by Peter Rees
Monash’s reputation was boosted. Lloyd George thought him the best general in the war—a reflection, perhaps, of his poor relationship with Haig. The British military historian Basil Liddell Hart later suggested that if the war had gone on for another year, he would almost have certainly risen to an Army command and ‘might even have risen to Commander-in-Chief.’ Hart asserted that Monash ‘probably had the greatest capacity for command in modern war among all who held command.’
Monash was the most junior of two dozen corps commanders in the BEF, and there was little likelihood that he would have been given an Army command within a year of getting the Australian Corps. In any case, the war was about to end. Over time, Hart’s assertion has come to be widely dismissed as part of an anti-Haig campaign.
Years later, Brudenell White dismissed the likelihood of such an appointment, writing: ‘the gossip that has grown up that Monash might have come to high and even the highest place in the British Army can be dismissed as moonshine. It has no foundation in fact.’ But White supported the decision to appoint Monash to command the corps:
Monash was without doubt the man most fitted for the task. It would have been interesting to have tested his command over a longer period; and it must not be overlooked that Monash in 1918 took over an instrument perfected in its job and he had before him a task in which Dame Fortune had set a stage to suit him and Fate had already placed its black hand on the German people and Army.
To White, Monash had ‘a brain which, like that of so many of his race was quick to grasp and quick to learn.’ He was also a strong character; but vain—a trait he managed to keep ‘under sufficient control to prevent him from falling into weakness.’ Monash had been ‘misplaced’ as a brigadier on Gallipoli, having ‘not the physique, nor the time, the youth and physical vigour necessary for the intimate leading of troops in a brigade command.’ But divisional command had fitted him well. White’s comments influenced Bean’s thinking.
In the Official History, Bean was to tread carefully. While praising Monash, he was also equivocal. ‘It may be safely premised that, if those who were endeavouring to unseat him had known the life story of John Monash, no voice would have been raised against his appointment even if some continued to doubt—as indeed they may do to this day—whether in all possibilities it was the best.’ He knew he had to be frank about his and Murdoch’s role in the intrigue against Monash, but did not back away from a critical assessment of the general. He acknowledged that when Murdoch sent his telegram to Prime Minister Hughes urging that the two senior AIF command appointments be made temporary, he and Dyson were guilty of misleading him about the support their views had among officers. However, Murdoch, never one to back away from a fight, prosecuted the campaign with his customary determination.
In a ‘confidential and personal’ note to himself, Bean’s equivocation was evident: ‘I am not sure that Murdoch and I were not wrong in trying to get these changes made in the AIF command,’ he concluded awkwardly but honestly. Bean did concede that he and Murdoch had indulged in a ‘high-intentioned but ill-judged intervention.’ He contended that while it had caused no harm, this was ‘probably due to the magnanimity of both White and Monash.’ With hindsight he acknowledged that the move could never have succeeded.
Bean believed that Monash’s success showed the truth of his long-held belief that he would command a division better than a brigade, and a corps better than a division. ‘Undoubtedly,’ he wrote, ‘there had been defects in his leadership in lower command, but they had largely been compensated for by the great care and capacity with which his arrangements were made, and at times his brilliance flashed through, astonishing those who observed it.’ In later analysis of Monash’s performance, Bean lavished praise on him for moulding the 3rd Division into ‘a magnificent division,’ and acknowledged Monash’s great capacity for organisation. While Monash was eager for military glory, he thought, none of his battles was embarked upon for that reason.
After the war, in a letter to Gavin Long, the principal Australian historian of World War II, Bean wrote with some venom about Monash’s capabilities and foibles. While conceding that Monash ‘was probably the ablest and most successful British corps commander in France’ and an able organiser, he said the general had a bombastic side—to
talk like Alexander—to be painted among bursting shells and dead men’s helmets, and to spout grandiloquent phrases about the bayonet and the front line. As a matter of fact, Monash never saw a bayonet used in action, and I don’t think he so very often saw the inside of a front-line trench: and he knows practically nothing by personal experience of what went on there. I know far less about the actual fighting, or life in the front line, than most ordinary privates in the infantry or gunners or engineers do, but I know fifty times as much as Monash did.
