Peter Rees has been a journalist for more than forty years, working as federal political correspondent for The Sun News-Pictorial, The West Australian and The Sunday Telegraph. He is the author of The Boy from Boree Creek: The Tim Fischer story (2001), Tim Fischer’s Outback Heroes (2002), Killing Juanita: A true story of murder and corruption (2004), The Other Anzacs: The extraordinary story of our World War I nurses (2008 and 2009), republished as Anzac Girls (2014), Desert Boys: Australians at war from Beersheba to Tobruk and El Alamein (2011 and 2012) and Lancaster Men: The Aussie heroes of Bomber Command.

Every effort has been made to trace the holders of copyright material. If you have any information concerning copyright material in this book please contact the publishers at the address below.

First published in 2015

Copyright © Peter Rees 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

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Australia

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ISBN 978 1 74237 954 8

eISBN 978 1 74269 786 4

Front cover photo: Phillip Frederick Edward Schuler

Index by Puddingburn

Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

CONTENTS

Preface

Prologue

Part One

THE EARLY YEARS

1 Here, My Son

2 Waterloo

3 Tempering steel

4 Moral stance

5 The lure of the pen

6 Seeds of the myth

7 The cub

8 The Sydney passenger

9 Moral certainty

10 Agent of change

Part Two

THE WAR YEARS

11 The booted heel

12 A hell of a time

13 Play the game

14 Digging in

15 Sideshow

16 Boosting a reputation

17 The non-combatant

18 Brothers in arms

19 General failure

20 The workhorse and the gadfly

21 A question of discipline

22 Counting the bullets

23 A new prism

24 A monumental folly

25 The giant mincing machine

26 The war gets personal

27 No way out

28 Good will not come of it

29 Self doubt

30 British impetuosity

31 Bean does a Murdoch

32 A change of focus

33 Cultural stereotyping

34 The juggler

35 War on a different front

36 An assessment of character

37 An ill-judged intervention

38 And so it is peace

Part Three

AFTER THE NIGHTMARE

39 The bush backwater

40 The Nipper

41 Bluff and double bluff

42 Censorship, tragedy and farce

43 In his own hands

44 The ghastly spectre

45 The straight line

46 About turn

47 Back among old Diggers

Epilogue

Notes

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

For Sue,

and in memory of my grandfather, Private James White, 7th Battalion AIF, who with his brother Fred knew the horrors of Gallipoli and the Western Front.

We have followed your work, Captain Bean; you seem to have been closer to this war than most people.

Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, Commander, British Grand Fleet, 17 October 1916

He is red-hot in every attack we make, always ready to help the wounded or do anything else in that line.

General William Birdwood to Australian Governor-General

Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson, 17 April 1917

I wish I could find a word about half-way between ‘prim’ and ‘prig’ and without either the unkindness or harshness that those two words connote. He did seem to me to be rather self-consciously upright and with more tolerance than understanding of the wickedness of lesser mortals such as politicians, public servants and persons who saw their responsibilities in a way different from his way.

Sir Paul Hasluck, former Australian Governor-General, 29 July 1983

I am too self-conscious to mix well with the great mass of men.

Charles Bean, 8 May 1918

PREFACE

On a sunny early spring afternoon, 2 September 1968, a nineteen-year-old cadet journalist walked past St Andrew’s Cathedral, in the centre of Sydney, as mourners gathered for the funeral of Charles Bean.

I remember pausing and wondering about this man—war correspondent, official war historian, and a founder of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

As long as there were Diggers at the front line he was there, in a way that is unimaginable today. The troops knew him by sight. He was not just a correspondent to them but someone prepared to share their discomfort in the trenches and risks on the battlefield. He did not fire a bullet but left a priceless legacy in his twelve-volume series, the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918.

Few writers can claim to have had the impact on Australia that Bean has had. For him, the views and experiences of privates were as valuable as those of the generals.

A century has passed since the outbreak of the Great War, yet so little is known about the man himself—a boy from Bathurst, educated in Britain, who arguably created the Anzac legend.

PROLOGUE

‘In our blood’. The phrase stared back at Charles Bean from the sheet of paper in his old typewriter. Carrying notions of moral and racial superiority, those words had long troubled him. Now, as he struggled to find some clarity of thought from the fog that was beginning to envelop him, he wanted to tackle concepts he had come to reject—base concepts that nonetheless shaped peoples’ and nations’ histories. He tapped away, determined to explain just why these beliefs were wrong. He typed back over lines to edit them out as his mind whirred, rejecting and replacing words, trying to express his thoughts. This speech was important; he knew it would also likely be among his last.

Anzac Day 1959 had just passed, and the lean, bespectacled Bean, not far short of eighty, with his once carrot-coloured hair turned white, sat in his study in a modest house in Collaroy, on Sydney’s northern beaches. Under his desk was an old Hecla cast-iron electric ‘Foot Warma’. In one corner stood a cricket bat that had been fashioned into a drink stand; and in another, a lectern where he often stood reading while adjusting the studs in his shirt collars. In glazed bookcases lining the walls, his library of 1000 books provided a timeless backdrop: the Australian poet Christopher Brennan, the historian Sir Keith Hancock, his English friend John Masefield, and Charles Dickens. In this, his sanctuary, these were among the books he drew upon. This is where he could be found in the last years of his life, doing what he had always done: writing.

Bean had long reflected on just what the Great War meant to ordinary people, how it had changed lives, shattered families and left a generation in search of answers. And then Australians had had to do it all over again with World War II. For Bean, World War II had stimulated a further change in his thinking about those words that now focused his attention—‘in the blood’.

He remembered a letter he had written to The Sydney Morning Herald six years earlier:

In my youth it seemed to be almost universally believed that qualities such as courage or gentleness were ‘in the blood’ of some peoples, and ruthlessness and savagery ‘in the blood’ of others. The belief had become part of our language.

When I went to the First World War we all accepted the general belief that something in the biological composition of the Prussians—perhaps a Russian or Tartar strain—impelled them to brutality. The atrocities of which we read in the first stage of the war were, one assumed, the consequence of it.

. . . It was not till, as a war correspondent, I tried to obtain particulars of such atrocities . . . that I began to doubt the truth of this assumption . . . In World War II the case was obviously very different . . . But whatever the cause of the dreadful happenings which left such deep wounds, it was definitely not a tendency to brutality inborn in Germans and Japanese and not in, say, Englishmen or Dutchmen.

As he acknowledged, in his youth Charles Bean had assumed that certain qualities characterised certain races. His early writings reflected this, from his first trip to the New South Wales outback in 1909, reporting on the wool industry for The Sydney Morning Herald and gathering material for his book On the Wool Track, to his appointment as Australia’s official war correspondent to the Great War five years later. He saw the outback as the great challenge but believed that such Anglo-Saxon traits as initiative, versatility, inventiveness and courage were taming the bush. At the same time, there had been his encounter with an Afghan camel driver on the banks of the Darling River. It was then, perhaps, that he had first paused to rethink views he had taken for granted; views about the order of nations and peoples in the world. And then there had been the falling out during the war with the great Jewish general Sir John Monash.

For much of his life he had ascribed to the British race qualities that set it apart—‘the racial capacity to think calmly even in times of mental storm,’ as he put it in a speech in 1934. But what drove Charles Bean was the search for the truth as he saw it. His parents had instilled in him principles that placed the quest for moral and intellectual truth above striving for personal gain. In a diary she kept, his mother, Lucy, recorded her hopes for her eldest son when he was just six, concerned that he had a ‘besetting fault of selfishness’ that he needed to fight:

Charlie dear, be truthful, and upright, and morally brave, I should like you to be brave in every way, but I care far more for moral bravery than for any other . . .

I do not want to see you a rich man, or man holding a leading position, so much as to see you a good, charitable man. You may be all, and I shall be happy if I live to see you all, but the riches and position come after . . . you can be happy without them, but you cannot be happy unless you are good.

Be kind and unselfish. You Charlie my eldest, know the little talks we have had together about this.

Lucy’s hopes for her son had been a guiding light in the years that followed. Now he crystallised his thinking after two world wars. ‘It is almost universally assumed by our general public that military morale springs from innate qualities—qualities “in a people’s blood’’, as the phrase goes. Yet my own observation, and the course of history, seems to me to prove beyond doubt that blood has nothing to do with it, [but] that experience, leadership, tradition and religion very much indeed.’ He then turned to the most unpleasant subject with which he had had to deal—war crimes and atrocities:

Wartime propaganda everywhere found very receptive soil in the practically universal belief that the moral qualities of any nation are innate—‘in our blood’ as we often say. I understand that biology has completely disproved this; at any rate history does.

You do not have to go far into this grim field to find that ancestors whose bodies and brains were presumably no different from our own, meted out to the unfortunate Jews of York and elsewhere treatment extraordinarily reminiscent of that inflicted by Hitler and his Nazis.

What has changed in us is not our physical make up, but our tradition—the causes of that brutality were not innate, or racial, and unchangeable, but the almost universal belief that they are so, immensely complicates the making of peace and bedevils the relations of nations after any great war.

My advice to our people and our poets would be . . . to attach supreme importance to the national tradition and all that goes to make it.

National tradition. Bean saw it as the critical factor that sets nations apart from each other. In a young country like Australia, where tradition was necessarily nascent, he had seen it as his task to identify, highlight and shape public perception of national values and achievements. In doing so, he embraced a template that set his official history apart from previous national war histories. As Bean saw it, egalitarianism was fundamental to Australia’s national tradition.

Reflecting years later on his first trip to the New South Wales outback, Bean noted of the men he met that they portrayed a general determination ‘to stand by one’s mate, and to see that he gets a fair deal whatever the cost to one’s self.’ This meant more to Australia than could yet be reckoned. He continued: ‘It was the basis of our economy in two world wars and is probably its main basis in peace time. Whatever the results (and they are sometimes uncomfortable), may it long be the country’s code!’

This was the point Bean’s philosophy had reached as he worked on his speech for an approaching ceremony at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. He had been invited to accept the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa ‘in recognition of your distinguished eminence in public service, and in particular for your far-sighted initiative and dedicated work in the production of the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 and in the establishment of the War Archives Committee and the Commonwealth Archives Committee.’ Such was his stature that the university asked him to respond at the ceremony on behalf of all the honorary graduands.

This was to be Bean’s second honorary doctorate: in 1931 he had accepted a Doctor of Literature degree from the University of Melbourne. Sir John Monash—despite their uneasy relationship during the war—had been party to Bean’s name being proposed. Five years after the war, Monash had acknowledged to Bean that the official history he was writing was a ‘great work’, and offered his papers. This was an outstretched hand.

Less than a month before the ANU ceremony, Bean wrote to the university apologising for being slow to respond to its invitation to speak. ‘I had to give it thought because over six months ago I gave up public speaking owing to an increasingly defective memory. However, in view of your suggestion that I may be very short, I shall be glad to say something.’

Even if the speech was to be simple, he nonetheless wanted to say something important about the concept of race, for he clearly recognised its continuing influence on people’s thinking—just as it had been influential on his own thinking for so many years. When he wanted to challenge something, Bean could be nothing but persistent. He thought he would begin by apologising to his audience for the decline of his speaking powers. ‘When one’s memory reaches the stage at which you not only fail to find the right word, but also, after an agonising interval searching for it, find that you have forgotten what you were speaking about, it is surely time to give up speaking in public,’ he wrote.

Having broken the ice, he would return to an anecdote from the period he knew better than anyone else in Australia: the Great War. He would say that standing before such an august audience reminded him of the story of the Digger seen buried almost to the neck in one of the many slime-filled craters along the dreadful tracks at Passchendaele in 1917. Only his head was showing above the muck. A party of rescuers set frantically about getting hold of some duckboards to help him out. The speech notes continued: ‘Don’t worry, mate,’ the party said, ‘we’ll get you out in half a minute.’ Came the reply from the tin hat: ‘Don’t bust yerselves, I’m orright, I’m standing on a mule.’ The draft speech went on: ‘I’m not standing on a mule, but among probably one of the most intelligent and, I feel, helpful audiences that you would find in Australia.’

Bean had first heard the anecdote, apocryphal or not, in mid-August 1917. As he trudged around the battlefields, the story symbolised for him the droll humour of the Australians in the mud of Flanders. Bean became a familiar sight in the lines—a tall, spare, ginger-haired figure wearing pince-nez spectacles, with a telescope slung over a shoulder and a notebook either in hand or protruding from his coat pocket. He watched—sometimes from the front line, sometimes from the rear, but always within the range of field guns—practically every battle small or great in which the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) infantry fought. If he had not been at the front on the day of battle he made it a principle to get there soon afterwards so as to see the ground, often with a photographer to capture it for the country’s records. He may never have been one of the boys, but he revered their determination—and their ability to make light of adversity amid the trauma of war.

But the speech would not be given. Atop the page he wrote: ‘Draft of intended address—not delivered, because of over-strain.’ As The Canberra Times reported the day after the ceremony, another eminent Australian, the physicist Sir Leslie Martin, a foundation fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and first chairman of the Australian Universities Commission, spoke. That night Charles Bean and his beloved wife, Effie, attended the dinner to mark the occasion. Bean noted in the little diary his mother had passed on to him that the dinner ‘was one of great strain for me.’ Within weeks his health had deteriorated. The years had taken their toll. For a modest man these years had not been an uneventful journey as he bore witness to extraordinary events that shaped Australia.

Part One

The Early Years

A child’s outlook on life is ‘caught’ rather than ‘taught’—learnt from the example and dogma of parents or other leaders who are the child’s heroes, and not from any reasoned explanation of how right doing leads in the end to happiness, and wrong doing to misery.

Charles Bean, The ABC Weekly, Sydney, 3 April 1948

1

Here, My Son

From the first day of his life, Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean knew the dust and heat of the Australian bush. Born at Bathurst, on the western edge of the Great Dividing Range in New South Wales, on 18 November 1879, he was a son of rural Australia. But he did not suffer the hardship that generally accompanied life for people in the bush. While the Bean family did not live in luxury, it did nonetheless enjoy comparative comfort.

Charles Bean’s father, Edwin, was a product of the nineteenth-century education revolution that had spread throughout Britain to cater to the emerging middle classes. He would never lose sight of the importance of education.

Edwin was twenty-six when he and his wife, Lucy, arrived at Bathurst, the oldest inland town in Australia, on a hot January day in 1878. Edwin had been appointed headmaster of All Saints’ College, which had opened five years earlier. When the Beans arrived, Bathurst had a population of just 4000. The Main Western rail line from Sydney, which carried the Beans to Bathurst, had reached the town two years earlier. Establishing All Saints’ College was part of Bathurst’s progress.

When Edwin took over, there were just fifteen students and the neo-Gothic college was struggling. The Beans arrived in the middle of a drought and, after Sydney, they found life in Bathurst tough and uncivilised. Lucy thought it primitive. Despite the travails, ‘we pulled through, and the school grew in numbers and reputation,’ she wrote later.

Edwin Bean had been born in Bombay, India, in 1851. His father, Dr John Bean, was a surgeon-major in the East India Company’s service. When Edwin reached school age, he was sent to Clifton College in Bristol, England. The family’s aim was for Edwin to enter the Indian Civil Service. The seven years he spent at Clifton influenced him—and subsequently Charles—for life. It was Charles, however, who would take the lessons beyond the schoolroom into Australian life and history.

Amid the revolution in secondary-school education taking place in England, Clifton’s first headmaster, John Percival, was intent on developing an educational philosophy that had been set by an earlier reformer, Thomas Arnold, when headmaster of Rugby School. Percival was Arnold’s protégé. Arnold focused on religious principles, gentlemanly behaviour and academic attainment, and emphasised the importance of character training: virtues such as loyalty, chivalry, sportsmanship and leadership. He believed education should prepare pupils for citizenship for the overall well-being of society. ‘Big noting’ was anathema to these values.

John Percival had learned the Arnold philosophy as a teacher at Rugby before being appointed as headmaster at Clifton, a post he held from 1862 until 1879. Under him, Clifton became one of Britain’s leading public schools. Years later, Charles Bean would describe Percival’s aim as ‘to give boys a course of education which would not run in the set hard and fast lines of the old Classical education’ but ‘should afford a wider scope of learning’. With a great work and study ethic, Edwin quickly became a favourite of John Percival. In 1869, Edwin went to Trinity College, Oxford, with a classical scholarship. In a letter to his grandfather in April 1871, his earnestness was clear: ‘I see more and more clearly that we do not live in the world for our own sakes only, but for our friends and countrymen.’

Edwin emerged from Oxford with third-class honours, thus missing out on entry to the Indian Civil Service. Offered a job as tutor to a wealthy Hobart family, he arrived in Tasmania in February 1874. But the family was unhappy with his inexperience and sacked him. A lifeline appeared when he was offered a teaching post at Geelong Grammar. This job he enjoyed, but he returned to Hobart during school holidays to see Lucy Butler, a member of a family of lawyers regarded as foundational to the establishment of Tasmania’s legal community. The courtship flourished.

In July 1876, Edwin wrote to his mother in England to announce his engagement to Lucy. He had met ‘numbers of good looking and clever girls in the colonies, but . . . I never was suffered to think of anyone else.’ He told his mother: ‘It was her large broad view of life and its duties that first attracted me to her.’ Edwin and Lucy married in June 1877, and six months later, having moved to Sydney to teach classics at Sydney Grammar, he accepted the post as headmaster at All Saints’. Edwin noted that Lucy had ‘an admiration for Arnold of Rugby, and I feel sure would welcome any efforts of mine to make towards his work.’

Taking on the headmastership gave Edwin the opportunity to foster the ‘muscular Christianity’ of Arnold and Percival. He spent time travelling the surrounding country explaining the benefits of a private-school education. By the end of his first year there were more than sixty students at the college. By the mid 1880s he had established All Saints’ as one of the great public schools of New South Wales. He did not necessarily have a high opinion of all of his students, writing of one, in a cutting observation of colonial society: ‘Of course he is not a gentleman, and of course he is rich, and a squatter—for the ignorant and rich boys are all budding squatters, though the converse does not always hold.’

Lucy had been pregnant with their first child when they arrived at Bathurst, and their daughter, Madeline, was born on 4 May 1878. Their happiness was short-lived, however. Madeline contracted meningitis and died on 8 January 1879. Charles was born just ten months later. In a letter to his father in England, Edwin described his new son as ‘a regular “King Sturdy”’.

A brother, John ‘Jack’ Willoughby Bean, was born in January 1881. Both parents were avid readers, and the boys flourished in a household where literature was highly prized. Lucy spoke of the enjoyment she and Edwin shared while reading aloud Charles Dickens’ satirical novel Little Dorrit. From an early age Lucy noticed that Charles was unusually observant: ‘Everyone notices how quick the child is and what a memory he has for names, people or words—indeed everything.’

Lucy read to four-year-old Charles the parable of the Prodigal Son, the verses of which he felt ‘were very poor’ and decided should be rewritten to something ‘far finer’. Jack remembered that Charlie titled the poem The Naughty Boy Who Ran Away.

He lay abed and worked out the poem in his wee mind to the tune and rhythm of the old nursery song ‘Jim Crack-Corn, I don’t care!’ Then, having its few short lines or verse or two finished and fixed in his memory, he got into his parents’ bed next morning full of keenness to share it with them! Both [father and mother] were quite deeply impressed and proud of the remarkable literary promise . . . and felt a future for that toddler poet!

The family encouraged conversation and learning. Edwin and Lucy were both storytellers, and on occasion Edwin would give the children geography lessons using the lamp for the sun and Jack’s head for the earth. By the age of four, Charles was writing letters on a glass drawing slate, and by five had written what was probably his first letter, to his grandfather in Hobart, complete with drawings of two ships and signed with his full Christian names.

By the time Charles and Jack entered preparatory school in 1886, they had a younger brother, Montague, who was born in 1884. Charles was described as ‘fairly quick’ at his lessons. He progressed solidly, but as he would later comment, ‘not in any way a marvel of learning or industry . . . I loved best to read the school magazine, the Bathurstian—poems, articles, stories and all the cricket and football news, and to play cricket in a small way.’

Away from school, the Bathurst Plains were at his door. With the area’s colourful gold-mining and bush-ranging past, there was plenty to capture the imagination of a young boy. While exploring abandoned diggings Charles began to sketch—a practice that he would develop and continue throughout his life, illustrating letters and stories.

On Christmas night 1887, with her boys in bed, Lucy wrote in her diary an assessment of Charles’ development. ‘I must tell you that I have been pleased to notice that you have been much more unselfish lately; I am very glad to see this.’

Worn out by the task of building up the school over the previous ten years, Edwin suddenly resigned, just as Charles, aged nine, prepared to enter the upper school. As Edwin explained in a letter to his father, ‘I . . . don’t think I could manage many more years of the incessant worry and effort of school keeping without breaking down.’

All Saints’ College was thriving when Edwin sold his interest in the school for £5750 to a Church of England clergyman. With the deal scheduled to take ten years to complete, the Bean family sailed to England in March 1889.

2

Waterloo

As the coast of England came into view from their steamship, a sense of anticipation gripped the Beans. ‘We all knew that the white cliffs would be there—I think we must have been aware of that before we were weaned,’ Charles wrote later. They arrived in London in early spring 1889, and young Charles was immediately captivated by the big, bustling city.

Edwin’s plan was to educate his three sons by his own tuition and by travelling. They would spend summers at Oxford and winters in France and Belgium. He taught them the classics, and to look upon Latin prose as a problem of logic rather than of language. ‘If you cannot translate that sentence as it stands, translate the meaning of the sentence into simpler English which you can translate into Latin,’ he would tell them. Edwin was not a mathematician but had an interest in the Greek mathematician Euclid and his system of geometry. Charles was fascinated. ‘I grew so fond of it that I used to love to do the little Euclid problems better than anything else—for years I would rather tackle a Euclid problem than the simplest sum of algebra.’

Holidays on the Continent were memorable. In Brussels, they were under the care of Belgian governesses, and Charles took drawing lessons from an artist. ‘It was taking a plunge for several weeks into another life—new scenes, new language, new customs, new sounds, new food, new smells.’ During this time the seeds of an interest in military history were planted. From this young age Charles learned the importance of forensically examining battlefields:

Our greatest delight was our visits with the Pater to the battlefield of Waterloo, of which he, and we too, came to know every inch. The museum at the Hôtel de Musée on the battlefield, with its chipped skulls, and broken swords and bayonets, and old shakos [tall, cylindrical military caps] with holes through them where the bullets had passed, had an intense fascination for us . . . I tried to find on the battlefield bullets and fragments of swords or harness.

The boy’s fascination grew with legendary battles that the British had fought. He would later write that ‘Australians, almost as much as the English, had been brought up on tales of Crécy and Agincourt, Trafalgar, Waterloo, the Indian Mutiny and the Crimean, Afghan, Zulu and other British wars.’ Charles’ imagination enhanced this. For years he chronicled in a scrapbook the adventures of one ‘John Mo’, who began as a humble black American before changing into an aristocratic black Englishman and ending up as ‘Field Marshal Lord Mow’. One of Charles’ drawings depicted Mo earning the Victoria Cross—running an Indian hill tribesman through with his officer’s sabre and fending off attackers.

During this time the headmastership of Brentwood Grammar School in Essex became vacant. Edwin’s father had been a pupil there, and his grandfather one of the wardens. The school had fallen on hard times, with enrolments declining to forty or so students in 1891. Charles would later write that his father took over the headmastership during an ‘acute crisis’ for the school. The analogy that sprang to mind for Edwin, as he tried to ‘nurse’ a run-down school, was ‘trying to light a fire in the bush in rainy weather, when you have to blow every spark into flame and shield it with your coat, and may find after all your efforts that the exasperating thing goes out!’ The bush had left its mark on him. To Charles, his father’s chief anxiety was the school’s standards and morale. ‘He was adamant in his belief that upper and middle class homes fostered qualities and standards vital to the school and to the nation, and he was determined to keep that element among Brentwood boys.’

Therefore, Edwin wanted to ensure that day boys from local state primary schools were fully accepted as members of the school. Opponents believed that the social ‘tone’ of the school would be hopelessly ruined, but Edwin refused to accept this. ‘Providentially, my experience of the best Australian schools had taught me that “democratisation” is quite compatible with a high tone and with good intellectual standards,’ he wrote. The young Charles was witnessing first-hand an important lesson in egalitarianism.

Brentwood’s history dated back to the less egalitarian era of Mary Tudor, a Catholic queen of England. In 1557 Sir Anthony Browne, the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, acquired the land on which the school was built. Two years earlier an event occurred which remained large in the school’s history. A young Protestant, William Hunter, was martyred when Browne, acting on the wishes of Queen Mary, ordered that he be burnt at the stake as a heretic for refusing to accept the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation, according to which the bread and wine of the communion become the body and blood of Jesus Christ. In 1558, with a grant from the Crown, Browne opened Brentwood School on the site of the execution. Years later, Charles Bean wrote a poem about William Hunter’s fate. Set to music, it later became the school song, and remains so to this day—all nine verses, the first of which speaks of how:

They bound a lad by a green elm tree

And they burn’d him there for folks to see:

And in shame for his brothers and play-mates all

They built them a school with a new red wall.

As he had done at All Saints’ in Bathurst, Edwin drew inspiration from John Percival. As Charles later recalled: ‘At Brentwood the influence of Clifton was very marked. School terminology [was] largely drawn from that source. But what was more important, the school’s standards were largely founded on Percival’s, with an added element of friendliness.’

Edwin did not see the headmaster’s job there as long-term. His plan was to get the school back on its feet and then resume travelling with the family. But in 1893 several commercial banks in Australia collapsed. The effect of this was profound: Edwin decided to stay on at Brentwood. As he later wrote: ‘If it had not been for Brentwood I should have been a ruined man when the great Australian Bank crash occurred, it robbed me of six thousand pounds at one swoop.’ The family resigned themselves to life in Britain.

Charles’ attitude towards Britain began to change. He had been there for four years and it had become home. Forty years later he would recall, with memories no doubt coloured by time, the days when the family would arrive back from the Continent:

Much as we enjoyed [the travel], we now found that the supreme moment of each trip—the single hour of compressed, distilled, undiluted enjoyment—was that of the last morning, when, after the nasty North Sea crossing, the returning boat had landed us at Harwich, and after crossing the wharf with its international smells of tar and rope and grated wood, and climbed into one of the clean, glossy carriages of the clean, glossy English train standing there all ready; and then in a train compartment with just sufficient sniff of upholstery to make us feel luxurious, we set off to race for an hour or so between the gentle English hills, covered with the plaid pattern of neat, pocket-handkerchief fields, with the cosy farms nestling into lovely trees and snug hedges; and, where we roared above the roads, the carters (or, where we roared past the platforms, the railway porters) were going about their business without shouting or gesticulation—just doing their job in the matter-of-fact, quiet English way. I speak only for myself, but as a boy I think I would have given the whole three weeks of that European tour for the quintessence of delight in that sweet hour at the end of it. It was not the mere scenery that was twining itself so deeply around one’s heart-strings; it was more a certain deep spirit of content and agreement that expressed itself in that orderly quietness.

The country and its school system, together with his parents’ attitudes, were shaping fourteen-year-old Charles Bean. He was benefiting from a unique travel-filled education, one that included opportunities he could only have dreamed about if the family had stayed in Australia. The principles and ideals instilled by both his parents and Brentwood were just the beginning. He was ready for the next step.

3

Tempering steel

The winter of 1894 saw fifteen-year-old Charles Bean at Clifton College near Bristol, some 250 kilometres from his family and Brentwood School, and a world away from all that was familiar. Edwin, an old boy himself, knew the school’s ethos and wanted this for his eldest son. The headmaster, Michael Glazebrook, was a forbidding and unpopular personality who was soon nicknamed ‘The Bogey’. Despite this, he maintained the excellent academic standards and high moral tone that John Percival had set.

Charles entered the classics stream of Form Three and had to tolerate jibes at his Australian accent. At cricket, his classmates invited him to ‘boawl them aout’. Because of this, he was known as ‘The Rum’Un’. He took it in good heart, later joining in the spirit in a letter to his father where he referred to the Australian cricket team, in England for the 1896 Ashes Tests, as ‘the Horse-trail-ians’. He lost his Aussie drawl within a couple of years to an English accent he had previously described as ‘putting on jam’.

Edwin wrote letters exhorting him to form good habits that would lay the foundation for future success. ‘Of course you are now launched on the stream of school-life which leads into the great river of world-life; so you must steer your own course. Don’t go to sleep at the helm, and let your boat follow the current, even if you see others around doing so. It is by perseverance more than anything else that men succeed.’ Edwin’s unusual use of metaphor was a trait his son was to inherit.

Charles found the early weeks at Clifton hard going. He had failed to win a scholarship and began to wonder whether being in a bigger pool might lower his academic standing. His early results were of concern. His father urged him not to be disheartened ‘as long as you are doing your duty.’ He recommended that it was ‘a good thing to make for oneself some opportunities of being alone, when one can perhaps hear the inner voices that are drowned in the rush and stir of school life.’ Edwin explained that a classical education developed the immature mind better than any other form of study. ‘If you seem to grasp a subject, to look at it from different points of view, compare it with other kindred subjects—then your classical work is training your mind.’

When Charles’ first half-term report showed he had not excelled, Edwin encouraged him to maintain steady work habits and keep healthy in both mind and body. He assured his son that a few places higher or lower in the class did not matter, nor whether he made the First or Second XI. It was more important to develop and uphold strong moral values that would set his course for life. The letters kept coming. Edwin warned Charles not to yield to ‘the manifold temptations’ or live for the present rather than the future and, above all, not to do anything base that he might live to regret. He likened the process of public school education to tempering steel. ‘Some blades of finest temper are made: and alas! How many are spoiled and flung aside. You are plunged in the fire of temptation and chilled in the cold waters of unpopularity—all to bring out the temper of your mettle.’

Charles’ results did not improve in his second year. The form master noted that he was careless and inaccurate—‘the more to be regretted because his work is not without signs of capacity and taste when he takes pains.’ Charles’ report at the end of the year bore the headmaster’s note ‘thoroughly discreditable’. This clearly stung Edwin, and he chided his son:

You carry your future in your own hand . . . One thing would grieve me more, and that would be to think that you had lived immorally as well as idly—but that, I trust, I need not fear. But remember that you must live a life of duty. If your new study life produces results like this it cannot be good.

Edwin sought to rationalise his son’s poor marks, putting them down to his rapid growth. He thought that ‘physical exertion is bad for your heart. You will grow out of all that in a few years, if you don’t overtax your system.’ Charles took note. Later that year he won a £25 scholarship, with another the following year. He attributed both to his Latin prose.

His mother, Lucy, was also concerned about his indifferent health. Aware that with his tall, slim build he found boxing a trial, she offered encouragement:

I should not like it, but we’re too ‘Noblesse Oblige’, you have to do it, so do it in a manly way, making up your mind not to care a rap about the fellows laughing or about being licked, there is nothing to be ashamed of. You laugh with them, and don’t let them see you care a bit . . . After all, it is only a training for many similar battles in the world you will have to fight; each one will be easier and you will have a feeling of very pleasant satisfaction each time you go through these things in a manly, cheerful spirit.

Clifton enabled Charles to indulge his love for cricket, and he made the Second XI in his first year. While his batting and bowling were competent enough, he was no star. ‘If I could only manage to field really well I should feel quite at home. But I must practise fielding hard to be good.’ He pinned his hopes on getting his colours but failed through being too nervous in the field. ‘I dreaded missing catches, and consequently missed one in the match against Liverpool. W.G. Grace’s son, Charles Butler Grace, got the colours instead.’ Even then it was clear that Charles was a cricket tragic—and one who played his best cricket in his head.

Among Charles’ closest friends at Clifton was Thoby Stephen, Virginia Woolf ’s much-loved brother. There were similarities in their family backgrounds. Thoby’s father had been a personal friend of Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown’s School Days. Some years later, when writing about her brother’s time at Clifton, Virginia noted that Thoby’s house master ‘had to apologise when he put another boy over him as head of the house.’

This reference to ‘another boy’ appears to be as close as Virginia Woolf ’s published writings come to noticing Charles Bean. He would later write of the matter:

I started near the bottom of the house and finished as the head of it, although my great school-friend, Thoby Stephen, was immediately above me in the school. He was a son of Leslie Stephen, the writer, and had a far better brain than I, but he was very young, and the housemaster (W.W. Asquith, a brother of the Prime Minister) thought it better that I should be head of the house. When I left Stephen succeeded me.

In later years Charles described how he and Thoby—‘a good deal quicker and cleverer than I’—did their homework together: ‘As he was quickest it always ended in his doing most of it—indeed nearly all.’

Although he did not see himself as ‘a real scholar’, Charles liked to write essays. His approach, he freely admitted, was to imitate the style of the fiction he read—authors such as Jerome K. Jerome, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling. From his study of Greek he learned the important lesson: ‘to hate overstatement, and to make a point tell, when possible, rather by understating than by overstating it.’ This was a skill he continued to hone.

In 1897, Charles became president of the debating society at Clifton. One debate considered the notion that ‘conscription is not necessary in England.’ Even though he personally opposed conscription, Charles spoke for it and was at least pleased that he made ‘a very successful speech.’ His side lost.

As Charles prepared for confirmation in the Church of England, Edwin wrote to him to underline the importance of the event, likening it to a crisis in which he would assume ‘some of the responsibilities of manhood.’ He himself was taking holy orders to enable him to deliver Sunday sermons in the school chapel, and foremost among his advice was to urge Charles ‘to resolve to follow Truth wherever it leads.’

Charles struggled with the big existential questions of religion and philosophy that beset many a teenager, turning to Lucretius and Socrates for answers. He read Lucretius’ epic philosophical poem De Rerum Natura which he found ‘tragically depressing’. Lucretius ‘believed that everything, including man, was merely the result of the rushing through space of innumerable atoms, combining and recombining; we and everything affecting us were just temporary products of that continuous process.’

He turned to Socrates and the study of the self, concluding that the philosopher ‘was only wiser than others because he knew that he was ignorant and they did not.’ But he saw that appetites such as ‘love of wealth . . . love of power, and ambition and perhaps vanity, love of approbation’ had to be kept in check as they belonged to ‘the brute part of our being.’

If such answers remained elusive, other subjects did not—among them the Royal Navy. He and Edwin—who had become a second lieutenant in the Volunteer Forces—visited the Navy’s headquarters at Portsmouth and walked the decks of Nelson’s Victory. He soaked up stories from Navy & Army Illustrated, and scoured The Times for naval news. He joined the Clifton College Rifle Corps. Jack Bean would later recall that by his middle teens, ‘Charles knew the tonnage and gunnage of the various ships of war to a nicety—and the meaning and make-up of the various naval flags; similarly the regimental uniforms and badges of rank—and something of the traditions and history of the great outstanding regiments.’

Edwin Bean recognised that Charles’ classical education and neglect of mathematics had virtually ruined his son’s chances of a military career in the Royal Engineers. But he was confident that Charles would be ‘shown his life’s work all in due time.’ He offered support if Charles wanted to pursue such a career, but warned that ‘the soldier’s is a hard life and there is much self-sacrifice in it and, of course, much risk.’

As his years at Clifton ended, Charles had developed into a spare, gangly figure, with a shock of red hair and a quiet intensity evident in his eyes. Jack Bean thought him ‘as handsome as a young Greek God—a typically Greek face in its perfect proportions and straight Greek nose’. By his latter teens, the nose grew larger and, according to Jack, took on a straight yet ‘Jewish’ look, inherited, he believed, from their maternal great-grandparents. ‘This disturbed the classic balance and beauty of the sixteen-year-old “Greek statue Charlie Bean”,’ he later contended.

Building on his lessons in earlier years in Belgium, Charles’ talents at sketching and drawing matured. This pleased Edwin, who had urged him early on to forgo carpentry or gymnastics and take drawing and painting instead. Jack Bean saw his brother as a keen and accurate observer who could ‘draw out of his head’ and kept a sketchbook handy for impromptu drawing. As often as not, it was battle scenes he drew. ‘The urge to illustrate was strong in him—I’ve even seen sketches made on blank leaves of his hymnbook or prayer book—made in church . . . I remember when we were schoolboys in our middle teens remarking to my brother: “Chas, you should be a War Correspondent—that’s the job you’re fitted for”.’ Jack Bean knew his brother well.

4

Moral stance

If ‘the terrible dilatoriness or dishonesty of some parents in paying accounts’ made life difficult for Edwin Bean, he still had reason to be pleased. He had been able to give his sons a fine education. ‘They are good boys: intelligent, industrious, modest and very homely . . . Charlie and Jack . . . are perfect leviathans now—nearly 6 ft high each—with great bass voices: full of spirit and fun, but also good workers.’

