by Peter Rees
Edmonds realised he had been overly provocative in his comments, and sought to appease Bean, replying that his letter was ‘of more than usual interest.’ He was now ‘in possession of the Australian point of view, of which I shall avail myself.’ He assured Bean that in dealing with the fighting at Hamel, on 8 August 1918, he would ‘appropriate’ Bean’s phrase that ‘colonial life and conditions produce, on the whole, a stronger fighting people.’ While he believed this to be true, Edmonds cautioned Bean that comparisons between the newly arrived Australians and the British divisions in France should acknowledge that the latter had lost many men and ‘had been so much diluted by very young officers and untrained other ranks that they did not fairly represent the old country’s fighting force.’ Commenting on British staff officers, Edmonds conceded that at the start of the war there would have been ‘no more than a couple of dozen really competent ones.’ Those in a position to know at GHQ had believed that by 1918 the staff work of the Australian Corps and divisions (except the 2nd) was superior to the rest.
During his time as the official historian, Bean was also a frequent letter writer to The Sydney Morning Herald, engaging in debate about the war and its subsequent impact on the course of international affairs after it ended. His aim was neither to glorify the war nor to denigrate what the Allies had achieved, but simply to tell the ‘truth’ about it. In this spirit he warned against literature that stressed war’s horrors—and departed from the truth. There were times, he wrote, for most soldiers when the war was ‘a good war’ and by no means a continuous chain of miseries. ‘Posterity will read its grandfather’s letters from the front, and discover that grandfather was not in continuous revolt against war’s horrors, or (unfortunately, perhaps) even continuously aware of them. And the reaction may be dangerous.’
When a retired AIF general and member of the right-wing New Guard, Brigadier General Herbert Lloyd, contended that if war were eradicated from the world ‘much that was finest in national character would be eradicated with it,’ and that the League of Nations was held together only by the British Empire, Bean took umbrage:
The qualities actually developed by war itself—cunning, trickery, deceit, reckless destructiveness, callousness—are by no means admirable. The best men unquestionably tend to be killed, and unchecked modern war would probably lead to the survival of a race with qualities akin to those of the sewer rat.
It is possible that General Lloyd, great soldier though he was, was not always intimately in touch with the personal feelings of the rank and file during the latter half of the war. If he was, I can only wonder that he did not hear the sentiment expressed again and again: ‘We’ve got to see this job through, but if we ever get back we’re going to make sure, as far as we can, that the world never again blunders into another struggle such as this one without every possible stone having been first turned to secure a peaceful settlement.’ My own experience was that I heard this determination expressed again and again.
Bean’s beliefs about the causes of the war profoundly influenced his reactions to international relations. In letters to the Herald he stressed the importance of paying heed to the lessons of the war, which was caused by an international arms race, diplomatic ignorance and fear, and Germany’s undemocratic system of government. Thus the paramount need was for wholehearted commitment to international cooperation through the League of Nations. Idealistically, he believed that the world had two alternatives: collective security through the League of Nations, or chaos as nations jostled for power.
An active member of the League of Nations Union, Bean debated in 1932 in the union’s British journal with a correspondent who believed that the case against war was being overstated. ‘When war is in the air,’ Bean wrote, ‘politicians and other public speakers quite sincerely stir their audiences to enthusiasm for the notion that many of their countrymen are prepared to forgo “life itself ” for the sake of national interests which those who govern them have failed to settle by other means.’ Although this was true, ‘among those who made this sacrifice in the Great War was the cream of the human race.’ Settling rights on the battlefield was folly.
What caused most soldiers to loathe war was not the danger to themselves, but the notion of the destruction of millions of bodies and brains that should have enriched mankind . . . If every soldier, when he fired his rifle or let off his howitzer, could not merely see that bullet or shell strike some man opposite, but could see the results strike home among that man’s family standing close behind him—if he could see the direct effect of his action on the face of that man’s wife as she receives the news, and the crashing blow to children, and parents—could the ordinary, civilised man fight?
Bean had no doubt that ‘right’ had been on the side of the Allies, and that the British Empire had taken up its moral duty to show that might was not right. However, he had come to the view that the Treaty of Versailles was not fair, and this had set the scene for Adolf Hitler’s rise. He argued that the Allies had committed a breach of faith through their failure to help the nascent German Republic, and that refusal to change the treaty had driven Germany ‘to take the only course open to democracies if united and violent action is needed—to trust itself to a single leader who is able to express the national longing.’
Bean’s thinking on Germany and Hitler’s National Socialists was inconsistent. In April 1933, just a few weeks after Hitler became Chancellor, he noted ‘the mortification of most thinking Germans at the excesses into which a demagogue is at present leading so large a part of their countrymen.’ Yet three years later, he would write: ‘While recognising that no treaty can be immortal unless it provides its own machinery for eventual changes, I firmly believe that young Germany can be trusted to maintain as firmly as any other nation a treaty negotiated by it as an equal.’
