Bearing Witness

by Peter Rees

  They made their way through these Paris crowds, either with a mate or with a girl—a woman they had picked up, no doubt, but often quite respectable in appearance as these Paris cocottes often are—they made their way through Paris exactly as if it were Sydney or Manly or Warrnambool.

  It was an Australian up in front of the nigger orchestra, who was waving his cane to the music—dancing a half cakewalk—laughing chaffing with the French men and the Canadians around. He was not drunk and keeping the folk about him merry. The Americans were stiffer and colder and restrained—our men were there to enjoy themselves and were living every minute. If a nation with so frank and free a soul does not add something of great value to the world it will belie all its appearance and its promise.

  Bean was proud of them and the promise such men held for the nation’s future. The next night he and Cutlack again ventured out, this time to the demimonde of Montmartre. On their way home Cutlack wanted to buy cough lozenges from a chemist. A cabman told him there was one at the corner of the Boulevard Montmartre. It was too far, so he and Bean tried to find one on the Avenue de l’Opéra. As they strode along the pavement, a woman wearing widow’s weeds overtook them. She stopped Cutlack and said she had heard him ask for a chemist’s shop but that he was going the wrong way. She offered to show him where it was. Bean soon realised she was touting for a brothel, but Cutlack did not. As Bean put it, ‘He did not tumble to it in the least but walked half a mile before he realised that she was not merely a kindly stranger who had chased him to put him on his way . . . Old Cutlack is as simple as a child.’

  After three years, Bean was war weary. The visit to Paris, and the novelty of the Folies Bergère, lightened his mood. He found his health suffered now that he was away from the fresh air of the French countryside and back in London breathing the smog; and the occasions when he slipped back into civilian society were difficult. His distaste for the British social system was now intense. As well, his politics were changing: he supported the 1917 overthrow of the Tsar in Russia, thinking it was a good thing to have Russia on the side of democracy. He returned to the issue in January, lamenting that the British ruling classes could not see ‘that the Russian socialists are men of earnestness and principle.’ He felt that ‘whatever the revolution brings to Russia, it is a tremendous benefit to her; one feels that she has entered the community of liberal nations in spite of all her difficulties and one trusts and hopes that the old regime there can never return again—that the great beginning is made.’

  He was clearly fascinated by socialism—and believed that many Australian officers and men shared his interest. Even those who were not friendly towards socialism before the war were now becoming so. ‘The army is one big socialistic state; and though the system is wasteful in a bad division it is excellent in a good one. Canteens and such institutions are all educating the men, and officers too, to possible state-managed businesses in peace,’ he wrote. The signs of this support had begun to emerge earlier in the war, but now Bean idealistically saw socialism as seemingly inevitable in the need to replace the political structures shaken by the war.

  He could see this affecting his relationships when he finally returned to Australia—something that he had suspected after meeting some old Sydney acquaintances in London. Writing to his parents, he commented, ‘I don’t think that I can ever belong regularly to that same Sydney set again—one’s politics are so entirely different that one simply has to agree to differ . . . The regular Sydney society in which one used to move years ago would not agree with me these days—nor I with it.’

  Indeed, as his views on the League of Nations showed, the fluid nature of politics now fascinated him, as he realised the day after he posted the letter home. He joined a group of correspondents for lunch at the National Liberal Club. ‘They talked politics all the time, which relieved me; for the life of me, I can never keep up with the clever small talk.’ Just how intensely he now felt about politics was clear shortly after when, amid rumours that Asquith was plotting against Lloyd George, Bean wrote scathingly: ‘God preserve us from that limp snobbery and jellybacked liberal conservatism in this crisis.’

  Before the war, and indeed through its early years, such forcefulness had not been a feature of Bean’s personality. Tired out though he was, he still had to get the Official History underway and, at the same time, keep abreast of the war. He was still closely involved with the collection of records, including Hubert Wilkins’ photographs and drawings by Will Dyson and other artists. Not least, there was the fight for Australia’s rightful claims to war trophies. It is arguable that this pressure had begun to affect his judgement on matters that he took to heart—not least the question of who should command the five Australian divisions when they were brought together as the Australian Corps. He was juggling on many fronts.

