by Peter Rees
The death of Schuler, just weeks before the start of Haig’s big offensive in Flanders, gave Bean pause for thought. The summer was unusually wet, and he wondered how this might affect coming operations. On 3 August, four days after Haig unleashed his attack, Bean noted that the weather was already bad. ‘Of course the only thing is to allow for the weather in your plans and assume that it may be the worst.’ With poor weather already making the operations more difficult, he brooded again over the issue of religion and its part in the war:
It quite negatives the idea of God having a hand in the world’s affairs. If a God exists he has certainly no influence on these happenings of nature. There may be a life after death, and there may be some great universal mind; but it is very sure this sequence of nature is purposeless. It is unthinkable that a good mind could favour Germany’s cause against that of the liberal nations in the way in which the weather has done again and again.
On Christmas Eve seven months earlier, in a depressed mood, Bean had confessed that he was ‘not a religious man’ and expressed doubts about his allegiance to the Christian faith; now he was less equivocal: there might be a God, he thought, and there might be immortality. But with more hope than certainty, he applied the moral principle of rightness—surely no God would favour Germany by influencing the weather.
And the rain kept coming.
32
A change of focus
Harry Gullett was nothing if not perceptive. With the war about to enter its fourth year, before leaving for Egypt he thought it time to give some advice to Charles Bean. They were good friends and he could talk frankly. Gullett knew what Bean had gone through; he also knew the responsibility that lay in front of him. Gullett had enthusiastically embraced the task of explaining to Australian units the operations of the Australian War Records Section and how they could help. Bean noted that Gullett had been ‘splendidly received’.
The two men had gone to inspect Royal Flying Corps squadrons to which officers of the Australian Flying Corps were attached, and on the drive back Gullett raised the subject of the Official History. This, he knew, was the crucial task that lay before Bean, and he worried that his friend was too caught up in reporting the daily events of the war to maintain the detached perspective necessary to a historian. Gullett said to him: ‘I only hope you’ll take three or four months clear holiday so as to get a bit of distance from it—so that it doesn’t all seem too commonplace to you.’ As Bean saw it, Gullett worried that having lived in the midst of the war, and become accustomed to it, he would not see what he regarded as ‘the real truths.’ Bean knew what he meant:
The wonder that all this self-disciplined army in France was until a few years ago a crowd of young Australians not one of whom had ever known any outside restraint whatever—not accustomed to be spoken to with authority, much less forced to obey it . . . that sort of truth, he means. He thinks I am writing too much for the military critic—the men of the AIF, and such men as White, and not enough for the people. One always writes up to some critic, he says.
To Bean, Gullett was a ‘brilliant, transparently clean Australian, with a wholesomeness that wins your admiration and respect when you consider the advanced crowd he has mixed with.’ He believed Gullett was ‘quicker of intelligence’ than himself and hoped to see him made prime minister of Australia, but thought he was ‘too honest.’ Gullett’s politics, though, were more conservative than Bean’s had become, and while he agreed with Bean that the monarchy was the ‘last centre and home of feudal ideals and snobbery in England,’ he could not see how the British Empire could ever have a president at its head.
Gullett did not let up on Bean and his responsibility for writing the Australian history of the war. A fortnight later, he again raised the issue with Bean, telling him that he should not delay for too long. He made a second point that hit home with Bean: that he was not indispensable as the official war correspondent, but he was indispensable as the war’s historian. Gullett could see that the various roles that Bean had come to assume—cabling stories from the front, organising the collection of unit records and collecting war relics for the new museum, together with the inevitable administration involved—were hindering him:
I agreed, not altogether for his reasons, but because it is obvious that the record work makes it impossible to do the correspondent work properly, and they both suffer. There are battalions I have not visited since Bullecourt, and Messines; and I have only written a couple of articles in the last month. The Australian papers will be crying out for their own correspondents and this competition is exactly what the system of official correspondent was intended to avoid.
Bean raised the issue with Brudenell White, who said he had hoped that he would be able to see the war through. However, with no end to the conflict in sight, White conceded that the change was advisable. They agreed that Bean should go to London, start on the history of Gallipoli, and come over to France as necessary. Bean now had to nominate a successor as official correspondent to the Australian Government.