Edwin was proud of them, but he was feeling the cost of sending his two elder sons to university. Charles had entered Hertford College at Oxford, where he would read classics, and Jack was headed for Cambridge to study medicine. In November 1897 Charles won a five-year, £100 a year scholarship, which helped ease the pressure on the family’s finances.

At Oxford, Charles Bean studied under two young scholars who would greatly influence his thinking. Henry Williams was his philosophy lecturer, and for ancient history he had Abel Hendy Greenidge. Philosophy at Oxford brought him ‘face to face with the insoluble contradictions of infinity of space and time, cause and origin . . . those lines only brought one back to the same full stop.’ He realised the limits of his knowledge, and further probing seemed a waste of time. His inclination from then on was towards events that influenced history. He was also attracted to the law as a profession. On 17 November 1900, while continuing to read classics, he was admitted to Inner Temple to study law.

During his time at Oxford, the Victorian era ended with the death of Queen Victoria. As a member of the Oxford University Battalion, Bean attended the funeral at Windsor Castle, on 2 February 1901. He wrote to his mother, ‘I don’t remember hearing anything quite so wonderful as the snatches of Chopin’s Dead March as the procession wound up from the station around the hill beneath us and past us up to the gate above us where it entered the Castle . . . and you could have heard a pin drop.’ He described the funeral in great detail, clearly seeing himself not just as a participant in the military pomp and ceremony but also as an observer, recording the funeral much as a reporter would. As the late Queen’s coffin passed him on a gun carriage:

. . . my attention was immediately taken by three pair of feet in black and gold trousers. When they were past me I saw that the middle one was the King. I thought he was nice looking, and not fatter than most men of his age. He looked worn. I then looked at the men each side of him. I couldn’t tell who they were as they had passed, but the nearer was Wilhelm, the Kaiser, and the other the Duke of Connaught. I hear from others that the Kaiser looked ill, like the King; but for it all he was the finest figure in the procession, upright and soldierly.

Bean’s 1902 exam results were disappointing. He was not among the twenty-four who won first class honours in classics, but among the fifty or so who got seconds. Greenidge offered reassurance about his marks, explaining that he had been in the running for a first. In his oral exam, however, he had lost ground when he admitted that, because of time pressures, he had gained some of his knowledge of Greek fortifications not from the primary source, Xenophon, but from a secondary source. Bean was later philosophical: ‘It was just as well. With a first I should probably have taken up teaching in England.’

Bean had had a comprehensive classical education, and in the process simplified his prose style. ‘Partly in rebellion against some of the philosophers whose works we read, and partly because the practice interested me, I determined never, if possible, to write a sentence which could not be understood by, say, a housemaid of average intelligence.’

With Oxford behind him but still pursuing his legal studies at Inner Temple, Bean applied for a position in the civil service of the Transvaal and Orange Free State in May 1902, offering to work at half pay until he had learned the local pidgin language and, if necessary, Dutch. Greenidge offered a reference: ‘His recent work has shown me how much he has benefited by his course of reading at the University. Much of it quite first class in style and in the intellectual power which it displays. He is a man of wide interests and general culture, and his manners are such as to ensure him friendly relations with those with whom he is brought into contact.’ His application failed. Three months later, Bean sat for an exam hoping to win a job in the Indian Civil Service or a cadetship elsewhere in the colonial service. Again he missed out, finishing 118th out of 145 candidates.

These were troubled times for Britain’s colonial outposts, with nationalist unrest in India and the Boer War in South Africa. Bean had followed the war closely. Despite his certainty of the rightness of the British cause, he was troubled by what he read of conditions in the concentration camps the British established there. He was not alone in this: none other than John Percival had fiercely criticised the conditions and mortality rates in the camps.

Bean followed suit. In a letter to the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette on 20 October 1901, he took up not only the alleged high death rates, particularly among children, but the Gazette’s manipulation of the figures involved. He argued that publishing the truth would not harm any good cause, though suppressing it certainly would:

I believe that it can do nothing but damage to our own cause to publish a paragraph so misleading as that in your yesterday’s issue. ‘The mortality,’ you say, ‘in London this time of the year is very serious. Thousands of people in the metropolis are stricken down with fever, diphtheria, and smallpox. But we don’t make a fuss about it. Why, then, all this outcry because the concentration camps in South Africa are not healthier than London at this time of the year?’

‘Not healthier!’ I do not suppose that the death-rate in London (especially if the death rate of London children is compared with that of Boer children) at any time reached one-eighth of that in the camps. A London child would not be pleased if you could only promise it twenty years of life. To the Boer children we cannot give more than two and a third years.

Bean had taken a strong moral stance, but Edwin took him to task—not so much for writing the letter as for not being clear about his target. He wrote to his son: ‘In your letter it wasn’t quite clear—certainly in the first part—what you were condemning—whether the Government for their want of management or the paper for its unwise partisanship. I think this tendency to obscurity in writing is an inherent quality for I certainly recognise myself in it.’ It was a lesson learned, though obscurity would continue occasionally to cloud his writing.

By the summer of 1902 Bean’s career was going nowhere. He sought refuge in a temporary teaching job at Brentwood. But with his health a concern, and being ‘very subject to severe colds,’ he sought a job in a warmer climate. Bean heard that a pupil at Rugby School, fifteen-year-old Herbert Sharp, was going to the warmth of subtropical Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, for the winter to help ease his asthma. With Bean as his tutor, they sailed on 6 November 1902. ‘He was a delicate but splendid intelligent youngster, and I grew very fond of him,’ Bean remembered.

The move to the largest and most spectacular island of the Canary archipelago suited Bean. Tenerife was a favourite retreat of the British well-to-do, particularly during winter. He began learning Spanish and, fascinated by life on the island, he sketched avidly. As a personable and unattached young Oxford man, he was much in demand socially when the British matrons were preparing their invitation lists. In his quiet times alone, he began writing a novel of ancient times. The ‘Roman novel’, as he called it, remained an interest to which he periodically returned.

Bean’s main task was to tutor Herbert, but he became increasingly concerned about the boy’s health. Much to the appreciation of Herbert’s father, he meticulously reported his son’s progress and itemised the expenditure involved. But Herbert’s asthma continued to worsen and they left Tenerife on 25 April to return to England.

Bean resumed teaching at Brentwood as an assistant master, while Jack Bean completed his medical studies and began work at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. In the meantime, their younger brother Monty was studying engineering. Bean now focused on completing his legal studies. In his Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) examination, he achieved useful but academically unimpressive third class honours. Nonetheless, it was an additional qualification, and he was called to the Bar on 15 June 1904.

As he later put it, ‘I took the B.C.L. degree simply because I thought the letters might help me to get some coaching. I did not really know much law, but from the time I was a small boy I always knew what the examiners wanted; I could always, on a minimum of work, pass a good examination—it was a sort of a game which I always enjoyed.’ The conferral of the degree coincided with a major decision: following discussions with his father, he decided to return to Australia to try his luck at the Sydney Bar. No doubt the warmer climate would also be beneficial for his health. To ease his way while he established himself, Edwin’s old headmaster at Sydney Grammar, A.B. Weigall, offered him some work teaching Greek.

Australia beckoned.

5

The lure of the pen

Charles Bean, alone on the deck of the mail steamer S.S. Ophir, was intent on capturing the first glimpse of the homeland he had left as a boy of nine and was returning to as a man of twenty-five. At sunrise on 8 December 1904, Bean was spellbound by the ‘red fleecy clouds . . . and . . . a yellow sky.’ As the steamer moved slowly through the Indian Ocean towards Fremantle, Bean stood on the eastern deck, and ‘faint and low along the horizon—but not far off—was Australia!’ The air was still, and all Bean could hear was the lapping of the water and the purring of the engines. He was the only passenger on deck.

A tug kept pace with the Ophir, and Bean watched its crew going quietly about their work. The contrast with the ports at which the ship had called during the six-week voyage struck him. Port after port had teamed with interest, colour and excitement, ‘places where the mere sale of a shawl at a roadside booth was in itself a drama in many acts; where the carrying of luggage across a wharf raised the noise and dust of a dog-fight.’ At Marseilles and Naples, ‘dark beauties with bright eyes and long lashes had ogled us with trinkets and opera glasses and silk stuffs; they had chattered, laughed, screamed, fought one another over the defenceless bodies of hesitating purchasers.’ But off the coast of Western Australia, it was already different. Things were done with barely a word uttered. ‘A nod, and the tug was beside us and a man was coming aboard; a monosyllable, and the boat was steadily moving away again on some business of her own. Here were men who calmly saw what had to be done, and went about it in quiet agreement.’

During the long voyage Bean had time to reflect on his return to Australia, and delved into his memory for images from his childhood. They emerged as a collection of ‘vague and isolated reminiscences of a dim past, such rags and scraps from early years as a child will carry with him into manhood.’ Such thoughts filled his mind as he waited to go ashore. He pictured a ‘colliery in the Blue Mountains, caught long ago haphazard from the window of a passing train—the tall chimnies [sic] smoking angrily, a solitary wheel turning lazily over the pit’s mouth, and the steep sides of the Blue Mountains frowning at you from above.’ Among these fragmented images were ‘yellow goslings on a waterhole, the road running by to a little western farm, thatched, dishevelled, muddy.’

As the ship docked at Fremantle, Bean was relieved to see the crew on the tenders, ‘free–looking men in slouch felt hats.’ He marvelled that he was 19,000 kilometres from England. ‘And here at last, at the end of the world, were men of English race, English order, English quiet, and the English language. It was very much like a coming home. Thank goodness!’

A warm greeting from his mother’s family lay in store for him on arrival in Hobart eight days later. Tennis parties and picnics followed over the Christmas–New Year period. His grandmother wrote to Lucy: ‘Your boy Charley is here and has won the hearts of all. We are delighted with him.’ Sydney was where he was headed, though, and in January 1905 he moved into a house in inner-city Darlinghurst. The rent was 30 shillings a week. His landlady, Laura Mason, appears to have served as a surrogate mother for a young man away from home.

Bean began teaching Greek at Sydney Grammar while investigating a career in the law. But teaching was not for him. ‘I was always in difficulties there for though I read and wrote Greek well I was always hopeless at Greek grammar, and it did not take the class long to find this out.’ He also appears to have coached cricket but left the school before the first term ended to take a job in a law office. He remembered the relief he felt on giving up his Greek class. It was not long before he visited Bathurst, writing to his mother in England that ‘I do feel very proud of my little birthplace.’

The visit coincided with the publication in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph on 13 April 1905 of a long and detailed article that Bean had written about the naval aspects of the then-current Russo-Japanese War. Among his earliest contacts on his return to Sydney was Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson. Again, the link was through his father, who had taught Paterson at Sydney Grammar. Paterson had become a national figure through the publication of such poems as ‘The Man from Snowy River’, and had also built a reputation as a war correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald during the Boer War. Paterson was editor of the Evening News and the Daily Telegraph was its morning stablemate. He had been a solicitor before entering journalism, and was keen to help the son of his old teacher. It is likely that he facilitated the publication of Bean’s article, which sought to explain the importance of the naval conflict from the perspective of Britain and, by extension, Australia.

Bean’s article speculated that the war would produce a titanic fight between two great armoured battle fleets. ‘It is of vast importance to the British people that the modern battleship should emerge from the struggle vindicated, and it should be proved to be the proper weapon for a maritime nation,’ he wrote.

Bean’s thinking would have been influenced by the knowledge that Japan’s small navy was equipped with several British-supplied warships of recent construction. The Russian fleet was larger but antiquated. Command of the sea would be essential to victory on land. As a result, military and civilian observers from every major power closely followed the course of the war—among them Ian Standish Monteith Hamilton, the military representative of the British Indian Army with the Japanese army in Manchuria. Hamilton was destined to play a major part in Bean’s life within just a few years.

The contact with Paterson was important for Bean because it introduced him to Sydney’s journalistic circles. However, there was a more immediate focus for him than writing for newspapers: he began work as the associate of one of the city’s leading legal figures, Mr Justice Sir William Owen, senior puisne judge of the NSW Supreme Court, ranking just below the chief justice. Based on his call to the Bar in England, Bean was admitted to the New South Wales Bar on 13 February 1905.

The job had been organised through Mrs Annie Selwyn, a friend of his parents and widow of Bishop John Selwyn, who approached the judge on Bean’s behalf. For practical purposes, a judge’s associate was something like a private secretary. Under direction of the judge, the associate supervised the mechanics of jury selection and administration of the jurymen’s oath. Throughout a trial the associate would sit at a low bench below the judge, within whispering distance, managing court records and performing various other administrative tasks, and generally liaising between Bench and Bar. For Bean as a young barrister, it was a transitional job. It provided him with an opportunity not only to meet judges, barristers and solicitors, but also to study Australian law and legal procedure.

Before he started practice in New South Wales, Bean had read for the English Bar with a barrister who was an expert in admiralty law and another who specialised in the commercial law area of marine insurance law. However, he was to find that such work was not common in Sydney at the time, and that major litigation of that type was more likely to be conducted in London. Under the tutelage of Justice Owen, Bean had the opportunity to observe a wide range of the work of New South Wales courts, and the high drama of a politically charged Royal Commission.

Justice Owen introduced his associate to each of the major types of jurisdiction exercised by a New South Wales Supreme Court judge, giving him the privileged perspective of an insider who was in the right place at the right time. Bean later recalled that as the Royal Commission over which Justice Owen was presiding dragged on, his thoughts were again focusing on journalism and writing. It was clear that Bean was never really captured by the law, and his interest in it was at best lukewarm. ‘I amused myself writing articles ready for publication when I should give up the associateship.’

One of those articles, published in The Brentwoodian magazine of his old school, recounted the tale of four sons of a squatter who beat off an attack by bushranger Ben Hall’s gang near Goulburn. Bean had apparently heard the story from one of the sons who escaped and, having known of the Hall gang from his Bathurst childhood, regarded the outlaws as ‘scoundrels’. Because ‘Australian bushmen have not a habit of missing anything at short ranges,’ the boys had to be quick-witted to avoid being shot. Bean’s aim, clearly, was to tell an Australian story—one that happened in May 1864, not 1867, as he wrote—that would capture the imagination of the boys of Brentwood. In doing so, he clearly took a certain subdued pride in the prowess of both the boys and the bushrangers.

By early 1907 Bean was giving more serious consideration to leaving the law. In a letter to his family, he hinted about his future career direction: ‘Now here’s a piece of news for family consumption only. I took some articles I had written to the Editor of the Morning Herald and he told me he would take a series of about nine of them. So that of itself would keep me on my legs for a good time. I have to work pretty hard getting them ready in time; but it is such a good start that it is more than worth it.’

In March that year Bean quit his associateship with Justice Owen, who himself was approaching retirement. ‘It was a pleasant life but promised nothing; so I told the dear old judge that I had decided to strike out for myself; he agreed.’ Bean moved into Wigram Chambers in Sydney, where he found members of the Bar with social connections similar to his own: Sydney Grammar School; All Saints’ College, Bathurst; and the Church of England. But the times were difficult for barristers, of whom there was a glut.

It did not take long for Bean to realise that his personality was not best suited to the Bar. He tried to conquer the weaknesses of being ‘a nervous self-conscious speaker, very liable to break down, or anyway to do injustice to my subject through extreme nervousness’:

I had partly overcome this by going down to the Sydney School of Arts on debating nights and practising there . . . but for the bar you need nerves of iron; you have to be ready for sudden home thrusts, which are sometimes fair and sometimes not, and I never felt sure that I should keep my head: I was more afraid of it than of missing those catches at Clifton, and this fear would have hampered me horribly. Probably one might have overcome it, as one did the weakness in fielding, by practice.

Bean’s name was publicly listed among those of barristers practising from Wigram Chambers, and he was listed in the Sydney phone book as a barrister from mid-1907, but his already half-hearted interest in a legal career evaporated.

At the end of a few months of waiting for briefs I recognised that the bar was not the career for me—I had seen men with far more brains than I, in England, still almost briefless at middle age; my interests were much more general, and I had seen one or two things of late which increased my distaste for the work—so much so that I tore up the only cheque I ever received for it.

Too timid to be a barrister and unimpressed by what he had seen in rural courts, Bean felt that there was something morally distasteful about practising law. Whatever it was that caused him to tear up that lone cheque, he was decisively putting the law behind him. In all this, he appears not to have confided in any of his judges—particularly Owen—or any member of the Bar. He turned instinctively to Banjo Paterson—not in the context of the solicitor he had once been but as an editor. He now knew he was cut out for neither teaching nor the law. He could get work as a schoolteacher, but he realised that his ability to impose his authority on his pupils was not high: ‘I was too soft with the boys—or, rather, too anxious to please and be popular with them. Father always said that was a fatal weakness in any schoolmaster—and he did not know that I possessed it.’

By now, Bean knew definitively what he wanted to do. He had always had ‘an irresistible tendency’ towards writing. ‘I decided that before I settled down to a career for which I was only ill-fitted, I would have one fling at work which I really loved—writing.’ It was the only occupation that made sense.

6

Seeds of the myth

Strictly speaking, Charles Bean was not ‘a new chum’, or recent immigrant—rather, he had returned home. But during his time with Justice Owen he had amused himself by writing and illustrating a series of articles that he envisaged publishing as a book capturing his perceptions on his return to the land of his birth. He planned to call it The Impressions of a New Chum. Bean took the manuscript to the publisher Angus & Robertson. It was rejected. In retrospect, he described it as a rather crude and somewhat priggish production. ‘I was afterwards exceedingly glad that it was so firmly rejected, though it was written with enthusiasm and meant well.’ Even in his self-reflections, both in diaries and in public accounts of his life, Bean still sought a truthful analysis and was not afraid to judge himself critically.

He took several of the chapters to The Sydney Morning Herald, whose editor, Thomas Heney, agreed to publish them under the title ‘Australia Revisited’. The writings reflected the wide-ranging interests that caught the imagination of both Bean the observer and Bean the putative social reformer. A strong idealism ran through his writing. The Herald published the series of eight articles under the byline ‘C.W.’ Bean was clearly fascinated by what constituted an Australian and how the national character had been fashioned:

Your first shock when you find the Australian native is to discover that he is not a black man; your second to discover that he is not an Englishman. At home we liked to consider him an Englishman, and it cuts against the grain when he draws a distinction . . . Australian country life is not in the least like life in any other country except New Zealand, and it has hammered out of the old stock a new man. [He] is a tall, spare man, clean and wiry rather than muscular; in face, . . . a certain refined ascetic strength.

His character is the simplest imaginable. The key to it is just this—that he takes everything on its merits, and nothing on authority. Perhaps he goes further, and takes everything on its merits, except for a bias against authority.

Bean saw the Australian as a lover of the truth, and he had seen this borne out often in Australian boys at British schools. Likewise, once an Australian made a friend, he would ‘trust you to death, and beyond.’ And he was always fighting something:

In the bush it is drought, fires, unbroken horses, wild cattle; and not unfrequently strong men. Never was such a country for defending itself with its fists. You will see more fighting in Sydney in a week than in London in a year . . . An Australian will not pocket an insult. Where an Italian or a Spaniard would knife you, an Australian will fight you . . . All this fighting with men and with nature, fierce as any warfare, has made of the Australian as fine a fighting man as exists. He would be the best soldier, too, were it not for the lack of just that one quality which is necessary to turn the fighting man into the soldier . . . Beyond a doubt it is difficult for him to obey any order, especially one of which he does not at the time see the precise expediency.

Bean felt that the Australian had in him the stuff of military greatness. ‘If the right and reason of going to be killed is clear to him, he will be killed cheerfully and with a very pretty courage, and will do a deal more damage before he is killed, and perhaps—if you will pardon it—will not be killed at all in the end, and that where 99 out of 100 would be slaughtered like sheep.’

Here, perhaps, was the seed of the myth of Bean’s Anzacs: tough, resourceful Australians, willing to sacrifice themselves for a good cause, but, in all likelihood, so tough and resourceful as to refuse to be sacrificed but rather surviving, even thriving, on the battlefield. He was in awe of their skill and daring as horsemen in particular. ‘Breaking-in horses, which to the new chum, appear to go temporarily and violently insane, is the ordinary amusement for a Sunday afternoon on a station.’

These early articles showed Bean’s fledgling fascination with the effect of cities on people, and he warned Australia against following the European example. While he saw refinement and luxury in Sydney, he also saw the vice of the old world ‘gnawing away at the heart of the new’. He feared for Australian cities and city-bred people, who would probably go the way of other cities around the world. ‘As soon as a nation begins to shut itself up in cities, it begins to decay,’ Bean wrote.

Echoing the then-popular theory of social Darwinism, Bean envisaged generations of city dwellers becoming smaller in body and weaker in courage and resolve than their forebears. He drew a comparison with London: ‘The nerve of the nation, its levelheadedness and fitness for a national emergency, desert it as they are deserting the modern Londoner. In their place you get a sort of beetle cleverness, an almost unnatural sharpening of the wits in the furious race for wealth.’ His solution was simple: to make life in the cities as similar as possible to that of the country.

Bean saw that the bush experience was producing a man of immense value, not just to Australia but to British communities the world over. He saw the issue in heroic terms: the Australian from the country was ‘the Briton re-born, as it were—a Briton with the stamina and freshness of the 16th century living amongst the material advantages of the 20th century.’ He saw life in the bush as the life of an adventurer. ‘Fierce toil, bitter desperate fighting, fighting with fire and with flood, with unbroken horses, wild cattle, unruly men, interspersed with lapses of ease and comfort.’

Bean believed the Anglo-Saxon race in Australia could still preserve its strength of body, mind and character in spite of city life. The answer was for city councils to ensure sufficient space for Australians to play whatever games they wanted. By doing so, they would be ‘buying the salvation of their race, and buying it dirt cheap.’

In the two and half years he had been back in Australia, Bean had clearly developed strong, utopian opinions about the superiority of bush life. Influenced by his work on circuit courts and his own travels, he perhaps drew inspiration from Banjo Paterson who, after his earlier successful ballads had not long published the hugely popular Old Bush Songs. Paterson’s rhythmic verses struck a chord with a young man enthralled with the romance of the bush.

As the Herald articles appeared, Bean also wrote a 1700-word article for The Spectator magazine in London supporting the White Australia policy, as the Immigration Restriction Act was known. Legislated at Federation in 1901, the policy was generally supported by Australia’s small European population, who feared being overwhelmed by an influx of migrants from the vastly different cultures of the populous countries to Australia’s north. Justifying the policy, Prime Minister Edmund Barton had asserted, ‘The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman.’ The legislation found strong support in the new Australian Parliament, with arguments ranging from economic protection to outright racism. The Labor Party wanted to protect ‘white’ jobs and pushed for more explicit restrictions.

In his article, Bean pointed to the fact that there were some three million whites in Australia inhabiting three million square miles, while as close as a day’s voyage away were eight hundred million Asians. In defence of the White Australia policy, he baldly stated that a Western and an Oriental race could not live together; yet he saw an oriental invasion as inevitable. He feared Britain would not come to Australia’s defence, and beseeched it to make a clear promise not to leave Australians to fight the battle of their race alone. He conceded that Britain was likely to support Australia in the end—‘but ungraciously at the eleventh hour.’ At this time, Britain was in an alliance with Japan and, Bean believed, ‘out of sympathy’ with Australia on the issue.

Bean had closely followed the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, and his thinking reflected growing fear of Japan in the wake of Russia’s defeat, which was principally achieved by the destruction of the Russian fleet in the Tsushima Strait. What worried Bean was that this was the first major victory by an Asian nation over a European nation in the modern era.

Bean saw the British as failing to understand the reality Australia faced in its proximity to Asia:

. . . the Australian sees a deal of the Oriental. He has the Queensland coolies, and the Chinese quarter in every town. Every ship brings them to his gates or takes him to them. He knows what every Briton who meets them knows—that, living together, the Western demoralises the Eastern, and vice versa.

Australians [would] not live as a white race over the head of a subject people, even if they could do so. Their ideal is to keep Australia, if possible, a land where their children can live the healthy Western life of their British fathers. That ideal you must allow them. [T]his is the last land open to the white man—the only one that can be purely British. South Africa cannot be a white man’s land, simply because you cannot spirit away millions of blacks. The United States—even our magnificent Canada—will be less purely Anglo-Saxon as time goes on. And Australia, of all countries in the world, is an ideal one for the white man to live in. That is what a white Australia means to Australia and to England.

Bean saw this as a continuing theme in world history, and that antagonism between Occidental and Oriental was not new, dating back to when the Greeks fought the Persians, the Romans battled the Parthians, the Huns fought the Ostrogoths, and the Crusaders warred with the Saracens. Such analysis was hardly surprising, given Bean’s grounding in the history and philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome.

In a note at the end of the article, The Spectator’s editor supported much of Bean’s argument but noted that Australia had made no great effort to open the country to white immigrants from Britain. Australia had been ‘too apt to regard it as her duty to protect her working men against newcomers.’ Nonetheless, ‘we shall stand by Australia be the cost what it may.’

During this period, a few politicians spoke of the need to avoid hysterical treatment of the White Australia question. Among them was Senator Edward Pulsford, a free trader and Nonconformist liberal who was out of step with prevailing attitudes to Asian immigration and was one of the few members of the Federal Parliament to vote against the Immigration Restriction Act. As late as 1905 he was still attempting to swim against the tide in his pamphlet supporting Japanese protests about the administration of the White Australia policy. Unsurprisingly, he took issue with Bean’s ‘alarmist’ views. No one would dream from reading the Bean article, he said, that Japan had made repeated offers to Australia to enter into a treaty controlling the emigration of Japanese to Australia, or that Australia, instead of accepting Japan’s ‘courteous offers’, preferred to deal with immigration restriction in a way that offended Japan. Pulsford refused to accept that restrictive immigration laws represented ‘the instincts and intellect’ of Australians:

Mr. Bean can do good work by urging on his political friends the wisdom of removing causes of friction between Australia on one hand, and Japan and other Asiatic countries on the other hand . . . I submit that the people of Australia are not in the least fear as to Great Britain, in a supreme hour, failing in her duty towards any part of the Empire; but there are many of them who do view with deep regret the fact that certain Australian legislation tends to create Empire difficulties that more courteous methods would obviate.

To The Spectator’s editor, these were ‘wise words’. This was controversial territory into which Bean had willingly walked; his arguments reflecting a view of the superiority of the British and the British Empire. Such views a century later would be seen as frankly racist and anachronistic, but not then. Bean rationalised his arguments as being more about a historical clash of civilisations—East meets West—than race per se. Given his interest in defence policy and military history, this was hardly surprising. And these views found fertile ground in Australia. But they were also views that he would revisit and reevaluate over the years ahead.

That aside, Pulsford was aware that Bean had ‘political friends’. This was clearly a reference to members of the Australian National Defence League (ANDL) with whom Bean had associated. The ANDL, which supported compulsory militia and cadet service, was a lobby group formed in response to the perceived threat Japan posed following its defeat of Russia. Bean was an early member, along with politicians and other senior figures in Sydney. He was moving in influential circles and not afraid to take a nationalist stand.

While at the time Bean was proud of the article and its publication, his big news for the family in England was that he would soon be joining the staff of The Sydney Morning Herald. ‘I may have to start low—but it is just the one work I most like and the prospects are good . . . I have set my heart on it for I don’t know quite how long—certainly for two years—and I have got the chance now.’ He told the family that his experience at the Bar would always be beneficial. Underlining his lack of interest in a legal career, he wrote: ‘I was never very worried about getting no briefs, because I never intended to get them except as a last resort. Still it is nice to have an assured income again, and this time one which lasts and progresses.’

Bean threw himself into his new career with an enthusiasm that had been difficult to muster in the law. He had already shown an ability to write about big-picture issues at the centre of Australian life. ‘Although I did find that many facets of the study of law could be very interesting, the prospect did not compare with that held out by writing, in which I found, from the moment I took the plunge, a fascinating interest in every task.’

He was offering something to which Australians were unaccustomed—a public intellectual who could give his readers a sense of where they came from and what they represented. And he laid before them ideals—however grandiose—for the nation’s future.

7

The cub

By the standards of the profession, Charles Bean was relatively old to be entering journalism. He was not far off turning twenty-eight in 1907—usually a time when journalists have long completed their training and become senior reporters. But in coming to his decision, he concluded that he had two gifts that a writer needed:

I know what interests people, and I have a pretty fair judgment—I can generally see the flaw in a false argument, and have a pretty true sense of where the right and the wrong lie. It is those two faculties which made me the right sort of person to take up journalism. I am slow, and lack ever so many other qualities, but those and a sense of duty (which Father and Clifton gave me) have carried me through.

It was this sense of duty that compelled Bean to write, to persuade and to convince. There was no better channel than journalism. That he was an emerging talent was clearly evident from The Sydney Morning Herald series. As his role model and mentor, Banjo Paterson advised Bean that journalism was ‘a poor job’ but recommended that he approach the Herald’s proprietors, the Fairfax family. Paterson thought the Fairfaxes, who knew Bean’s father, offered him the best hope. He met with Geoffrey Fairfax, who told him that ‘if I took up shorthand and started at the bottom, he thought there was no reason why I should not rise pretty quickly.’

Bean enrolled at Stott & Hoare’s business college, learning Pitman shorthand and typing eight hours a day, at classes and in his rooms. Within four months he could ‘manage eighty or a hundred [words a minute] with a scramble.’ In January 1908, the Herald took him on as a junior reporter at £4 a week (about $500 in 2013), at the Hunter Street, Sydney, office. He wrote excitedly to the family in England:

I am at work on the Herald; and as I was anxious to get a special article or two and not let a chance skip I was working till 12 or so last night, and most of today have been writing . . . They are going to give me, I think, their military work and their trades and labour work—which is pretty advanced work but of course I shan’t be on that for a week or two . . . One’s principal duties consist in getting to know everybody you possibly can in your own time, e.g. officers, trades unionists etc.

Bean was put on police rounds, which required him to phone police stations, the fire brigade and hospitals looking for news. One of the Herald’s senior reporters, the boisterous and lovable Archie Whyte, showed him the ropes and became his mentor. Bean thought himself lucky that there were ‘no big murders or other crimes or even fires, while I was on rounds.’ Among his first jobs was to report on a deputation to the state Minister for Works lobbying for the construction of a bridge. Bean ‘made a paragraph of it’ and the chief sub-editor, the legendary Montague Grover, liked the report. Grover would later recall the night that he had to edit ‘a wad of copy written in an unfamiliar hand’ by a long, lean, red-headed newcomer:

It concerned a deputation from the shire of Gumtree Flat, or some such district, asking the Minister for Works for a bridge over Dingo Creek. The copy itself was as unfamiliar as the writing . . . It was written so that the street-bred resident of Surry Hills knew precisely the significance and the value of the proposed bridge. It violated all the traditions of the Sydney Morning Herald and most of those of the old-time journalism. It put the case with such incandescent clearness that the position could not be misunderstood, and put it in half the space which tradition would have occupied. The subeditor turned back to the first slip and saw the writer’s name. This was the very first job of practical journalism, which the same man had attempted; and it was a model for three-fourths of the newspaper men who could look back to 10 or 15 years creditable experience. Probably for the first time in the history of newspaper work a reporter had his maiden copy sent to the printer without a mark of the blue pencil on it. That reporter was C.E.W. Bean.

Bean made the transition to cub reporter and professional journalist effortlessly. He later explained that he had found great pleasure in writing news reports, fixing ‘on the interesting or crucial point’, and putting it as clearly and crisply as he could, with the ‘news’ leading the story:

I always looked on the reader as a fish, to be hooked, if possible, in the first sentence and then ‘played’—or kept tight on the hook—until the article was finished. You should never relax your hold on him—if you put in one uninteresting sentence—for example, if you repeat yourself—he will get away and wriggle off and dash away to some other article.

He would apply these principles as a journalist and as an author—indeed, such basic advice on how to write ‘news’ would still be part of training for cadet journalists decades later. As he made his way in the new job, Bean soon found himself in a curious position—reporting on the law courts and coming into contact with people with whom he had worked not long ago. He did not like such assignments; nonetheless, the fraternity among fellow journalists was helpful and supportive. These were happy times for Bean. ‘It was a big family, from Jack the office boy to the Editor and even to Geoffrey and Jim Fairfax, the proprietors. All the old Herald men were loyal friends.’

Bean quickly established his standing. ‘No one was more popular in the office or better qualified to help the paper in every call made upon him,’ an associate editor and future editor of the Herald, C. Brunsdon Fletcher, said, adding that Bean was ‘a tremendous worker.’ For a short time, Bean was also put onto the trades and labour round, which meant going to Trades Hall to keep abreast of strikes and industrial action. Often wearing his Clifton College boater, he was an incongruous sight at Trades Hall. His young cousin Joan Butler, who first met him around this time on a visit from Hobart, would later recall his ‘laughing face, shining pince-nez and a cockatoo crest of red hair’.

During this time, a strike hit the operations of the three New South Wales coastal shipping companies, when wharfies demanded the same rate of pay as those working for interstate companies. Work stopped at the wharves at Newcastle and Morpeth. From a simple quarrel, as Bean saw it, the strike quickly became extraordinarily complex. Bean was able to straddle the tricky line, earning him the respect of both parties involved. Being in charge of the strike news, Bean had contact with the firebrand Welsh-born Labor figure William Morris (Billy) Hughes, Federal Member of the House of Representatives and president of the Waterside Workers’ Federation. Bean thought Hughes had acted with good sense during the dispute, and soon thought him the ‘ablest man’ in Federal Parliament.

Like Bean, Hughes was an early member of the ANDL, and it is likely that this is how their association began. The two men had common origins in the English education system, owing a shared cultural link to ‘the Arnold Tradition’—in Bean’s case through John Percival and Thomas Arnold, and in Hughes’ case, through Arnold’s son, Matthew Arnold, who had been his supervisor when Hughes was a pupil teacher in London. Throughout his life Hughes gratefully acknowledged Arnold’s influence upon him. Bean and Hughes also shared contemporary interests—foreign affairs and defence, the law and journalism. As Bean began his career at the Herald, Hughes was already writing, having begun a widely read weekly column in the rival Daily Telegraph.

After the shipping strike ended in June 1908, the Herald sent Bean out west to report on two rival routes for the railway to Broken Hill—one from Cobar via Wilcannia, the other from Condobolin via Menindee. He was struck by his first experience of the far west as he travelled:

. . . first through the mountains and then through the wheatfields until the country had gradually flattened itself out as if beneath a steam roller, and the landscapes began to extend at times somewhere near the brim of the world; and then the wheat paddocks became fewer, and the railway stations farther and farther between, and when you did come to a siding there was as often as not no township at the back of it, but only, somewhere in the landscape . . .

He took a horse-drawn coach to Wilcannia, from where another coach took him to White Cliffs. Changing horses at midnight, they drove all night and the next day, and all the next night. As the coach pitched and rolled over rough, jarring tracks, he began to understand the empty vastness of the region. ‘During that time, being lucky, we saw perhaps a dozen men . . . half a dozen horses and bullocks, a hundred sheep, two rabbits, five emus, a couple of cockatoos, and a few galahs,’ he wrote of the trip.

He came to realise that a western sheep station was less a country house than a township, with its tradesmen in private employment, its store and sometimes its school. He was ‘intensely interested in the people, the country, the grasses, the animals, the trees and the life.’ From Broken Hill he went to Menindee by coach, and then to Condobolin in a buggy. He wrote a series of articles about the experience, and concluded that the southern route via Menindee was the better one. By now, he was one of the Herald’s recognised feature writers.

Bean’s next assignment was to meet the United States Navy fleet, which was touring the world to impress the major powers and had been invited to Australia by Prime Minister Alfred Deakin. The captain of the British flagship on the Australian station, HMS Powerful, had offered the Herald a free return passage for one of its reporters to meet the fleet in Auckland. Bean’s colleague, Archie Whyte, told him, ‘You may like it—you speak the language.’

Bean reacted to the American fleet with a passion that makes odd reading a century later. One battleship was ‘a great grey warhorse, brave and big and fast, and full of the gentleness of all big things,’ its smoke ‘as black and soft as—the coat of a Persian kitten.’ In another article, he wrote that, ‘the eyes of one [American] sailor grew very soft as he slapped one fat barrel on the Louisiana . . . He fondled that cold steel contour as you might a woolly lamb.’ These awkward metaphors would have made Bean’s father proud.