  35

  War on a different front

  Two days after watching the temple pillars tumbling in the opera Samson and Delilah at the Theatre Royal in London, Bean left his office and headed towards Charing Cross to buy a newspaper. The headline of 21 March 1918—written on a blackboard—jumped out at him: ‘Bombardment on the Whole Front.’ The symbolism would not have been lost on Bean, whose ‘heart and spirits jumped up 100 degrees.’ He hoped ‘almost beyond hope that they would fling themselves upon our army.’ He did not believe the Germans would succeed, as ‘the attack always loses more men than the defence.’ Over a front of 100 kilometres, the Germans had unleashed the long-expected spring offensive. Operation Michael would prove their final attempt to win the war. The Germans, reinforced by men from the Eastern Front after the effective collapse of the Russians in 1917, launched their main assault with the aim of forcing Britain and France to give up before American reinforcements arrived.

  Bean immediately crossed to France and soon realised that the position of the vastly outnumbered Allies was serious. The Germans had taken the British Third and Fifth Armies by surprise. Divided, they were forced to retreat. German troops then rapidly advanced across the Somme battlefield towards Amiens and soon recaptured all the territory they had lost around the Somme in the previous two years. Amid this crisis, General Hubert Gough, having lost the confidence of his men some time before, was finally sacked as commander of the defeated Fifth Army.

  There were lighter moments, however. On 1 April, as he trudged across the fields at Ribemont, Bean saw ‘a sturdily built man in a top hat, waterproof cape, waterproof trousers, with a stick walking down the road with one of our men.’ It was Captain Bill Orchard of the 38th Battalion, which had been rushed south to meet the German offensive. ‘I suppose he was amusing his men—he seemed a cheerful sort of chap,’ Bean thought. From a big barn nearby, Bean heard sounds of merriment and snatches of singing. ‘I imagine that somebody had got hold of some champagne in there—there is any amount of cheap sweet champagne in these villages and as the shells with certainty get it and the poultry if the men don’t, they make free with both of them.’ He added that Australians in some villages had sworn not to take things from the billets they lived in. Behind this was a blunt warning from the 15th Brigade commander, Brigadier General Pompey Elliott. After a British officer had allegedly been caught leaving the nearby town of Corbie with a cart full of looted champagne, Elliott infamously ordered that anyone caught taking wine out of Corbie was to be publicly hanged in the marketplace.

  Bean linked up with Fred Cutlack and they drove to Villers-Bretonneux, the shell holes becoming thicker as they neared the town. Dead horses lay on the road and roadsides were blurred with the ugly burnt dust of newly exploded shells. A few men stood in the doorways of houses as they turned into the empty high street with shells screaming down on either side. A big building in the centre of the town was burning fiercely, and yellow-white smoke streamed up to the sky. They went quickly through the town and down the hill towards Amiens.

  Later, at nearby Cachy, they met Australian troops retiring down the road, seemingly not knowing where they were going. Bean got out of
the car and attempted to exert some control, saying to some: ‘Look men, you Australians here, it’s no good going on without knowing where you’re going to. Hang on here a moment until an Australian officer comes along.’ The men stopped immediately and sat down on the side of the road as traffic swarmed by. Whether this crossed a line of military authority or not, uppermost in Bean’s mind was his concern for the men. Although a civilian, he had enough battlefield experience to read the signs of the German attack that now threatened not just his own safety but that of the men around him:

  Just then a 5.9 shell came down about 10 yards from where we stood and covered us all with mud and wounded a man beside us. That made me think this cross road was registered, and that the German fire was going to come onto the road. There was a heavy rattle of machine-guns around the town . . . it looked as if the Germans might turn up there at any moment. The shell settled my attempt to hold the men.

  Bean and Cutlack drove to Corbie, where they stopped to brief Pompey Elliott on events at Villers-Bretonneux so he would not be caught in the flank if the town were captured. Bean had been unsettled by what he had seen, but ‘the one thing that cheered us was the difference between our men and the British in the retreat—our men most easy to handle—quite easy to take back if we had had an officer there. The British, though only walking as if from a football match, were clearly panicked and quite spiritless.’