Even as Germany invaded Austria in 1938, Bean pleaded with Australians ‘not to be stampeded into hasty judgments’. There were forms in which the expansion of German trade and influence eastwards was as justifiable as the expansion of Great Britain in all parts of the world:
Our policy should surely be not simply to resist German expansion—a wrong and hopeless aim—but to offer it scope along those lines. Second it is not likely that the policy in such a form will be the one pursued by Hitler and it seems unlikely that we have the power to stop him whether by force or by the offer of a justifiable settlement (which however can only strengthen our moral and material position).
Bean took hope that ‘no nation strengthens itself by the extension of its rule over bitterly unwilling peoples and it is internal trouble that will eventually pull Nazism down.’ He maintained his confidence for another twelve months, until March 1939, when Hitler completed the annexation of Czechoslovakia. No longer could he support the appeasement policy adopted by the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, at Munich the previous year. He abandoned his support in an article for the Herald, stressing that he, along with many others, had wanted only to avoid the ‘ghastly spectre of world war.’ He added: ‘If recantation means singing a different song, then we recant.’ He now saw that Hitler had embarked on a ‘campaign of imperialistic adventure without scruple’ and that this would probably lead to world war.
Bean’s worldview in the inter-war period had been determined by the Great War, and he tended to judge contemporary events by reference to parallel events before the war. With German militarism on the rise in 1936, he had exhorted readers of The Sydney Morning Herald to study the outbreak of the war and ‘discover by what blind blundering the experts stumbled over the precipice; and then to judge for themselves what is likely to happen to the world if its people continue to entrust their fate to foreign Ministers and diplomats without making their collective will felt.’
No longer privy to inside military information, Bean knew little of the circumstances of the crises of the 1930s. He tended to treat them as secondary to the goal he held high: the maintenance of world peace under the umbrella of collective security
through the League of Nations. Bean believed this was the only way to prevent war. He did not consider the possibility that aggressive force might have to be met with force, not just words.
Like many of his contemporaries, Bean believed that another war would destroy civilisation. ‘No nation—not even the regimented ones—will go into a new war as blindly or unitedly as into the last one, or will enter it for any cause that most of its people are not fully persuaded to consider a vital one.’ Hitler’s actions, however, finally convinced him that he needed to re-evaluate that view.
45
The straight line
The sight of raw recruits on the dusty parade ground at Ingleburn Army Camp near Sydney stirred memories for Bean. Once again young men were drilling in the early summer heat, weeks away from going to war. It was December 1939 and this was a sight Bean had hoped never to revisit. He knew that many of these men in their fresh new uniforms would not return. Poignantly, he wrote: ‘A considerable proportion of the young AIF are sons of Diggers, often of Diggers with a breastful of ribbons and in many cases of Diggers who were killed. To these the AIF is their spiritual home, and in them, in a very real sense, the old AIF lives again.’
Inevitably, he drew a comparison between the men of the 1st AIF and the new recruits, likening them to the men of Sir John Monash’s 3rd Division. ‘The platoons that we saw marching to their swimming pool more than four miles from camp looked the most wiry, the keenest and the lithest body of young men we had ever seen,’ he thought. They had a definite advantage over their predecessors, as the men of the 1st AIF had to forge a tradition without any template of Australian soldiering to help them. But these new recruits were benefiting from instructors who had backgrounds in either the inter-war militia or the 1st AIF. These were men ‘steeped in that tradition and the experience of the last war.’
Bean still held out faint hopes that the German people would rise up against Nazism. ‘Hitler largely through an all-powerful censorship and lying propaganda has secured a firm hold on part of his people, and a passing hold probably on the majority,’ he wrote to The Sydney Morning Herald. ‘It is only when this war places the whole people under a terrible strain that the opposition to him will be able to make headway . . . the revolt from within is the surest means of ending the war.’ He believed it would be wrong not to acknowledge there were deep divisions in Germany. The British and French could distinguish between Nazism and the German people as a whole, and this was necessary if disaster was to be avoided. ‘If the aim were to crush the German people as well as the rulers . . . and to inflict a second and worse Versailles, it would unite the German people and divide our own.’
Yet Bean had faith in the natural goodness of humankind. When Volume VI, The Australian Imperial Force in France During the Allied Offensive, 1918, appeared in mid-1942, with the German boot again on the throat of much of Europe, there was no trace in the book of any hatred or contempt for the enemy. As Geoffrey Serle noted, Bean well knew that the German soldier was as much a victim and bore as little responsibility for the war as the Allied man in the line. Bean appreciated the friendly collaboration of German historians and archivists who had provided him with records and the German perspective. In his final chapter, however, he would allow no doubts or qualifications about war guilt. Bean rejected as a ‘careless verdict’ the suggestion that ‘both [Germany and the Allies] were to blame.’ He contrasted ‘a ruling class deliberately schooled in the principles of Clausewitz and Bernhardi’ with ‘one brought up in the creed of the English public schools.’ Moreover, he saw Nazism as only an accentuation of Prussianism. According to Serle, on these matters Bean was a prisoner of his generation.