Just who was an easy choice for Bean: he had no doubt that Fred Cutlack, a thirty-one-year-old intelligence officer with AIF 3rd Division headquarters, was best suited for the job. Cutlack had worked as a journalist in Australia and then London. He subsequently joined the publicity staff of the Australian High Commission, coinciding with the time when Bean was The Sydney Morning Herald’s London correspondent. He had similar interests to Bean: in 1913 he was special correspondent on HMAS Australia for the cruiser’s maiden voyage from England, and when war broke out in 1914 he was reading for the Bar in London. He soon enlisted in the British regiment King Edward’s Horse, was commissioned a lieutenant, and served in France in 1915–16 with the Royal Field Artillery. He was then attached to the AIF as intelligence officer in April 1917. ‘Cutlack is level-headed—a brave man, and would represent Australia with credit in any gathering of war correspondents,’ was Bean’s assessment. ‘That is why both Gullett and I were keen on having him.’ Cutlack was duly appointed assistant correspondent, allowing Bean to start preparing to write the history of the Gallipoli campaign.
Meanwhile, Australian troops had become bogged down in the mud of Passchendaele, in the Third Battle of Ypres. Attacking from Ypres in Belgium, Haig planned to drive the Germans from the surrounding dominant ridges, with the eventual aim of reaching the Belgian coast. But then it rained, and kept raining, turning the battlefield into a quagmire that Bean likened to ‘the bottom of an upheaved ocean.’ All the while, Haig insisted that this was the wrong time to relax the pressure.
The Australians had moved north to rear areas in Flanders, with an attack planned to proceed in a succession of limited offensives. As Bean described it, they would unfold ‘like blows of a sledge hammer.’ On 20 September, the Australian infantry divisions joined the action in the Battle of Menin Road. In the hours beforehand, Bean had accompanied Hurley and Wilkins to find the areas surrounding the Menin Road under fire. Bean advised Wilkins on the photos he wanted. Bean would later write in the Official History, that the men were full of admiration for Hurley and Wilkins ‘recklessly exposing themselves on the Menin Road to secure a record of this bombardment.’ Hurley would also later recall that Bean took him on a tour of the line held by the Australians in the Ypres sector when the Germans launched a heavy barrage:
We were standing on the crater admiring the ‘scenery’; suddenly there was a vicious scream, and ‘plop’ just behind. My swagger new uniform was copiously spattered with mud, and though we were in a mightily warm spot I felt exceedingly shivery. Charlie was smoking at the time—he just went on smoking, and remarked, ‘They don’t always go off. It’s a hundred to one chance another won’t fall in this precise spot. We’re safe here for a time’. I thought otherwise, and found intense attraction in a hole that burrowed into a nearby slope. Thither we went.
If Hurley’s recollection of the non-smoking Bean enjoying a cigarette was correct, perhaps it says something about the impact of war on a man who s
eemed nonchalant about the dangers surrounding him. Tobacco and cigarettes became highly valued comforts and symbols of comradeship when troops were out of the line, and it would be no surprise if Bean occasionally, at least, lit up.
Besides the photographers, Bean by now also had the artist Fred Leist to supervise. Also present was the newly arrived Australian war correspondent Gordon Gilmour, of the Australian Press Association. Bean did not approve of Gilmour’s appointment. ‘The private interests and the papers,’ he fumed in his diary, ‘are something which often cut right across the interests of the country—scoops, competition, magnification and exaggeration, are out of harmony with what is best for the country.’ But as he himself had acknowledged only a month earlier, he had not been sending the Australian papers enough copy, and Gilmour’s arrival was exactly what he had feared would happen.