Birdwood concurred, saying that to his men Monash was known as ‘The Dug-out King’. Bean beseeched Long not to show this letter to anyone ‘who might conceivably unintentionally cause trouble between me and Sir John Monash, whose qualities I admire in many ways, and who, in spite of all he writes was probably the ablest and most successful British corps commander in France.’
Another observer critical of Monash was John Gellibrand, who clashed with him in the final months of fighting. He believed that Monash ‘thought of war as a matter of books, maps, orders, experiments and material’ and as ‘a quasi-engineering problem with himself as engineer, o/c, and super-foreman.’ Gellibrand asserted that Monash ‘never led. He directed or ordered, and but for his facial peculiarities would not have been known to the troops.’ Writing just after the war, Gellibrand found it difficult to rate Monash above Chauvel or White: ‘his true level would be nearer McCay, Bridges, Holmes, Walker.’
Perhaps it was the privileged position he held in the AIF inner circle, together with high-level political access in the Australian and British Governments, that gave the normally cautious Bean the nerve to act as he did in concert with Murdoch. His justification was the belief that White would take better care of the troops. But as White—who wanted no part of the intrigue—succinctly put it, Bean and Murdoch were not the responsible advisers. They had misjudged—and on a grand scale. Monash’s biographer, the historian Geoffrey Serle, concluded: ‘It is perhaps the outstanding case of sheer irresponsibility by pressmen in Australian history.’
38
And so it is peace
A sense of urgency gripped Bean as the war drew to a close and he surveyed the decimated ranks of the AIF: he needed to explain to Australians the importance of the sacrifice the troops had made on the nation’s behalf. Exhausted though he was, Bean could not allow this to be forgotten. His thoughts took shape as he prepared for a much-needed break on the French Riviera in October 1918 after word came through that the Germans were asking President Woodrow Wilson to arrange an armistice.
Bean had spent almost five years at war. From Gallipoli to the Western Front, he had been there with the Australian troops, chronicling their deeds. He had seen much death and destruction right up to the last days of the fighting.
A few days earlier, walking through a darkened tunnel near the entrance to the St Quentin Canal, he had come to a brick chamber. Suddenly, in the torchlight, he saw two large open copper boilers and eleven dead Germans. Nearby was another, ‘lying crumpled up like a dead mouse.’ The first of the coppers held a thirteenth man ‘shaken to bits, with his head below the surface of the copper and his shoulder blade showing clearly through the tattered grey cloth of his coat.’ Bean was in a chamber of horrors. ‘One man’s head was completely blown off; another’s skull was cracked like an eggshell; and the explosion had flung pieces of them on to the walls,’ he wrote. ‘Red brickdust and shattered earth was sprinkled all over the dead and cans of fat that had been stored in the room.’ Word spread that this was another so-called German ‘corpse factory’. When Keith Murdoch picked up the story, Bean commented: ‘and by the way in which the typewriter was going I should say he relished it.’ While
he inspected the scene, Bean nonetheless left the story to Murdoch.
Bean quickly realised that it was a mess room, and that an explosion had killed the men. The sight left him reeling. ‘The chamber was filled with a most sickly stench . . . I was very nearly sick before we reached the open air.’ The prospect of some sea air now was a relief.
The crowded train clattered its way south through verdant French countryside, leaving behind the devastated cities, towns and villages of the Western Front. He quickly sensed the anger of the French: the family who shared his compartment wanted the troops to force the Germans back to Germany. Arriving in Marseilles, he went to the theatre, where the leading lady announced that the British had taken Ostende, in Belgium. Bean watched the audience’s euphoria as ‘the band struck up the Marseillaise, and people stood up and sang it.’ The French understood what victory meant, but he knew that for Australians half a world away it would not be so clear.