After a month on the Powerful, Bean thought the articles he had written would make a book—and that could bolster his reputation. When no publisher offered a contract, he paid for the book to be published by William Brooks & Co of Sydney, complete with his own drawings, under the title of With the Flagship in the South. The exercise cost him £100, for a return he later estimated at £50, ‘But it was well worth the expense.’

Bean clearly thought that there would be war with Germany. His assessment would prove prescient, and the articles generated wide interest. He wrote that he wanted to give a picture of the great fight that had never yet been fought—an equal battle between two big modern fleets:

The Navy knows that the German is a magnificent sailor in magnificent ships; and the war would be desperate . . . There is only one possible justification for war; and that is if in its heart the German people, as apart from its Emperor, covets some corner of British territory. We do not know that it does. But the Empire must make ready to speak with anyone [who comes] in the gates. So, for that matter, must Germany.

The Americans and their white-painted warships impressed Bean, but he noted that their officers, especially their captains, had an average age of around sixty—at least fifteen years older than most British captains. He had no doubt that ‘our service is ideally youthful just now.’ He approved of the American crews he met—‘as young as their officers are old—mere slips of schoolboys, brimful of bright intelligence, sparkling and overflowing with humour.’ He looked for an Australian parallel. ‘One cannot help thinking that the Australian seaman will have every bit as much intelligence as the American; and the nerves and energy of the British. His difficulty will be discipline.’ This was premised on Bean’s dream for the Commonwealth Naval Forces, which had been established in 1901, becoming a much expanded and stronger Royal Australian Navy patrolling the Australian seas. As much as anything, the book was a plea for an Australian navy.

To Bean, this was needed to ensure ‘the place which Anglo-Saxon men and Anglo-Saxon ideas shall take and keep in the Pacific’. Politically, he was on fertile ground, as both Alfred Deakin and Labor’s rising star Billy Hughes believed in asserting Australia’s role in the Pacific. This common ground was a reflection of the racial nationalism that had become popular in the late nineteenth century.

On a per capita ratio to the British fleet, Australia would need five battleships, twelve cruisers and thirty-four torpedo boats—at a cost of £14.6 million. But the all-up cost with infrastructure would be at least £25 million and £4 million a year to run—which would provide a navy a third as strong as the Japanese one. Bean cautioned that:

. . . Australians do not realise the value of thoroughness. The Japanese artillery—probably the Chinese, too, by this time—may be officered by men who are really elaborate engineers; who may have their balloons, their kites, their wireless telephones, their crowds of signallers. But any old thing is good enough for the Australian batteries.

In reflecting on war in general, Bean saw that there were times when all this ‘prodigious preparation to kill or be killed’ seemed useless and hopeless. ‘But after all it is based on the one truth, which is true beyond question, that there are matters about which a man worth anything cannot compromise; that there are worse things than dying; that, if it comes to that pass, life which would have to be lived not as you think right, but as some Asiatic may think right, is not worth living at all.’ However anachronistic this might appear today, Bean reflected a view commonly held at the time—not least by politicians such as Billy Hughes, who echoed the case for an Australian navy and argued that if Australia tied itself wholly to British naval power, over which it had no control, it might find itself abandoned in the event of war. In the political debate of the time, advocacy such as that of Hughes helped give legitimacy to Bean’s views.

When the book was published, Australians took note—among them Henry Lawson, who wrote to his sister more than a year later that he was ‘reading With the Flagship in the South over and over again’. Bean’s style reminded him of Rudyard Kipling and the Australian writer and Boer War veteran John Henry Abbott ‘at their very best.’ Abbott’s 1902 book, Tommy Cornstalk, presented a picture of the Australian soldier very much in accord with the one Bean eventually incorporated in the Anzac legend.

Monty Grover was also greatly impressed when the articles that formed the basis for Bean’s book landed on his desk at the Herald. Grover, too, compared Bean with Kipling, citing his 1898 book, A Fleet in Being, but found Bean the simpler and more honest writer. He called him ‘a super-journalist for several reasons.’ Foremost among these was ‘his marvellous clearness of description.’ Bean took nothing for granted and allowed the reader to take nothing for granted. Thanks to his legal training, he approached the subject with an open mind and realised that his job was to explain things to the reader as clearly and as briefly as possible—not to appear wise or pose as ‘literary’. Bean did not strive for effect and was ‘too good a sport’ to descend to Kipling’s trick of flinging technical terms at a mystified reader ‘that men might think him brave’. Nor did he use tricky phrases or didactic generalisations to conceal sloppy investigation. Importantly, Grover added, ‘Like every true journalist Bean regards the manner as less important than the matter. Facts are supreme; the writing is only a necessary attribute to the work.’

Grover had one reservation, though. At the end of With the Flagship in the South the influence of Bean’s British and public school upbringing was clearly evident. He wrote that there was ‘a certain pure old cross of St George which the smallest grey gunboat carries about the world.’ To Bean, it was ‘. . . a thousand and one ideas wrung out by British men and women from the toil and sweat of nine hundred years, that make the Anglo-Saxon life worth living for the Anglo-Saxon.’

This imperial idealisation was too much for Grover, who observed: ‘The book concludes with a short chapter which is unworthy of the writer—a few hundred words of flamboyant flapdoodle about the flag. It could well have been omitted.’

In a postscript to a new edition published in London in August 1909, Bean ignored such criticism. He noted when the book first appeared, ‘Germany has quietly been planning, for some purpose, to have on the sea, some time in 1912 or 1913, a navy stronger than the British navy.’ And he forecast:

Australians have never yet had their naval problem brought really home to them. It will come on them with a jump in 1915 . . . The navy knows today its greatest problem is that in 1915 England must either make some stupendous effort to send to Hong Kong 14 or 18 Dreadnoughts; or else for the first time give up the Pacific Command. The navy knows. But the first land folk to realise the bareness of the Pacific will be Australians not British . . . England has definitely pledged herself to defend Australia on the seas. But at that time, as far as can be seen, England will still be struggling neck and neck with Germany . . . Under the circumstances, does it not seem absolutely impossible for her to send at that time a quarter of her fleet, wrung out of the purses of her people, to the other end of the world chiefly to defend Australia?

Bean was certain that war was coming and wanted to shake Australians out of their torpor about this prospect. Just who the men were who would form the backbone of the new Australian Army he was about to find out.

8

The Sydney passenger

The newspaper world was taking notice of Charles Bean. The Melbourne Argus tried to poach him; so too did the Herald’s Sydney rival, the Daily Telegraph. The Herald raised his salary to £9 a week—and he stayed. By 1909 Bean was fast becoming its star reporter. He had cut his teeth on the hard news of daily rounds, but he saw himself more as a commentator. Living away from Australia for ten years enabled him to stand outside and take a different perspective, observing at once as an Australian and as a foreigner.

His editor, Thomas Heney, was clearly impressed. Bean had not long returned from reporting the opening of the Kosciusko [sic] Hotel, which had taken him into the alpine landscapes that Banjo Paterson glorified. The opening, by the Governor and the Premier of New South Wales, was a noteworthy event. Bean was enraptured and reported in the Herald:

Last night the State Governor formally opened to the people of Australia a district which, once having seen it, one cannot doubt to be the playground of Australia in the future, the Australian highlands.

Men could not ride down these ridges, as the [people of the Monaro region] undoubtedly do, as the man from Snowy River did, if the climate did not make for strength, both of body and spirits.

Heney, however, had a new project in mind for him, far from the snowfields. He called Bean into his office and told him he wanted a series of articles on the comparative importance of the wool industry. The paper had recently looked at the problems of wheat, fruit, dairy and other farmers, but Heney, who had edited a paper at Wilcannia on the Darling River, believed that the wool industry counted for more in Australia than any of these and was being unduly ignored. He gave Bean an open brief. More than fifty years later Bean—writing in the third person—recalled:

The youngish reporter was not enthusiastic—the chief-of-staff, into whose cubby-hole he turned, had tasks much more urgent in view for the young man; and as the latter trudged up Pitt Street, glumly revolving a possible division of the subject in accordance with the products of the sheep industry—wool, meat, tallow, glue, lanolin—his heart was as heavy as the prospective articles. And then it flashed upon him that the most important product of the wool industry for Australia was men; it was responsible for creating some of the outstanding national types. If he described the lives of those men—their qualities, worries, and occupations out in those lonely parts—he would incidentally be describing the processes and methods of the wool industry.

Bean realised that he had never seen wool industry characters systematically portrayed. Who were the boundary riders, the rouseabouts, the shearers, the drovers and the rest? As he walked along Pitt Street he explained to his colleague Harry Green how he would tackle the assignment, the first article already shaping itself in his mind. Bean caught the tram home a happy man.

He took the train to Quirindi, 400 kilometres from Sydney, and stayed at Kurrumbede station, one of several sheep properties owned by the respected physician, politician and grazier Sir Charles Mackellar, who was prominent in Sydney society and in the dominant Anglican community. Mackellar held strong views, including the belief that environmental factors determined the development of the young. To Bean, Mackellar was a respected friend. He was also the father of his good friend Dorothea Mackellar, then a rising literary figure. A few months earlier, the London Spectator had published her evocative poem ‘Core of My Heart’, which would become better known as ‘My Country’.

From Kurrumbede Bean headed to Bourke, a riverboat town on the Darling River and a hub for pastoralists in western New South Wales since its establishment in 1861. Here, where the railway met the port, steamers unloaded goods for outback communities and collected wool from the stations. The Darling River was the barren and inhospitable region’s vital artery. At Bourke, Bean found the riverboat Jandra—or, as he would name it in one of his two books on his travels to the outback, the Dreadnought.

The Jandra took Bean down the Darling, and four days later he arrived at the vast Dunlop Station, sprawling over nearly 400,000 hectares. The pastoralist Sir Samuel McCaughey owned Dunlop, and it was there in 1888 that the world’s first mechanised shearing of sheep took place in a forty-five-stand woolshed that, more than 125 years later, still stands. Bean stayed in the large sandstone homestead, one of several grand residences along the Darling River.

Bean returned to Sydney after two weeks in the outback, convinced that he had ‘seen all I could of the wool industry.’ He rounded off his research with a visit to a factory in suburban Marrickville to see what became of the wool. With this knowledge, Bean wrote twenty-three articles that the Herald published as the ‘Wool Land’ series.

A visiting British journalist, Archibald Marshall, himself a novelist, read the articles and asked Bean if he could take them back to England with the aim of having them published. ‘I put the wool articles into book-shape, altering them very little, and called them On the Wool Track.’ Marshall gave the articles to the London publisher Alston Rivers, and the book appeared to general acclaim.

Together with his trip the previous year to Broken Hill, the travel also enabled him to write The Dreadnought of the Darling, published in 1911—again based on nine articles that first appeared in mid-1910 in The Sydney Mail, which the Herald also published. These experiences provided Bean with an insight into the character of Australians in the bush, and the struggles they faced in a harsh and inhospitable land. The first chapter of On the Wool Track begins dramatically:

There was death in the paddock. For nine days the police had followed a man’s footsteps. Once and again the footmarks would turn back upon themselves. Now they would lead round and round a tree. Now they would shoot off at right angles. At long intervals the searchers had found towards evening clear signs that his feet had begun to drag. They could see clearly the long scrape of the toe before each heel-mark. They quickened pace, following the tracks with all the skill that was in them. Presently they came to his hat.

The first page sets the scene for the life-and-death battle that Australians faced in the arid interior. In this case, the dead man had become lost in a vast paddock as he attempted to walk to Sydney, 1000 kilometres away. ‘He never got out of the one paddock,’ Bean wrote. Amid this harshness, Bean was mesmerised by the beauty of the endless, pitiless country:

One has seen the country where men have died; and if the place had not actually done them to death, one would not have dreamed that there could be any cruelty in the heart of it. There were no Alpine precipices. No avalanches or black jungles full of wild beasts, no earthquakes, not even a flood or a bushfire. The countryside looked like a beautiful open park with gentle slopes and soft grey tree-clumps. Nothing appalling or horrible rushed upon these men. Only there happened—nothing. There might have been a pool of cool water behind any one of those tree-clumps—only there was not. It might have rained, any time; only—it did not. There might have been a fence or a house just over the next rise; only—there was not. They lay down, with the birds hopping from branch to branch above them and the bright sky peeping down at them. No one came. Nothing happened. That was all.

The men out there fascinated Bean, not least the shearers. He heard conversations on a variety of topics, which he thought made better listening than many speeches in Parliament. To Bean, the shearer was a surprisingly high class of workman. He ‘could manufacture what was needed out of things which one would have thought impossible to turn to any use at all,’ and this had become more than an art. ‘It has long since become part of his character.’ Bean thought that Australians alone were born with this quality, and he was reminded that British Field Marshal Lord Kitchener had said that, as raw material for soldiers, Australians were the equal, if not the superior, of any people he knew. Kitchener added: ‘A great deal of training that would, in the ordinary course, have to be supplied to obtain an efficient soldier is already part of the daily life of many of your lads.’ Bean saw this as a product of race:

Such qualities as Australians have are, of course, only drawn from the British race, because the people of Australia was then and still is as purely British as the people of Great Britain—perhaps more so than the population of London. But these qualities were never—and never will be—elicited from the race by such agencies as the sea-beaches and soft breezes, sweet fruits and easy hours of which the advertisements speak. The men whom Kitchener had seen at Eland’s River [Transvaal] came spare, brown, and wiry from the cattle stations and sheep runs, the dust and heat—the dreary months with vivid intervals of overstrain—of Queensland.

Race, together with Britain’s cramped city living conditions, helped Bean explain why Englishmen who had migrated to Australia had adapted to the trials of the outback. New chums tended to believe at first that ‘a thing could not be done’ whereas, of course, it always could. At the base of his argument was a belief that having to deal with the harsh—and by comparison with Britain, primitive—conditions of Australia somehow reinvigorated the British migrant.

It is a convenience, but at the same time it is a sign of danger in a community, when people begin to walk on the right-hand side of the footpath. They begin to lose the capacity for elbowing themselves through a crowd. That capacity obviously exists pre-eminently in the British race. But it does not come out till the race gets to places like Australia, where it has to.

When it came to indigenous Australians, Bean approvingly quoted shearers saying that they would not have a Chinaman, an Indian or an American negro among them, but they would work with a Maori or an Australian Aborigine. As he put it, ‘All the Governments recognise a duty to the blacks, and the Australian worker of his own accord regularly recognises his obligations to the blackfellow by drawing a firm distinction between him and other dark-skinned peoples . . . It is really a matter of principle; they recognise that Australia and New Zealand once belonged to the blackfellow and the Maori.’

Conscious of these rights of ownership of the land that they no longer controlled, Bean concluded that the old tribes had not so much fled from their districts as simply dwindled there. Out west, the remnants survived in the ‘blacks’ camps’ on the outskirts of a few small towns, such as one he saw that was just ‘a few miserable “humpies” barely worth the name of huts, which might have been hen-roosts or the houses of any miserable class of white people, for all the distinctive marks that they displayed.’

The trip to the Darling had occasioned his first real contact with Aborigines, and with it an understanding of how and why they lived as they did, and what had happened to them. People who had lived in the area for many years explained to Bean about the widespread conflict. One station owner told Bean of incidents when the local Aborigines had been giving trouble at the stations, and ‘every blackfellow that was killed was considered as a pest . . . like a snake in the grass.’

Recognising the damage that the clash of cultures had wrought, he also appreciated Aboriginal achievements in a harsh country. He accepted that early encounters between blacks and whites were characterised by wrongdoing on both sides, and lamented the displacement of Aborigines from traditional lands. Importantly, he recognised in European Australians an acknowledgement of Aborigines as worthy of special consideration because they were the original inhabitants of the land. He lamented that in less than fifty years the number of full-blooded Aborigines in New South Wales had dwindled to fewer than 4500. Their misfortune had been to come into contact with the ‘wrought-iron civilisation hammered out in the wild competition of the world from which Australia was for aeons cut off.’ Bean blamed drink and European diseases for what he believed would be the death of the race.

Bean’s views on race reflected a worldview that endorsed the supremacy of the British Empire and at the same time envisioned a vibrant future for Australia. In these years he was rarely challenged, as he voiced attitudes generally held in Australia. At Bourke, Bean—portraying himself as ‘a rather raw, bespectacled young man, with an innocent expression and an English accent, and the usual city man’s idea that the West was an uncivilised country, from which he should expect little convenience and less comfort’—met an Afghan cameleer. They struck up a conversation. Condescendingly, he asked the Afghan if he had been in Australia long, and suggested that he found it easier to make money here than in Afghanistan. He thought that the cameleer must look upon Australia ‘as a sort of a peaceful, plentiful paradise, whither he has fled to escape from the trials of his own native land.’ But the Afghan replied proudly that he would go back to his own country. ‘Can make money here, but what the use of this life? This not life,’ he added contemptuously.

Bean was surprised—‘even annoyed’—with what he regarded as ingratitude. ‘What right had this half-savage to growl at a country in which he was offered all the advantages of civilisation,’ he wrote indignantly in a chapter he called ‘The Benighted Heathen’. Bean saw ‘quite obvious disgust written in every line of his forehead’. Pointing to the camel camp, the man asked Bean what was the use of living like that. He could go back to the rye and the wheat in the mountain valley where he lived in Afghanistan. Despite his scarcely passable English, there was no mistaking the mixture of pride and longing in his tone.

Bean suggested that there was a ‘good bit of fighting in your country, isn’t there? Kill a good many people now and then, don’t they?’ Bean expected the cameleer to sniff the breeze, roll his eyes and smack his lips. Instead, he told Bean: ‘No more so much killing now’days . . . Things much better now, We have a law too, and a king, like you. Our king, he punish bad men. Things not so bad in my country.’ Bean was chastened. ‘He was not rolling his eyes, he was hurt, and he was defending his country against defamation. The Sydney passenger suddenly felt very sorry he spoke. He somehow felt very mean, but he could not well explain. So he just listened.’

Bean realised he had overstepped the mark and, for the first time, questioned his belief about Anglo-Saxon racial superiority. He had always thought about ‘race’ in the context of a divide between ‘East’ and ‘West’. The cameleer made it clear he thought his society in Afghanistan was better, and Bean knew he had to listen. A ‘half savage’ had taught him a lesson. A seed of doubt was sown.

His views about the advantages of the bush over the city were not so challenged. His excursions into the outback had strengthened his belief that the simplicity of life there was bound to have its effect on city life, if for no other reason than that city folk admired the Australian of the bush as their ideal man. Bean was certain that nothing would ever destroy the outback because it had too powerful an influence. And it was not as if the men of the outback were uneducated. He was particularly impressed with bullockies, who were quite different from the quick-witted shearers or even station hands. No philosopher in Australia gave so much of his time to original thought as the bullocky, and ‘the Prime Minister of England would find him worth listening to.’

One outback characteristic that struck Bean was the code of loyalty to a mate. While he conceded this was possibly an article of faith with all Anglo-Saxons, he believed that loyalty was a quality largely originating in the back country. To Bean, the ‘ideal Australian’ was still being moulded in the outback, in the pastoral industry and at the diggings, with the standards of ‘pluck, hardiness, unaffectedness, loyalty, truthfulness [and] hospitality.’ It was true that the outback produced wool, meat, tallow and skins. ‘But in the course of that great pastoral industry it produces something far more valuable to the country than all the rest, and that is—men.’ Bean believed that the Englishman had long ago thought out and settled his ideal—the gentleman. He had finished his pioneering and was inclined to rest on his oars; aesthetic or antiquarian questions, and even matters of rank and ceremony, became questions of moment with him:

But in Australia it is different. The cities, the railways, the navy, the army are not made. The homesteads are not settled. The whole calibre of the people is still being altered by changes in their education. Australia is largely a big blank map, and the whole people is constantly sitting over it like a committee, trying to work out the best way to fill it in.

On this platform of hope for a grand Australian future, built upon the idealised virtues of the men of the outback, Bean had established a claim to chronicle and analyse Australia’s contemporary history. Just how this would unfold was the question.

9

Moral certainty

After years of urging by his older brother Jack, Bean arrived in Sydney in August 1910. They were a close-knit family and for the first time in six years the three brothers were in the same city. Earlier, in March 1909, Monty had returned to Australia from Britain as an engineer, and was sharing accommodation with Charles. Jack, now a doctor, needed a surgery and Charles found him a house on Old South Head Road in Bellevue Hill. The choice was not a good one, as the wealthy suburb had already attracted more doctors than were needed there.

Meanwhile, Bean was feeling overworked on The Sydney Morning Herald, where he was writing editorials as well as providing stories for The Sydney Mail. The Herald offered him the plum post of London correspondent, on an annual salary of £400. He saw it as ‘the very work which I could have prayed for with a return to this sunny land at the end of it and perhaps a war correspondentship . . . I can’t imagine anything so happy.’

There was a bittersweetness in taking the job. After waiting so long for his brothers to join him in Sydney, he would soon be leaving them. But it did mean that he would see his parents, still at Brentwood School. Importantly, there was another consideration: with the political situation in Europe deteriorating, he would be on the spot. He had long believed war to be inevitable, and the portents were growing stronger.

En route to London, Bean travelled across the United States in September 1910, visiting the Midwest, where huge cities were to be seen. In Chicago he was fascinated by the evolution ‘of the finest city front in the world out of a pile of garbage heaps’. Besides its beautification, he also looked at the industry underpinning the city. He toured Chicago’s huge meat processing and packing factories. In an article for the Herald he described their operations. Noting that they were so big that they had their own railway stations, he wrote: ‘Slaughtering, whether of pigs or bullocks, is never a very pretty process—but it is probably as clean in Chicago as anywhere else, if not cleaner.’

In Detroit, the wide tree-lined boulevards and a central park that was five kilometres long impressed him. He thought it a model city—and found it extraordinary that Detroit had not been spoiled by the rapid growth of the car industry.

In New York, he stayed ‘in one of the biggest and richest hotels’ in the city. The experience was an uncomfortable one. ‘It is not the hotel itself that grates on you—that is well planned and well managed. It is the atmosphere of money-worship and sycophancy that gets on your nerves. It is apt to make the ordinary impecunious tourist feel like a criminal from the moment he enters—liable to be detected and arrested at any moment on suspicion of not being able to afford it.’ Bean was affronted by such displays of ostentatious wealth and left the next morning for more modest accommodation.

Arriving in London in October 1910, Bean did not find the work arduous at the Herald’s bureau, having only to write a weekly column. With time on his hands he was able to poke about London and reacquaint himself with old haunts in search of new material. He wrote a series of articles comparing London’s East End slums with those of Sydney. The subject was close to his heart, but the Herald did not print them and the articles were lost. Thereafter, he tailored his weekly output to what the Herald would print.

The dumped articles underlined just how highly town planning rated in Bean’s thinking. He closely followed a debate he saw as important for Australians if they were to capitalise on the chances that a young country offered for improving living conditions. Town planning, he wrote in a column just a month after his arrival, was the movement of the age and had ‘spread like wildfire through England’. Drawing on an interview with a British government minister, Bean noted: ‘Australians have led the world in several social experiments but it is not at all comforting to realise that we are altogether out of the running in this. It was astonishing, coming from Australia, where the subject of town planning is practically unknown, to find that the experts in the outside world look upon Australia as the one country, par excellence, where town planning ought to be in full application.’ Bean believed that Liverpool was an example of a city that was benefiting from the application of town-planning principles, predicting that it would become one of the finest cities inhabited by an Anglo-Saxon people. In Bean’s mind, Sydney had a wealth of advantages over most cities, but he warned that ‘unless Sydney wakes up and uses those advantages she will find herself surpassed not only by fine cities like Detroit and Liverpool, but by such unpromising places as Birmingham and Chicago.’

He found it curious that the British experts looked to Australia as the chief hope of town planners—they would ‘give millions to have our chances.’ Town planners knew that although Australia had some big cities, they were only the nucleus of what they would be some day. There was optimism that Sydney and Melbourne would not waste such a chance. Bean was not confident. He, like the experts he had talked to in London, looked to the new federal capital in Canberra. ‘The general hope in England is that the planning of the federal capital will be such an object lesson to the other cities of Australia that there will be a sort of wholesale conversion of them before they allow their still existing chances to peter away as the old-world cities did, in the unenlightened days.’

Town planning, with all that it meant to Bean in terms of open space and healthy living, had taken firm hold in his mind. His trips to the outback had imprinted on him the superiority of wide-open spaces over confined and narrow inner-suburban streets. He believed the Anglo-Saxon race could not thrive in city slums; people needed space and light.

He took the opportunity to visit most town-planning experiments in England. His aim was to learn what Sydney might do and he was convinced that Sydney could still ‘turn itself into a city that will be difficult to match.’ Bean’s thinking was informed by a discussion with a ‘distinguished eye specialist’ who ran a school near London that treated trachoma in children who also exhibited ‘feeble-mindedness’. The parents of these children, the specialist told Bean, were often ‘the dregs of the population’ and their brains ‘have never a chance to grow under conditions of food and surroundings such as they get there.’ It was ‘surprising’ how they developed after a couple of years of good food and country air, some even becoming ‘quite sharp-witted’.

Bean was philosophically opposed to the growth of skyscrapers, and reacted strongly to news that Sydney City Council had authorised the construction of Culwulla Chambers, the city’s first—twelve-storey—skyscraper. He was in tune with the building’s critics, who feared Sydney would develop a ‘New York style’ skyline, and thought the building itself a potential fire hazard, as fire ladders could not reach its maximum height. ‘Everyone who has travelled to cities which own skyscrapers knows well that one single example of them, without being beautiful in itself, suffices to put out of joint the nose of every fine piece of architecture in the city.’

•

Rather than live in London, Bean stayed with his parents at Brentwood School. He quickly fitted into the life of his old school, which by then was flourishing. He put his spare time to good use developing a bowling machine, which he described as ‘something like one of Caesar’s catapaults’, delivering a ball consistently within a dinner plate-sized ring to a batsman in the school’s nets. The school’s history describes the machine as ingenious.

Bean took up the role of cricket coach. He decided that the boys needed a detailed description of just how to play the forward and back strokes, especially on ‘sticky’, uncovered wickets. The Brentwoodian printed the near–800-word article, which the editor thought ‘should be of great value to any batsman.’ The article underlined Bean’s ability to write in precise—if over-long—detail. It was essential in playing a forward stroke, he said, to keep the bat’s shoulders oriented so that a line through them pointed towards the pitched ball. ‘By-the-bye, lift the bat straight up and down. Don’t flourish it, or it will swing out of the straight line. To keep your shoulders right always step out with your left foot square and not pointed to the bowler. Secondly, keep sight of the left shoulder in the corner of the eye, and point it at the ball while striking, and keep it so pointed till the end of the stroke.’

Bean was further able to indulge his love of cricket by covering the triangular Test series in England in 1912 involving Australia, South Africa and England. His meandering reports were often long—as much as 3000 words—and had the air of a gentlemen’s club discussion. Despite his passion for the game, much of his writing was wooden, only rising in tenor to capture the reception to a brilliant 99 scored by the Australian batsman Charlie Macartney in a drawn, rain-affected match at Lord’s. The innings ended with a ‘tremendous cheer’ for Macartney, and Bean wondered ‘whether at present he is not the finest batsman anywhere.’ He also made special mention of Charlie Kelleway, wondering whether his ‘batting methods’ reflected his stoic character. Perhaps Bean saw something of himself in the tall Kelleway.

While in London, Bean met with his London publisher, Alston Rivers. Having published both On the Wool Track and The Dreadnought of the Darling, the firm also agreed to publish an enlarged version of his earlier book, With the Flagship in the South. The new book, Flagships Three, covered the establishment of the Royal Australian Navy. The first flagship was an old Viking longboat Bean had seen in a Norwegian museum; Flagship No. 2 was HMS Powerful, while Flagship No. 3 was the new battle cruiser HMAS Australia. Bean saw a direct racial link from the Vikings to the British and then the Australians. As he explained: ‘The first flagship was the reason for the second; and the second was the reason for the third, and there’s the sum of it.’ It was no accident, Bean contended, that the people of Australia were the descendants of Danes and Norsemen, Frisians, Jutes and Englishmen. It was also no accident that ‘the people who came to the greatest island in the world were an island people,’ or that the Royal Navy had protected Australia until it had a navy of its own.

Recalling his earlier book, in which he argued the case for the establishment of the Australian Navy, Bean was happy to take a good deal of the credit for its creation. He wondered if he ‘may perhaps for once be forgiven if he feels not a little satisfaction at having expressed views which have been so quickly and completely fulfilled.’

The high point was the construction of HMAS Australia and the light cruisers HMAS Sydney and HMAS Melbourne, the main striking power of the new navy. At the launch of the Australia at the Clydebank shipworks, Glasgow, on 25 October 1911, Bean watched workmen hammering in wedges beneath the cradle holding the great cruiser. ‘That same night, working like devils in the weird uncertain light reflected in the black water under the stern, they fixed the four great golden propellers on to the carefully swathed shafts. And then, at last, towards morning, they began to knock away, one by one, the blocks beneath the keel,’ he wrote. Bean thought that in the darkness beneath the ship’s flat bottom, the men looked like Roman soldiers, battering a city wall. ‘The sixteen blocks at the bows were still all taut against the keel, but they all seemed to be moving, bending over, all together, like a squad of soldiers. She pulled them over like ninepins as she went.’

Bean believed the sea to be Australia’s best means of defence and its only means of attack. He saw it as inevitable that because of the sea-faring skills peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon race, Australia would become a naval power and would the play the role of the sheriff in the Pacific—a policy espoused by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, who thought dominions such as Australia should shoulder the burden in their own region in return for British support in a crisis.

Bean thought that given the need for a strong naval presence in Europe it was probable that Australia and Canada would have to ‘educate the Empire’ to the necessity of keeping a powerful fleet in the Pacific. His posting in London, while clarifying his vision for Australia’s role in the British Empire, was also strengthening his nationalism. At the same time, his sense of duty was affirmed. As his horizons expanded, he was growing in confidence and moral certainty.

10

Agent of change

Charles Bean’s time in London was up. The Sydney Morning Herald wanted him back at head office in Sydney. A reluctant Bean responded in mid-1912 that he wanted to remain for at least another year. With a light workload and time to indulge his interests, he was enjoying himself. The Herald management expressed surprise and refused to give way, telling Bean, ‘the simple fact is that we think we have more valuable work for you to do here.’

Bean had established a presence in London. As he later recalled, he was in danger of becoming accepted as an authority on the Australian wool industry. On the Wool Track had been well reviewed in the British press. Students wrote to him seeking information about the industry. The London School of Economics asked him to give six lectures in which he covered the whole course of the wool trade, from the sheep’s back to the tailor’s shop. He was also asked to give a lecture to the Royal Society of Arts and was awarded a silver medal.

As he prepared to pack up in 1913, Bean believed that a European war was getting closer. Not only were the Balkan states at war, but a militarised Germany was asserting its strength amid increasing tensions in Europe. In his column, Bean chided Prime Minister Andrew Fisher for rejecting an offer from the British government for an Australian Minister, either periodically visiting or permanently based in London, to attend meetings of the Committee of Imperial Defence. It meant that Australia would forgo the opportunity to influence Britain for or against war at a critical period; indeed, Canada had taken up the offer. ‘The great mistake Australians make is in believing that, because there is no obvious urgency, therefore any time will do for making these arrangements. In these matters of defence, those who have any real experience know that, if a thing is good to be done at all, then it cannot wait.’ So critical was Bean of the decision that he returned to it in his next two columns, asserting that Australia should take ‘a man’s share in deciding her own fate rather than leaving it like a child to be decided for her by others’.

He boarded the passenger liner Orvieto and left England on 16 April 1913. Somewhat wistfully, he made it clear he was leaving London with happy memories of his three-year posting. ‘And here let it be stated that, in spite of all her defects, this old city possesses an allurement, an all too powerful allurement, for the average Australian.’

Arriving at Sydney on 22 May, he was put to work as a leader writer. During the next year he wrote frequently on his favoured subject—town planning. In an article in the architectural journal The Salon, he admitted that he had no qualification to write about town planning except that of being an enthusiastic lover of Sydney. While overseas, he wrote, he had consciously compared every city that he visited with Sydney. Although almost all of them were applying more intelligence and energy to their development than Sydney, no city had ‘the possibilities either for beauty or health which Sydney possesses’. He was convinced that Sydney could still turn itself into a city that would be difficult to match. ‘There is no inlet in any harbour that I saw in Europe or America that can compare with Farm Cove. I saw no gardens with a site which could approach that of our Botanical Gardens.’ But he feared the time was fast approaching when the only place from which the harbour would be visible in most districts would be a private housetop. One by one, all the great views of Sydney, which ought to be preserved for the people for all time, were being shut off forever.

Sydney’s most pressing problem was to make and enforce a plan for expansion. In the city’s centre, the damage had already been done. Bean contended that a Sydney Code based on a Greater Sydney Act was needed. There should be a local government board and a Sydney Building Act—something that was twenty-five years overdue. He wanted a Chair of Town Planning and Architecture at Sydney University, whose graduates ‘would create the public opinion and set the standard for Australia.’ Expansion of the city’s railways was also necessary: ‘the future Sydney will contain a far more intricate network of railways than any yet planned. There is no reason why these should not now be as far as possible planned, and the necessary land resumed.’ As well, a Sydney Harbour bridge was urgently needed. One thing that worried Bean was that ‘widespread interest and pride in the city does not exist in Sydney to the same extent as in Melbourne or many country towns.’ The best way to create that interest lay with the professional institutions for architects and engineers, as well as the Town Planning Association of New South Wales.

The association had been established seven months earlier, in October 1913. Walter Burley Griffin, the designer of the new capital at Canberra, gave a lecture to the inaugural meeting on town planning and civic ideals. In the audience were two men who would play key roles in furthering town planning and become allies of Charles Bean—the architect and town planner Sir John Sulman, and the publisher and progressive thinker George Augustine Taylor. Sulman was elected foundation president, while Taylor was honorary secretary. Within a year war had been declared on unhealthy, inefficient and ugly cities.

Bean was not only mixing in influential circles, he was also fulfilling a role not uncommon among journalists in the so-called Progressive Era. As the American historian Richard Hofstadter later wrote: ‘It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the Progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind, and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer.’ Like fellow journalists George Taylor, who published the journals Building, Construction and Local Government, and Australasian Engineer, and Charles Reade, whom Bean had met in London, Bean was playing an educative role as a journalist in taking town planning to a wider audience. His aim was to inform and convince readers of the need for action. He would later reflect that he came up against entrenched interests among suburban aldermen whose positions would be at risk if he succeeded. Dismissing them as ‘too strange’, he insisted that the logic for action was irresistible. ‘I had seen in London and Birmingham etcetera how a nation’s physique could be changed in 75 years by the growth of unplanning.’ Bean had become an agent for change.

Writing for The Salon was quite different from his Herald job typing editorials, a task he found far from congenial. As Bean became increasingly frustrated by his work at the Herald, his parents returned to Australia in early 1914. Edwin had succeeded in building Brentwood into a successful school, lifting numbers from just forty-five to more than 200. But it had taken its toll on his health, and he now had a serious kidney infection. All the family was now settled in Australia, Edwin and Lucy in Hobart, and their sons in Sydney. Monty had just become engaged, and Jack had set up a surgery in the Sydney suburb of Kensington.

Bean shared a house with his aunt, a member of the Butler family, and her daughter, Joan, who had moved from Hobart. For Joan Butler, Charles and Jack were foster fathers, her parents having separated. ‘Charlie left all the disciplining to Jack,’ she recalled of the ‘smouldering resentment on my part, and stubborn, somewhat heavy-handed correction on Jack’s. Charlie kept clear of these tussles.’ Joan remembered that there was ‘much exasperation—but always affectionate—on Charlie’s part at Jack’s lack of business sense, his lack of worldliness as regards the [medical] practice.’ Even then, Jack was eccentric, so unselfconscious that he doggedly refused to believe, for example, that ‘people could possibly see him doing physical jerks stark naked in an upstairs bedroom, with the blinds up and the lights on.’ Such behaviour exasperated Charlie, who would exclaim, ‘Good Lord’ and ‘Good Heavens’ in discussions with his brother. That, according to Joan, was ‘about the strongest language I ever heard Charlie use.’

Along with brother Monty, Charlie and Jack decided to invest in a shooting gallery as part of the new White City amusement park at Rushcutters Bay, with Charlie in charge of the decor. Joan recalled: ‘You will not be surprised when I tell you that this was a most spirited and colourful painting, a mural stretching across the back of the gallery, showing a blue sea, headlands, seagulls, and—yes, BATTLESHIPS—the last named attached to a moving belt, targets at which the shooter had to blaze away at and knock over for a prize.’ But the venture failed and was closed down.

