australian who first showed that it could be done with complete success.’ Holmes was ‘an experienced administrator who possessed fine moral qualities, transparent sincerity, energy and great courage, and was one of Australia’s most eminent citizen soldiers.’
When Brigadier General John Gellibrand gently chided him for not having done justice to Holmes in his article, Bean took it to heart. In his diary, he compared Holmes with his fellow Australian officers, noting that Gellibrand believed that he was the first successful Australian leader. In Bean’s assessment, Bridges was not a leader but a commander, whereas White had never had the chance to be a leader. ‘He is easily our leading soldier, but a staff soldier and scholar, not a commander yet,’ Bean added. Holmes had had the power of command which Monash and another senior Australian soldier, Major General Sir Talbot Hobbs, the 5th Division commander, did not. In Bean’s eyes, Holmes ‘had a driving force and attraction—and was as straight and unselfish as any man ever was.’
Monash, too, was a citizen soldier but Bean clearly believed he was continuing to fall short, despite having been given command of a division. And by now, Bean was confident that he had a firm grasp of the capabilities of not just the Australian troops but their leaders. He regarded White as the pre-eminent general, observing of him that ‘an ounce of enmity worries him more than a ton of work.’ White was his mentor in matters military, but they were also mutual confidants.
That relationship was crucial to Bean because having White on side meant he had access to the thinking of the senior leadership, and their support not just on the battlefield but also in his tortuous dealings with British superiors. After nearly three years together, they each understood how the other thought. Bean had no doubt that if White had a field command he would have been outstanding.
But there were also other matters on Bean’s mind in mid-1917. For him and senior Australian officers such as White, the Bullecourt fiasco further exacerbated their anger and frustration with the British military. Against this background, there was a crucial development on another front when that same month the Australian War Records Section (AWRS) opened in London. Behind it lay a powerful mix of nationalism, an emerging historical consciousness, and a growing sense that the nation had an obligation to preserve the memory of the dead. And of them Bean was constantly reminded. On a visit that month to the Somme he immediately noticed that:
the whole field from the Maze to Fricourt is haunted with a sickly smell of dead—half-buried men, I fancy a huge cemetery of them. The Graves Registration people are gradually going over it and hundreds of little white crosses are all over the valley of La Boiselle. I don’t think they will find many of our people.
Pozières is one vast Australian cemetery but they have been shattered and buried too often by shells for much to remain.
Thousands of men can go and very few graves remain.
Bean, who had been impressed by the Canadian War Records Office the previous year, was at the forefront of the push for the AWRS. He had been collecting war relics since Gallipoli and reasoned that since by its efforts and sacrifices Australia was at last making its own history, it had earned the right to keep its own records. They otherwise would disappear into the vast morass of British records.
Bean understood the historical importance of these rapidly accumulating files: they were vital to telling the story of the war. It was daunting to have to wade through volumes of paper before writing his cables. He acknowledged this when he wrote, ‘The keeping up with all these reports, operation orders etc is too much for me—and the record scheme is not yet on its feet.’ When the AWRS was first established, its role was only to collect written material, principally war diaries. This dashed Bean’s hopes for a comprehensive collection such as Lord Beaverbrook’s.
The newly appointed officer in charge of the AWRS was twenty-three-year-old Lieutenant John Treloar, who had been White’s clerk and secretary. While Bean and Treloar shared a common commitment to recording Australia’s role in the war, their backgrounds were very different. Treloar did not have Bean’s privileged education; rather, he had been educated at the Albert Park State School in Melbourne, and had joined the Department of Defence in 1911 as a clerk, working for White. At the outbreak of war he had enlisted, and had served at Galllipoli until he was evacuated to Australia in September 1915 with enteric fever. Recovered, he joined the Australian Flying Corps as an equipment officer and served in Egypt before transferring to Headquarters, I Anzac Corps, in France, in mid-1916.
The energy that Treloar brought to the new job impressed Bean, but there was no closeness between them, such as there was between him and Bazley. A few weeks after it opened, Bean left Bazley in London at the AWRS, before returning to France. ‘The kid will get promotion as he deserves,’ Bean wrote. ‘It is a really great wrench because we have become very close friends, and I also rely on him more than I ever have on any assistant.’ There was no doubt, however, that in the coming months Treloar would need as much help as he could to get the section operating. And Bazley, with his intimate knowledge of Bean’s diaries and experience of both Gallipoli and the Western Front, was just the man to forge a critical link between the two—especially at a time when Bean had begun to think on a grander scale. On 3 August 1917, on the eve of the fourth year of the war, he wrote to George Pearce urging the establishment of ‘some nucleus of a national museum, gallery and library.’
Bean apparently envisaged an institution that woul
d house both museum objects and archival materials—relics and records. Pearce asked his department to let Bean know that the government, in conjunction with the trustees of the Exhibition Building in Melbourne, had already begun to make arrangements for war trophies. If this seemed satisfactory in Melbourne, in France the mood was different. Under the ever-present stimulus of sacrifice and death, the thinking was developing beyond a museum to the concept of a memorial to those who had died or who would die in future fighting. And Bean was at the forefront of this.
31
Bean does a Murdoch
Amid the discontent with the British military rumbling through all levels of the Australian ranks, Bean decided there was only one thing for it—he would go straight to the top. He would try to see Prime Minister David Lloyd George and put to him the need to combine all the Australian divisions into a single entity. But first he consulted Brudenell White, who agreed that bringing the divisions together ‘would be a good thing.’ While he had Lloyd George’s attention, Bean would put in a plea for changes to the military censorship that all the correspondents found so frustrating.
So unhappy were the London newspaper proprietors with the chief press censor, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Hutton Wilson, that he was replaced by Captain John Faunthorpe. Bean believed Faunthorpe, the Military Director of Cinematograph Operations at GHQ, was ‘a fine broad-minded man.’ But Hutton Wilson was not done with: his uncle was governor of Gibraltar. As Bean put it, that was quite sufficient, ‘as appointments go in England,’ to enable him to get back again into what was effectively half of his old position by being put in charge of visitors to the front. Another colonel named Church was put in over Faunthorpe. Because of his newness to the job, Church referred to Hutton Wilson on every point that arose. Faunthorpe was on the verge of resigning from what had become an impossible position.