In Cannes the next day, the rainy weather was an anti-climax: ‘This place is not so blue and sunny as I hoped . . . not what one came for.’ However, it was perfect weather for staying inside his hotel and doing what he had come to do—write a book. On 23 October, Bean started on the manuscript he wanted to publish before the troops returned to Australia. The subject would be ‘how the children of the country can take up the work of the AIF for Australia—make their country and not themselves their life’s work.’ Over the next week he forsook the bars and bright lights of the Riviera for his hotel room and typewriter, setting down his hopes and aspirations for Australia in the coming years. Out of the tragedy he was determined to see a new beginning for a nation that he believed had come of age and made its reputation in the family of nations.
Bean hadn’t quite finished the manuscript when he took the overnight train back to Paris. He noticed a young girl sitting on her suitcase in the cold corridor of the train with her face in a pillow. He offered her his seat and camped in the passage. ‘After the hardening of these campaigns it was no great hardship. I believe one could sleep anywhere now.’
In Paris, he took in the familiar sights and, of course, wrote. As the day wore on he thought of having a glass of wine. ‘But one is not taking it during the war. Coffee and chocolate did quite well.’ Even with the end of the conflict in sight, Bean was not able to relax his strict personal discipline. He was on a mission. He had spent the war years searching for truth; he saw the sacrifice of Australian lives in defence of democratic values and of the notion that might is not right as a defining story for a young nation. Morality had been on the side of the Allies; of this he was certain for the rest of his life.
Bean had been at Oxford at the time Australia became a Federation in 1901, and had missed all the attendant optimism—such as it was. In reality, as the writer and social critic Donald Horne observed, the new constitution was the result of a pragmatic deal by conservative politicians, expressed neither democratic aspiration nor national inspiration, and had not been fought for by war or revolution. But if some Australians saw Federation as the birth of the nation, Bean dated it to 1914–18. He subscribed to the nineteenth-century idea that war was the supreme test of a nation’s strength and character. To him, Australia had faced its first great test on the battlefield and passed it. He wanted Australians to understand this and accept the debt owed to the men who had given so much. He did not want them to have died in vain.
As the final details of the Armistice were hammered out, Bean concentrated on finishing his manuscript. It was done in just two weeks. On 11 November, he awoke late at his billet in Lille to hear a few cheers in the street and discordant notes from a child’s trumpet. The war had ended at eleven o’clock that morning. It was a strange feeling:
No more gun flashes, no more flares. Tonight the streets would be bright—the town would be lit; the cars would take the black-painted eyelids off their headlights. The munition factories would have to bring their work gradually to an end; the business of the world for the last four years was finished. We had won—beyond all hope, everything exactly as the most optimistic democrat would have planned it. The Kaiser and his son had gone to live in Holland . . . I couldn’t realise it and I am sure the people of Lille couldn’t.
Bean chose not to join the celebrations; instead, he drove to the battlefield at Fromelles, the scene of so much tragedy for Australians, to take photos. It was as if he wanted to pay homage to the dead—this was the day they had fought for but would never see. He found No Man’s Land ‘simply full of our dead,’ while in the area between the Laies river and the Sugar Loaf salient ‘the skulls and bones and torn uniforms were lying about everywhere.’ He found a bit of Australian kit, ‘and the bones of an Australian officer and several men’ within 100 metres of it. Near a water channel, he recognised Australian bottles. ‘The poor chaps must have crawled here wounded, at night, for water, I think.’
Bean then drove to Boulogne, where the crowds were celebrating the war’s end, some Australians among them, ‘a few obviously half-seas-over.’ A soldier blew a trumpet and others waved a flag. ‘And so it is Peace,’ Bean wrote. ‘The military regime is gone—split, rent, smashed, fled. Who could possibly have imagined this four months ago?’ A day later, he crossed the Channel to London and reflected on the change. ‘After these four years, when one all-impounding purpose possessed the world, there was a freedom in the air which made all the difference. I find it hard to describe—but the difference to one’s personal comfort was as great as that between drinking castor oil and enjoying a cup of French chocolate.’