At the Herald, Bean believed he would serve the paper far better by becoming a roving correspondent. The general manager, W.G. Conley, agreed, and he was re-assigned as a feature writer, or ‘special commissioner’. Bean was delighted by his new role; it meant he could once more immerse himself in the outback. There was no doubt about his affinity with the bush, which had become integral to his conception of what made Australians ‘Australian’.

In May 1914 he began writing a major series on the Murray, Murrumbidgee and Darling rivers. A South Australian government commission had begun an inquiry into the possibility of building locks on the river system. Bean was with the committee when it began its inquiry at Barren Jack Dam—now the Burrinjuck Dam—and travelled with its members through the Riverina and onto the mouth of the Murray River at Goolwa, in South Australia.

While he supported harnessing the flow of the inland rivers, and the case for locking them, Bean concluded that irrigation caused salinity problems that would worsen over time. As he neared the end of the journey it was clear that the isolation of the landscape, and its impact on people and the way they lived, was on his mind. He was delayed for ninety minutes at a whistlestop railway ‘station’ platform, measuring just three yards by six, while on his way to the Murray River town of Tailem Bend. Bean shared the platform with two bags of chaff and reflected on a landscape where the railway line ran out of sight in front and behind, as it ‘rose and dipped over the long, low billows of land till it heaved over a billow bigger than the rest and disappeared on the other side of it’. He and the committee party were stuck there; their train couldn’t move because another train somewhere out in front of them was late. Bean sat on one of the chaff bags and asked the stationmaster about the delay:

It was impossible for him to tell. The other train was somewhere on the road in front, and we could not move until it came in. Perhaps it had run off the line, and its staff was out there somewhere in the mallee trying to jack it on again. Or perhaps, it had merely come to a hill too steep for it, and had tried once or twice, and then decided to go on with half a train and come back later for the other half. Or it might just be leaving the terminus at Tailem Bend, or, perhaps, going back there. It might be doing any one of these things—a mile or 10 miles or 30 miles away. The stationmaster could not tell. He could not see the train on account of the mallee; and the authorities had not given him any other way of finding out where it was—a telephone line, for instance, or a telegraph. So he could only sit and guess. He knew it was somewhere in the mallee, and would come in some time, unless it had gone back or been crumpled up, in which case another train would, I suppose, some day come in instead of it. We never found out in the end.

Reaching the end of the trip and arriving at the Murray River’s mouth, Bean pondered the immensity of the river system and visualised it from beginning to end. ‘Sitting there, on a white sandhill, I can see them—the freshes from the Queensland hills, the snow of Kosciusko [sic], the Macquarie marshes, the Darling lakes, the Anabranch, the Warrego, even the Paroo River when it is a river—sitting here I can see them all, within 25 yards of my left foot.’ The third of his great inland trips for the Herald was over.

In his own mind, Bean had his future nicely laid out. Before he left England, he had drawn up a list of ‘Suggested Works’ for 1913–14: among them a history of Bathurst, his long-planned novel based on Roman times, a book on Brentwood, perhaps some essays, and a project focusing on his mother and father. While in South Australia, he had travelled to Killalpaninna, a mission near Lake Eyre, with government officials investigating Aboriginal education, and also visited the town of Tarcoola and the new transcontinental railway, then under construction. Bean thought these trips would make first-rate articles; he also had a book in mind dealing with the underground and over-ground waters in southern Australia. But events were about to take a very different turn.

Part Two

The War Years

Australians watched the name of their country rise high in the esteem of the world’s oldest and greatest nations. Every Australian bears that name proudly abroad today; and by the daily doings, great and small, which these pages have narrated, the Australian nation came to know itself.

Address by Charles Bean to the New South Wales Institute of Journalists,

29 October 1930

11

The booted heel

The fuse that set Europe on the inevitable path to war was lit by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. The Sydney Herald immediately assigned Bean to writing daily War Notes on developments flowing from ‘the trouble in Serbia,’ as he later put it. With his knowledge of European affairs honed by his time in London for the Herald, Bean was the ideal person to make sense of rapidly moving and complex events.

He had to rely on cables from London to interpret the fast-changing situation. On 31 July, he told readers that by far the most important news from the Australian perspective was that the British First Fleet—‘the strongest fleet that had ever left any port on serious service’—had sailed from Portland the previous day. To put this development in context, he wrote that the force was more than twice the size of the American fleet that had visited Sydney in 1908.

Bean could foresee dire economic effects of the war on all countries, but ‘as long as the British fleet is undefeated Australia will feel very little of the effects of this war . . . The moment the British fleet is defeated . . . then an entirely new set of circumstances would arise for Australia to face in the future as best she could.’ On 3 August, Germany declared war on France, and a day later invaded neutral Belgium. Britain responded by declaring war on Germany. Prime Minister Joseph Cook stated on 5 August that ‘when the Empire is at war, so also is Australia.’ Bean would later write that during the last days of peace, Australians ‘were possessed of one anxiety alone—the fear that Britain might hold aloof from the war.’ This overstated the case: in fact, strikingly few such statements were made. Nonetheless, there were strong calls in the press for Australia to become involved. The Herald, for example, asserted on 3 August that Australians would support Britain ‘to the utmost of their resources’. Bean, like many others, clearly believed the wider strategic arguments about why Australia should go to war if Britain did. Fears of the Asian invasion he had warned about were now brought into focus.

Although Australia faced a federal election on 5 September, there was bipartisan support for Cook’s pledge of an initial force of 20,000 troops to be placed at Britain’s disposal. Further, the Government placed the ships of the Royal Australian Navy under the immediate control of the Royal Navy, as had been planned before the war. Two opposing alliances faced each other: the Allies, based on the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia; and the Central Powers of Germany and Austria–Hungary.

With war declared, and his War Notes finished for the day, Bean walked down Macquarie Street late that night. Oppressed by a sense of foreboding, he looked up. Even the cloud formations seemed menacing to him. He saw them, ‘dimly piled high in the four quarters of the dark sky above . . . like the pillared structure of the world’s civilisation, of which some shock had broken the keystones . . . The stable world of the nineteenth century was coming down in chaos.’

In those first War Notes after the declaration of war, Bean was cautious, warning against the ready acceptance of early news reports. The war was no frontier expedition, no Crimea, no Indian Mutiny. ‘It is a fight for life and death against an enemy of tremendous strength, who, if he succeeds, will quite probably endeavour to break up the British Empire for all time,’ he wrote. Bean also focused on the economic links between Australia and Britain, and the implications of the war for these. Australia had a choice: ‘We can volunteer and go out to fight wherever the British people may need us; or we may stay at home and go quietly about our ordinary business as nearly as possible as though no war existed at all.’ Regular shiploads of mutton or wheat would be worth more than all the patriotic funds that Australians could raise.

Despite his urging to continue normal trade, inevitably some Australian companies cancelled large orders for goods from Britain at the outbreak of war. With its trade with much of the Continent cut off, Britain would ‘feel it desperately hard’ if the dominions’ merchants were the first to desert Britain in war. ‘Thousands of the poorer Australians are volunteering their lives as the best help they can give, and it remains tor the wealthier people of commerce frankly to face sacrifices also, and show that they are not British only as long as there is monetary profit to be made out of the fact,’ he excoriated, adding: ‘The man who cancels an order in Great Britain and transfers it to America in the present crisis, is dealing the mother country a heavy, well aimed blow in the back.’

Bean wondered if he should enlist in the newly formed Australian Imperial Force (AIF) to serve overseas. His brother Jack had done so on the first day, as a medical officer, and he urged him to ask Colonel Henry MacLaurin, commander of the 1st Infantry Brigade, if he thought he should also. MacLaurin said ‘not yet’. As well as the War Notes, Bean was also writing the Herald’s Saturday editorials, which he regarded as ‘the best leaders I think I wrote during my time on the Herald.’ Among these was an editorial on the brutal German defeat of Belgium—a victory over a country, Bean wrote, that just three weeks earlier had been ‘at perfect peace with the world’ and which ‘had no quarrel with Germany, nor Germany with it.’ All that had changed dramatically as German troops marched through Belgium on the way to France. Having spent childhood holidays in Belgium, Bean was appalled at the country’s destruction. Unusually in an editorial, he allowed his repugnance to show:

The mists still rise over those peaceful farmlands, of three weeks since, but the bent figures in the blue smocks are there no more. They are lying, thousands of them, with their heads amongst the furrows that they tilled, shapeless forms here and there amidst the corn, bundles of tattered uniforms lying distorted and stiff amongst their own stubble. The sun still sinks in a red flush over the Belgian hills, but it finds no sturdy peasant trudging home thankfully beside his cart to his evening meal. When the end of a long day comes it finds him—thousands of him—piled three or four deep, silent and motionless, in the trench that he has defended since daybreak against his country’s enemies.

The noise of battle had subsided. In the distance the German cavalry was ‘hacking, slashing and hewing’ at the retreating Belgians, mowing them down with machine guns:

The German army has passed like some irresistible engine over nearly a hundred miles of the most innocent, industrious, closely-settled country in Europe. Thousands upon thousands have writhed beneath its feet. If in the villages the peaceful farmers and bakers and confectioners of the week before, the innkeeper and the people that kept the sweet shop, have been exasperated to the point of firing upon the advancing troops from their windows, they have been hanged or tried and shot at daybreak quite regularly and frankly according to the laws of war. The villages of a week ago have been burned, the pretty farm houses stand smoking. The German army has crushed the main defence of this small nation before its friends could get to the help of it, and is placing its booted heel upon the national capital.

As Bean pored over cables writing War Notes and editorials, the British government suggested that an official correspondent might be sent with the AIF, on much the same basis as the ‘official eyewitnesses’ with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France. A special Australian Journalists’ Association (AJA) committee meeting in Melbourne on 24 August passed the request on to the AJA’s central executive in Sydney, together with the names of those who had already announced themselves candidates, the prominent Melbourne journalist Keith Murdoch among them. When applications for the post closed, twenty nominations had been received. These were finally balloted down to two contenders: Murdoch and Bean. In the final nationwide vote of journalists Bean had a narrow majority, and the AJA submitted his name to Senator George Pearce, the Defence Minister in the new Labor government of Andrew Fisher, which had been elected on 5 September.

Bean attributed his victory largely to the lobbying of his Herald mentor Archie Whyte, who had been posted to Melbourne as the Herald correspondent. Murdoch was deeply disappointed, but was generous in his congratulations to Bean. As one of Murdoch’s biographers later wrote, the right choice was undoubtedly made, for Murdoch, with his idealism and independence of spirit, almost certainly would have found irksome the restrictions imposed on an official correspondent.

In resigning from the Herald to take the new job, Bean walked away to an unknown future. The Herald’s general manager, W.G. Conley, thought him foolish, adding: ‘You don’t think the Australians will ever be used at the front, do you? They will never be further than the lines of communication,’ and even if Australian troops were used, ‘they would never let you get near the front anyway.’

Undeterred, on 20 September 1914, Bean caught the express to Melbourne to report to Major General William Throsby Bridges, commander of the AIF. Entering the corridors of the grim Victoria Barracks overlooking St Kilda Road, Bean first met Bridges’ Chief of Staff, Lieutenant Colonel Cyril Brudenell White. He was immediately struck by White’s warmth and personal charm. White hurried to put Bean at ease: ‘From his first word I felt he was my friend.’ Indeed, Bean immediately ‘came under White’s spell.’ White introduced him to Bridges—‘a tall, thin, professor-like figure’ who ‘had the stoop of a student and a cold manner. He spoke few words.’

Bridges and White explained that he would be graded as a captain but would retain his civilian status. Bean would later learn that the main reason for this was that though bound by military control, as the correspondent he should be free to see as much as he could and to write as he thought fit. This freedom would remain throughout the war, with White, and later the Australian Corps commander Lieutenant General William Birdwood, both holding that Bean ‘should preserve his independence and be free, in emergency, to criticise the conduct of themselves and others without any breach of loyalty.’ The only basic rule was that no cable should be sent except through the censor; for the immediate future, White or a subordinate would fulfil that role. Theoretically, at least, Bean would have more freedom to report than his British counterparts, who quickly faced highly restrictive censorship under the new Defence of the Realm Act. Australia would introduce its own version, the War Precautions Act, which, among its various controls, also introduced censorship of publications and letters. This meant Australian newspapers were brought into the net restricting what they could publish on the war.

Bean also spoke to Defence Minister Pearce to discuss how his reports would be printed in the Commonwealth Gazette and distributed free to the morning and evening newspapers. Eight days later the Defence Department formally ratified Bean’s appointment to the headquarters of the 1st Australian Division, with his pay set at £600 annually and a field allowance of 10 shillings a day. He would remain a civilian but wear a close copy of an officer’s uniform, without buttons or badges of rank. At times he would be ‘horribly uncomfortable’ in his ‘enigmatic uniform’.

From the St Kilda boarding house where his brother Monty and his new wife, Mabel, were living, Bean wrote to his mother at the end of September, optimistic about the coming experience, joking about his marital prospects and making it clear he did not believe the war would last long. ‘I do believe that I shall come back from this expedition after 12 months or so in the open air far stronger and healthier than I have ever been in my life,’ he wrote. ‘But I don’t think I shall bring back a German fraulein . . . the family breakfast table would be too argumentative.’ He told her he had bought two dictionaries, French and German, and a Rhine guidebook. He clearly expected a short war.

The Sydney press representatives in Melbourne honoured Bean with a lunch on 28 September, and forty Melbourne journalists did the same five days later. George Pearce, the principal speaker, hoped that Bean would go to the front but realised that he might not be allowed to do so. Pearce made it clear that he saw Bean writing the history of Australia’s involvement:

He will have to write part of the history of Australia . . . I have read Flagships Three [and] I am satisfied that the man who wrote that book is just the man to write about the scenes that he will witness abroad. We are hoping that nothing will be lost of what he writes. I am endeavouring to make arrangements so that if the Censor does wield a too vigorous pen, the original will be kept so that what was written will be known by future generations.

The after-dinner speeches impressed Bean, but in a letter to his parents he was less complimentary about his own. ‘I had practically learnt mine by heart, and, as it was short and I forgot only a little bit, it didn’t go so badly.’ His preparations were almost complete, and he was going with a ‘plentiful supply of notebooks, copying paper, blue pencils, knife fork and spoon, [and] wristwatch.’

Bean was allowed to choose his own batman—as he put it, ‘a sort of personal servant who is at the same time enlisted and carries a rifle.’ Archie Whyte thought a junior clerk from The Argus office, Arthur Bazley, would be ideal. As Bazley later recalled, Whyte introduced him to Bean, who was wearing ‘gold-rimmed pince-nez and a straw hat’, as they stood on the front steps of the Argus building. Whyte fired a series of questions at Bazley, from Boy Scouts badges he had been awarded to his abilities as a cook and his knowledge of first aid. Bazley only had time to nod his head. Facing Bean, Whyte said: ‘There you are, Charlie, Didn’t I tell you so?’

Bean quietly asked Bazley if he would like to join him as his batman. The eighteen-year-old Bazley wanted to join the AIF, but the age for enlistment was nineteen. In a letter to his parents, Bean described Bazley as ‘a youngster who is awfully keen to go’, but added that he had been ‘held up on his chest measurement, but I think we can get him through.’ If not, there were several others who were anxious for the job, he said. As Bazley confirmed, the issue was not his chest measurement but his age. After his meeting with Bean, Bazley applied to enlist again:

By the following afternoon I had got into the AIF—by the old but simple expedient, followed by numbers of others in those days, of overstating my age. The officer at Victoria Barracks who attested me was General Bridges’ junior ADC, Lieut. E.C.P. Plant . . . While waiting in the corridor—his door was ajar—I heard Plant say: ‘Well, Bean, if he is 18 when he comes in here we can’t take him.’ He need not have worried on that score—the only one who showed any sign of worry was C.E.W. who, being the man that he was, realised that he was condoning something that he knew was not altogether right.

With his legal background, Bean would have known that he was participating in a noble lie. But in the heady atmosphere of the early days of the war, many ‘blind eyes’ were turned to under-age men wanting to enlist. Bazley was soon—and would remain—Bean’s devoted and loyal servant, clerk and typist. For the next ten months, though, a cloud hung over his enlistment. In the event of his death, uncomfortable questions might have been asked.

On 20 October, Bean and Bazley boarded RMS Orvieto, the ship that had brought Bean back to Australia 18 months earlier. Already, the crowds were cheering and breaking through the barrier at the wharf. ‘I saw one excited sentry chasing a man off with a bayonet but there were about 2000 others behind,’ he wrote to his mother.

Also on board Orvieto were General Bridges and his staff of the 1st Australian Division, and another journalist, Phillip Schuler from the Melbourne Age, whose involvement had been approved by the previous government before George Pearce, as the new Defence Minister, decided that one journalist should represent all Australian papers. Schuler and Bean were soon good friends.

Because the German warships Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Königsberg and Emden were known to be cruising somewhere in the waters around Australia, departure of the troopships was postponed until adequate naval escort vessels were available. The thirty-six-ship convoy carrying 20,000 Australians and 8000 New Zealanders was to rendezvous in King George’s Sound, off Albany, Western Australia, on its way to Europe under the escort of the RAN light cruisers Sydney and Melbourne, the Royal Navy cruiser Minotaur, and the Japanese cruiser Ibuki.

Bean’s brother Jack was also sailing in the convoy, on the Euripides. On 21 October the Governor-General, Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson, boarded the ship as thousands of wellwishers cheered themselves hoarse. At 3 p.m. Orvieto pulled away from the pier in Port Melbourne and the band of the 5th Battalion played the national anthem as streamers tossed to those on the pier snapped. As Orvieto got under way, Bean noted in his diary that he thought he saw his parents waving a white handkerchief. He would not see them again for nearly five years.

It is doubtful that they would have been mollified by the knowledge that the Government had authorised their son to arrange a life and accident insurance policy for £2000. And they might have raised an eyebrow at Pearce’s reassurance that if he were blinded or otherwise disabled, the Government ‘would see that I was fairly treated.’ Bean, at least, was satisfied as he headed off, suggesting that the Government merely take over the payments for the £500 life policy he already held. Being a war reporter was never going to make him a rich man.

12

A hell of a time

Sensing the momentous events that were about to occur, Charles Bean wondered what his role would be. As the Orvieto left Australian waters on 1 November 1914, he mused, ‘One can hardly realise that we are off now on a really huge, hazardous experiment.’ What gave him heart were the words of one newspaper: ‘No journalist in Australia, or, one may venture to say, elsewhere, has a more picturesque and graphic style in describing scenes of peace, and the spirit animating his fine book, Flagships Three . . . is sufficient assurance that he will be equally at home in writing of war.’

The passage to the Middle East was eventful. In the previous two months, the German raider Emden had sunk or captured seventeen ships, and only two days earlier had torpedoed a French destroyer and a Russian cruiser in the seas off Malaya, then vanished. Sleeping on the deck, just eight days out from Australia, Bean noted that the air was mild and the only sound was the ‘fist fist’ from the engine room. But the tranquillity of the night gave way the next morning, 9 November, to news from the Cocos Islands that Emden had been sighted some 80 kilometres west of the convoy, and HMAS Sydney was ordered off in pursuit. Messages came through at intervals updating events.

Immediately Sydney spotted Emden, at 9.15 a.m., both ships prepared for combat. Emden fought a gallant running battle for more than an hour, but its four-inch guns could not match Sydney’s six-inch guns. At 11.20 a.m., after 134 German crew had been killed and another sixty-nine wounded, the Germans beached the wrecked and twisted Emden on a coral reef at North Keeling Island. Sydney got off lightly, with only four killed and sixteen wounded. Meanwhile, Bean and those on the Orvieto conjectured about what was happening:

We lounged over the rail like spectators in the gallery looking down over the glassy sea—the transports steaming steadily on their course at their usual snail’s pace. Just over the horizon someone was being done to death, in the midst of crashing steel work, burning decks, sudden flashes of flame . . . About 11.15 we heard that the fight was practically over. The enemy had been stopped before she even came within sight of us. ‘Enemy run ashore to save sinking,’ said the message . . . It was all very sudden, this fight in the morning—the Sydney had raced off, killed them, and was ready to return as swiftly as a terrier would kill a cat. It had taken just twenty-five minutes for the Sydney to finish ‘her business’.

The sinking of the Emden ended Bean’s plan to use the voyage to write his long-planned novel about ancient Rome. He had spent each morning dictating half a dozen pages to Arthur Bazley, but as his batman later recorded, ‘Things started to move too quickly.’

Reaching Colombo, Bean took a launch over to Sydney and interviewed the ship’s captain, Captain John Glossop, and other officers. He needed the facts from those directly involved. ‘I stayed up dictating to Bazley until 3.30 and then turned in.’ He posted the story back to Australia, with two further articles later in the day.

This had begun his coverage of the war, but the AIF’s officers didn’t know quite what to make of him. One of them, John Gellibrand, who would become one of the 1st AIF’s five divisional commanders in 1918 and a good friend of Bean, later wrote: ‘We wondered what could and ought to be done to help unobtrusively towards a sufficiency of knowledge of men, manners and methods military so that the poor bloke’s stuff should be of value as well of interest.’

Having the honorary rank of captain gave Bean ready access to the senior staff from the outset. In the mess he sat at a table with not just Gellibrand but the likes of Colonel Neville Howse, VC, Lieutenant Colonel William Paterson, Major Walter Cass, Major Duncan Glasfurd and Major Charles Brand. For Bean, the voyage was a chance to build trust and connections with the leaders he would have to deal with daily. Moreover, dining with General Bridges gave Bean a unique opportunity to forge relationships at the highest level.

As a journalist he was in unknown territory. A special niche had been created for him in the AIF, but no one could know just how this would actually function. Since he answered to no senior commander, Bean knew that the execution of his duties would depend entirely on his judgement.

A traditional hostility had existed between the press and military ever since the London Times journalist William Howard Russell revealed the barbarity of the Crimean War in the mid-1850s. Bean’s early mentor Banjo Paterson noted after his stint as a correspondent during the Boer War, the Boxer Rebellion and the Great War: ‘A war correspondent, in army eyes, is an evil to be tolerated, in fact he is distinctly nah-poo . . .’ The Australian military staff could not avoid inheriting this attitude, but Bean was fortunate to have had an early opportunity to make his transparent honesty and discreet patriotism clearly evident. He was beginning to see that he needed the officers’ trust much as they needed his honesty.

The voyage gave Bean time to contemplate how he would collect information for his war reports: ‘What to write, and where to write it, were the main problems a war correspondent had to solve.’ As they neared Egypt on 27 November, he decided to make his diary his chief personal record of the war:

A classification of items under subjects—such as I generally make—is not suitable for this job—not yet at any rate. The diary has drawbacks; but after all, where the events are mainly historical, and later events put the nose of earlier events out of joint, the diary form is useful . . . There are strong points against a diary. It is not always easy to find from it the facts you want when you are afterwards writing up some particular subject . . . It would be easier to write these things up if at the time when the points are noted they were noted under that heading (as I have usually done). I try to do this too. But the main record, I can see, will be most conveniently kept in diary form.

Writing or acquiring information took so much of his time he had almost stopped reading. He had been writing virtually since the Orvieto left Aden, and the next day he would have to start gathering facts to be written up in the following days and posted at Suez. While his reading had suffered, he realised his experience was unique. ‘It is a great life and after all one is learning half the time even if not from books.’

Bean’s other concern was keeping a balance between articles for the evening and morning newspapers and making the two equally interesting. Events soon gave him plenty of material. On 28 November he heard that the AIF and the New Zealanders would not be going to England but would stay in Egypt. He thought the decision wise. The men would spend the worst of the winter in a climate they were accustomed to, and, importantly, given the high death rate among horses during the voyage, at least 300 horses would be saved. ‘Above all we shall begin to count as of value from the day we reach Egypt . . . if the Turks do come along we are there with the Indian troops, a pretty considerable army, to defend the [Suez] canal, which the Turks would have to reach across 100 miles of desert.’

The shock of the new, and the stark differences between Australian and Egyptian cultures, were soon apparent as Orvieto prepared to berth at the Egyptian port city of Alexandria on 3 December 1914. From the deck Bean saw an Arab hawker on the quay. Selling newspapers or drinks, he had pushed his way past the sentries, ignoring a policeman’s order to get back. Suddenly, Bean saw the officer go for the trader ‘like a tiger’ with a horsewhip, hitting and kicking him. ‘The men in the Orvieto, who were all watching like a crowded gallery, couldn’t understand this sort of thing at all. They called out to the policeman to stop, and really their temper began to be worked up to a pretty high pitch,’ he wrote. From the window of the train taking the troops to Cairo, Bean was struck by the strangeness; there was a constant stream of people that he thought could have stepped out of the Bible.

This was the Australians’ introduction to a culture utterly alien to them. They reached Cairo that night, the streets alive with ‘dazzling electric lights, big white shop fronts, gardens of palms, clang of trams, and clatter of cabs along the asphalt.’ Bean was reminded of a big French or Italian city. He went into camp with the 1st Australian Division at Mena, under the Pyramids, about 15 kilometres from central Cairo.

Bean saw that the Australians ‘were cheek by jowl with the natives when they landed—as any good democratic Australian would be. I was inclined to be so myself.’ Within a few weeks, though, his tolerance was waning. He was at first unsettled by an officer referring to the locals as ‘vile spawn spewed out of the ground.’ That he thought too strong for any Australian talking about his fellow man. Having wrestled with this in his own mind, however, he concluded that:

These same hawkers and pests in the streets have taken them down so consistently and pestered them so much that they don’t look at things quite the same way . . . It seems almost the only way of dealing with the rabble here. They have no restraint and no morality of any sort; and although they have considerable virtues of their own you are apt to get disaster when people with their morality meet with people of our morality unless the two are kept apart by a hard and fast division.

To help the troops better understand their new environment—there were three times as many Australians as any other foreign group in Cairo—Bean was asked to write a booklet, What to Know in Egypt. Published in early 1915 with the approval of Bridges and senior British military leaders, it pulled no punches, warning, for example, that street traders washed strawberries by putting them into their mouths and licking them. Larger fruits were washed by ‘a far filthier method.’ He saved his strongest language for the locally produced alcohol and the sex trade. Alcoholic drinks sold as cognac, absinthe and the like were liable to be ‘native imitations’ made from doubtful raw spirit and coloured. ‘They may contain any percentage of alcohol and be practically pure poison; and in some cases the colour is obtained in ways too disgusting to be described. Some inhabitants have no conscience whatever in this matter—their only object is to sell.’

The sex trade in Cairo alarmed Bean. There was good reason to worry, for in the crowded lanes and the tangle of alleys of the brothel quarter behind the Esbekiah Gardens in the areas known as the Sharia Wagh al Burka and the Derb el Wasa—known to the Australians as the Wassir or Wozzer—were more than 30,000 unlicensed, and about 3000 licensed, prostitutes. Bean warned that men should be careful to avoid ‘attempts at familiarity with native women.’ If the women were respectable, fraternisation would get them into trouble; if not, venereal disease was a likely outcome. Syphilis had been rampant in Egypt since Roman times, and modern Cairo, with its mix of women from a variety of countries and cultures, had long been a hotbed of it. Bean counselled that ‘If a man will not steer altogether clear of the risk by exercising a little restraint, his only sane course is to provide himself with certain prophylactics beforehand to lessen the chance of disastrous result.’

The booklet revealed as much about Bean as it did about Egypt and would have done little to endear the country to the Australian troops or soften their prejudices towards the ‘Gyppos’. Neither a womaniser nor an immoderate drinker himself, Bean saw in Cairo many affronts to his moral code. But in Cairo on the eve of war his cautionary advice was hardly likely to be taken. Soldiers were out for a good time in an exciting and strange city. ‘About Christmas time,’ Bean wrote, ‘our men certainly began to play up a bit. We were inexperienced and had not yet realised the system necessary to stop it; and I think the police system has been a bit inefficient from the first. The same old wasters would break camp every night and as they were therefore the men Cairo saw most of we began to get a bad name in Cairo.’

The rowdiness caught the eye of the British military hierarchy at their headquarters at the plush Shepheard’s Hotel, not least General William Birdwood, who had recently arrived to take command of the Australians and New Zealanders. Small, pugnacious and practical, he was aptly known as ‘Birdie’. While prone to a degree of self-promotion, he was also likeable. He was yet to understand the Australians and now wrote to Bridges complaining about the rowdiness. Bridges showed the letter to Bean, who had no doubt about why he was being extended this confidence. ‘From what he said I take it that he would not take it amiss if I sent a letter and a wire to give people in Australia some idea of how things are; we shall be probably getting rid of a few of these old hard heads—sending them back to Australia. And it is just as well Australians should have an idea of why some of them are returning or else they will probably treat them all (on their own representation) as heroes.’

With Christmas over, and having taught Arthur Bazley how to develop films, Bean sat down four days later and wrote an article that The Sydney Morning Herald and other Australian newspapers would publish three weeks later. The Herald headlined Bean’s story:

AUSTRALIA’S FAIR FAME WASTERS IN THE FORCE. SOME NOT FIT TO BE SOLDIERS.

It would be a deceit upon the people of Australia if it were reported to them that Christmas and the approaching New Year have found the Australian Imperial Force without a cloud in the sky.

. . . The last week has been one of some anxiety to those who have the good name of Australia at heart. Cairo is one of the great pleasure resorts of the world, and a place where the soldiers in any neighbouring camp can always have a reasonably enjoyable time during their hours of leave, provided they exercise the same amount of restraint as the ordinary tourist; but certain scenes have occurred and have become more common during the past few days which go a good way beyond that, and which are already affecting the reputation of Australia in the outside world . . . The truth is that there are a certain number of men among those who were accepted for service abroad who are not fit to be sent abroad to represent Australia . . . in recruiting an army, just as in picking a cricket or football team to represent Australia, the inclusion of a man who has not got the necessary moral qualities, however splendid his physical qualifications may be, is apt to do more harm than good.

Bean’s focus was on the ‘one or two per cent’ who he believed were responsible for what Cairo was beginning to talk about:

There is in the Australian ranks a proportion of men who are uncontrolled, slovenly, and in some cases what few Australians can be accused of being—dirty . . . they are really doing a very much more serious thing than losing other soldiers their leave—they are losing Australia her good name in the outside world, and those Australians who happen to be living in Cairo or in touch with the world outside the camps have the mortification of looking on while day by day the reputation of Australia slowly vanishes before the actions of a handful of rowdies who do not really represent the country.

Two days later, on New Year’s Day, Bean noted in his diary that between 200 and 300 Australians were absent without leave in Cairo, their whereabouts unknown. During this period he clearly saw enough to convince himself that the article was correct. ‘There was a great deal of drunkenness and I could not help noticing that what people in Cairo said was true—the Australians were responsible for most of it.’

In commenting on the level of venereal disease among the Australians, he was at pains to point out that this was brought on by their indulgences in Cairo. Some of the cases were ‘simply tragic; young soldiers, really fine clean simple boys who have been drinking and have found themselves with a disease which may ruin them for life.’ He heard that all leave was to be stopped. As a result, ‘any man found in Cairo will be a man breaking camp.’ Some men had been AWOL for days or even weeks, such was the lack of discipline. This was predictable enough in a fledgling army, yet to see a front line, where the officers had failed to impose sufficient discipline in an environment full of temptation.

Bean ventured into dangerous territory on the issue of using firing squads to set an example. ‘We have been so comparatively lenient (rightly I suppose) up to the present that it would be impossible to shoot these chaps—in fact it wouldn’t be just, except in cases of most serious crime (of which I don’t personally and definitely know of any). But they recently shot 3 Indians for trying to get away from the Canal on a pilgrimage to Mecca. This was to stop a ‘‘rot’’ from setting in, as we say in cricket.’ Bean kept these thoughts to his diary rather than putting them in print. He would have known that ever since the execution of Lieutenants Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant and Peter Hancock by the British during the Boer War emotions had run strong on the matter among Australians. Never again would the Australian Government place troops under total foreign command, so executions of Australians by the British military could not happen in this war.

A few weeks later, though, Bean returned to the subject again when a ‘respectable decent’ moneychanger was beaten and robbed of £130 by four masked men armed with knuckledusters. The victim claimed they were Australians and had escaped through the stables at Mena House, the AIF Divisional Headquarters. However, the evidence was slender. When he heard of the incident, Bean noted there were many men ‘of the larrikin class’ still in the camp, and no doubt some of these were professional criminals. ‘They ought to be shot if they are found but it will be desperately hard to find them,’ he wrote. ‘Those are the sort of blackguards that bring discredit on the whole of our force.’

In Sydney, The Sunday Times—which was not taking Bean’s articles—picked up on the rowdiness story after it was published in the morning newspapers. Its version was published under the heading: THE GOOD NAME OF AUSTRALIA. CAPTAIN BEAN SAYS IT IS ENDANGERED BY A FEW NE’ER-DO-WELLS. The story said that Bean’s allegations were ‘serious and weighty’ and could not be lightly passed over:

Bean definitely states that some of the men have been drinking and disgracing themselves in Cairo. Indeed, he goes even further, and says ‘there are in the ranks a proportion of men who are uncontrolled, slovenly, and in some cases dirty.’

This is severe comment upon the efficiency of the officers. He reports that ‘one of the most distinguished men in the British army’ said to him, ‘They are as fine a body of men physically as I have ever seen, but do all Australians drink so much?’

The story continued that notwithstanding the crimes said to have been committed by the rowdy Australians, Bean’s account did not record any punishments beyond the mention that some of the worst offenders would be sent home—‘like boys expelled from school.’ To The Sunday Times, it was the AIF’s officers who were at fault for the fiasco. When Bean had written that ‘a proportion of the men are uncontrolled,’ those words could only mean ‘that the officers are not enforcing discipline and controlling them.’

A very different reaction came from Australians who had served in the Boer War. The South African Soldiers’ Association said Bean’s ‘pernicious and unwarranted’ allegations were emphatically resented and denied. News of the article quickly found its way back to Egypt. A gunner in the AIF’s 2nd Field Artillery Brigade, Sergeant Frank Westbrook, took aim at Bean with savage wit in a poem, ‘To Our Critic’, calling on him to ‘cease yer wowseristic whining’:

Ain’t yer got no blanky savvy,

Have yer got no better use,

Than to fling back home yer inky

Products of yer pen’s abuse?

Do yer think we’ve all gone dippy,

Since we landed over here?

Is a soldier less a soldier

’Cause he sucks a pint of beer?

Have yer got no loving mother

Waiting for yer over ’ome?

Do yer own no smiling sister

Over there across the foam?

Do yer thinks they likes yer better

For yer tales of drink and shame?

Do yer think they’ll praise yer action

In defamin’ our fair name?

One swallow makes no summer,

Three shickers not a force;

Where a few makes it a welter,

You condemns the lot, of course.

Do yer think yer Gawd Almighty.

’Cos yer wears a captain’s stars?

Thinks us blokes is dirt beneath yer,

Men of low degrees and bars?

Bean soon realised that the article was causing resentment among the troops, but he couldn’t understand the fuss, as he believed there was nothing in it that anyone could object to. Certainly there were no objections among the officer class that Bean checked with. They agreed with him—as they would, given that he was not criticising them but rather the men. However, he realised that among the men it was different. The great majority were ‘inclined to be quite bitter about it and I am clearly in for a rocky time.’ He concluded that wives and families in Australia had misunderstood the article, possibly as a result of The Sunday Times article.

He sent a cable to the morning papers claiming his original story had been so twisted and misquoted by a certain newspaper or newspapers as to appear to be an attack on the Australian troops in Egypt. This had been the exact opposite of his intention, he said, adding: ‘The newspaper article alluded to also contains sweeping criticisms on the whole of the officers, who were never mentioned in my article, and the criticisms are quite unjustified.’ Nonetheless, if the officers had been doing their duty the rowdy behaviour would not have got out of hand.

Bean became aware of the Westbrook poem, which he acknowledged was ‘rather a good one’ that had sold 2000 copies. Years later, a copy of the poem would be handed to the Mitchell Library in Sydney, the owner having written on the back: ‘In answer to Capt Bean’s attack on the Australian troops now in Egypt. I believe Capt Bean has written articles in the Sydney papers detrimental to our character.’