Bean could never have imagined that he would be releasing his final volume when Australia went to war again. Publication of the volume had been held up for several months by wartime conditions, but it now brought to a close the monumental task he had begun at Tuggeranong in 1919. Its final paragraph read:
Twenty-three years ago the arms were handed in. The rifles were locked in the rack. The horses were sold. The guns were sheeted and parked in storage for other gunners. The familiar faded-green uniform disappeared from the streets.
But the Australian Imperial Force is not dead. That famous army of generous men marches still down the long lane of its country’s history, with bands playing and rifles slung . . . What these men did nothing can alter now. The good and the bad, the greatness and smallness of their story will stand. Whatever of glory it contains nothing now can lessen. It rises, as it will always rise, above the mists of ages, a monument to great-hearted men; and, for their nation, a possession for ever.
This paragraph would be quoted and paraphrased countless times in the years to come. Its four last words—‘a possession for ever’—are themselves a quotation from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, where the Greek historian claims that his work was written not just for his contemporaries but for the ages. In quoting him, Bean sought to equate the glory of the AIF with that of ancient Greece. Just as Thucydides helped preserve the deeds of Athenian heroes, so Bean wished to preserve the deeds of Australian soldiers.
This final paragraph was written in 1919, in the immediate aftermath of victory in the Great War. In fact, it had been Bean’s planned opening paragraph of the first volume. When he read it, George Robertson was aghast; nor did Professor Tucker approve of it. Bean reluctantly dropped it and wrote a new opening paragraph. By the start of World War II Tucker had long since left Australia, and Robertson had died in 1933. Bean was thus free to publish his original opening as a summing-up.
The completion of the twelve volumes of the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 twenty-three years after Bean had started work on them was a monumental achievement that should have been acknowledged with appropriate fanfare. Bean deserved it; what he had achieved was a tour de force. He personally hoped that the story of ‘one smashing victory after another’ in 1918 would be ‘very heartening to our people’ in the dark days of 1942. But Volume VI made little impact. The daily and weekly press reviewed it perfunctorily. Reviewers in the Melbourne Argus, the Bulletin, the Australian Quarterly and the Times Literary Supplement were more generous in their praise.
Before its release, Bean gave an interview to The Sydney Morning Herald in which he discussed the various volumes of the history, and the effect on him of having finally completed the task. He stressed that the main reason the history was so detailed was that it was a study of national character:
Finally war reduces itself to the actions of single citizens. The soldiers of the last war proved that they were willing to throw their lives away for an ideal. They proved that under the democratic system they had a special capacity for resourceful and useful action in warfare. At the end of the war they were doing things that probably no other force, except perhaps other Dominion armies could have done.
Bean had written in Volume III that in war, men exhibited ‘in the sight of all, often a dozen times in a day, feelings and tendencies which might not be visible to their fellows once in an ordinary lifetime.’ Such responses were a crucial benchmark for Bean in his assessment of Australia’s performance. He told The Bulletin that he had wanted to assess how the nation reacted to the ‘supreme test for fitness to exist’ that the Great War presented, and that he saw in Australian soldiers, sailors, airmen and nurses a ‘fair cross-section of our people.’
Not one to rest on his laurels Bean now began planning a book in which he would give Australians the benefit of his many years of thought on the question, ‘What is the short line to better things internationally and internally?’ He told the Herald: ‘A great many young Australians, with many great qualities, have not given much thought to the question: what we are here for. I feel that anything that would help them to answer this question would be well worth doing. Our great need today is to find our bearings.’ Bean also admitted to the paper that with the Official History essentially finished, ‘One feels a bit lost.’
He sought to keep his focus with the new book, War Aims of a Plain Australian—in one sense a companion edition for In Your Hands, Australians. Published in 1943, it was, as Bean saw it, an effort to stimulate thought towards grasping ‘this time the chances we missed after World War I.’ In Your Hands, Australians had been pervaded with optimism and Bean’s belief that Australia had come of age as a nation through the much-hailed deeds of its troops. Now there was a sense of futility, even bitterness at the failure to secure peace and the indifference that had left Australia’s future to cynical political machines:
In place of the ceaseless local effort to solve problems for ourselves, which means health for the whole nation, in place of the leadership for which young Australia was crying and under which we could have achieved almost anything, we abandoned our youth to the mercy, too often, of political and industrial crooks, wreckers of every fine ideal with which young Australians had emerged from the hands of their underpaid and overworked schoolmasters and mistresses.
To Bean, there had been barely a single change of any value: ‘. . . next to no town planning in those of our States that needed it most; no country community centres; no vigorous attempt to solve the problem of our tropical regions; hardly any advance in what might have done most for us—education.’ In Your Hands, Australians had advocated all of these reforms. But an unfortunate ‘deadness’ had befallen Australia between the two wars, politically, socially and religiously. Bean railed that ‘our labour parties forsook their fine ideals, to busy themselves with lotteries, dog races, and similar trash, and our “National” parties forgot the development of this great land in the hurry to liquidate the public industries their predecessors had established.’ So little had been done, but there had at least been the launch of the national fitness campaign—with which he had been associated—and the Depression had also driven home the lesson that there could be no economic security without careful planning.