Now he had not just Hurley and Wilkins to consider, but also Leist and Gilmour, all eager for a taste of war. Gullett had joined Bean when he took Gilmour and Leist beyond the main Menin Gate, walking up through the 2nd Division’s sector, across Bellevarde and Westhoek ridges. As they neared Polygon Wood they reached a trench, full of men killed by shellfire. Gullett and Bean climbed out of the trench and made their way through the stubble of thin sapling stumps projecting between the shell holes that had been Polygon Wood. Leist and Gilmour followed. The four were alone on the battlefield. With shells bursting every few minutes, Bean took Gullett along a line where a low bank running parallel to their path offered some cover. A shell burst and they crouched down, the bank sheltering them as fragments flew harmlessly overhead. But Bean was suddenly worried:
I had forgotten that Leist and Gilmour would not be up to this dodge. They were following us at about 100 yards, and when we passed this point we looked back and saw them in obvious anxiety how to get along. I signed to them to come along, but it was pretty rough on them.
However they got through and the thing that pleased me was that Leist had now been round this battlefield within a day or two of the actual attack which he might have to paint. He had seen a more active battlefield than any of our artists except Will Dyson, and the knowledge he gained would be very valuable to him and to the Australian records.
Bean had ensured that the newcomers would not forget their introduction to the war, yet they had but a taste of the bloody ordeal of the 1st and 2nd Australian Divisions as they advanced side by side—a first for the AIF—through the splintered remnants of the wood. As part of the wider effort, the 4th and 5th Divisions then took over and attacked at Polygon Wood a few days later. With heavily fortified German concrete pillboxes often blocking their progress, shell and machine-gun fire cut a swathe through the Australians. However, with heavy artillery support, Bean noted they managed systematic step-by-step advances, pushing the line forward by a few kilometres. But the gains were made at a heavy cost; in little more than a week the Australians suffered just over 5000 casualties. Later, the 4th and 5th Australian Divisions, protected by a barrage that reminded Bean of a ‘Gippsland bushfire’, were part of an attack on a 10-kilometre front that advanced the front line, as Haig intended, to a position from which to strike at the main ridge at Broodseinde on 4 October.
Forty minutes before the attack, scheduled to begin at 6 a.m., Bean sat with Gullett and Murdoch in a shell hole not quite 2 kilometres in the rear. Suddenly he saw and heard the signs of German flares, white and yellow, hazy in the drizzle, on the Australian front. Soon there was the ‘crump, crump’ of a heavy German barrage—a counterattack timed for the same hour as the Australian attack. To better defend Broodseinde Ridge, German troops were attempting to recapture some of the territory previously lost. As Bean watched, the Lewis gunners in the advancing Australian line opened fire and the Germans broke. ‘The Australian lines rolled on over the remnant and up the slope. The rain stopped, the ground became drier,’ he wrote. The Australians had captured Broodseinde Ridge. The attack, Bean concluded, was a great success—‘the most complete yet won by the British Army in France.’ The two hammer blows of Menin Road and Polygon Wood, he wrote, showed the German command that its system of relying on counterattack by divisions held close in the rear was completely ineffectual against Haig’s step-by-step tactics. But the operation cost the Australians 6500 casualties, the New Zealanders 1700, and the Germans 5000 prisoners.
The focus shifted to Passchendaele, a village lying on the last ridge east of Ypres, 8 kilometres from a vital German railway junction at Roeselare. As Bean put it, the weather for the following five days was ‘damnable’. Along with most other correspondents, Bean was deeply concerned about the attack, noting that the official attitude was that Passchendaele Ridge was so important the attack was worth making whether it succeeded or failed. He feared it was a huge gamble that would further damage the troops’ morale. The generals at headquarters had no idea, he wrote, how desperately hard it would be to fight the Germans ‘in the mud, rifles choked, Lewis guns out of action, men tired and slow,’ and with a new, untried British division among them. ‘Every step means dragging the foot out of the mud,’ he predicted. ‘I shall be very surprised if this fight succeeds.’
The rain became torrential. On the morning of 9 October, as the Passchendaele attack began over sodden ground on a 12-kilometre front, Murdoch and Gilmour arrived to watch the battle with Bean. A streak of competitiveness surfaced in Bean. ‘I went with them,’ he wrote, ‘very willingly with Murdoch. We tried to shake off Gilmour by various means, but he came. I wanted him to content himself with a visit to a [Casualty Clearing Station] and pick him up there again. But he decided to come with us.’