Bean conceded that the article was exceedingly unpopular. ‘Today I got things shouted at me sometimes when I went through the camp,’ he wrote, clearly unsettled at claims he had labelled them ‘a set of bally wasters.’ He also had to justify what he wrote to Lieutenant-Colonel Les Maygar, who had been awarded a VC in the Boer War and was commander of the 8th Light Horse Regiment. He began to have doubts about the wisdom of writing the article. ‘I don’t know that I’d have written it if I had thought any Australian people would have twisted it into scares about their absent soldiers and that wives and relations would so hopelessly misunderstand what was so clearly written.’ But he reassured himself that his job was to tell Australians the truth:

My job is to see that at any rate the blame is put on the right people and that the innocent don’t get a bad name for what they didn’t do. When things go right I have to try and see that the Australian people know the right people to get the credit. If they want someone to feed them on soft pap, only to tell them good and pleasant things whatever happens, then I am not the man for the job. I am not going to shift any part of the responsibility for this article on to other shoulders.

He considered quitting the 1st Division and becoming attached to the New Zealand and Australian Division. But he quickly dismissed this as running away. Maygar invited Bean to speak to the South African veterans now in the Light Horse at a social, guaranteeing that they would give him a fair hearing. Bean agreed, believing it was a method that ‘never fails with Australians, to go and face them.’ The meeting was set for the night of 10 March, but when Bridges heard about it alarm bells rang. As a result, Maygar advised Bean not to attend. Bean was relieved. He was lucky, for he heard later that artillerymen planned to waylay him on his way to the meeting ‘and lay me out.’ They believed it was ‘up to us to see that bloke doesn’t get there.’ He also had warnings not to walk too close to the Nile.

Bean told no one except his brother Jack, the 3rd Battalion’s medical officer, that Bridges had asked him to write the article. ‘The General asked me to write something to prepare the people of Australia for the return of the men who had been disgracing their country in Cairo and bring a bad name on the whole force. They are mostly old soldiers, many of them not born in Australia at all,’ he wrote. Yet Bean had agreed that something needed to be written and that it had done some good. He took responsibility for the article, for it was better that he should be unpopular rather than Bridges.

Bean had learned an important and chastening lesson: however much he esteemed Bridges and Brudenell White and other officers, it was equally important to keep the men they commanded on side. In this he had failed—temporarily at least.

Bean probably felt some vindication when, on 3 February 1915, 132 men were sent back to Australia on board the troopship Kyarra. Accompanying these drunkards and shirkers, as Bean called them, were 169 invalids, among them the worst of the gonorrhoea cases. Reluctantly, he concluded that the AIF contained ‘more bad hats than the others’ and had come to the view that ‘the average Australian lived hard.’

I think the Australian will have to rely on the good things he does to wipe out the bad ones; and I think the sum will come out on the right side when it is all totted up. That is my great comfort when I wonder how I shall ever manage to write up an honest history of this campaign. I fully expect the men of this force will do things when the real day comes which will make the true history of this war possible to be written.

Bean admired these men, yet he was not one of them. Whether they would accept him he did not yet know. However he was determined to tell their story. The Cairo experience, as he would later recall, had been ‘a hell of a time.’

13

Play the game

As he watched Indian troops pull dead Turks out of the Suez Canal, Charles Bean was unnerved ‘It gave me a bit of a shock,’ he noted. The further he went, the more confronting were the sights:

There were dead Turks buried . . . and their cartridges lying about all over the place. The whole of this side of the canal for 2 miles or so had a very rank nasty smell. The burial parties had scarcely covered some of the Turks—you could see their legs sticking out—sometimes bare feet, sometimes boots, sometimes stockings with curious leather soles.

On 3 February 1915, after crossing the Sinai Desert, an Ottoman force of 20,000 men had attacked the Suez Canal. Amid bitter fighting, the Turks were repulsed after losing more than 1500 men. Keen to see the results of the Turkish attack, Bean travelled to Ismailia ten days later, where he spoke to nurses from the Australian Army Nursing Service who had been sent there to set up a hospital for the wounded:

One sister from Melbourne told me that she lay in bed listening to the sound in a dreamy sort of way without in the least realising that it was battle they were listening to—the firing of huge projectiles and the bursting of shell not so very far away. Later in the day some of them walked down to a position from which they could see some of our guns and the huge geysers of white spray shot up by the enemy’s projectiles as they fell in the water. They could not bring themselves to believe, as one Tasmanian sister told me, that the guns were being fired into the midst of bodies of men only a little way over the sandhills there.

Such was Bean’s introduction to war. It had come after a decision by the War Council in mid-January 1915 for a naval attack on the forts guarding the Narrows in the Dardanelles, the nearly 50-kilometre-long strait separating the Aegean Sea from the Sea of Marmara. Control of the Dardanelles and conquest of the Turkish capital of Constantinople would break the stalemate that had developed in the war dramatically in the Allies’ favour, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, argued. Turkey would be cut off from the Germanic powers, and opening the Black Sea would give Russia easy communication with the Allies. Despite the strong reservations of the commander of the Eastern Mediterranean Squadron, Vice Admiral Sir Sackville Carden, the council gave the plan the go-ahead.

The Turks, anticipating trouble, had constructed strong fortifications on the Gallipoli peninsula, and the naval attack was a failure. It would be necessary to land military forces to drive the Turks out of their fortified positions. A decision came in March to send an expeditionary force to the Gallipoli peninsula with the aim of destroying the Turkish batteries.

In March, Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, appointed General Sir Ian Hamilton to command the operation. Aged sixty-two, Hamilton had been in charge of land defences for England, but although a senior and respected officer, he was considered too unconventional, too intellectual and too friendly with politicians to be given a command on the Western Front. The portents were not good from the start: Hamilton was not given a chance to take part in planning the campaign, and intelligence reports grossly underestimated the strength of the defending forces and their willingness to fight. It was thought that a force of 70,000 men would be adequate to rapidly overpower the Turks.

The decision meant that rather than going on to France, the Australians and New Zealanders would now stay in Egypt—over which Britain had declared a protectorate on 18 December 1914—to play their part in the new strategy. They would also play a key role in defending the Suez Canal, which Britain had closed to all but Allied and neutral shipping.

Now that he had witnessed the reality of battle, Bean set about undoing the damage his report about rowdy behaviour had done to his relations with the troops. He had to convince them he was not their critic but their supporter. He sent an article to the morning papers praising the progress of the AIF troops through the prism of the poet Henry Newbolt, who had preceded him at Clifton College. Newbolt had written the poem ‘Vitai Lampada’, which extolled the principle of playing the game in battle as in cricket.

After ten weeks’ training in the desert, which was carried out in a spirit which one would have expected from Australians, the first Australian division is emerging into one of the finest fighting units any soldier could wish to see. Hard work, cheerfully undertaken day after day in toilsome sand and heat in the true spirit of ‘playing the game,’ has gradually manufactured a fighting force of which Australia may be intensely proud . . . the Australian force in Egypt deserves all the pride with which Australians will follow its progress.

A month later he sent a long article that captured the disparate nature of the men of the AIF, and how they were developing a unity of purpose, indeed an esprit de corps, as their training progressed. With echoes of themes he touched on in On the Wool Track, Bean wrote sympathetically and with easy familiarity of the men whose stories he had learned and how they were coping in this new environment. The Sydney Morning Herald ran the story under the heading:

A COMPACT BODY OF MEN. COMRADES TRIED AND TRUE.

‘I hope they won’t break up the division,’ said the Army Medical Corps corporal, removing his pipe for an instant and speaking over his shoulder. ‘It would be a pity to break it up now.’

The Army Medical Corps corporal stuck his pipe in the other corner of his mouth and turned to look over his shoulder at a line of privates in khaki—the good old Australian ‘peasoup’ khaki, as distinctive among the brown khaki of the New Zealanders and the orange khaki drill of British troops in Egypt[—]as if it were light blue or pink or daffodil yellow.

Down the dusty white road, between the crowded cheering rooms of ‘peasoup’ came a cheerful column of more ‘peasoup.’ The men smiling all over their faces, and striding past as fresh as paint, the white dust notwithstanding.

‘They’re in luck to get sent off like this to the canal,’ said the Army Medical Corps corporal, ‘but I hope they won’t keep them there when we go. It would be a shame to split up the division.’

The Army Medical Corps man, Bean wrote, came from Queensland, and the man he was talking to came from Ballarat, while he came from Sydney. The men marching past them came from disparate parts of Australia and had been thrown together as one unit. Just a few months earlier they had been nothing to one another, yet the corporal was troubled by the notion of their being separated now:

You could count about 1000 such fragments from the solid infantry battalions of Sydney and Melbourne down to the half-company from Bathurst, the squad from Wagga Wagga, not forgetting the three heroes from Dead Horse Flat, the local bruiser from Sandy Creek, and Sam Wayback, the solitary representative of Gumtree Gully.

. . . All they knew was that they and hundreds of similar parties, after drilling for three or four weeks in big and small detachments, were shipped off in big barrack-room flats—rather like the flat of a wool store—which had been hastily prepared for them in the interior of a merchant steamer.

With their arrival in Egypt a remarkable change had come over the force as the men assembled in three separate camps. Daily they met strangers in the camp streets, on fatigue duty and in the Cairo tram. Many officers and men scarcely knew the organisation of their own brigade. But all had been learning every day that the division was ‘arms all hanging together like limbs of a big body.’ Almost imperceptibly, the Australian division began to know it was a division—that it was all one body and not merely a collection of detachments from different states and townships. It began to realise it was a compact unit which might at any time be sent off anywhere. This was mateship.

The Signal Company came to look upon itself as the nerves of that body which would have to carry the messages from the brain to the limbs. The field companies came to consider themselves the fingers which would have to construct all the more intricate works that the body needed. The infantry brigades were the great heavy fists and arms which were to deliver the blows for which this body exists . . . It is difficult to describe it very clearly, but I am not speaking of any abstraction on my own mind. I am speaking of a perfectly definite change of the units which various parts of Australia have sent across the sea during the last five months. This mental change may seem vague, but its effects are quite concrete—one sees them every day.

To Bean, the men were coming together to form not just an army but, symbolically, a nation. That aside, he still awaited British accreditation. On 8 February he met with Birdwood’s chief of staff, General Harold Walker. The outcome was unsatisfactory. Walker informed him that the staff of General John Maxwell, the General Officer Commanding (GOC) in Egypt, believed that his position was no different from that of other journalists in Egypt. To Bean this was ‘simply thick-headed.’ There were only three other journalists in his position in the British Empire, and none of them was in Egypt. ‘That is to say, [the] “Eyewitness” whom the British people is allowed to have with its soldiers; the Canadian “Eyewitness” appointed by the Government of Canada; the journalist who will be appointed by the Government of New Zealand; and myself who have been appointed by the Government of Australia.’

The position of ‘Eyewitness’ was established by the British War Minister, Lord Kitchener, as a means to control reporting from the Western Front. Kitchener appointed Colonel Ernest Swinton to write reports on the war, which he then personally vetted before sending them on to the newspapers, where they appeared as ‘Eyewitness’ reports under Swinton’s byline.

The British attitude meant Bean could not do the job the Australian Government had sent him to do in Egypt. This was unacceptable. ‘As my work could not by any possible flight of imagination be considered as doing the least vestige of harm to the minutest military interest, I don’t mean to accept the position without, if necessary, a reference to the Australian Government. I have to get the story of the war for them for subsequent publication and I can’t possibly do that without seeing something or hearing something more than I am at present allowed to do under these restrictions.’

He could see by mid-March that action was imminent, and he would need to be on the spot when it began. Birdwood had ordered a cable to be sent to London asking whether Bean could go to the front. The answer came back: ‘Press correspondents are not to leave Cairo at present. The date when they can do so is not yet settled.’ Bean was angered by what he saw as the ignorance of War Office officials and their discrimination against Australia:

The British Government or War Office is determined to treat me as any other Press Correspondent and of course it is a slight to Australia—though I don’t suppose they realise it—that the man the Australian Government chose to send with their force to give some sort of account of it should be treated by the War Office as if they couldn’t see any difference between him and the correspondent of any English newspaper. They make a big difference in the case of their own ‘Eyewitness’ and the Indian Eyewitness and I believe Canada had an Eyewitness too. [Brudenell] White who has more genuine sense in his little finger than many War Officials have in their small minds knows that I can do no harm and may do much good. There’s no question of my attempting to evade censorship. I’m the representative of my country and not of a newspaper. But the War Office is unlikely to grasp the difference.

With White’s approval, Bean wired High Commissioner Sir George Reid in London, seeking the War Office’s consent for him to accompany the troops on condition that he write nothing until authorised. The troops were now on a war footing, with tens of thousands of British and French soldiers gathering on the island of Lemnos, just a few hours by troopship from the Dardanelles. These troops, along with the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps—by now known as the Anzacs—were to form the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (MEF) and launch a major amphibious assault.

Bean travelled to Alexandria and, on 31 March, met Hamilton, who told him he believed a journalist could do ‘the necessary press work in war better than an Eyewitness.’ There were points a journalist would notice that were of great interest to the public and perfectly harmless in security terms which an Eyewitness was apt to miss. ‘He thought that as we had this Eastern show in English hands the Government would let the people have a little more information—or rather would give the journalist a little more scope,’ Bean noted. The two men got on well, and Bean told Hamilton of the history of the war the Australian Government wanted him to write. ‘Well, I’ll give you any help I can,’ Hamilton replied. ‘You can’t begin writing it too early. Do it now—write down everything in your diary.’ Hamilton also praised the Australians to Bean. ‘He thought our men had actually grown since they came to Egypt—plenty of work of a sort likely to develop them, open air and a glorious climate. Of course they’re trained troops now and their officers know how to give an order—they know that it doesn’t merely consist of making a suggestion.’ Hamilton urged Bean to quote these comments, which Bean did. He had no doubt that the Australians, in the shadow of imminent battle, were a changed body of men:

It seems to me that the consummation which has overtaken these men shows the meaning of manliness in its first revelation and in its final proof. Some of them, no doubt, had their faults; but what we ought to remember first is their gallant conduct against the enemy in defence of their native land. They have blotted out evil with good, and done more service to the commonwealth than they ever did harm in their private lives.

As he returned to Cairo, Bean remained hopeful of accompanying the men. With all leave stopped and the mood suddenly alive with expectation, he ran into his brother, Jack, and his cousin, Jack Butler, a signaller. Both would go to Gallipoli. That night a cable came through from Sir George Reid, saying the War Office had referred the question of his going to the front to the Admiralty ‘for early decision.’ Bean started packing in case approval came through. He decided to leave his diaries and notes for the book he was planning and copies of past articles with a doctor at the medical school. If the doctor left Cairo he would hand them to the British Consulate to keep for Bean. He believed this to be safer than sending them from Egypt to Sir George Reid in London. He added: ‘If ever it were used it would have to be used most carefully. For one reason, it contains a good deal of criticism; the bright side has to be written up in one’s letters and that leaves a great deal more than the due proportion of criticism for the diary—I can’t write everything here as well as in my letters.’

As departure neared, Bean’s anxiety grew. With just two days to go, General Bridges called Bean in and advised him to wire Sir George Reid ‘to say you must have an answer within twenty-four hours.’ Bean was relieved. ‘That delighted me of course because I knew I should get an answer now.’ Bridges explained that Birdwood had agreed for Bean to come as an officer attached to the Australian leader’s staff but would ‘not write anything.’ Bean sent the wire immediately. A little later his batman, Arthur Bazley, handed him an envelope containing a message from the General Staff in Egypt telling him to report at once to the staff of the MEF for instructions ‘as to your further disposal.’ Brudenell White showed him a signal from the War Office confirming that he would be allowed to go attached as an officer to Bridges’ staff ‘on giving a written undertaking that I will write nothing until permitted.’ The outcome was not perfect but at least he would be there at the front line: ‘It is the chance of a lifetime. It means that I shall eventually be able to give the Australian people an account of one of the most interesting events in history from a position closer than that of any observer who has been allowed to write his impression in the present war.’

He knew he owed thanks to White and Bridges. ‘White and the general have got me this privilege—it’s a great reward for all the restraint one has imposed on oneself to have got their confidence to this extent and it is very handsome of them to have supported me like this. White is clearly genuinely happy about it, and the general is glad too.’

On the night of 9 April, Bean reported to divisional headquarters where Bridges confirmed the arrangements and sought a guarantee that he would not write until authorised. Bean readily gave it, agreeing that he would ‘not communicate anything to the press until I receive definite sanction.’ Bean was told to deal with the division’s intelligence officer, Major Thomas Blamey. He would later write of Blamey that he was ‘keenly interested in everything he sees—quite exceptionally interested, quick to grasp a matter, and independent in his judgments.’

At 7 a.m. the next day, Bean sailed on the troopship Minnewaska. Excited, he confided to his diary: ‘As for me, I am in luck if ever any pressman was. This is perhaps the most interesting operation in the war—one of the most interesting in history; a business of this sort on this scale has never before been attempted. And I am nearer to it than [any] journalist has been to the actual firing line since the beginning of the war. Dear old [Jack] will I suppose be right in it. Well, if we come through all right, we shall have had an experience that will last us our lifetime.’

With some difficulty, the two brothers managed to organise dinner together on the eve of departure. One officer had shouted them champagne, and another praised Jack to his brother. ‘I’ve never met a kinder man in my life than our old doctor. If anyone needs him nothing is ever too much trouble for him. It’s just the same at any hour, day or night.’ Bean thought Jack was looking very fit, ‘his head shaved like a round orange.’

There was, however, another experience before Bean and the Australians left Cairo. Not all the ‘bad hats’ had been sent back to Australia and on the eve of departure, Australian and New Zealand troops had some scores to settle at Haret el Wasser Street, where they descended on Good Friday, 2 April 1915, for the infamous battle of the Wazzir. A riot began about 5 p.m. when some New Zealanders who had contracted venereal disease decided to ransack brothels. Mattresses and bedding were apparently torn up inside brothels and piled into a bonfire in the street. The Australian town picket—Light Horsemen on watch duty—was called up and attempted to stop the bonfires and clear the men out of the houses. Five men were arrested.

Piecing the story together, Bean learned that about a quarter of the Australian troops due to sail the next day for Gallipoli had been given leave for the day and were present when the riot began. As the handful of men fighting, smashing furniture and tearing the houses apart became drunk on the ‘vile doctored liquor’ sold in the street, the crowd grew, the majority of them Australians ‘there to see the fun.’ Some of these onlookers rescued four of the prisoners. About thirty British military police were called, drawing yet more Australians to the scene. The ‘red caps’—as the military police were known—attempted to disperse the rioters by firing into the crowd, wounding several soldiers.

About 10 p.m. Bean went to Shepheard’s Hotel and saw British Territorials drawn across the road. The town was quiet again but the disturbed street was a wreck. Bean heard that one brothel was burnt out. ‘The men were tremendously bitter against the red caps and a few fools would have tried to lynch some of them after the firing. I heard every side argued by Australians who were in it,’ he wrote. He had no doubt that it was the New Zealanders who had played ‘a leading part in this scrap,’ having made up their minds to ‘go in and pay the house back.’ However, Australians were also ‘pretty well in it.’ Bean continued: ‘Many men are very sick at it having happened at all, as it will get Australia and New Zealand a hopeless name in Cairo.’

Years later, Bean would hear an amusing tailpiece to the incident. A letter written to the Governor-General of the day, Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson, a year after the battle of the Wazzir, noted that according to a Salvation Army colonel who was in Cairo at the time, the owner of the property and the person who derived the profits from the brothels’ ‘evil work’ was the Coptic Archbishop of Cairo.

14

digging in

At first, Bean heard the noise faintly, carried by a wind gust off the barely visible shore of Gallipoli. There was a distant knocking, a sound like someone holding up a small wooden box and hitting the inside of it with a pencil. But the sound grew louder, and louder. Bean’s heart leapt. ‘To my mind there is no mistaking it whatever . . . It is the distant echo of rifle firing—first few shots, then heavy and continuous.’ The time was 4.38 a.m. on Sunday, 25 April 1915, a day that would fuse Charles Bean and Australian history. He was on board the troopship Minnewaska with Anzac headquarters staff, sailing from Lemnos to Gallipoli. There were those on board who doubted it, but within a few minutes they all knew he was right: there was heavy firing going on in the shadowy hills ahead. They could not see the flashes but they could hear the crack of rifle fire.

Bean was in a frustrating situation: he still needed permission to write. On Lemnos, he had taken a letter from the intelligence officer Major Tom Blamey to General Walter Braithwaite, Hamilton’s chief of staff. The letter explained that the Australian Government had appointed Bean as an Australian ‘Eyewitness’. It said Bean was considered ‘very loyal and discreet’ and sought the same facilities for him as the British correspondents had. Braithwaite’s response was dismissive. As Bean put it, he was surprised Blamey had asked for the same conditions to apply to Bean ‘because it was perfectly understood that I was to write nothing.’ Bean pointed out that the order stated that this was ‘until sanctioned’. Braithwaite said he knew nothing about any sanction being given. Whereas the British journalists ‘had come properly accredited,’ there was no reason ‘to suppose that sanction would ever be given.’ Bean left frustrated, chafing at what he saw as British high-handedness. He was relieved to return to his ship and ‘Australian manners’. ‘The only result of doing things in the right way as far as the War Office goes is that they can ignore you altogether.’ He lamented that he had not pulled political strings that could have resolved the problem quickly. Nothing, however, could stop him from making notes in his diary.

Scheduled for 23 April but postponed until 25 April because of bad weather, landings were to be made at six beaches on the peninsula. The British 29th Division was to land at Helles, on the tip of the peninsula, and then advance upon the forts at Kilitbahir. The Anzacs, with the 3rd Infantry Brigade spearheading the assault, were to land north of Gaba Tepe on the Aegean coast, from where they could advance across the peninsula, cutting off the Ottoman troops. So slow and disorganised had been the British planning for the invasion that the Turks, under the German commander Otto Liman von Sanders, had had time to organise their defences. Hamilton, however, held one advantage—he could choose the site and date of the invasion. Liman von Sanders was left to carefully apportion his forces to likely strategic locations and hope he had chosen wisely.

On Lemnos, as he watched rehearsals for the landing at Gallipoli, Bean could well see the immensity of the task. According to the British historian Robert Rhodes James, Sir Ian Hamilton’s headquarters regarded the Australians as ‘indisciplined amateurs’, and for this reason they were only entrusted with what was thought to be the simple part of the landing.

But Bean knew he stood on the verge of history. He sensed that the men did, too. He listened through the porthole around midnight to someone on the deck singing sleepily, and to the conversation of two mates, one of whom had just woken: ‘What time is it?’ ‘Ten past twelve—she’s sailed. Where have you been?’ ‘Me and Bill have been down below having a farewell yarn.’ An order of lights out confirmed the level of danger, as ships carrying 75,000 troops glided through the Aegean Sea in total darkness. Before them stood 84,000 Turkish troops, charged with defending their homeland from invasion.

At 4.55 a.m., ‘a bang’ shook the Minnewaska. Bean watched as ‘a huge bilious yellow cloud for a moment sprang out from the side of one of the warships just south of us.’ Far down on the point a ‘geyser of yellow black earth’ lifted itself skywards—‘a lurid red flash just showing through the cloud of it.’ The infantry on the deck below Bean ran to the side, ‘cheering, delightedly’. But Bean could only hear ‘that ceaseless knocking’.

He could hear firing in the blurry, distant hills as the officers went down for a hurried breakfast. Bean could scarcely think of eating, but someone urged him to join them: ‘You’d better come. Never know when you may get a good meal again.’ In the saloon, the ship’s stewards, napkins on arms, went round quietly asking, ‘Porridge or fish, sir?’ Shells fell near the ship, and Bean feared that ‘any minute one might come through the side.’ Up on deck, the sound from the hills was much louder. On the water below he could see small boats frantically rowing back to their ships: there were no soldiers in them—just four seamen with another sitting at the tiller. He was sure this meant the Australians must at least be on the beach. They were: they had landed at 4.30 a.m. Great shots shook the Minnewaska every ten or twenty seconds. At dawn Bean watched as troops climbed down rope ladders to be taken ashore. Among them, he knew, was his brother Jack, who had been on an adjacent ship.

Bean watched Australian troops landing at Anzac Cove, a curve of beach not quite a kilometre long and marked by two knolls, Ari Burnu to the north, and Little Ari Burnu, soon known as Hell Spit, to the south. The small cove would become known simply as ‘Anzac’. Men in the boats were being hit by Turkish fire but the Turkish opposition at Anzac Cove at the time was relatively light—reinforcements were still some hours away. Ottoman battlefield messages and signals that have emerged in recent years show that the covering force, with a strength of around 3500 troops, was faced by only 300 to 400 Ottoman troops in the whole sector. Ironically, this meant that for up to four hours after the landing the Anzacs’ superiority in numbers was nearly ten to one.

Bean saw the men dash across the beach to a sheltering bank, some fixing bayonets as they ran. Dropping their packs to regain their breath, they sheltered from the Turkish fire. Hundreds of Australians, lugging full kit and rifle, rushed up the steep slopes of Ari Burnu. Men dug their bayonets into the ground to haul themselves along or grabbed the roots of scrub. Half way up, two 11th Battalion men stumbled on a Turkish trench. Bean wrote:

A single Turk jumped up like a rabbit, threw away his rifle and tried to escape. The nearest man could not fire as his rifle was full of sand. He bayoneted the Turk through his haversack and captured him. ‘Prisoner here!’ he shouted. ‘Shoot the bastard!’ was all the notice they received from others passing up the hill. But as in every battle he fought in the Australian soldier was more humane than in his words. The Turk was sent down to the beach in charge of a wounded man.

From the Minnewaska, Bean looked through his telescope and saw men in khaki on the skyline. Exultantly, he wrote: ‘They are Australians! And they have taken that further line of hills!—three ridges away you can see them; the outlines of men on the furthest hill; men digging on the second hill; and the white flags of signallers waving on the ridge nearest the shore.’ The Australians reached the top of their first steep hill, which towered above Ari Burnu, in less than twenty minutes. The summit was found to be a small plateau covered with low scrub. The Australians found themselves looking out on a tangled, deeply folded country almost entirely covered with dark, knee-deep scrub.

The first Australians to land were from the 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th Battalions of the 3rd Brigade. The objectives were for the 9th to clear Gaba Tepe and head for Anderson’s Knoll on the Third Ridge. The 10th would land in the centre, capture the Turkish guns on 400 Plateau, then cross Legge Valley and occupy Scrubby Knoll on the Third Ridge. The 11th would land on the left and seize Chunuk Bair at the top of the Third Ridge. The 12th would be in reserve.

The landing, though, was in disarray: where the troops came ashore was about a kilometre to the north of the vague intended landing site. Bean contended—in a theory now discredited—that a sudden and mysterious northerly current had carried the landing boats off course towards the north. General Birdwood added to the confusion when he told Hamilton: ‘I had purposely not intended to land at the spot we arrived at because from what I had seen of it, the country looked extraordinarily difficult.’ But later, in a letter to the Australian Defence Minister, George Pearce, he asserted that the landing in Anzac Cove was his idea.

Worse, the tows bringing the troops ashore had not stayed in their intended formation and did not land in the intended order. Instead, they haphazardly bunched around Ari Burnu, causing confusion as men from the 9th, 10th and 11th Battalions were thrown together. Their one hope was that they outnumbered the two companies of the Turkish 27th Regiment, which retired to the heights above the beach and called for urgent reinforcements.

At 9.20 a.m. it was Bean’s turn to join the Australians. With his overcoat, rations, towel and waterproof sheet in an infantry pack, and also carrying his papers, some chocolate and a rug, he climbed down a rope ladder and twenty minutes later waved goodbye to Arthur Bazley, who would re-join Bean as his batman five days later. About 200 metres from the shore the destroyers carrying Bean and the troops stopped and they clambered into boats, grounding in knee-deep water. He jumped out, waded to the beach and paused to get out his camera. ‘I took a photo of two of the fellows landing and then turned round to see the beach.’ In front of him were half a dozen dead Australians, covered by overcoats. Further away were another two dozen bodies.

Bean joined artillery staff scrambling up a cliff, winding in and out under the leaves, dragging one another up the gravelly banks until they reached a ridge top. About half-way up he noticed ‘an insect with a soft rustle of a flight.’ He thought it might be bees flying overhead:

I could hear them and looked once or twice to make sure. Then for the first time I realised it must be a bullet. It was so feeble, that sound, and so spent that it was quite comforting. One had expected something much more businesslike. As we got higher up the whistle did become louder, but I hadn’t any idea whether they were near or far.

Bean returned to the beach on a track hastily built by Australian engineers and had biscuits, chocolate and some water for lunch. He tried to find Jack, and heard he had been treating the wounded. Only much later did Bean learn that Jack had been shot but not badly wounded. He was already on a hospital ship.

By the first night, most of the officers had dugouts on the hillside above the beach. Bean decided to start digging his own and found a vacant corner up among the signallers. Whoever was in the dugout next door objected that he couldn’t sleep with the noise Bean was making. ‘Haven’t you got any bloody consideration?’ he demanded of Bean, who thought this was a bit rich coming from someone already settled for the night. Bean found a better place on the other side of a creek just above the beach. Earth from the dugout was heaped on the Gaba Tepe side to give some protection from Turkish gunfire. Bean slept briefly as firing on a ridge above continued incessantly. Around 2 a.m. on the 26th, he made his way to divisional headquarters, struck by the activity and realising that something was in the wind. ‘In a minute or two I had what it was—some question as to whether we were to hold on or to embark at once.’

Bean waited in the moonlight. Thirty minutes later, he saw ‘a general stir in the small crowd that was in the know.’ He heard a message being read out from General Bridges’ dugout: ‘Sir Ian Hamilton hopes they will dig . . . and that the morning will find them securely dug in where they are.’ The next morning he went for a walk along the beach, where he met General Birdwood. It was clear to Bean that Birdwood was ‘obviously disappointed’ by the outcome so far. He told Bean: ‘First there was the mistake of landing us a mile and a half north of where we should have landed, in this ghastly country.’

Ten months later Bean would learn from White that he had advised Bridges to recommend withdrawal, and still believed that would have been the right decision. ‘We knew nothing about the Helles landing but we knew the Anzac landing had failed—and as it had not succeeded the right thing was to get out of it and use the troops where they could be effective,’ he told Bean.

The morning of the 26th brought a surprise—there was no Turkish bombardment. Evacuation had been flirted with and ruled out because of this expectation. Now the troops would dig in for the foreseeable future—and the deaths of thousands of men became inevitable.

Bean cut some branches and used them as rafters to support the waterproof sheet that became the roof of his dugout. On top of that structure he placed a post that carried sandbags to provide protection from shrapnel. The dugout was never wide but it was relatively safe, and he could write in it. In these first few days Bean established an operating pattern: he would spend daylight hours among the troops and return at night to scribble down notes that he would later transcribe. The night did not necessarily provide complete reassurance, as he would ‘hear all the bullets that whizz down this gully, and fairly often hear them “thrpp” into the ground outside.’ The conditions were primitive and difficult, as Bean noted:

If I am plugged and anyone gets this diary they will probably think that I was either tight or very unnerved when I wrote it. The fact was it was written by night when no candles were to be had and I had to do the best I could in the moonlight. On some nights the sky was clear and one could see fairly well. On others I simply had to place the lines by guesswork and many of them are written over one another.

In the days that followed, Bean noted that a fear of snipers took hold among men increasingly lacking sleep as they fought to keep their toehold above the beach; snipers were even believed to be inside the Allied lines. He realised that the ‘state of the men and of many officers is such now that they imagine things that don’t exist—just as anyone else would after 4 days tremendous hard work and no sleep. I don’t know how many snipers there are but hundreds are reported . . . The whole camp is seeing snipers.’

Back at camp a major he knew, who was just out of the front line, told Bean that German officers in the Turkish line were prodding the soldiers with them to make them keep going. He then contradicted himself, telling Bean a few minutes later he had seen little or no sign of German officers. That made Bean think that—although the major was a man whose account he would trust against that of a hundred others—this must be some sort of hallucination. ‘I had just tumbled to it when Blamey, as I walked away said quietly, “Bean, I suppose you know it’s not wise to take seriously what a man says when he’s in a condition like that . . . I meant to warn you.”’

But Bean’s faith in the Australian soldier, and what shaped him, had been reaffirmed by these first few days. From close quarters, he compared them with New Zealanders, sure that there was ‘a clear and interesting difference’ between them. The New Zealander regarded the Turk ‘much more kindly’ than the Australians, and Bean believed the Kiwi fought ‘more with his gloves on than the Australian: the Australian when he fights, fights all in.’ He added: ‘‘The N.Z. man is a good trustworthy soldier; but he has not the devil of the Australians in him; the wild, pastoral independent life of Australia, if it makes rather wild men, makes superb soldiers.’

•

Eager for news from Gallipoli, Australian newspapers were becoming impatient—and still they heard nothing from Bean. Reports from the War Office in London confirmed that ‘after a hard day’s fighting the troops on the Gallipoli peninsula have succeeded in thoroughly making a good footing with the navy’s effective help.’ A day later The Sydney Morning Herald reported a War Office statement that the troops were steadily advancing, and then, worryingly: ‘The Turks claim to have inflicted losses on the Allies, and to have captured a number of Australians.’

Australian troops were in combat but a vacuum of information existed even for the Australian Government. Prime Minister Andrew Fisher was forced to admit that same day that he had no information about the troops. On 2 May the Government released an initial list of eighteen dead and thirty-seven wounded, while the Herald reported that the Allies now held the end of the Gallipoli peninsula. This hid the reality that the Allies were barely holding on. With Australian troops dead and a lack of information from the British, the Herald editorialised two days later on ‘Our need of news,’ noting that a case could be made against censorship. Charles Bean, of course, was banned from writing by prejudicial restrictions.

When the London Telegraph correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett’s report reached Australian newsrooms on 7 May, the fact that the official Australian correspondent was yet to file became irrelevant. Unlike Bean, though, Ashmead-Bartlett had not landed with the men but had watched events from the comparative safety and comfort of HMS London, three kilometres out to sea. He was finally able to go ashore at 9.30 that night.

Fifteen months younger than the more gentlemanly Bean, the competitive Ashmead-Bartlett had served in the Boer War and in 1911–12 covered the Balkan wars. When he arrived at the Dardanelles he was an experienced war correspondent with a knack for scooping his rivals. His dramatic account was full of praise for the Anzacs and helped slake the desperate thirst for news of the invasion. The next day’s story in the Herald and many other papers around the country told of the ‘glorious entry into war’ by the Anzacs. In Melbourne, The Age headlined it ‘Thrilling Deeds of Heroism’. Ashmead-Bartlett wrote of ‘the flash of the bayonet in a sudden charge of the Colonials’ who were ‘practical above all else’:

The Australians rose to the occasion. They did not wait for orders, or for the boats to reach the beach, but sprang into the sea, formed a sort of rough line, and rushed at the enemy’s trenches. Their magazines were not charged, so they just went in with the cold steel, and it was over in a minute for the Turks in the first trench had been either bayoneted or had run away, and the Maxim guns were captured.

. . . the task of the covering forces had been so splendidly carried out that the Turks allowed the disembarkation of the remainder to proceed uninterruptedly, except for the never-ceasing sniping. But then the Australians, whose blood was up, instead of entrenching, rushed to the northwards, and to the eastwards searching for fresh enemies to bayonet.

. . . I have never seen anything like those wounded Colonials in war before. Though many were shot to bits, and without hope of recovery, their cheers resounded throughout the night, and you could see in the midst of a mass of suffering humanity arms waving in greeting to the crews of the warships. They were happy because they knew they had been tried for the first time, and had not been found wanting.

On 2 May—seven days after the landing—Bean was finally given permission to write. He spent the day writing a long cable on the landing which he sent, along with a second article on events there on Day 2, the next day. The means of delivery was circuitous: Bean gave it to an officer who promised to transfer the material via a battleship to a Royal Mail ship. A mix-up by British officials at Alexandria delayed the reports for ten days, from where the two cables were sent at a cost of £75. If fulfilling his job was not easy, the frustration was made worse by the long delay before his account arrived in Australia, a week after Ashmead-Bartlett’s had been published.

Under Bean’s byline, The Sydney Morning Herald published his 4000-word account on 15 May, headed:

HOW THE AUSTRALIANS FOUGHT: IMPERISHABLE FAME.

The Australians and Maorilanders landed in two bodies, the first being a covering force to seize the ridges around the landing [which took place] about an hour later. The moon that night set about an hour and a half before daylight. This just gave time for the warships and transports of the covering force to steam in and land the troops before dawn . . . The men leapt into the water, and the first of them had just reached the beach when fire was opened on them from the trenches on the foothills which rise immediately from the beach.