At the Australian War Records Section, he was surprised to find that John Treloar was away on his own celebration—he had married and was on his honeymoon. ‘Funny old fellow,’ Bean thought, ‘he brought the girl over quietly from Australia and married her last week without even telling [John] Balfour, his assistant and confidant all through the war.’ He met Lieutenant Colonel George Long, the Army chaplain who would oversee the AIF’s postwar education scheme for the troops before their return to Australia. As part of the scheme, Long agreed to take Bean’s ‘little book’, which he had now finished. ‘He will order 2000 at once—of course the scheme will get any profits,’ Bean wrote.
As he left to dine with Keith Murdoch, the street lights came on. ‘I realised that for four years I had not seen street lamps at all except the hooded ones of war time.’ Returning to his hotel later that evening, Bean saw a crowd standing around soldiers and girls who were dancing a jig. There was laughter and shouting, but Bean could not bring himself to join in. Arthur Bazley had had no hesitation in joining the dancing in the streets the night before, but this night Bean remained the observer. ‘It is the people trying to express its relief, I suppose, trying to get back into the frame of mind of peace—throwing off the responsibility which has been on everyone this last four years, and not having any other expression but to wear their feelings gradually down in this way.’ The war, with its danger, its need for rigid discipline, its intrigue, indeed its trauma, still gripped Bean: ‘One doesn’t get used to peace in a day; and the old remaining anxiety and strain of war is still at the back of one’s brain and will remain there till the world is itself again.’
His ninety-six-page exhortation to Australians was uppermost in his mind. Its opening words were dramatic, and passionately felt: ‘They gave it into your hands, Australians, when the bullet took them . . . Australia lies in your hands now, where those men, dying, laid her. You have a much bigger task facing you than the Australian force in France and at Anzac had. It is the same great task really; but the AIF only began it.’ He called his book In Your Hands, Australians. The Diggers who died had gone to war believing that Australia would be the greatest and best country in the world, he wrote. ‘They cannot make her so—60,000 of the very best we had are out of the struggle . . . They can never finish the fight which they began for Australia. But, you, the younger generation, their survivors in the AIF, the young people of Australia, can do it for them.’ The ‘big thing to emerge fro
m the war,’ he asserted, was ‘the discovery of the character’ of Australians. They made decisions without always seeking superiors’ advice, and once their mind was made up they went at their job ‘with a boyish enthusiasm which carried them through everything, even when things seemed hopeless.’
The last and longest chapter was about education. Bean urged that the state should guarantee for every Australian child the kind of character-building education that had previously been available only to the few: a system that would combine the best features of British education with the democratic spirit that had been nurtured in the bush and the mining camps. ‘It is the difficulties of our country that have made our character—not its ease.’ That applied to urban dwellers, too. ‘Our boys hear or read the stories of the bush, and the standards they have in their minds are in nine cases out of ten the standards of the bush.’ Bean drew an analogy between war and the hardships of life in the outback: ‘A drought is very much like the hardships of a campaign; and a bush fire is not so different from a barrage. Mustering cattle is often a more exciting business than taking prisoners. The hardships of Australia, and not its softness, have made the Australian strong and swift in decision.’
Bean was sure that the war had shown that ‘a high-minded, straight and capable leader’ could do anything with Australians, who responded to the truth. ‘Never think you can manage Australian troops by talking down to them.’ This was also probably true of Australian schoolchildren and workers. However, leadership required organisation and national unity. He admitted that before the war he had thought the best way to achieve social goals was to leave things to evolve on their own. But the war had revealed how wrong this was.
In one act—in one month—we came to the end of what . . . they call the laissez faire of peace . . . It was realised within a very short time that the only way to win the objects of the war was to plan and plan and plan; to leave not one single little thing unplanned that could possibly be planned for effecting the objects of war . . . Therefore, if we want to make Australia the greatest and best country, it can be done by planning.