  The German onslaught was brutal. Returning to Villers-Bretonneux the next day, Bean and Cutlack arrived amid shellfire to find the town virtually destroyed. ‘It was a shocking sight—every house seemed to have been hit. One high velocity [shell] was swishing into the rear of the town and exploding every 3 or 4 minutes; and a 5.9 shell and 4 whizzbangs were playing every few minutes on the east side of the town.’ Walking up the deserted streets following a bicycle track they turned a corner to find a dozen Australians outside a building and others ‘in easy attitudes on their various occupations.’ The men were from the 33rd Infantry Battalion, relieved after restoring the front around Aubercourt and then withdrawn to Villers-Bretonneux to rest. But the line had been broken again and the town was in danger of falling to the Germans. Bean saw their commander, Colonel Leslie Morshead—‘a dapper little schoolmaster, only 28 years of age, in whom the traditions of the British Army had been bottled from his childhood like tight-corked champagne’—who waved to him and said, ‘I would much rather be in the front line than in this town.’ Bean wondered how any of them had the nerve to stay.

  With a German attack expected later that day, Bean and Cutlack hurried back to their car. On the way they saw an old woman walking up a side street with a pail of water. They followed her to her empty cottage, where she sat alone, hens pecking at the remains of her corn. She told Bean that all she wanted was a light. He gave her a box of matches. ‘It must have been desperately dangerous and miserable for her there alone with night coming on,’ he noted. He told an officer about the old woman. He wished he had brought her out of the town. ‘The idea of a stray fragment catching that poor old thing—of her spending her night amidst the shell flashes—is terrible. I doubt if she could have walked to the car and I doubt if I should have been justified in trying to get the car into the village. But these things make one loathe and detest the contingencies of war and the whole horrible system.’ In the midst of the horror of war it is often the personal, albeit fleeting, moment that can penetrate men’s protective veneer. Bean was no exception.

  On the main roads, French civilians fled from the German attack, carrying whatever possessions they could manage. Bean and Cutlack drove south through St Omer and Rollencourt, passing refugees with carts piled high with mattresses, chairs, bedsteads, tables and sometimes even a crate of pigs. Younger women walked and older women rode on top of the bundles. One man driving a cart shouted out a plea for them to give a lift to a ‘mamselle’ dressed in black, as if going to church, walking by herself. She had come from Neuve-Eglise and was walking to Abbeville, a distance of about 160 kilometres. She had already been on the road a week and and could hardly walk any further. Bean took her to the next town, where he arranged for her to be put on the next lorry to Abbeville. But she was just one; Bean was witnessing the unfolding of a vast civilian tragedy.

  Hamel had been captured and at Villers-Bretonneux the Germans were closing in. By 9 April, the situation was becoming critical as German troops threatened the channel ports linking France and Britain. By 18 April, it was clear that the Germans would attempt to push on to Amiens again. Six days later the Germans took Villers-Bretonneux and turned towards Amiens.

  Bean noted that as soon as the news reached British headquarters, ‘orders showered down’ to retake this vital position from whose commanding heights north of the town the spires of Amiens Cathedral were clearly visible. Along with some British battalions, the job of retaking Villers-Bretonneux was assigned to two Australian brigades of the 4th and 5th Divisions—the 13th, commanded by Brigadier General Sir Thomas Glasgow, and Pompey Elliott’s 15th. One brigade approached from the north and one from the south, meeting at the village’s eastern edge. They surrounded the Germans, and in fierce fighting drove them from Villers-Bretonneux and the adjacent woods. As Bean put it, the Australians had remedied a dangerous situation. The battle had been a remarkable victory for the AIF, but while it marked the effective end of the great German offensive on the Somme that had begun so successfully four weeks earlier, the fighting did not let up. The Germans still had 206 divisions to the Allies’ 173 divisions along the Western Front.