Ever one for the unusual simile, Bean likened the landing place to the Hawkesbury River country north of Sydney. He continued:

Bullets struck fireworks out of the stones along the beach. The men did not wait to be hit, but wherever they landed they simply rushed straight up the steep slopes. Other small boats which had cast off from the warships and steam launches which towed them, were digging for the beach with oars. These occupied the attention of the Turks in the trenches, and almost before the Turks had time to collect their senses, the first boatloads were well up towards the trenches. Few Turks awaited the bayonet. It is said that one huge Queenslander swung his rifle by the muzzle, and, after braining one Turk, caught another and flung him over his shoulder. I do not know if this story is true, but when we landed some hours later, there was said to have been a dead Turk on the beach with his head smashed in.

Bean described heroism among the men and officers. Among them was the officer who rejected an order to retire from a hill position. The officer in question was there at his post next morning, when it became necessary to send a man down the hill on some business. Before the man had gone twenty metres he was wounded:

The officer walked down the hill at once to pick him up. Within a couple of seconds the Turks had a machine gun trained on him and he fell, riddled with bullets. Australia has lost many of her best officers in this way. The toll has been really heavy, but the British theory is that you cannot lead men from the rear, at any rate, in an attack of this sort. It would be absurd to pretend that the life of an officer like that one was wasted. No-one knows how long his example will live on amongst men. There were others . . . who died fighting like tigers, some who fully knew they would die.

While highlighting the bravery of men and officers, Bean’s report of a momentous event was more sober and probably more accurate than Ashmead-Bartlett’s, but much drier. His commitment to accuracy would never permit him to indulge in his rival’s more emotive and colourful journalistic style. But none of this mattered, for he had been scooped. In his diary Bean admitted to feeling a ‘pang of jealousy.’ But in time he came to realise that Ashmead-Bartlett’s report, although exaggerated, had done more than capture the imagination of Australians: it had roused public sentiment and boosted morale.

When Ashmead-Bartlett died in 1931, Bean observed that ‘the tradition of the Anzac landing is probably more influenced by that first story than by all the other accounts that have since been written.’ But Bean had been there on the beach and knew the truth. Years later, in 1946, he challenged the misconceptions surrounding the landing that had found their way into popular myth. ‘Neither then nor at any time later was that beach the inferno of bursting shells, barbed wire, and falling men that has sometimes been described or painted,’ he wrote.

But as Bean would show in days, weeks and months after Anzac, he did not mean to underestimate what the men had achieved as Turkish reinforcements arrived to stop their progress. From the time he landed at Anzac Cove, Bean was well aware of the Anzacs’ fortitude.

15

Sideshow

The relationship between Charles Bean and Colonel John Monash was destined to be difficult, such were the stark differences in their backgrounds and personalities. Bean was tall, thin, myopic and far from robust; Monash, was slightly shorter and solidly built. Bean came from a family steeped in the teachings of the Church of England, with a father who had taken holy orders; Monash had been raised in Melbourne in relative poverty, conscious that he was an outsider—doubly so as a Jew of Prussian parentage. Bean was idealistic and unworldly, his gentle and unassuming demeanour hiding a determination that formed the mainspring of his courage and remarkable productivity. In contrast, Monash was pugnacious, dogged and nakedly ambitious. He was recognised as Australia’s foremost concrete engineer. In their personal dealings, Bean was modest while Monash craved to be the centre of attention and was sensitive to slights; he won respect and friendships through his intellect and achievements. Where Bean was ‘proper’ in his friendships with women, Monash’s affairs were tempestuous and scandalous. They would never see eye to eye, but they could not avoid each other and, indeed, would need each other.

Their first meeting in Alexandria, on 31 January 1915, was unfortunate. Bean and The Age’s Phillip Schuler had gone to the old port city where they booked into a hotel to await the arrival of more Australian troops under Monash’s command. Also on board the troopship Themistocles with Monash was his brigade major, Lieutenant Colonel John McGlinn, one of Bean’s Sydney friends. After meeting them aboard ship, Monash and McGlinn invited Bean and Schuler to dinner. The meal did not go well for Bean:

Unfortunately I had eaten something that morning or the night before that disagreed with me—or perhaps merely had eaten too much of something that agreed with me too well, as one is apt to do in these hotels, and I was rather seedy as a consequence, only just managing to sit the dinner out. It was just biliousness and one was soon better.

Their uneasy start set the pattern for their future dealings. Bean watched Monash’s 4th Brigade training in Cairo and was impressed by a divisional manoeuvre, describing it as ‘something very fine, spectacularly.’ Later that month Bean remarked that: ‘those who looked on noticed the methodical, extreme thoroughness with which he [Monash] worked out every detail of the activities of his brigade, and the extreme lucidity with which he could explain to his officers any plan of operations.’

Their first contact at Gallipoli came early, over the battle for control of the hill Baby 700. After landing on 26 April, Monash and his 4th Infantry Brigade, comprising the 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th Battalions, were given responsibility for the vital left-centre No. 3 Sector. This included the ridges with what became Pope’s, Quinn’s and Courtney’s posts. From the left flank of Pope’s to the right flank of Courtney’s was barely 500 metres. Separating Pope’s from the other two posts was an open valley that Turkish trenches would soon dominate on the aptly named Dead Man’s Ridge and the Bloody Angle. From these and the higher ground beyond, The Nek and Baby 700, the enemy could observe and fire into Monash Valley, where Monash had his headquarters. Along this perilous path all traffic to and from the posts had to move.

An attack was planned to extend the Anzac line to encompass Baby 700. Monash was against it, thinking the plan flawed, but he couldn’t talk General Sir Alexander Godley, the imperious commander of the New Zealand and Australian Division, out of it. The combined force of Australian, New Zealand and Indian troops was a ramshackle arrangement. Furthermore, Godley was resentful over being denied promotion and ‘detested’ Australians. Neither was Godley a fan of Bean, making it clear that he preferred dealing with the New Zealand correspondent, Malcolm Ross. He did ‘not like being dependent for a report on our doings on Captain Bean.’

To Monash, Godley was part of the ‘Army Clique’, and one who did not take ‘amateurs’ seriously. Hamilton thought he had ‘a certain vein or tendency to pomposity . . . You only need to put him in a very important position and he becomes even more important than the position,’ he wrote to Bean later.

A night attack was ordered for 2 May. There were problems from the start, not least that Godley gave Monash his orders with just five hours’ notice of the attack. This hamstrung the preparations of the Australian and New Zealand units; times of attack were not coordinated—a situation worsened by poor decisions taken by the Otago Battalion of the New Zealand Rifle Brigade. After dusk, the 13th and 16th Battalions of the 4th Brigade climbed the Bloody Angle, next to Quinn’s, and attempted to establish a line along the Chessboard—a criss-cross network of Turkish trenches opposite Pope’s Hill and Russell’s Top—to Baby 700, between The Nek and Battleship Hill. Bean noted that there was ‘a hot fire’, but there were some strains of ‘Australia will be There’ and ‘Tipperary’ as the 16th advanced with the 13th to take the hill.

The Australians only managed to form a series of disjointed trenches along the foot of the Chessboard. The Otago Battalion was meant to capture the summit of Baby 700 but reached the front forty-five minutes late and was decimated. Elsewhere the positions gained were exposed, offering no advantage. At dawn on 3 May, most of the troops withdrew. Some of the 13th Battalion held out all day, abandoning their trenches that night. The attack was a debacle. From a nominal strength of 4000 men, Monash’s brigade was reduced to just 1770 men. The attack had been Monash’s first offensive and he had been let down by Godley’s faulty planning. Bean saw the result: ‘The whole face of the cliff of the nearer hill which yesterday was covered with bushes, is today bare, and along the top of it our dead can be seen lying like ants, shrivelled up or curled up, some still hugging their rifles: about a dozen of them. The face of the further plateau is also edged with our dead.’ Bean interviewed Monash, who gave what he said was a full account of the operation: ‘They’ve tried to put the work of an Army Corps onto me.’ Monash explained that at 4 a.m. he was discussing a move ahead, as he was gaining two Royal Marine Light Infantry battalions. These waited too long in the valley, arriving too late to put them to use. ‘The Australians however had dug in and could probably have held on,’ Bean wrote. At 5.15 a.m. Monash said that ‘the whole of our artillery opened on the ridge held by our men.’ The artillery got in three 18-pounder shells and five mountain gun shells—which burst right in the trenches and blew men into the air. Back at headquarters, Bean checked with White, who told him that Monash was wrong and that the guns were those of the enemy behind his right flank. Bean did not spare Monash in his diary:

Monash seemed to me a little shaken. He was talking of ‘disaster’, and said our men would certainly have to retire from the part of the new ground which they still held . . . I’m sure I can’t see why they should. The reason may be that they (our men) have been there since the afternoon of the first Sunday and Monday—seven days, without relief.

This was hardly a compliment to Monash. Bean later toughened his assessment, damning his performance in this early period:

It was averred against Monash in those days that he was seldom seen in the front line, the complaints from Quinn’s Post, where the problems were toughest and the danger greatest, being sometimes bitter. It was further stated that the disastrous attack by his brigade on May 2nd at Baby 700 had left him unstrung, as well it might, and at higher headquarters doubts were expressed as to how he would ‘stand up to’ heavy strokes of adverse fortune.

Bean’s friend John Gellibrand shared his view about Monash’s reluctance to visit Quinn’s. Birdwood and Bridges took chances to visit the trenches and rally the troops that Monash seemed to be avoiding. But Monash thought unnecessary exposure did ‘no possible good and seriously impairs morale.’ Elsewhere, Bean described the attack as a complete failure but was less harsh on Monash. He noted that the capture of Baby 700 had been urgently necessary and, ‘so far as Colonel Monash’s arrangements were concerned, had been planned with all that scrupulous care which was to mark his operations throughout the war.’ But when the Otago Battalion failed to arrive, the battle was hopelessly lost. Bean would later acknowledge that for more than a month Monash’s 4th Brigade held the most difficult sector at Anzac Cove. But his assessment of Monash’s abilities was low from the start. Their relationship would continue uneasily, not just at Gallipoli.

•

With the failure of the attack on Baby 700, Bean settled down to write. After the frenzy of the first week, the day was strangely quiet. The weather was warm and sunny, allowing his imagination to wander. As he sat writing, with his feet in the sun and his back under the shade of a rug which now formed the canopy of his dugout, he was beguiled by the relative tranquillity. In front of him the sun turned the sea ‘into satin with little embroidered ships on it.’ Only an occasional shot from snipers on the hills above the beach reminded him that he was sitting bang in the middle of a war zone. Even so, the sound of the rifle fire brought memories of his school days flooding back: the shots reminded him of ‘the crack of a cricket ball . . . I could scarcely believe that this crack, crack, was not the nets at Clifton College or Rushcutter [sic] Bay, when three or four men are practising at once.’

Moments like this were too few. By next day Bean was writing that the snipers had been cleared out of the gullies, the Australians having ‘got them with bayonets.’ Because of the danger of shooting within the lines, bayoneting was the only way. ‘The sniper lies low whilst you search for him, and won’t generally shoot at two or three men armed because the others would drop and search for him. He simply lies low and is generally bayoneted when found.’ Gallipoli was a brutal business.

As the Anzac forces had established a toehold, and the attacks of 2–3 May had made the line at Anzac Cove secure, Hamilton decided to transfer the 2nd Australian Brigade and the New Zealand Brigade south to Cape Helles to help British and French forces consolidate the position there. These battalions would assist in an attack on Achi Baba, a prominent peak of the peninsula. Bean couldn’t help but feel ‘a natural disappointment in finding our show turned into a sideshow.’ He accompanied reinforcements from the 2nd Brigade along with the New Zealand Infantry Brigade.

Bean was stunned by the chaos surrounding the move, which he saw as a ‘rotten piece of staff work.’ The trawler captain taking the men to Cape Helles did not know when he was to sail or, indeed, who would give the orders to do so. By such incompetence, Bean believed commanders were telling the Turks that Anzac Cove had been weakened at the cost of strengthening the Allied position to the south. ‘A hopeless thing to do,’ he noted scathingly. ‘Altogether tonight’s arrangements are in keeping with the worst days of the British service.’

Bean was feeling the exertions of the previous eleven days when he came ashore amid geysers of water from Turkish shells around the wreck of the collier River Clyde, which had been driven ashore in the disastrous attempt to land troops at Cape Helles on 25 April. He was, however, more worried about his health. As protection ‘against the old pneumonia’ he carried his sleeping bag, along with his heavy kit, and was ‘glad of the rest’ when he reached shore. After marching through olive groves Bean and the Australians came to a valley. In the distance, 10 kilometres away across gently undulating country, rose Achi Baba. On its slopes was the town of Krithia. The Australians could see that the British and French had got no further than they had at Anzac Cove. Bean joined them in digging in, aware that two days of hard fighting in the renewed Allied offensive at Cape Helles had failed to achieve goals.

A renewed attack on Krithia and Achi Baba was planned for 8 May. Bean, carrying his telescope and camera case, moved with the Australians and New Zealanders after the order to begin the advance at 5.30 p.m. and as an Allied bombardment shelled the Turkish lines. He had gone less than 250 metres when the Turks opened fire. Salvo after salvo of shrapnel burst in fleecy little clouds over the 7th Battalion. A haze of dust whipped up by shrapnel and gunfire striking the dry plain sometimes obscured the hurrying platoons. Bean thought advancing as the thick curtain of bullets whistled past was ‘like walking against a dust storm in Sydney.’ He sheltered in a trench and focused his telescope on the Turkish bombardment, occasionally diving for cover, a shrapnel pellet at one point rolling onto his arm. As Bean did his best to protect himself, all hell broke loose:

The uproar was tremendous. You could not hear the bullets whizz—but I was never in the midst of such an uproar—bang, bang-a-bang, bang-whang-bang-a-whang . . . It was as if the universe was a tin-lined packing case, and squads of giants with sledge-hammers were banging both ends of it, and we tiny beings were somewhere in between . . . We were stumbling over the low gorse, tramping ahead. One boy to the left of me carried his spade, shovel end upwards like a fan in front of his head with his left hand, I wonder if it was a sort of instinct because I think the greater number of bullets were coming from there.

About half a kilometre up the plateau, Bean and the men suddenly found a trench—and were relieved to find it was full of Lancashire Fusiliers. The Anzacs joined them, flinging themselves down to recover their breath. Bean kept his head down most of the time but couldn’t resist peering over the edge. Before him, he saw many casualties on the ground. Most were motionless, but he noticed that about 20 metres away to his right one of the men was moving. He was alarmed for the soldier’s safety:

I thought he would probably be hit again if he stayed out there, but the prospect of getting out and helping him in was not nice. However, I thought, if one gets into these positions in the firing line one must accept the consequences. I waited a bit, and presently the youngster rolled over and began to painfully crawl in. One couldn’t stay any longer, so I nipped out of the trench and ran out to him and helped him back—with my help he could get along on both legs. We were back in the trench very quickly. I don’t think I did much good, but one’s conscience wouldn’t let one stay any longer—that was my only reason.

Despite Bean’s selfless effort to save the soldier, Colonel James McCay, commander of the 2nd Brigade, was unimpressed. ‘Look here, Bean, if you do any more of these damn fool actions I’ll send you straight back to H.Q. I’ve power to you know,’ Bean recorded him saying. But just a few minutes later Bean heard McCay say, ‘Well Bean I suppose this is where I have to do the damned heroic act.’ He jumped up on the parapet of the trench, waving his periscope to urge a hundred or so of his men on into the teeth of murderous fire. ‘Now then, Australians! Which of you men are Australians? Come on, Australians!’ McCay would later write home that he had in effect said to his men, ‘Come and die,’ and they had done so ‘with a laugh and a cheer.’ Bean thought the Australians went on ‘like a whirlwind’ and reached for his camera—but he had only brought the case; the camera was back at headquarters. He was aghast. ‘So I missed the finest war photograph that has never been taken,’ he noted ruefully.

A second batch of troops from the 6th Battalion, led by Lieutenant Colonel Walter McNicoll, came up. McCay ordered him to take the men forward, whereupon McNicoll jumped up on the parapet. The moment he did so, a bullet hit him and he collapsed against a tree next to the trench. ‘Only slightly,’ McNicoll ventured when someone asked him if he had been wounded. Bean watched as two men tore open his tunic to find a flesh wound. McNicoll jumped up again, blew his whistle and led the men on. Men began to drop fast. One man jumped back into the trench, bleeding heavily from the throat. A signaller was hit in the neck, while another man threw himself on the parapet of the trench and was dragged in. Bean saw that he looked frightened and haggard. ‘He was losing blood from a wound in the upper leg,’ Bean wrote. ‘A man behind the trench must have made some sign, poor chap, that he wanted help; for a Lancashire Fusilier ran out, sat beside him for quite a long time lying in front of him so as partly to protect him; and then lifted him on his back and brought him in. A good number of men, of course, lay out there and never moved.’ Others limped back, sometimes crawling on all fours.

Bean heard the officers urging the men on. ‘Come on chaps,’ one said. ‘We’ve got to get it sometime. We can’t stay here always!’ Bean thought that ‘was the spirit—that and the feeling that being Australian they must get on.’ The men were ‘absolutely unaffected by the bullets’:

I never saw one man whose manner was changed by them except in that moment when they got up and faced them and rushed over the trench; then their faces were set, their eyebrows bent, they looked into it for a moment as men would into a dazzling flame. I never saw so many determined faces at once. Oh what a photograph I missed.

Along the trench came a scrap of paper from Lieutenant Tom Hastie, whom McCay had sent back to hurry forward the 8th Battalion. ‘Shot through both hands. Please inform brigadier,’ the note said. Bean immediately thought over the ethics of doing this, and concluded that there was no rule against war correspondents carrying such a message. ‘Whatever the message said, I should have felt forced to take it,’ he later explained. He got up and followed the telephone line that the signaller and the volunteer from the 8th, marching behind McCay, had unrolled as they went forward. He knew it must lead to the brigadier. Here and there he passed a dead or wounded man. About 250 metres out, he was surprised to hear his name called again. ‘Hallo, old man; you up here?’ He saw nearby Colonel McNicoll lying badly wounded behind a couple of packs placed there by his men. He had been shot in the abdomen, the machine-gun bullet lodging in his hip joint, ‘after a number of forward rushes.’ McNicoll later recalled that he had heard Bean’s voice in the dark calling his name. ‘He found me, and though the ground was being peppered with [machine-gun] fire, collected a couple of packs to put in front of my head as some sort of protection, and something to put under the hip, then went off in search of a stretcher party,’ McNicoll recalled nearly twenty years later. ‘I remember protesting to Bean that he should get out of that area before he was hit, but he took his time and made me comparatively comfortable.’

Bean went on another 150 metres to the new brigade headquarters trench. As ‘three or four shots snapped about my ears,’ McCay called him a fool. Bean realised that ‘things were a bit close—they seemed to think so there,’ for of the seven men who started with the brigade headquarters, only McCay and a signaller had got through. McCay told him it was impossible to reach the ridge behind Krithia and that his men had been set ‘an impossible task.’

About an hour later Bean left the headquarters and once more passed McNicoll, assuring him again that he would get stretcher bearers. Shortly after, when it was nearly dark, he came across stretcher bearers and told them about McNicoll. Two of the men followed Bean, who carefully scanned every wounded man he passed. Finally he came across the three packs, behind which lay McNicoll. Holding a lantern, Bean watched as McNicoll was loaded onto a stretcher and carried back to the dressing station. McNicoll later recalled that all this happened under steady machine-gun fire. ‘There is no doubt that if it had not been for his efforts I should have been there till morning, or perhaps till now,’ he wrote.

Returning to headquarters, Bean came across a member of the 8th Battalion, shot through the intestines and in terrible pain. At times Bean heard him crying like a child, asking for ‘Doctor! Doctor!’ Bean reached for the opium tablets Jack had given him. One of the lozenges fell to the ground, but the second gave the soldier temporary relief. He was soon in pain again, however, writhing on the ground, rolling over the leg of a signaller whose leg was broken. Men in the trench urged him to be still, and when he cried out for water they moistened his lips. Away in the darkness to his right Bean could hear many other distressed men crying out for stretcher bearers; some were coherent, others not.

Later that night, Bean took water in kerosene tins out to the wounded lying on the ground where they had fallen. He stopped at the Tommies’ trench to give the wounded a drink, telling them there was little to spare. Each man took a couple of sips and handed the tin back. Bean was touched. ‘Really you could have cried to see how unselfish they were.’ One of the men had been hit in the head, or back, and was lying face down. ‘I moistened his lips first and then we managed to get his head into a position from which he could suck at the tin.’

Out on the plateau, one of the hundreds of wounded who were lying there caught his eye. ‘Poor devil,’ Bean thought. He was trying to get back to cover. ‘I asked if I could help him—he was hit through the leg, high up, and was crawling. We went some way together, limping. He was in great pain, when he fell saying: “Oh God—Oh Christ—oh it’s awful.” He had been hit a second time through the same leg, or the other leg. I asked if he could still come on. “Oh, no—no I can’t,” he said. The plateau was very exposed, so I simply dragged him by both legs—he consented—into the nearest thing to a dimple in the ground that I could find.’ Bean found two packs and put them round him, and left him. ‘He had torn open his trousers, as they generally do, to see the wound, and was bleeding pretty freely. I don’t fancy he can have lived poor chap.’

Around 4 a.m. Bean returned to headquarters. ‘I stumbled through the gorse, falling heavily once or twice.’ On the way he passed someone who was groaning, a man he had spoken to earlier. He told Bean he was in agony.

I told him what I had told them all, that the stretcher-bearers would be along soon to take him away. It was most unlikely, but it was the one thing they clung on to; so did the men in the Tommies’ trench; so did those around the firing line. It made you mad to think of the dull, stupid, cruel, bungling that was mismanaging the medical arrangements. The men in the firing line would gladly have gone without a day’s rations if only the carts could have been used in carrying the wounded down from the dressing station to the beach, and the stretcher-bearers left free for taking the men from the firing line. One knew now that there was no earthly chance of many of the men near the firing line being taken in before daylight, and that meant that they must lie unattended, sometimes exposed to heavy fire, for a whole 15 or 16 hours more.

Bean realised that the British medical arrangements were a mess—a ‘sheer scandal’. This was in keeping with the mismanagement by the British staff of the campaign so far: everything was a muddle, and late. He had seen ‘no evidence of brains.’ Indeed, before leaving for Gallipoli, Bean had written that the Australian doctors expected a 30 per cent casualty rate. In his first few days at Gallipoli, he had soon worked out that he should always have water and cigarettes with him when he was going among the men, especially if he came across the wounded.

But nothing at Gallipoli compared with the agony he witnessed first-hand at Krithia. An attack that had been unnecessarily staged in daylight could easily have waited until that night. McCay had soon realised that the attack was hopeless, for the rest of the line had been held up. They may have made the only worthwhile advance in the entire battle of Krithia, but nearly half the brigade’s men—more than 1000—were killed or wounded. McCay had his leg broken by a bullet and suffered unjust blame for the failed attack. It was not his responsibility, but he lost the respect of the men under his command and would never regain it.

In his diary, Bean noted both the patriotism and the practicality of the troops. Importantly, this mirrored virtues he had recorded in On the Wool Track and The Dreadnought of the Darling before the war. These were the connections that were developing in his mind about how the war was defining the Australian character. And then there was Bean himself: he had shown the men that he would take great risks to tell their story. Maybe it was bravado, maybe it was foolhardiness, yet he had placed his personal safety behind helping the wounded and gathering information.

For Bean, the sight and sounds of wounded men imploring him for help as they writhed in pain could have been nothing other than traumatic. And it was an experience for which nothing could have prepared him. This was just the start of a four-year journey in which the pain of the wounded and the cries of the dying would never be far away.

Bean was modest about his valour in rescuing the wounded soldier, and would never refer to it again in writing. ‘I didn’t incur any more danger than any poor private even in this one attack. No! Not so much. I have no right to the credit of the lowest simplest soldiers—and I am not as brave as most of them,’ he wrote in his diary. Yet he was recommended for a Military Cross for his effort. As a civilian he was not eligible; nonetheless he was mentioned in despatches. A Digger at Krithia afterwards wrote of Bean in the Sydney Bulletin:

The advance was made in short rushes . . . It was after the third rush and we were about 1000 yards from the Turks. My left-hand neighbour (we were in support about 100 yards behind the firing line) had a shovel arranged as an armour plate before his head. We were both pancaked out as flat as possible . . . A tall, gaunt figure stalked over our line, and strode away ahead towards the firing line. We were so ashamed that we leaned up to watch. Only once his head suddenly swung aside, probably a bullet had droned past rather close. Then we remembered the dangerous posture we were in and, cursing ourselves for our carelessness, we flattened out again, and saw no more of the gaunt officer till we spotted him sitting under a tree at the rear, writing up his notes after the show was over.

Bean’s bravery had not gone unnoticed among the men. Whatever hostility remained from his story about the soldiers’ behaviour in Cairo was erased. His relationship with John Monash, however, was another issue altogether.

16

Boosting a reputation

The news stunned Bean as he stood on the deck of the fleet sweeper taking him back from Cape Helles to Anzac Cove: General Bridges had been severely—indeed mortally—wounded. Bean thought Bridges had led a charmed life during the previous three weeks as he went among the men on daily inspections in open and dangerous positions, careless of his personal safety ‘almost to the point of recklessness.’ He would stand in full view of the enemy, often laughing down at his staff when they took cover and asking ‘what they were getting down there for?’

But Bridges had apparently begun to realise that this boldness—indeed, foolhardiness—could not continue. On 15 May 1915 he took heed of warnings from the men as he walked the perilous track along Monash Valley on his morning inspection. Bullets were coming thick and fast. As he passed wounded men at dressing stations, they told him, ‘Better run across here, Sir.’ Soon he reached another dressing station, where he yarned as he smoked a cigarette before turning to the staff and saying, ‘Well, must make another run for it.’ Bridges sprinted around a corner through the scrub towards the next cover some metres away. He never made it—a sniper’s bullet smashed through his right thigh, severing the femoral artery.

A doctor ran forward and, stooping down, hurriedly staunched the gushing wound, saving Bridges from immediate death from loss of blood. Bean reported that Bridges’ first words, when he was brought in very white and weak, were, ‘Don’t carry me down. I don’t want any your fellows run into danger.’ Stretcher bearers carried him back to the beach, from where he was evacuated to the hospital ship Gascon. Doctors decided against amputating his leg because he was too old to withstand the operation. When Bean landed at Anzac Cove he was told the wound had become gangrenous and there was little hope. Brudenell White and Birdwood had been two of Bridges’ last visitors. On 17 May, after urgent representations from Birdwood, King George V knighted him.

Bridges had been 200 metres below the headquarters of Colonel Harry Chauvel, commander of the 1st Light Horse Brigade, when he fell. Chauvel, an old friend of Bridges, had landed on 12 May with two regiments of dismounted Light Horse troops to bolster the Anzac force, which had shrunk badly since the landing. Chauvel was senior to Monash and took over command of the vital No. 3 Sector, though most of its troops belonged to Monash’s command. While relations between the two were outwardly harmonious, Monash was displeased at being outranked. He observed that Chauvel was ‘fidgety’ and ‘rather annoys me’ by his interference. Relations between them would continue to be uneasy throughout the war.

As Bridges lay dying, Bean was shocked to hear that Birdwood’s chief intelligence officer, Major Charles Villiers-Stuart, had been killed while out sketching maps. Bean held him in great respect. ‘He was a quiet able fellow—an exceptionally nice man and good officer . . . he was shot through the heart by a shrapnel pellet,’ Bean wrote. On the night of the 17th, Bean was present when Villiers-Stuart was buried:

At 7.30 the staff gathered on beach and at 8, when too dark for enemy’s guns, all walked along the beach to the corner which the enemy’s guns have made dangerous. There we buried him. It was almost too dark to see—the exquisite last lights of sunset were just fading over Imbros—the old volcano cone showing dark grey against them. Above, along the path, mules were going past in the half-dark, clanking, Indians leading. New moon hanging over Imbros—ships out there floating like toy things on the sea—flash on men’s backs as of distant lightning—then r-roll-r-roll as warships fired away behind us. Continual whistle of bullets overhead—occasional whine of ricochets. Constant crack crack crack crack up above. Man passes below along beach path whistling—whistling suddenly stops when he hears the service. Strong gravediggers of the A.M.C., brown knotted muscles on forearms showing below grey flannel shirt cut short near shoulder.

. . . The strong men lift him very tenderly from the stretcher. The congregation melts. A little figure whom we have all grown to love leads the way past the grave. And there we left him among those few little wooden crosses on the shrapnel swept point.

The ‘little figure’ was Birdwood, who had joined those farewelling Villiers-Stuart at the beach service that had so moved Bean.

The next day, Bridges died. Bean had witnessed death on a large scale for three weeks, but the loss of Bridges stunned him. He had only been able to sail to Gallipoli because of Bridges’ advice that he wire Sir George Reid in London urging him to lobby the War Office. Approval granted, Bean had been attached to Bridges’s staff. Bean knew that without Bridges he would not have been there for the landing and everything that followed. Their friendship, forged on the Orvieto on the voyage from Australia to Egypt, was close; Bean looked up to Bridges as a mentor and clearly agreed with Brudenell White’s later assessment that he stood ‘by head and shoulders bigger than any soldier Australia has produced.’ To Bean, this ‘greatest of Australia’s soldiers’ not only possessed a powerful mind and great knowledge but ‘outstanding moral and physical courage.’

This may have been an overly generous assessment. Bridges was outwardly cold and possessed a difficult nature, which sometimes affected his relations with staff officers. Bean admitted as much, noting later that Bridges’ manner was gauche and on occasion rude. ‘Several members of his original staff were too nervous of him to make decisions of themselves or to advise him strongly and candidly. His grim attitude only made them more nervous; they lost confidence, and left more and more of the decisions to him, with the result that they were piling upon him a heavier responsibility for solutions and details than any man in his position could bear . . . If he quarrelled with an officer, he got rid of him.’ Indeed, Bean had felt a backlash from the men after writing, at Bridges’ request, the article explaining why certain offenders from the AIF were being sent home from Egypt.

Nonetheless Bridges—and White—formed the yardstick by which Bean judged the Australian officers. With White, this high regard would remain for the duration of the war, and beyond. Evident from their early contact in Australia, it had grown in Cairo, where Bean soon came to regard White as ‘the ideal staff officer. He never forgets anything . . . White is a soldier above everything . . . He is the only man I know to whom there is never any necessity to mention a thing twice.’

Not least among the officers Bean compared with Bridges and White, of course, was John Monash—and their relationship had already got off to a tricky start. Unlike Bean’s opinions of Bridges and White, his opinions of Monash were not influenced by friendship and personal indebtedness. Inevitably, Monash would suffer by comparison.

But when Bridges died, Monash had other things on his mind. The Turks had brought in new divisions and a massive attack, with 42,000 troops against 17,300, was planned to drive the Anzac troops off the peninsula and into the sea. For Bean, 18 May was ‘unusually quiet—as quiet as a lazy holiday afternoon in summer.’ That evening, he was suspicious and went to bed thinking ‘we shall probably be attacked tonight.’ His instinct was right: on 19 May, in the hour before dawn, the Turkish attack went in all along the Anzac line. Bean thought the fire at Quinn’s Post, defended by Monash’s 15th Battalion aided by the 2nd Light Horse Regiment, was the most furious rifle fire Australian troops had so far endured. For six hours the Turkish infantry attacked, in long, slow-moving waves, chanting their rhythmic ‘Ul-lah! Ul-lah!’ as they jogged up the slopes to be cut down by Anzac fire.

By 5 a.m. large bodies of Turkish troops began massing near Quinn’s and Courtney’s posts. Turkish fire and then attacks began to press heavily against Quinn’s, the lines soon so close that the Australians resorted to bombs and revolvers. When it was over, five major attacks had been made against Quinn’s, and all had been repulsed.

At Courtney’s Post, which a small squad of the 14th Battalion held, the Turks had rushed the post at 4 a.m. After throwing hand grenades and killing some of the defenders, they occupied part of the post as the Australians retreated. By midday, the attack had become a slaughter. The weight of the Australian fire left 10,000 Turkish casualties, 3000 of them dead. Australian casualties were 160 men dead and 468 wounded. This was the last time that the Turkish forces would attempt a major counteroffensive in an effort to force the Anzac troops off the peninsula.

When Bean made his way to Quinn’s later in the day hundreds, indeed thousands, of bodies lay everywhere. The stench of death was already noticeable. Bean saw that some of the Turks ‘had frightful wounds in the head—half the head blown away.’ He saw one head wound that was ‘like a star, or pane of broken glass; another more or less circular—you could have put your hand into either.’ Until this momentous effort by the Turks, the Anzacs had thought the enemy was using so-called ‘dum-dum’ or explosive bullets, which caused terrible wounds. After the Turkish attack, the Australians realised, as they looked out on the enemy dead in front of their trenches, that their own machine guns and rifles also caused dreadful wounds.

Bean detected a changed attitude among the Anzacs towards the Turkish soldiers following the attack. ‘After the terrible punishment inflicted upon the brave but futile assaults all bitterness faded . . . The Turks displayed an admirable manliness . . . From that morning onwards the attitude of the Anzac troops towards the individual Turks was rather that of opponents in a friendly game.’

Something else brought them closer together: the thousands of dead who lay rotting on the battlefield. The smell from the decomposing corpses was soon overpowering for both sides. Flies swarmed and a plague of maggots crawled from the bodies, infesting the trenches. A truce was arranged, as Bean noted, to last from 7 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. on 24 May to allow each side to bury the dead who lay in their half of No Man’s Land. There would be no movements of troops. Digging, or reconnaissance such as sketching, mapping and photography, was banned. ‘What we wanted was to have their dead buried so as to improve life in the trenches,’ Bean wrote. With the burial parties well into their gruesome work by 8.30 a.m., Bean accompanied White to the trenches, where he saw the results of the horror. ‘Our men were shoveling Turkish dead into a short abandoned Turk trench and the Turks were dragging their men to the edge of the gully opposite Courtneys and shoveling them over—where they lay as we saw them 20 or 30 together in a crevice.’

In correspondence in the days after the battle, John Monash wrote that despite the numbers against them, ‘we did not give an inch of ground.’ His brigade, he wrote, had borne the brunt of the fighting and had suffered more than 2300 casualties, with at least 300 men killed. By late May, Quinn’s had become a horror for his men. Even after the truce to bury the Turkish dead, the smell of decomposing bodies hung heavily. But the Turks had not given up on taking the crucial post. In the early morning of 29 May the ground under the sector erupted, killing men in the front trench. The sound of the blast from the mine woke Bean, who had written late into the night. Told that it was a dummy attack, he went back to sleep only to find several hours later when he awoke that the men at Quinn’s were fighting to hold the post. He hurried up the track towards the firing line to face a stream of walking wounded making their way down.

As men of the 15th Battalion waited to counterattack, Bean photographed them. In the bitter action that followed, Major Hugh Quinn—after whom the post was named—was among the dead. But they held the post. Bean was there again, photographing the dazed prisoners as they were led away down the main sap. When it was all over, thirty-three men from the 4th Brigade were dead and 178 wounded.

Later that morning Bean sat just below the crest with Lieutenant Colonel Harold Pope, of the 16th Battalion, watching men pull corpses out of the trenches, when suddenly they scattered, dropping one of the bodies. A bomb—which Bean, naturally, compared with a cricket ball—came bouncing down the path and exploded against a dead Turk’s body. The blast severed a leg from the body less than 2 metres from where the two men sat. Bean likened the sound to a big Chinese cracker. ‘There was a blue smoke and a bit of dust, something hit me on the hip—don’t know what—and the dead Turk was lying there with his leg blown off. I expect it would have been mine if it hadn’t been his. I was spattered over with bits of dead Turk—fortunately not very thickly,’ he noted in his diary.

Bean’s matter-of-fact description of the incident is noteworthy, for it implies a level of dissociation from the carnage. Perhaps unconsciously, he was developing a defence against the bloodshed around him that was essential if he was to capture the reality of the war. Even at this early stage Bean was no ordinary onlooker; his mind was working all the time, walking the fine line between objectivity and closeness to the men fighting the battles. Already, he had shown he was able to take in the brutality of what he was witnessing while still operating with professional detachment. This may well have given him further immunity in what today would be the role of an embedded journalist. The difference was, of course, that he was often in the trenches and the firing line in ways that would not be countenanced today. In this sense he was a trailblazer, but in trying to carry out his journalistic role he necessarily ran the risk of antagonising some—not least John Monash.