They drove to II Anzac Corps headquarters, leaving his car by the Menin Gate, and walked through the heavy traffic up the Menin Road. Bean was shocked by the condition of the Australians as he passed the 7th Brigade. ‘A couple, or I think it was three, passed us going very slow. They were pale white and drawn and detached and put one foot slowly in front of the other and I have not seen men do so since the Somme winter.’ Making their way up to the duckboards to 6th Brigade HQ, Bean was further struck by the deathly appearance of men who had been exposed to the worst mud since Flers the previous winter. There was ‘one tall thin white-faced youngster, especially looking like a dead man looks and scarcely able to walk.’ Another Australian approached limping, his arm over the neck of another man. Bean saw that his right shin and calf were completely blood red and that a wound inside the thigh above the knee was still bleeding. There was something else that Bean noticed—he wore shorts! At about 15 metres Bean could make out the grin on his face. As he passed the trio one of them, grinning, volunteered: ‘We got the buggers good on the second ridge.’
By evening, as a heavy Allied bombardment erupted, they had reached Westhoek, where they learned that the mud was so bad half a dozen guns had disappeared into the slush. The flashes of the guns on the edge of Anzac Ridge captivated Bean. The continuous play of light reminded him ‘of a woman’s fingers over the keys of a piano.’ Beyond the horizon there was the occasional rippling flicker of German batteries. They turned for home along the duckboards as the light began to fail. A few scattered artillery drivers who had been up to the advanced batteries with ammunition were taking their horses back:
Even in that light the horses were floundering across trenches and shellholes. We saw one pioneer or sapper methodically mending the duckboard crossing over a trench where a horse had floundered in. The number of horses dead beside the track shows what the work is like—they have most of them a small cloud of blood pink foam above the nostrils, and I don’t think it was often a shell that killed them. They were bogged and shot.
As they wound backwards between the tail of one horse and the head of another they passed line after line of men going east along the same track. They looked warm and well and Bean was struck by the contrast with ‘the peaked white worn bearded men of 7 Brigade whom we had seen coming out.’ Bean was confident these men would hold the line—a task beyond the worn-out troops they were rep
lacing. ‘And I wouldn’t blame them. Army has no right to squander men in this fashion.’
Enough ground was gained to justify a further attempt to seize and pass Passchendaele a few days later. As Bean would write, Haig was determined to strike once more, believing that the Germans had not recovered from the shock of Broodseinde and that the Allied troops were now almost through the pillbox defences. The attack was launched at dawn. Murdoch joined Bean but Gilmour decided to visit the hospitals. ‘I must say we rather encouraged him,’ Bean wrote. ‘This idea of watching battles from shellholes doesn’t approve itself to him. What you want, he says, is a little imagination.’
Bean and Murdoch left at about 3 a.m. in a misty rain that did not stop. Past Poperinghe they had to put out their sole remaining light and steer through the dark as best they could as they passed, somehow, long lines of horsemen. They reached Ypres in heavy rain and decided not to grope along the misery of the duckboards and shell holes but to wait in 3rd Division HQ until daylight. They then ‘trampled down the mud to make a sort of layer just above the level of the pool in the shellhole, and sat down with the telescope.’ Through it, Murdoch saw Anzac troops on the top of the ridge—lots of them, he told Bean, standing and walking freely with German shells bursting around them.
The advance on Passchendaele was made by II Anzac Corps with the 3rd Australian and the New Zealand Divisions, the 4th Australian Division of I Anzac Corps supporting their right, and five British divisions attacking on their left. But heavy rain continued and, as Bean wrote, even in the few bright hours that morning the barrage was imperceptible. Germans firing with impunity from pillboxes stopped the New Zealanders, while most of the 3rd Australian Division was bogged in the stinking mud of the Ravebeek Valley, below Passchendaele. The fights for Passchendaele had been, as Bean remarked, ‘complete failures’:
We pushed in each case against the weather. The weather prophet warned us. We knew the weather had been bad and was likely to be bad on October 9; and we knew it would be bad on October 11. In the face of our Somme experience, we tried it.