  But elsewhere, as Bean saw it, other fault lines were appearing. In early May he was surprised by an incident involving Birdwood. He learned that Brudenell White had told Birdwood of murmurings at GHQ and in the AIF that Birdwood liked to keep on close terms with Keith Murdoch because of his influence. Miffed, Birdwood hardened his stand against visiting Australian war correspondents, immediately informing GHQ that he would take no further responsibility for Murdoch or Gordon Gilmour. Further, he would no longer have them to stay at his headquarters, nor provide them with a car. As Bean put it, ‘Murdoch was intensely indignant at this and wrote to Birdwood most strongly—so that Birdie has thoroughly antagonised his powerful friend; but the little man’s mind is quite made up.’

  Even Haig knew that when Birdwood felt a stand was necessary on the AIF’s behalf, he would take it.

  Against this unsettled background, Bean, Cutlack and Will Dyson had a long argument about whether Monash or White ought to succeed Birdwood if he left the command of the Australian Corps. Dyson and Bean favoured White, while Cutlack supported Monash. Bean noted that Dyson believed Monash would get the job, adding: ‘He has the crude advertising pushing genius which must succeed. But success for German methods is worse in the long run than defeat.’

  The discussion was prescient. In mid-May, Haig decided to reconstitute the Fifth Army—a decision that had critical consequences for the Australian Corps. Haig offered the command to Birdwood, who reluctantly accepted after Haig’s chief of staff pointed out that if he remained with the Australian Corps he would block the promotion of Australian officers to the highest Australian command in the field. Birdwood told Bean he had advised the Australian Government that White, 5th Division commander Major General Sir Talbot Hobbs—fresh from the success of recapturing Villers-Bretonneux—and Monash must all be considered for command of the Australian Corps. Birdwood was doubtful of Hobbs, even though he had proved to be an excellent divisional commander. This left the choice between White and Monash. Knowing White’s great capacity, Birdwood would be inclined to recommend his promotion to the post if Monash could have been passed over. But Monash could not; he had undoubted ability and success behind him. Therefore Birdwood recommended Monash, with White to join him at the Fifth Army as Major General, General Staff. Birdwood would also keep the position of General Officer Commanding the AIF. The divisions would as soon as possible be brought into his army. Blamey would become chief of staff to Monash and Gellibrand get Monash’s d
ivision. Glasgow and the 4th Brigade commander, Brigadier General Charles Brand, would get the 1st and 2nd Divisions. This was no surprise, for Birdwood had written to Pearce on 18 March that if he had to give up command of the Corps he would recommend Monash to take over.

  From his own discussion with Haig a few months earlier, Bean knew that the British commander had also long favoured Monash’s promotion. From the first parade of Monash’s 3rd Division in France, Bean would later write, Haig had been deeply impressed by his ability. But now what he had long regarded as unthinkable was happening, and Bean listened, staggered by what he was hearing; he had never accepted the idea that Monash, rather than White, could command the AIF. He wrote in his diary: ‘This is a very great blow. That White should leave the Corps is simply to make a misuse of the staff of the AIF. If White has a great value to the British Army he has a greater value to Australia. I have been thinking out the straightest and strongest telegram I can to Pearce.’

  Still coming to terms with the news the next day, Bean arrived at the AIF’s war museum salvage depot at Ailly-sur-Somme, near Amiens, when a staff member ran out, looking frightened, to warn him that a shell had just exploded in the storeroom and a ‘curly headed little chap’ of the 2nd Division was badly wounded. In the yard Bean learned that Corporal Ernie Bailey, who had accompanied him on many battlefield trips to Pozières and Messines, was dead, blown apart by a big trench mortar he had been trying to disarm. Bean reeled at the news. He liked the genial, newly married Bailey, who had been dedicated to the job of collecting relics. ‘He “jumped” lorries on the greasy Flanders roads, begged a ride here and a driver there, visited unceasingly the salvage dumps of the divisions and all their ordnance workshops, making friends of the senior NCOs and getting us all sorts of machine-guns, too much battered for use . . . Bailey’s whole heart was in this work of collecting for Australia everything that could be of interest.’