Monash was proud of his troops’ performance, and thought that although his men were exhausted by five weeks of trench warfare, they had ‘behaved like heroes.’ Their battle discipline was perfect and they neither flinched nor hesitated. That day, after helping defeat the Turkish attacks, the 4th Brigade was withdrawn into reserve.

All of this heightened Monash’s determination to ensure that the deeds of the men he led were made known to Australians. He was conscious that the brigade could be neglected in publicity because it was part of a mixed division. His focus settled on Bean, whose early despatches he believed failed to properly acknowledge the brigade’s role at the landing. For Bean, the landing meant the events of the first day. This was a justifiable journalistic decision, as he knew that those first-day events would not only capture the imagination of Australians but be of great historical importance. As he wrote in his first cable about the landing: ‘There has been hard fighting since, which I will report later . . . When all is said, however, the feat which will go down to history is that first Sunday’s fighting, when three Australian brigades stormed, in the face of fire, tier after tier of cliffs and mountains apparently as impregnable as Govett’s Leap.’ Bean covered the fighting over the next four days in his second cable, but he did not mention the 4th Brigade. By then the tired Australians went for a swim at Anzac Cove, and, he noted, ‘for a time the beach in the midst of the fiercest battle ever fought in the Dardanelles looked more like Manly on a bank holiday.’ Perhaps his tendency to liken Anzac settings to places in his home state grated with the Victorian Monash, adding to his vexation.

In a historical sense, it was Monash’s misfortune that his brigade was not chosen in the vanguard of the landing, as the 4th Brigade troops were not among the early men ashore by many hours. The brigade’s landing was delayed by confusion, with the 16th Battalion going ashore about 6 p.m., the 15th between 10.30 p.m. and 9 a.m. the next day, the 13th at 3.30 a.m. on the 26th, and the bulk of the 14th not until the morning of the 26th. Bean would later note that part of the 15th Battalion was put in at Steele’s Post not long after landing on the night of the 25th and early the next morning to dig in on part of the front line.

To Monash, the Anzac ‘landing’ appears to have included landings on the days immediately following 25 April. Even before the first Australian papers arrived at Gallipoli carrying Bean’s reports of the landing and the action over the following days, Monash had decided on a strategy to bypass him as official correspondent. This is clear from a letter on 31 May to his wife, Hannah Victoria (Vic), in Melbourne. Monash drew her into a plan to pass on news he would send her for The Argus journalist C.P. Smith, who had sailed with him to Egypt before returning to Melbourne. Monash told his wife that he did not believe any of his letters would be the subject of censorship in Australia because he was writing about events that would be long past by the time his letters reached her.

I think there is no reason at all why, if you wish and opportunity presents itself you shouldn’t let people know freely about our happenings or about the special honors we are winning.

The public is not likely to hear of them otherwise, because Charley Bean seldom comes our way, nor is he allowed to write anything of a personal bearing. But C.P. Smith, whom I hope you have seen and treated well, would at all times be most glad to get titbits about my Brigade or me to make a news paragraph of and he would also understand the spirit in which these matters were given to him to use.

After just a month at Gallipoli, Monash also clearly thought this strategy could boost his own reputation: ‘One ought not to hide one’s light under a bushel, nor fail to have an eye to the future, and any little discreet publicity may weigh heavily in the scale when later on it becomes a question for those in authority to decide on recommendations for the War Honours list.’

Clearly, Monash—like fellow Australian officers such as Harry Chauvel—had his eye on a knighthood. Perhaps he shared the widely held belief that the war would not be a long one. It is evident that Monash did not believe Bean was paying enough attention to his brigade’s exploits. At the same time, he acknowledged that Bean was not permitted to write ‘anything of a personal bearing’—in other words, reports that could affect people’s careers. Just three days later, he again wrote to Vic. With the letter to his wife was enclosed another letter:

Please lose no time in ensuring that enclosed letter reaches Mr Smith at The Argus office personally, and if you see him, urge him to have the account published in full.

It is due to this fine Brigade that the fullest publicity should be given to its historic doings, and that Australia should know what the Army thinks of us.

This was a reference to the remarks General Godley had made praising the 4th Brigade on 2 June. Their record was a fine one, Godley said, and one of which they and the whole of Australia had reason to be proud. As Godley spoke, Monash ordered one of his staff to take down his speech in shorthand. He added an introduction and conclusion and included it in the letter to Smith, which gave a not entirely accurate summary of the brigade’s actions on the first three days.

Bean would later describe the 4th Brigade’s defence of Monash Valley as one of the AIF’s four finest feats in the war. But that same day relations between the two worsened when Monash accused Bean of neglecting the exploits of his men. Bean did not refer to any of this in his diary entry for 2 June, but while his contact with the 4th Brigade at this early stage had not been lengthy, he did observe in this same entry that Monash’s men were ‘a fine brigade—rather easier and freer with their officers and not so neat or rigid as our division but fine free brave chaps with some good officers.’ He also defended Monash, noting that ‘some fool’ had approached a 1st Division officer ‘with a criminal bit of gossip about their commander, Col Monash, being a spy in the pay of Germany.’ He had no doubt that the rumour-monger ‘deserved to have been cashiered.’

On this issue Bean took a different—and more generous—line than John Gellibrand, who, years later, recalled an incident at Mena camp in Cairo when General Bridges showed him a bundle of letters that branded Monash as ‘an alien Jew’ and accused his wife of ‘open disloyalty’. Asked if he would recommend Monash’s discharge, Gellibrand told Bridges: ‘Yes—if the men distrust him he should go.’ In light of this, Gellibrand was amused to hear rumours in Egypt that Monash had been ‘shot for treachery at Anzac.’

In a letter to his wife on 30 June 1915, Monash wrote that since C.P. Smith had returned to Egypt, he no longer cared whether the article was published in The Argus, The Age ‘or even Punch as I want the 4th Brigade to get its share of Kudos.’ He expressed irritation with Bean:

Bean seems to write nothing but about the Australian Division; his boosting of the 3rd Brigade on the first two days is simply ridiculous. My Brigade had a far worse time (see the casualty lists) and made more ground than any other Brigade—but then you see our identity is lost with the ‘New Zealanders’, in whom none in Australia is interested. I gave Bean a good talking to about it, perhaps he will mend his ways. I do hope Godley’s speech reached you, and that you have succeeded in getting it published.

A 3500-word article under Smith’s byline appeared in The Argus on 16 July. Painting a glowing portrait of the deeds of Monash’s troops—and, by extension, his leadership—it was a gripping account of war. But in briefing Smith, Monash had not only effectively written his own press release but given it as an exclusive to a commercial competitor of the official correspondent.

Six days earlier, on 10 July 1915, three letters from Monash, dated 13, 16 and 20 May, appeared in The Argus with a note that Vic Monash had sent them in for publication. Rather paternalistically, he said the men were ‘as docile and patient, and obedient and manageable as children’ and ‘full of the finest spirit of self-devotion. For the most perilous enterprises whence volunteers are called for, every man offers instantly, although often it means certain death to many of them.’

While acknowledging that war was ‘not a nice thing at all, but one has to see it through,’ Monash also appeared to minimise the ordeal. ‘We are all of us certain that we shall no longer be able to sleep amid perfect quiet, and the only way to induce sleep will be to get someone to rattle an empty tin outside one’s bedroom door. If it were not so tragic it would be absolutely laughable to see men sleeping soundly and peacefully amid the awful clatter and confusion of sound,’ he wrote.

In a further letter, he noted the arrival of sixty mailbags, and the pleasure his letters gave him:

You will scarcely believe it, but I read the greater part of above mail during a severe battle. The firing line at one point was not more than 100 yards from my headquarters, and I kept on reading my letter in the interval between the long stream of inward and outward dispatches, messengers and orderlies. The action was by the 15th and 16th Battalions, in defence of an important position, and although I suffered 180 casualties I disposed of at least 2000 of the enemy, and took several prisoners including one German officer. The brigade is continuing to win undying glory.

With the role of his men on 25 April clearly uppermost in Monash’s mind, he asserted: ‘The 14th Battalion on the day of landing were sent to seize a hill and did so with the loss of 12 officers and 200 men, without faltering or wavering.’ Among those killed, he said, was ‘Captain Hogarth’. This was a reference to Captain William Hoggart, who was in fact killed on 27 April at Quinn’s Post. Monash conflated the two dates. The effect was to imply that Hoggart was killed on the day of the first landings. Monash also wrote: ‘The 16th Battalion on day 1 at dusk charged the Razor Ridge singing “Tipperary”’ and “Australia will be There”.’ However, the action involving the 16th Battalion occurred on the night of 2–3 May.

At the time there was little Bean could do that was right in Monash’s eyes. In a letter to his sister, Mat, on 18 July, Monash referred to two articles published a month earlier: ‘The one by Bean is stupid tosh, and spoils a really fine story of my Brigade’s earlier fight.’ Monash was entitled to want the story of his men’s deeds published, but the manner in which he achieved this was never going to sit well with an unpretentious character like Bean.

Bridges and White had assured Bean when he took the job that though under military control, as the correspondent he should be free to see as much as he could and to write as he thought fit. Thus to Bean the notion of journalistic independence was paramount. Monash could influence C.P. Smith to write favourable articles, but not Bean. Conflict between them was inevitable. In going behind Bean’s back to get his version of the story out Monash had acted unethically. On the other hand, his perception that Bean had spent more time with the battalions of the 1st Division may have been correct.

Ultimately, Bean and Monash needed each other, however, and both would come to admit it. But their relationship would be far from easy for the rest of the war and beyond.

17

The non-combatant

Anzac Cove was awash with newspapers from Australia. Monash saw the great excitement among the men on 8 June as they read the reports of their exploits. However, reading the papers for 9 May, Monash noticed that the casualty lists to that point included none of those killed in action during 25–27 April. ‘I am afraid Australia will get a terrible shock when it gets the full later lists,’ he wrote.

Bean thought the same. The Australian papers were several weeks old by the time they reached the peninsula, and he wondered about the mood back home. The latest reports showed that Australians were shocked when the names of fifty casualties were published. The actual number at that date had been more like 5000 for the 1st Division alone. He worried about the reaction when people saw the real figures. He turned to thoughts of his brother, Jack, who was recovering well from his wound but ambivalent about having the bullet removed. Jack’s shooting made the war seem all the more personal. In an almost casual note in his diary, Bean said that he had been ‘sniped at twice today whilst looking over parapets.’

Among the papers that had arrived, Bean saw an article by C.P. Smith in The Argus. He was incredulous as he read the claim that the troops in Egypt were catching pneumonia because they had to spend almost all their pay in making up for the starvation rations on which they were kept, while the officers lived well. He dismissed the article as ‘hopelessly misleading’, concluding that ‘some bitter doctor has got at’ Smith and ‘pulled his leg a bit’ in Alexandria. Clearly, Bean was feeling frustration—he may have been the only Australian journalist with the troops at Gallipoli, but the other correspondents were able to get their cables out far earlier from their bases in Egypt. And they were not bound by the same demands of accuracy. A few days later, on 21 June, another bundle of papers arrived from Britain. What Bean saw rankled:

The picture agencies ought really to be shown up—they are a disgrace to English journalism. There is never a bundle of these cuttings comes in but it contains a barefaced fraud upon the public. A photo of our men jumping out of boats without packs and without overcoats rolled is given as ‘the first Australians on Turkish soil.’ The men here take it as obviously a picture of one of our practice landings in Lemnos Harbour. It was far too dark when the first lot landed to take any instantaneous photo. Photos taken around camp at Mena, or on the old drain along the road, are given as views of active service on the Suez Canal. This is the sort of stuff which the picture papers are supplied with—and dish it up to the public. There really ought to be a law against it.

Bean’s attitude to the use of photos to illustrate the war was unbending; there was no room for manipulation. To say a photo represented something it did not was unacceptable. His mood was not helped five days later when he opened another bundle of papers. ‘My first reports arrived in papers from Australia today and see that they didn’t all take the 1st cable—The Argus didn’t—considered it late I suppose.’ Those words hardly masked his intense disappointment, for the first cable dealt with the landing—and he alone among the correspondents had been there all that first day.

Bean felt the need to explain to Australians—and by extension, newspaper editors—the situation in which he was operating. That same day he wrote a cable to the Commonwealth Gazette acknowledging that Australians might have wondered about the comparative lateness of some cables from him, their press representative. This, he wrote, was because when the troops landed he was not authorised to communicate anything to the press. British correspondents had already been given permission, but he had had to wait until the eighth day before he was given the official go-ahead. He said the news that Australians really wanted ‘can only be obtained by living in the thick of things.’ He then turned to his position in relation to the work of other war correspondents who, from the outset, had provided Australians with ‘splendid accounts’ of general events. ‘I decided to subordinate all other considerations to giving Australians a detailed accounting of the doings of their force upon which they could rely as certainly as if seen with their own eyes, even if it came a few days late. This account could be obtained by no other means. The Censor is helping me get these despatches away by the quickest possible method. I intend to continue the same principle.’

Bean suggested that Australians would by then have realised that cablegrams sent from Imbros, which were generally the earliest to arrive, were seldom true. Despite his own private diary entries questioning Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett’s accuracy, he added diplomatically that the Englishman’s cables were ‘needless to say thoroughly reliable.’

Monash still had the matter of press coverage on his mind. A few days earlier, on 22 June, he noted in another letter home that the men’s greatest wish was for news and general reading matter. All newspapers were greedily seized and passed from hand to hand, even though the news they contained was generally a month or more old. He added that although a fine account, Ashmead-Bartlett’s coverage had omitted ‘some of the best parts’:

Now this journalist did not land at all, and what he has written relates only to what he could see from the warship London and what he was told by the wounded. He, therefore, dilates only on the first landing under shell- and rifle-fire, the rush up the cliffs, and the gradual occupation of a defensive line. But this was only the beginning of things, and much the best work was done afterwards in gaining fresh ground, and in properly establishing ourselves and in beating off the constant fierce Turkish attacks which lasted for the first three weeks without cessation, night and day.

This, of course, was also at the core of Monash’s criticism of Bean: that he had not written about what he considered ‘much the best work’—the work by his own brigade.

If Monash was dissatisfied with Bean, the troops did not necessarily share his view. They had read Ashmead-Bartlett’s vivid account of the landing, and gradually their reactions filtered back to Australia. One army private wrote to his mother in early July: ‘I have been reading some Sunday Mails to hand with the pictorial honour lists and account of our doings in Gallipoli. They are fairly accurate. Bean’s is more accurate if not so graphic as Ashmead-Bartlett.’

As Private John Sloan wrote this letter to his mother, Bean was fighting to stay at Anzac Cove. Having returned from Pope’s Hill at 7.30 a.m. on 26 June and sent the cable to the Commonwealth Gazette, Bean tried to get some sleep. However, Arthur Bazley woke him urgently to hand over a letter that contained ‘something of a shock.’ The letter came from army headquarters and informed Bean that it had been decided to establish a war correspondents’ camp at Imbros. He was ordered to present himself there as soon as possible. Bean thought this was ‘all very well’ for the European correspondents who wanted general news of how the campaign was going. ‘For me—it would be just as good to be in Australia.’ And headquarters needed Bean’s skills in a variety of ways. Earlier in the month Major Blamey, concerned by frequent rumours he suspected had been spread by spies, asked Bean to arrange a ‘Furfies Gazette’, with the rumours ‘so exaggerated as to laugh them out of court.’ Thus was born the Dinkum Oil, which was soon circulated to the troops.

Angered by the order to move, Bean protested to Blamey and Brudenell White, who then took the matter to the new AIF commander, Major General Gordon Legge. An unpopular appointment among the senior Australian staff, Legge had taken over after the death of Bridges. He discussed Bean’s complaint with Birdwood, the result of which was a request that he set out his case in a memorandum.

Bean argued that it would be ‘quite impossible’ for him to do at Imbros the work for which the Australian Government had appointed him. His instructions from the Defence Minister, George Pearce, required him to ‘satisfy the poignant anxiety of Australians for news of their own men—their daily life, behaviour in action, their peculiar Australian interest which could only be given by an Australian.’ The Government had also given him instructions to write a history of Australia’s role in the war, as a permanent record for the nation. Bean pointed out that in their speeches at the dinner given to him in Melbourne before he left, Pearce and other ministers laid special stress upon this:

The category of news which my duties require me to obtain has no relation to that required by correspondents responsible to newspapers. I am paid and employed by my Government for the above duties. I have not attempted to sum up the general trend of the campaign, except in one, or possibly two small references to events already long since published in England. I do not know, I do not want to know, and, needless to say, have not attempted even remotely to touch on any future plans.

In an earlier diary entry, Bean saw the job of official war correspondent as consisting partly of propaganda work for the AIF, aimed at building morale at home: ‘the bright side has to be written up in one’s letters [despatches], and that leaves a great deal more than the due proportion of criticism for the diary.’ And in his memo to headquarters, he made it clear that he was seeking to present ‘scenes that will stir Australian pride—which is what the nation I represent wants to hear.’ He pointed out that news from Anzac would still get into the press in Australia, from letters, returned soldiers and third-hand exaggerations from Cairo. As was already the case, this would be ‘false news’ that was often distressing and sometimes alarming. ‘My duty to my Government has been to steadily correct these, distinguishing most carefully, falsehood from truth.’ Bean reminded headquarters that he had no competitor and the censor saw every word he wrote. He pointed out that the British had constant news about their troops:

Our nation has not one observer with its army, 8000 miles from home, to see and record similar things of its men, except myself . . . I would submit that my case is really quite distinct from that of private correspondents or of British correspondents, and trust the authorities will see their way to let me remain with the Australian Force.

Bean did not see it as his job to criticise military practices. While his attitude would change dramatically later in the war, at this stage he did not want to make waves. General Hamilton well knew this, and although he told Bean in his letter of response that no exception could be made, he nonetheless conceded the points that the Australian correspondent had made. Accordingly, he was promised ‘every facility to visit the Australian Division as often as he wishes to do so,’ and would be permitted to remain at Anzac for three or four days at a time. This, said Hamilton, recognised the desire of Dominion correspondents to practise their profession. Bean thought otherwise, noting that he had been prevented from covering the landing which Ashmead-Bartlett—and Reuters correspondent Lester Lawrence—had reported. Hamilton was even more generous in private, telling Bean and the New Zealand correspondent Malcolm Ross that he did not mind how long they stayed at Anzac Cove on their ‘visits’. ‘We caught his meaning,’ Bean said, ‘and thenceforth lived happily at Anzac, but with the inestimable privilege of being able to visit Imbros for a day or two holiday whenever we wished.’

Bean had been granted an important concession—something he recognised—though he was far from happy with the outcome: ‘It is probable we shall be able to carry on—the only drawback being waste of time and the moral certainty of being shelled almost every time we come in and out—which is quite unnecessary seeing our business gets no benefit and the State no security.’

Arriving at Imbros on 6 July, Bean soon saw just why the decision had been made to group all the correspondents together there in tents at ‘K Beach’—Kephalos Bay—on the south-eastern tip of the island. Bean didn’t often drink beer, but the press censor, Captain William Maxwell, invited him in for a drink and a long yarn. Bean had rarely troubled the censors, and Maxwell began by praising his work as ‘much the most complete that had been done here.’ He then explained just why Bean now found himself on the island. ‘The reason for rounding the rest of us up was in order to round up Ashmead-Bartlett. They weren’t at all satisfied with his proceedings, and wanted to have him thoroughly under control—and so made the rule to apply to the lot of us,’ Bean noted in his diary.

He soon found out that Ashmead-Bartlett had been doing more than reporting the war. Over breakfast, the Englishman talked about how he had seen the campaign go wrong. He had been forced to return to Britain in June after all his kit went down with the battleship Majestic, sunk by a German U-boat, and while there, he had lobbied the War Office, explaining exactly how he saw the situation at Gallipoli. To Bean, this seemed to be ‘typically and exactly the thing that a war correspondent ought not to do.’ Nonetheless, he thought Ashmead-Bartlett ‘a competent man, though certainly inaccurate.’

Assigned the job of setting up the new correspondents’ camp, Ashmead-Bartlett likened the proposed site to being ‘stranded on an inhospitable shore like Robinson Crusoe.’ Beside an army rest camp, it was ‘unsuitable for anyone who has to concentrate their mind and endeavour to write an intelligible account of what was passing at the Dardanelles.’ He chose another location a kilometre away amid a grove of shady trees and pegged out a central area among grape vines. He had tents pitched with little paths separating them, and soon had the Army erect a large hospital marquee as a mess tent. A cook was acquired, local wine was purchased and Ashmead-Bartlett managed to find some champagne supplies.

No one was in any doubt that it was Ashmead-Bartlett’s camp, and while some officers grumbled about the cost, they nonetheless went along with it. As Bean noted,‘Things always go his way when he’s about.’ Bean found the camp entertaining as Ashmead-Bartlett the raconteur held court. ‘We could not have had better entertainment in London. He was the cleverest conversationalist I have ever known, and for two hours after dinner he would scintillate.’ Bean noted that Malcolm Ross and another British journalist who had joined the camp, the older and highly experienced war correspondent Henry Nevinson, would urge Ashmead-Bartlett on, seeming ‘to know exactly how to apply the necessary leverage to keep that wheel turning.’ The tension between Hamilton and Ashmead-Bartlett was barely hidden, but the flamboyant correspondent showed little sign of resentment at Hamilton’s not so subtle attempts to control him.

Bean was in a contemplative mood when The Age’s correspondent, his friend Phillip Schuler, arrived on Imbros. Hamilton had given Schuler permission to join the camp—a welcome breakthrough for the Melbourne journalist who, enterprisingly, had watched the Gallipoli operations in April and May from a small launch before British destroyers banished him and two other correspondents from the zone. Schuler returned to Alexandria, from where he reported on the war as best he could.

As Bean welcomed Schuler, his brother Jack—now sufficiently recovered to resume his medical duties—also arrived. Along with Arthur Bazley, the four had dinner. Bean acknowledged the role that his batman was playing. ‘I’m afraid all my hospitality really is Bazley’s hospitality—all the work falls on him.’ Dinner finished, they all went for a swim. Later, Bean wrote in his diary: ‘I do hope we all get through this all right—it will be something to talk and think of afterwards between us all.’

Taking Schuler to the New Zealand No. 2 Post, which the Anzacs had held since May, Bean found the position now fortified and entrenched. The visit had another side for Bean. They saw a ‘Turk with his black head and shoulders over the trench top.’ One of the New Zealanders, Captain Cecil Paddon, of the Otago Mounted Rifles, had three shots at the Turk, who was about a mile away. Bean saw that the second shot made him move his head. He was momentarily taken aback by what happened next. ‘Paddon asked me if I would like a shot any time—but my job is not to shoot—I am not a combatant—and I will not do so.’

The status of non-combatant, however, does not necessarily confer invisible armour. Jack Bean had discovered this on the first day. Charles Bean had been sniped at, and knew well the sound of bullets. Two days before Paddon had offered him a shot at the Turk Bean had woken up during the night at Walker’s Ridge ‘to hear a bullet nick—PZzzzzzz—off the top of the parapet.’ The threat was there constantly as he wrote through the nights, trying to get his work done before sleeping during the morning. ‘During the night you hear all the bullets whizz down this gully, and fairly often hear them “thrpp” into the ground outside.’ The stray bullets were the worst, for they were the bullets that no one could prepare for. As Bean noted one day at headquarters: ‘The bullets flying over were only strays but there were a good many of them and a stray is just as deadly as a bullet aimed at you—only less likely to hit.’ The gap between life and death was often a matter of chance.

Bean thought it curious ‘how men get back to simple habits during a time like this. I have found one or two officers starting to read the Bible—and one told me he found it extraordinarily interesting.’ This struck a chord, for he added, ‘I wish I had the time—but I haven’t.’ Staying alive in such lethal surroundings not surprisingly turned one’s thoughts to mortality and spirituality—issues that Bean had wrestled with in his teenage years were now not quite so abstract.

18

Brothers in arms

Bean made his way along a winding dirt track to Reserve Gully on the evening of 5 August 1915. He was intent on more than the rugged features of a landscape he had come to know all too well. A briefing by Colonel Monash at his dugout lay ahead. Bean was to learn details of Monash’s role in the August offensive. This was to be General Hamilton’s final attempt to claim the peninsula after three months of continual hammering had produced no worthwhile gains. The stalemate left the Turks in control of the Dardanelles. The focus shifted to the area north of Anzac Cove, and the attacking forces bolstered by five additional British divisions.

As Bean recalled of the meeting with Monash, he had ‘strolled round to Reserve Gully, where [Monash] and his troops were perched in dugouts, as in pigeon holes round the great amphitheatre of sandy cliffs.’ The attack was set for the next day. The immediate objective at Anzac was to capture the heights, including the key positions Chunuk Bair, Hill Q, and the highest point, Hill 971, by early on 7 August. Converging attacks from the Australian Light Horse at The Nek and New Zealanders, under the command of the unpopular General Godley, from Chunuk Bair would then capture Battleship Hill and Baby 700.

The first attack at Anzac would be a feint launched at 5.30 p.m. on the 6th by the Australians. The 1st Brigade of Major General Harold ‘Hooky’ Walker’s 1st Australian Division would attack Turkish trenches at Lone Pine along the southern part of the Anzac line. The 1st Division comprised the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Brigades, which would also be responsible for holding the line at Anzac. Walker was opposed to the Lone Pine operation, believing it had little chance of success, but at least he had managed to postpone the start until after the 3 p.m. originally proposed. At 9 p.m., after the infantry attack had been launched against Lone Pine, landings would begin at Suvla Bay. The British IX Corps would proceed to occupy the hills to the north of Anzac known as the ‘W’ Hills in a bid to nullify Turkish batteries there. The ambitious plan was that once these hills had been taken, the British would link up with the Anzacs.

By then the main thrust towards the Sari Bair Range would have begun. Major General Herbert Cox would lead the force to attack Hill 971 and Hill Q, comprising Monash’s 4th Brigade and Cox’s own 29th Indian Brigade. They would advance along North Beach and make their way a kilometre up the Aghyl Dere, where two of the four Australian battalions would screen the northern flank. The rest of the troops would make the hard climb through rough and tangled terrain until they reached the Aghyl Dere’s main fork. At that point two of the Gurkha battalions would press on to attack and occupy Hill Q. The remaining Australians and Indians would continue north-east, climbing over Damakjelik Bair and then down into the Asma Dere, before reaching Abdel Rahman Spur. This would leave them just a kilometre away from capturing Hill 971, the high point.

Coinciding with this, the attack on the right would also begin, the advance spearheaded by the New Zealand Infantry Brigade, to take Chunuk Bair. The key objective was to capture this summit and the heights to its south and link up with Anzac positions at Russell’s Top. The New Zealand Mounted Rifles were to capture Turkish outposts and clear the Turks from the foothills by 11 p.m. to allow the infantry to start their approach. With the Sari Bair ridgeline taken, the 3rd Light Horse Brigade would launch their assault at The Nek at 4.30 a.m. Along with various feints to be undertaken, this was an ambitious and complex plan involving coordinated timing which would test the fittest of troops, let alone men ravaged by fatigue and disease. And it required first-rate commanders.

Bean was impressed by Monash’s explanation. ‘As a clear logical exposition of a scheme of operations, it surpassed any that I had ever listened to . . . a masterpiece of lucid explanation.’ Given the antipathy between the two, it seems reasonable to conclude that Monash briefed Bean with a view to ensuring that his role—and that of his men—in the coming attack was reported prominently. Clearly, he was confident of the outcome. The two men met again early the next afternoon. Neither was in any doubt about the importance of the next few hours.

Bean left Monash and went to see his brother Jack in preparation for the attack at Lone Pine. ‘He and I had previously been along to see where the fight could best be seen from,’ he noted. With 200 metres of No Man’s Land between the Australian and Turkish trenches, ‘Hooky’ Walker had hit upon the ruse of minimising the danger to his men by having them burst out of tiny, cramped tunnels dug into No Man’s Land. Bean wanted to be close to where his brother was located, and went to a tunnel crowded with men from the 3rd Battalion. ‘Some are crouching beside me under the parapet; others are in the body of the trench.’ Like the troops, Bean wore a white calico patch sewn onto his back. That way the Australians would not be mistaken for Turks.

Bean noted that the time was 5.25 p.m. There was an air of expectancy, with men chaffing one another, eager for action. ‘I saw not the slightest trace of nervousness,’ he wrote. ‘Men all had packs with some sort of tucker or knick-knacks in.’ The top sandbags were pulled down to make it easier for the men to scramble over, and Bean heard an officer yell: ‘Prepare to jump out.’ He then put a whistle between his teeth and blew it as the signal to attack. At 5.33 p.m. the first wave of 1800 Australians jumped out and dashed towards the Turkish trenches. Bean saw four of the Australians ‘dancing’ the last part of the way. ‘One poor fellow beside me immediately fell back into the trench bleeding at the mouth, shot through both cheeks. I can see through the periscope flocks of our men who are running forward from the trenches all along this part of the line, all racing at a good running pace through the scrub.’

But something was not quite right; the troops seemed to be bunching up. Soon they were standing like ‘spectators along a street kerb’ above trenches covered by heavy pine logs that the preparatory naval bombardment had failed to smash. They stood on top, firing through the gaps or jumping in any opening they could find. Bean saw ‘rifle butts come up’ as the troops went to work with their bayonets in the narrow trenches. As he put it, bayonets were ‘drenched to the butt with blood.’ He saw more men brave the Turkish shrapnel. ‘I follow in the periscope some man who doubles like a rabbit across that patch of fireswept scrub. One watches with his heart in his mouth, but the majority get safely over the further parapet. The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Battalions have made their rush, and the 1st Battalion is now filing into the fire trench behind me.’

Turkish shellfire began hitting Bean’s trench, ‘simply lathering this line of trenches. Every man in them has been drenched from head to foot with showers of sandy parapet thrown up by the explosion.’ After ninety minutes of fighting, Bean looked forward and saw men clustered in two bunches. ‘Someone looking long through the periscope notices that not one of those white-patched uniforms has stirred; they have fought their last brave fight. I suppose some machine-gun caught them lying exposed.’

Lone Pine was taken, but Turkish reserves began to arrive for the start of the long attempt to retake the trenches by bombing. Over the next three nights the Australians would experience a bomb fight such as they had never known. Bean captured the desperate madness:

Noting that the Turkish bombs had long fuses, the Australians constantly caught them and threw them back before they burst. The Turks then learnt to shorten the fuses and many boys’ hands were blown off, and others were blinded or killed. Hundreds of times bombs falling into the trenches were smothered with half-filled sandbags; but others burst, killing and wounding the groups behind the barricades, and the stream of wounded was continuous.

On both sides the dead clogged many of the trenches. When on 10 August fighting stopped at Lone Pine, six Australian battalions had lost, in all, eighty officers and 2197 men, and the Turks 5000 men. The battalions of the 1st Brigade lost so heavily that few witnesses of its efforts remained.

This, of course, was supposed just to be a feint for the main attack on the night of 6 August, at Suvla Bay. But under the command of Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Stopford, the plan had gone wrong early. At the age of sixty-one, Stopford had been appointed to a position for which he had no experience. He possessed no combat experience, and it would later emerge that he knew he was unsuited to the job and protested his appointment. Nevertheless he was given the command to guide 10th, 11th and 53rd Divisions—IX Corps. Having landed at Suvla, Stopford dithered. Rather than immediately striking out beyond nearby Salt Lake as directed, he chose merely to consolidate his position at Suvla Bay, though there were no Turkish troops to hinder the advance.

Having witnessed the start of the fighting at Lone Pine, and when he thought things ‘seemed settled here,’ Bean decided to leave the trench and have dinner. As he left, he passed men from the 3rd Battalion; someone told him that his brother had been hit in the wrist by shrapnel and was back at the beach. Soon after, Jack was evacuated to the hospital ship Sicilia. The wound turned septic and he was sent back to Egypt, en route to Britain.

Just after 11 p.m. Bean had the first inkling that plans might not be going to schedule for Monash. He heard that the New Zealand Mounted Rifles were held up on Table Top, at the foot of Rhododendron Spur. Despite this, Monash and the Indians were starting out. ‘Some small risk perhaps if [Mounted Rifles] could not clear ridges—might make Monash’s retreat difficult—but worth taking. Gen. Birdwood clearly thought so,’ Bean noted. During the night, things started to go awry; he lost his pince-nez and field glasses.

Bean made his way towards General Godley’s headquarters. On the way he passed two wounded men, left behind by Monash for the stretcher bearers. Bean knew they needed help quickly and approached a British medical officer. He refused to send his men in because the area was under fire; fortunately, New Zealand stretcher bearers he approached had no such qualms. Then there was the ‘poor chap’ he saw lying motionless on the ground. ‘I stooped down to feel for his pulse but the hand was quite cold.’

By now it was clear that the attack was falling well behind time. Reaching Godley’s headquarters, Bean was surprised to find that the general was not on top of things, having forgotten ‘an elementary part of the attack’ concerning orders given to the Indian Brigade. As bullets whipped into the sand in front of the headquarters, Godley gave him a whisky, and Bean left before daybreak to find news of Monash. Godley gave him a message to tell Monash to hurry things along. Bean left in the moonlight and headed towards the 4th Brigade’s front line, passing slow-moving Indian troops and several wounded Australians. Stray bullets were ‘lisping into the ground’ around him. He thought Monash was further to the left, and was about to head there when he heard distant fire that he assumed must be British. At that point the war became very personal:

I was moving on again when something gave me a whack (like a stone thrown hard) in the upper part of the right leg . . . I was pretty sure I had been hit by a stray which had gone in on the right and not come out, but I couldn’t feel any blood, and so thought it might not have penetrated at all. Some of the stones from shell bursts had hit me quite as hard earlier this day—but presently I felt my hand greasy in my pants, so I knew I must go back.

He limped his way back to Godley’s headquarters, where the general gave him another whisky and sent him to a dressing station. After treatment, he walked slowly ‘home’ along the sap. He heard a tremendous but brief bombardment as dawn broke. He had been given a white ticket to take to the Casualty Clearing Station, and realised that if he went there he would almost certainly be sent to the hospital ship. ‘I did not feel any trouble except a stiff leg, and so I decided to keep the ticket in my pocket and go to my dugout.’ This was fortunate, for otherwise he would have missed the rest of the August fighting.

As Bean hobbled back with a bullet in his thigh, disaster was about to beset the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at The Nek. A delay in leaving the trenches following confusion caused by the Royal Navy’s preliminary bombardment stopping seven minutes early allowed the Turks ample time to organise their defences. Despite this the Light Horse were ordered to attack on the grounds that everything must be done to assist the New Zealanders to make the main attack on the heights. When the first wave—men of the 8th Light Horse—rose from the trench, the Turks cut them down within seconds. A second wave of the 8th was similarly destroyed. There was a pause. An officer questioned the value of sending more men to certain death but the Light Horse were ordered to press on. Next rose the first wave of the 10th Light Horse. As Bean would later write: ‘The 10th went forward to meet death instantly, as the 8th had done, the men running as swiftly and as straight as they could at the Turkish rifles. With that regiment went the flower of the youth of Western Australia.’

A fourth wave of Western Australians also charged before the attack was finally called off. To Bean, this was ‘one of the bravest actions in the history of war’, in which every man knew he was unlikely to survive: ‘At first here and there a man raised his arm to the sky, or tried to drink from his water bottle; but, as the sun of that burning day climbed higher, such movements ceased: over the whole summit the figures lay still in the quivering heat.’ In the forty-five minutes to 5.15 a.m., 234 Australians had been killed in an area little larger than a couple of tennis courts.

Amid this slaughter, Bean staggered to his dugout and went to bed without waking Bazley. Later that morning, Bazley thought Bean was sleeping rather late and woke him. ‘I’ve been hit, Baz,’ Bean groaned. Bazley summoned Colonel Neville Howse, the senior medical officer, who strongly recommended that Bean be evacuated to minimise the risk of tetanus infection. Bean refused to leave. He stayed in the dugout for the next three weeks, having the wound dressed daily. Bean needed to rest but refused to stop working. Phillip Schuler helped out by keeping him up to date on the fighting. This allowed Bean to continue dictating cables to Bazley. To Schuler, Bean was ‘the most enthusiastic, painstaking, and conscientious worker that I have ever met.’

Bean rationalised that many men on Gallipoli would have a wound similar to his and would not report it, dismissing their limp as merely a strain. A few days later, Howse told Bean that he would not cut out the bullet, because if he did Bean would have to leave Gallipoli for a while. The bullet would remain in his leg for the rest of his life. On 26 August, The Sydney Morning Herald, along with other Australian newspapers, carried a paragraph from Bean revealing that he had been shot and that this would affect his ability to file his reports:

CAPTAIN BEAN WOUNDED.

Reporting from Gaba Tepe, under date of August 11 on the extensive operations of the Allied armies in Gallipoli, Captain C.E.W. Bean, Official Press Representative with the Australian Expeditionary Forces, says: I regret personally having been unable to get later details of the great attack, owing to being slightly wounded on the morning of August 7, whilst making my way toward the 4th Australian Brigade. This will prevent my personally moving about for a few days, and will unfortunately delay the collection of details for letters.

As he rested, Bean sent a note about his wounding to Jack, who was still in Alexandria. Jack replied, ‘Do take care of yourself in future. You know it would break [Father and Mother] if anything happened to you and whatever you may say—Your clear duty to Australia is to safeguard yourself to the utmost. A fat lot of good you’ll be to write History either wounded or dead.’ Jack didn’t like the idea of his brother nursing himself in a dugout. He thought he should be on a hospital ship, but if he was going to stay at Anzac, he should request plenty of morphia tablets, as well as some mosquito netting, creosol antiseptic and linoleum to improve conditions in his dugout. Jack was tired and in pain himself:

I can’t help getting wounded like this. I was only obeying orders—tho’ I blame myself for not moving to a safer spot when my little aid post got enfiladed as it very soon did by Turkish shrapnel. Heavens we did have a hot time. Shell after shell kept bursting quite close to us—just overhead or a few yards behind or a few in front. I got hit on the back of the neck by a lump of earth and shells exploding near covered us in a dust cloud . . . Then a man who had been detailed off to me to manage the anti-gas spray got hit by shrapnel in the chest. He was standing by me at the time and I was attending to him myself when I was hit.

Jack was depressed about his wound, fearing it might end his soldiering, and doubted if his right hand and wrist would ever be much use again. Indeed, he wrote to his brother using his left hand. ‘Hold this to a mirror and read from right to left and you will make it out,’ he suggested with a touch of droll humour that Lucy and Edwin Bean—had they known of the wounds their sons had suffered—would have struggled to find amusing.

•

At the time Charles Bean was shot, John Monash was dealing with an unfolding disaster in what would later be described as ‘an extraordinarily difficult bit of country.’ This was the Aghyl Dere, a deep creek bed north of the main Anzac position, along which Monash’s 4th Brigade was to move to assault Hill 971. The route had not been properly explored beforehand, and the brigade became lost and delayed in the dark amid the wild tangle of ravines.

By 5 a.m. on 7 August Monash’s battalion commanders were reporting that their men were ‘absolutely done and were lying panting instead of digging.’ Two hours later, with his plan wrecked and close to exhaustion after the exertion of the night march, Monash was a shaken man, his mood resembling that following the failure of the attack on the night of 2–3 May when he had complained to Bean. Ill-feeling began to emerge against Monash: while there had been heavy sacrifices at The Nek and Lone Pine, his troops had been unable to advance against light opposition in the Aghyl Dere.

In his diary, Bean dwelt at length on what had happened to Monash: ‘He was held up by finding opposition (he was rather anxious about this because his track led him past or near their reserves) but opposition cannot have been great for his losses were small.’ Bean noted that Monash had failed to reach Abdel Rahman ridge—the northern spur of the Sari Bair Range, coming off Hill 971. With shrapnel pouring on them going up the valley to the ridge, and with his men deadly tired, Monash had not pushed on but dug in on the ridge. Bean ridiculed such an excuse: ‘It seems to me a decision which many weak commanders would make but utterly unjustifiable. That is to say instead of pushing on in spite of fatigue till he was actually stopped by the enemy, he stopped short of his objective without being stopped.’ The plan had been to try and ensure that there were few men in front of Monash for about twelve hours:

The whole chance lay in avoiding the risk of this battle crystallising again into a trench battle and that could only be done by sacrificing everything to speed. We might not have succeeded even then. The point in which some of these Brigade commanders seem to me grievously to have failed was that they did not on the first advance find out whether they could have succeeded—they stopped before the enemy stopped them. I don’t believe General Walker, or Sinclair-MacLagan, or McLaurin, or McCay would have stopped . . .

This was the strongest criticism Bean had levelled against any Australian officer. Bean, of course, was convalescing in his dugout when he penned the withering assessment and had gained most accounts of Monash’s operation second-hand. Moreover, he did not obtain Monash’s own account of what had happened until 20 August, on the eve of the first battle for Hill 60. This was hardly a convenient occasion, and Monash wrote testily, ‘Bean to tea and he lengthily and wearily cross-examines me on operations of August 6/7.’

Although Bean’s tone in the Official History was more moderate, his criticism of Monash stood: ‘he was not a fighting commander of the type of Walker, McCay or Chauvel, and the enterprise in which he was now engaged was one calling for still more—the touch of a Stonewall Jackson, and the recklessness of a J.E.B. Stuart.’ However, Bean doubted whether Birdwood and his new Chief of Staff, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Skeen, grasped how difficult was the task they had set Monash’s brigade. He blamed their inexperience: ‘In France . . . we should have considered about half this task practicable and would never have dreamed of setting more with any hope of success.’ Thus Bean effectively recognised that the 4th Brigade could not have been pushed farther, regardless of who commanded it. Not having been present that night, he was unable to analyse the extent of the brigade’s disorganisation.

Monash’s leadership was certainly far from faultless. But in that he was not alone. The operations had failed because of poor leadership at corps, brigade and divisional level. This would be true of all the operations of the August offensive.

19

General failure

Raw troops from the 5th Brigade’s 18th and 19th Battalions had arrived at Gallipoli. Reinforcements they were, and desperately needed, with dysentery adding to the toll of battle. Most of the battalion were working class—labourers, bootmakers, miners, boundary riders—and Charles Bean observed that ‘everybody wanted these new Australians—great big cheery fellows whom it did your heart good to see—quite the biggest lot I have ever seen, and such a splendid cheery contrast to our tired old fellows.’ Indeed, the reinforcements arrived ‘like a fresh breeze from the Australian bush.’

The 18th Battalion’s commanding officer was Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Ernest Chapman, a forty-six-year-old police magistrate and Boer War veteran from Sydney. There would be no time for him and his troops to ease their way into operations. Having arrived on Gallipoli on the night of 19–20 August, they were ordered to be ready for action just two nights later in a bid to capture Hill 60, a low knoll at the northern end of the Sari Bair range which dominated Suvla Bay. Capturing this hill, along with Scimitar Hill, would allow the Anzac and Suvla landings to be securely linked. The operation should have been unnecessary. Anzac troops had passed over the hill during the assault on Hill 971 but had not secured it. Now they would have to do it all over again in trying to wrest it from the Turks.

The attacking force largely comprised Monash’s men, who had taken up positions in a gully known as Australia Valley, leading towards Hill 60. Among other units involved were the Canterbury Mounted Rifles and the Otago Mounted Rifles of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade. According to Bean, the British General Herbert Cox, commander of the 29th Indian Infantry Brigade, and Colonel Guy Russell, commander of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles, decided just before midnight on 21 August that ‘the [Turkish] communication trench on Hill 60 should be carried at dawn, and that a fresh battalion should be used for the task.’

This was a questionable decision, as what was proposed was simply another frontal attack uphill, against an entrenched enemy who had protected supply lines and expected just such an action. Chapman’s 18th Battalion was chosen to be part of the operation. Bean admired both Cox and Russell, whom he described as careful and able officers. Chapman protested: his men were tired, and they had not been issued with rations nor supplied with bombs for an attack that required them. The New Zealand officer who gave the orders to Chapman, Major Charles Powles, merely replied, Bean wrote, that ‘They could do the best that was possible without them.’ Before the battle began, the battalion’s young officers ‘had spoken gravely to [the men] of their high duty in the tests they were about to face.’ Bean knew the family of one of them, Lieutenant Wilfred Addison, from his days in Sydney’s legal world. The young officer had said, ‘I daresay, I shall be one of the first to fall.’

From his trench, Bean could see the glare of fires springing up in the tinder-dry scrub from exploding shells. He was concerned that a grass fire was burning in the place where Anzac wounded were lying. He calmly noted that a Turk had shot at his telescope from about 400 metres. ‘The earth flicked over me,’ he wrote with seeming unconcern. Later that night, as he came up a gully he ran across three saddles—all that remained of three mules that had been carrying bombs. One had started to kick, setting the explosives off—and killing two men.

Bean was unimpressed by what he saw of Monash’s 4th Brigade that night. Describing one company’s reaction to enemy shellfire, he wrote: ‘Can’t help thinking the 4th Brigade hasn’t quite got the standard of the 1st and 3rd. The company I saw ought not to have run away when a high explosive shell or two burst in the gully.’

Bean took aim at Monash’s ability to command his troops, identifying faulty communication that he attributed to inadequate training. ‘They don’t know where the other parts of their battalion or Brigade are.’ He considered that they were also apt to wander. ‘The Brigadier certainly knows less of the situation than any Brigadier I have seen—twice if not 3 times I have found that I know more about it than he does.’ Bean praised the men as excellent and rated the officers as very good. ‘But its want of success can’t be accidental every time.’ He believed the units were left to themselves more than in any other brigade.

Monash was not the only one in Bean’s sights during this operation. Observing from trenches where fifty men of the newly arrived but ill-prepared 18th Battalion remained in the front line, he was scathing about Chapman’s behaviour:

I saw this Col. [Chapman]. He clearly had not the remotest idea of what [his men] had or hadn’t done. He was saying in front of the men that they had lost their confidence that it was wicked to put them in tired as they were . . . They didn’t know the look of a bomb . . . It would have been better to put them in and tell them nothing (which I rather suspected is just a bit what the Colonel did for he didn’t seem to understand his orders)—‘and now they’re blaming me for this!’ he said in front of them (his troops)—clearly the first thing to be done for the good of a good regiment like this one is to sack Col. Chapman. He said he wouldn’t act on his orders like those if he got them again.

In Bean’s account, Major Powles directed the 18th Battalion to front-line trenches where they were told to fix bayonets, charge magazines and form two lines, then carry out the assault. Sent out through a gap in the scrub and into the open, they captured one trench before being sent on to another. As the Turks poured a ‘tremendous fire’ onto the positions, Powles sent out the next wave of the 18th. Lieutenant Addison was reported to have jumped up and shouted, ‘Come on, boys, the next one.’ Bean described how Addison ‘with dying and wounded around him, and machine-gun bullets tearing up the ground where he stood, steadied and waved forward the remnant of his platoon until he himself fell pierced with several bullets.’ As he had predicted, Addison died.

The Australians were forced to withdraw to the first trench. Fewer than half of the 18th Battalion’s 750 men in the assault survived without injury. It had been a futile attack. Chapman, the second in command for the attack, was accused of huddling in a trench with his adjutant while the men ran ‘around like wild rabbits in the trenches, and the morale of the battalion was considerably shaken.’

Chapman’s position continued to deteriorate, and he tried to resist his next order to attack, on 24 August. His superior officers took an increasingly dim view of his actions. But Chapman was furious with the way his battalion had been treated and wanted to protect them from another pointless attack—which, despite his protestations, went ahead. When it was over, there were 1100 casualties among the combined force of the 18th Battalion, the 9th and 10th Light Horse Regiments, the New Zealand Mounted Riflemen and the 5th Connaught Rangers.

Three days later, the 18th Battalion went into action, again fruitlessly, at Hill 60. And again they were decimated, suffering another 256 casualties. After just two charges, barely 100 men remained of the original 750 from 21 August. Two days later, Chapman resigned in fury when his men were told they could have another go at the enemy. He was evacuated to Lemnos with ‘shock’ before being sent home as medically unfit.

Bean’s reporting of the events shows how reluctant he was to publicly criticise soldiers—even when he did so in his diary. In his report of the attack, he wrote that ‘by a fine charge the 18th took one trench but, being unused to bomb warfare, were forced to retire before a bomb attack, which the Turks put up from a trench 20 yards distant.’ Bean did not mention Chapman. He wrote of the action again a few weeks later, describing how enthusiastic the men of the 18th Battalion were and how ‘Australians should be legitimately proud that there was an instantaneous demand for their services. Everybody seemed to want some of the “new Australians”.’

In putting the operation in the best possible light, Bean acknowledged that the lack of bombs had been decisive. Thus was established the accepted, public, historical record. However, Bean failed to hold to account the officer directly responsible for issuing the orders that sent ill-prepared raw troops into battle and led to the massacre—Colonel Guy Russell, commander of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles. Perhaps he had become inured to the suffering of battle, while newcomers such as Chapman were not.

Later, in his Official History, Bean did focus on Russell and his brigade major, Powles, saying they ‘lacked the realisation that the attack upon such a position required minute preparation, and that the unskilfulness of raw troops, however brave, was likely to involve them in heavy losses for the sake of results too small to justify the expense.’ Plainly, the 18th Battalion had been sent out under-equipped and ill-prepared.

In a diary entry at the end of August, Bean returned to the failure of the first attacks of the month, ridiculing British use of older and inefficient men to command battalions and brigades. ‘Poor old things they are doing their best; it is really rather pathetic,’ he wrote, adding that no brigadier should be over forty-five and no colonel over forty. In particular, he had sixty-one-year-old Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Frederick Stopford in his sights. While waiting until the Turks had poured in reinforcements to surround the beachhead at Suvla, his troops had suffered heavy casualties. Once again a state of trench warfare set in. Stopford was sent home to London in disgrace a week later.

Monash also thought Stopford’s leadership inept. In a letter to his wife on 25 August, Monash summarised the Dardanelles situation after the failure of the offensives. This was one letter he did not want published, and it would remain so for twenty years:

At Suvla, while there was an open road to the Dardanelles and no opposition, a whole army corps sat down on the beach while its leaders [including Stopford] were quarrelling about questions of seniority and precedence . . . the delay of 48 hours enabled the Turks to bring up their last reserve and render futile this landing, which was to protect the left flank of the Anzac advance.

Here at [GHQ on] Lemnos the watchword for everything and everybody is inefficiency and muddle, and red tape run mad. I only wish I dare to write without reserve about this and many other things.

Bean remained critical of Monash’s performance on the night of August 6–7—a moment that he believed had required great energy. ‘Sleepy old John Monash—cautious if ever a man was—is one of the worst sort of men for such a move; but he’s probably brilliant compared to some others.’ Bean believed that British and Anzac commanders were responsible for the failure of the offensives—and Monash, though clearly not to the same degree as Stopford, had contributed to this.

Monash no doubt would have disagreed with Bean’s assessment of his part in the offensives, but he agreed that the crux of the failure lay with the ‘poor quality’ of British troops and their commanders, who had allowed themselves to be driven out of positions hard won by Anzac troops and given over to them to hold. Monash had had a number of British soldiers under his command from time to time, and he claimed: ‘. . . they can’t soldier for sour apples. They have no grit, no stamina or endurance, poor physique, no gumption, and they muddle along and allow themselves to be shot down because they don’t even know how to take cover. It will be a poor lookout for the Empire if this is the class of soldier they are going to rely on in Flanders . . .’ Monash placed the fault squarely with the officers. They kept themselves aloof and did ‘not mix with the men as we do,’ and were ‘chiefly concerned in looking after themselves and making themselves comfortable.’

If Bean was critical of the officers he believed too old or incompetent to command in war, he had nothing but praise for the Australian troops who had been prepared to sacrifice their lives during the August offensive. The Light Horsemen slaughtered at The Nek on 7 August were ‘single-minded, loyal Australian country lads—who left their trenches in the grey light of that morning with all their simple treasures on their backs to bivouac in the scrub that evening—the shades of evening found them lying in the scrub with God’s wide sky above them.’ Bean saw this as a deed of ‘self-sacrifice and bravery’ unsurpassed in military history.

Such gallantry fitted the image of the hardy, bush-bred soldier who Bean believed formed the backbone of the AIF. The Australians and New Zealanders did ‘not trust the Tommy,’ he asserted, adding that they had ‘not the slightest confidence in Kitchener’s army.’

The truth is that after 100 years of breeding in slums, the British race is not the same, and can’t be expected to be the same, as in the days of Waterloo. It is breeding one fine class at the expense of all the rest. The only hope for it is that those puny narrow chested little men may, if they come out to Australia or N.Z. or Canada, within 2 generations breed men again. England herself, unless she does something heroic, cannot hope to.

Bean clearly believed that the industrial revolution in Britain, which had forced people into unplanned and unhealthy cities, was now playing out adversely on the battlefield. Because of a failure to better plan towns and cities and thus improve the health of the people, Tommies were inferior to the troops from the Dominions. It was a theme he would return to again and again.

Bean’s more immediate focus was the failure of the final operations in the August offensive. The Australians had captured trenches at the summit of Hill 60, but the Turks clung to the vital northern face that overlooked Suvla. The month-long operations had been a disaster, leaving the Allied forces still with just a toehold on the peninsula, and winter approaching. The prospects were bleak.

20

The workhorse and the gadfly

When Keith Murdoch arrived at Gallipoli, Charles Bean was just managing to get around, despite the bullet in his leg, when dysentery sent him back to bed again. Arriving on 3 September 1915, Murdoch was on his way to London for the Sydney Sun and Melbourne Herald to manage their jointly operated United Cable Service from the Times office. He also had another task: the Australian government had commissioned him to stop off in Egypt to investigate alleged irregularities in the mail service to the troops.

But Murdoch also wanted to know what was really happening with the Gallipoli campaign, as did the Australian Government, unhappy with inadequate briefing by the British. Prime Minister Andrew Fisher had not been informed in advance of the Anzac landing, and little substantive information had reached him since then. Military censorship had effectively masked unpleasant news, leaving Australians with the impression that while Gallipoli was a difficult campaign, the Allies would ultimately triumph. In July, General Sir Ian Hamilton had decided that, despite the military censorship, the reports of war correspondents were not sufficiently positive. With the August offensive, he began releasing his own brief but optimistic reports for publication; phrases such as ‘a successful attack’ and ‘additional gains and further progress’ described the operations of Anzac troops as the ‘Turks beat a hasty retreat.’

Bean’s reports were the most influential in shaping Australian public understanding of the campaign’s progress. But his cables, while providing great detail on the nature of fighting and the ‘bravery under fire’ by the Anzacs, were also guarded as to the progress of the campaign. When Bean’s story of the battle for Lone Pine appeared in the Australian afternoon papers in late August 1915, his discursiveness softened the reality of the failures during the month’s offensives:

Our troops have taken the main Turkish trenches . . . Lower down our ships are placing shells into the trench. . . . The Turks have counter-attacked on the main ridge . . . The beach for two days has been almost quiet. For a time only one Turkish gun appeared to be shelling the Australian position at all. On the others a mysterious silence has fallen . . . The position at the moment of writing is that we have given the Turks a heavy blow. Opposite part of the Australian line the battle is still raging.

Such reports made for less than compelling reading. Bean knew that while he was free to write as he saw fit and to criticise the military hierarchy without any suggestion of disloyalty, he was still under military control. He therefore had to be careful about inadvertently revealing operational information. This necessarily restricted what he was able to write. Everything he wrote had to be sent through the censor. Inevitably this encouraged self-censorship. Murdoch was not subject to the same controls, and his visit immediately after the failure of the August offensive came at a crucial time. Frustrations were running high, and people were ready to talk.

Murdoch’s sense of patriotism had been galvanised by the outbreak of war. He had friends in high places, including Prime Minister Fisher. In a letter to Fisher on 21 June 1915, Murdoch convinced him that his journalism would be valuable to the war effort. He emphasised that with his London appointment, he would have ‘sole control and responsibility for the cable service.’ He wanted to do more. ‘I turn to you for guidance in this matter, and I want you to know that I have always felt that I could joyfully perform any task you set me in the service of my country.’

For Murdoch, journalistic values of impartiality and accuracy were secondary considerations. He was more concerned with the effect he could produce on readers. He loved the power he could wield through writing, and in war such power was great indeed.

Letters of introduction from Fisher and Pearce, together with a ‘wheedling’ letter from Murdoch himself, convinced Hamilton to allow him to visit the Australian troops at Gallipoli on condition that he agree to abide by censorship rules. Murdoch agreed, pledging not to attempt to correspond by any means not officially sanctioned. (Later, Hamilton remembered Murdoch as ‘a sensible, well-spoken man with dark eyes, who said his mind was a blank about soldiers and soldiering, and made me uncomfortable by an elaborate explanation of why his duty to Australia could be better done with a pen than with a rifle.’)

His stopover in Egypt left Murdoch well primed when he arrived at Gallipoli. Although ill, Bean took him to view the battle-torn landscape from the hilltop. Over the next two days Murdoch moved about Gallipoli by himself, meeting senior officers and also General Birdwood. Bean took Murdoch up to Quinn’s Post before he left on 6 September. The visit convinced Murdoch that life at Anzac was ‘spiritual, mental and physical pain.’ His conversations with officers confirmed that a costly and hopeless stalemate had developed. As he would tell the Dardanelles Commission in 1917: ‘I became strongly impressed with the fact that the expedition had wholly failed, that the armies were in a parlous position, and that the situation was not receiving due consideration in London.’

Murdoch sailed to the war correspondents’ camp on Imbros, where he met Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. The pair got on well, and it was not long before Ashmead-Bartlett confirmed Murdoch’s assessment that the campaign was doomed and that no one in London, or at Gallipoli, seemed to have given a thought to this. In his diary, Ashmead-Bartlett noted Murdoch’s visit and his alarm over the state of the army and the prospects of a winter campaign:

He tells me that the Australians dread it above all else, and that many of their positions will be quite untenable. He declares, and I think quite rightly, that unless someone lets the truth be known at home we are likely to suffer a great disaster. He is about to leave for London but he says as he has only been here a short time, and has only acquired a local knowledge of Anzac, he does not feel that his word will carry sufficient weight with the authorities.

Ashmead-Bartlett had serious concerns about accepting an offer from Murdoch to take a letter from him to the British government ‘telling the plain truth,’ but he realised it was most likely his last chance before it was too late ‘to let the truth be known.’ He rationalised his decision in his diary: ‘Even if I am breaking the censorship, that is beside the point: the issue now is to try and save what is left of the army.’ He decided to write a letter to the British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and resigned himself to the potential consequences. Additionally, he gave Murdoch his thoughts before handing him the letter addressed to Asquith.

As Murdoch sailed via Marseilles for London, the war correspondents’ censor, Captain William Maxwell, a former war correspondent himself, arranged for the war correspondents to have a ten-day Greek island holiday at Mytilene. After the hardships of Gallipoli, the town’s cafes and hot baths were a welcome break. Staying at the Hotel Grande Bretagne, however, Ashmead-Bartlett thought it a ‘vile hole’ and complained of the fleas. Bean told him he had experienced no such problem, prompting Ashmead-Bartlett to respond to his tall, lean colleague, ‘Well, you know, Bean, even a flea won’t bite a bone.’

As his few days away ended, Bean reflected on the task of reporting war, concluding that the war correspondent was responsible for most of the ideas of battle that the public possessed. He did not spare himself self-criticism but was critical of the cant produced by other correspondents wrote:

. . . that is why I can’t write about bayonet charges like some of the correspondents do. Ashmead-Bartlett makes it a little difficult for one by his exaggerations, and yet he’s a lover of the truth. He gives the spirit of the thing: but if he were asked: ‘Did a shout really go up from a thousand throats that the hill was ours?’, he’d have to say, ‘No, it didn’t.’ Or if they said, ‘Did the New Zealanders really club their rifles and kill three men at once?’ or ‘Did the first battle of Anzac really end with the flash of bayonets all along the line, a charge, and the rolling back of the Turkish attack,’ he’d have to say, ‘Well—no, as a matter of fact that didn’t occur.’ Well, I can’t write that it occurred if I know it did not, even if by painting it that way I could rouse the blood and make the pulse beat faster—and undoubtedly these men here deserve that people’s pulses shall beat for them. But war correspondents have so habitually exaggerated the heroism of battles that people don’t realise produced by the real actions are heroic.

Bean’s frustration at the constraints on his reporting of the war began to show as he focused on ‘the nonsense about wounded soldiers wanting to get back from hospital to the front’ that correspondents in Egypt had written. He had asked the nurses and the men, and they all had said what everyone at Gallipoli knew—there was not a soldier in fifty that wanted to go back to the front. They dreaded it—and he was aware of the lengths to which some men would go to avoid going back. ‘Not very many will actually shoot their fingers off to escape from the front, but even this is not uncommon even among Australians, and it is probably less common with them than with most. There are men who want to get back to the front, great stalwart, true Australians—but there are not many like them in any army.’ War teemed with heroism, Bean wrote, but it had been so overwritten that in the public’s mind it had been devalued:

You come here and see the job and understand it and get out of your head the nonsense that is written about it. There is horror and beastliness and cowardice and treachery, over all of which the writer, anxious to please the public, has to throw his cloak—but the man who does his job is a hero. And the actual truth is that though not all Australians, by any means, do their job, there is a bigger proportion of men in the Australian Army that try to do it cheerfully and without the least show of fear, than in any force or army that I have seen in Gallipoli. The man who knows war knows that this is magnificent praise. The public can never know it.

Although tinged with a bitterness born of his frustration, Bean knew that this was ‘the true side of war.’ He wondered, however, if anyone would believe him outside the army:

I’ve never written higher praise of Australians than is on this page, but the probability is that if I were to put it into print tomorrow the tender Australian public, which only tolerates flattery and that in its cheapest form, would howl me out of existence.

One has some satisfaction in sticking to the truth in spite of the prejudice against it—the satisfaction of putting up a sort of fight. But I have a suspicion that I’ve spoilt my chances forever of being some day tolerably well off.

Murdoch, having lost out to Bean for the official correspondent’s job, now relished the freedom that Bean longed for. If Bean was the steady, reliable and thorough workhorse, then Murdoch was the gadfly. Just two days later, two officers returned from general headquarters, bringing the news that Ashmead-Bartlett was going home. ‘Lucky beggar,’ Bean said, wondering when he would return, and was stunned by the response: ‘Well, as a matter of fact, he’s not returning,’ the officers told him. ‘He’s got the sack!’ Ashmead-Bartlett confirmed to Bean that he had been ordered out and told him the details of the letter he had sent with Murdoch to deliver to Asquith.

Bean thought it was a ‘brilliantly written letter.’ While it overstated the case, as was Ashmead-Bartlett’s style, much of it was ‘absolutely unanswerable’ and badly needed saying. Ashmead-Bartlett had made two assumptions in the letter: first, that the Suvla–Sari Bair plan in April could not have succeeded, and would have accomplished nothing if it had. Bean disagreed, believing that although the operation was difficult there had been a chance of success. Ashmead-Bartlett’s second point was that a landing at nearby Bulair would have succeeded, and would still succeed. Bean thought Ashmead-Bartlett did not have sufficient military and naval knowledge to give an opinion of any value on this.

He had no doubt, though, that the British Government would consider the letter in time. ‘Several members of the Cabinet asked him to write to them privately which was not a very loyal thing of them to do, but then politicians are not loyal,’ Bean wrote. He thought Ashmead-Bartlett had made one mistake: ‘He ought to have taken the letter home himself after he had written all he wanted to about the battles of August. It was difficult. It would have been scarcely loyal to his employers to go home and leave the work here, and I don’t know if he would have been allowed to return; unless he went I don’t think the letter could have been got through—the censors would not have passed it. So he decided that the object was worth any means.’

There has long been argument over who betrayed Ashmead-Bartlett, a widely held belief being that it was Henry Nevinson who reported to GHQ that Murdoch was carrying an uncensored letter (which British intelligence dramatically confiscated on his arrival in Marseilles). This was Arthur Bazley’s view, which he revealed in an interview many years later. While Nevinson was a friend of Hamilton, Bean laid the blame squarely on British Major Delmé Radcliffe—‘the little worm of a Press Officer who I think keeps a spy in our camp in the shape of one of the servants.’ He thought Radcliffe was a ‘most objectionable person’ who had the backing of the chief of intelligence, Colonel Gerald Tyrrell, who typified ‘the attitude of an obsolete class of British Military officer’ towards democracy. Bean had played by the rules, and this had inhibited his reporting. His frustration leapt from his diary:

I have been so loyal as I could possibly be—have brought myself into constant trouble in Australia by being loyal to military rules; my own Australian staff knows that it can trust me to the uttermost—but this little whippersnapper the British War Office has put over us is trying to put every difficulty he can in my way along with that of the others: sends us orders by the private soldier from whom he gets 2 reports every week about our camp and who is almost certainly acting as his spy.

. . . The War Office puts this sort of difficulty in the way of men who are doing their work as carefully, loyally and scrupulously as Nevinson and I (for example); and yet allows any swindler, or at any rate rule-breaker, of an officer, who gets a film or photo, smuggled home past the censor, to have it published in the London Press—which has perfect impunity in publishing it, in advertising requesting officers in flat defiance of orders to send similar photos in, and in booming £1000 prizes for them. It censors rigorously all the names of officers and regiments out of my letters—written by one who actually saw them; and allows them to be picked and forwarded second-hand in a bundle of exaggerations and untruths quite uncensored from Cairo.

We don’t deserve to win wars. When this happens in my department, what happens in others! Ye gods, don’t we know too well!

By now Bean had seen enough of the narrowness of the British officer class to regard them and their methods with contempt. Many displayed arrogance and haughty superiority towards Australians despite their own incompetence. There were a few exceptions, like ‘Hooky’ Walker, and while Bean liked Hamilton and Birdwood he saw flaws in their leadership abilities. The mood at Gallipoli had become poisonous, and Bean’s querulous tone showed just how much this had affected him.

His mood did not improve the next day when a letter arrived from the Department of Defence in Melbourne telling him that the Argus and Age proprietors had decided to stop publishing his reports ‘because they are of insufficient interest to them.’ Two of Australia’s major newspapers had effectively sacked him. Bean was annoyed. ‘I suppose the Age and Argus think them uninteresting because they have their own correspondents in Cairo who can send them stuff which is bound to arrive weeks before mine and is not subject to censorship.’ He was also now aware that Australian newspaper politics had played a role in his struggle to win authorisation to report the landing in April:

The Age and Argus . . . did not like the Government service from the first and I believe that the Argus people in London expressed a preference for having their news from Reuter’s Agency in Cairo and said they did not desire to have a man with the Australian forces at all. The Empire Press Union which represents them is said to have put that view, anyway; and that was the main reason why there was a delay in authorising me to write letters or cables at all and why the Australian people went without any letter or cable from me at the time when we landed. The Argus is getting this special stuff from Reuter’s Agency [in] Cairo and beautiful stuff it is. Not one event in every five of those which he relates are true and most are wild, sensational inventions like the famous one about Germans enlisted in Australia shooting officers here from behind. This stuff has plenty of ‘interest’ for The Argus. Mine has merely the interest that I risk my life hundreds of times over on the spot itself in order that they may know that every word is as true as it can be.

If risking his life was the standard that he had set for himself, then he was surprised when, the next day, intelligence chief Tyrrell bluntly told him that war correspondents were a dying profession. Bean told him that on the contrary, he believed he represented a new profession. Since people had to have news of their troops abroad, was it not better, allowing for necessary military secrecy, ‘to have somebody to do it who can tell them the sort of things they want to know than to leave it to some officer who only sees the military importance of events and not the public interest in them.’ Bean argued that it did no harm to any conceivable military interest to tell the people how their sons and brothers lived, how they fought and what a battle looked like. A journalist could do that a thousand times better than a staff officer. ‘The little important news—the outline which is permissible—the journalist can make interesting,’ he said. ‘The staff officer makes it stodgy. Where is the benefit in the staff officer? In the next war every important staff will have one trusted journalist attached—as a staff officer, if you like.’

Tyrrell thought ‘authorities need not tell [the people] anything at all.’ He believed that in a properly organised nation the government did not need war correspondents—‘it simply tells the people what it thinks will conduce towards winning the war. If truth is good for the war it tells them truth; if a lie is likely to win the war it tells them lies.’ At the present moment he believed the truth would do good. This gave Bean pause for thought. ‘I must say I shift my ground also on hearing that argument. If the winning of a war were the end of all things it would be sound. But it isn’t the end of a nation’s existence.’ He accepted that there were many ways in which victory in a war did far more harm to a nation than defeat. Ultimately, though, he thought the nation ‘must have as true an account of the war as military necessity can possibly permit’:

I quite agree you can’t have the war correspondent running a modern war; but I do think the people of any modern state worth living in will require some sort of information at least partly independent of their generals and general staffs as to what is happening; and they are not getting that in this war. I can’t see any way out except for the correspondent to be allowed to be an independent pressman, and free to see what he likes.

That night Bean told Ashmead-Bartlett about his discussion with Tyrrell. The intelligence chief ’s arguments prompted a pithy response from the British correspondent as he packed his bags in preparation for leaving the next morning: ‘He thinks we’re dyin’, does he? Well, I’m glad we’re dyin’ game!’ Bean could not help but like Ashmead-Bartlett, whom he thought ‘extraordinarily brilliant’, not least for his unexpected retort. ‘He thinks very straight and his written despatches are full of life and colour, hit hard, and give a brilliant idea which is remarkably true. He exaggerates a bit to make his points but the general result is a pretty accurate description of what has happened, and always vivid. He’s perhaps not quite so accurate in detail as the English papers think him, but he is most honest in giving the real outline and trend of events.’

Around the time of Ashmead-Bartlett’s departure, Henry Nevinson was hit on the head by a shell fragment, and Bean noted that much was made of it. He wondered if he should mention his own wound to his publisher, Alston Rivers, to use it to advertise a new edition of his book, Flagships Three. ‘In the end I couldn’t do it. After all I can’t advertise—I haven’t done it and I won’t do it.’ Self-promotion was not in Bean’s make-up.

As the correspondents moved into a new house on Imbros—a rough stone building that Bean had leased from a Greek peasant and facetiously dubbed ‘Chateau Pericles’—Bean also assessed the performance of The Age correspondent, Phillip Schuler, and John Monash’s favoured journalist from The Argus, C.P. Smith. Whether it was because of his friendship with Monash is not clear, but Bean did not rank Smith highly. Schuler was ‘a more truthful war correspondent than Charlie Smith, i.e. he does see things. I don’t fancy Charlie always does.’

Meanwhile, on arrival in London, and having memorised much of Ashmead-Bartlett’s letter, Keith Murdoch met with Asquith government ministers, including David Lloyd George, the Minister for Munitions, who noted: ‘I saw Murdoch the Australian yesterday. He struck me as being exceptionally intelligent and sane. This made the account he gave me of his visit to the Dardanelles much more disquieting.’ As they took in the ramifications of his explosive claims, Murdoch wrote an 8000-word letter to Andrew Fisher, outlining to the Prime Minister the casualty lists, the terrible conditions under which the men were living and fighting, and their courage in the impossible task of pushing back the firmly entrenched Turks. Murdoch wrote that winter was approaching and it brought grave dangers to the 105,000 troops on the peninsula. ‘We are faced with serious dangers from cold, rain, and snow on land. All our engineering work has been done with the idea that our positions would be evacuated by winter . . . And I fear that the decision has been left too late for such work to be thoroughly undertaken before the winter is upon us. No structural material had reached Anzac when I left. . . .’

Murdoch’s ‘Gallipoli letter’ galvanised the critics. Lloyd George arranged for Murdoch to send a copy of his letter to Asquith, who had it printed and circulated as a state paper. An immediate review of the campaign by Lord Kitchener followed, and ten days later the government abandoned the campaign. Kitchener cabled Hamilton next day relieving him of command.

When word reached Imbros on 17 October that Hamilton had been sacked, Charles Bean was staggered. After Hamilton visited the correspondents’ camp before he left, Bean wrote that he looked ‘very haggard—almost broken up.’ He believed Hamilton’s failing was that he was not strong enough to command his staff; as a result, they commanded him. ‘It is rather fault of character than of intellect that has caused him to fail . . . He has an unlucky ability for gilding the pill . . . and, with his beautiful style in literature and kind gentlemanly manners, is hopelessly weakened by it—poor old chap.’ Bean’s analysis was that the campaign had failed after operations on 6, 7 and 8 May when the plan of going straight ahead over Achi Baba was ‘clearly proved impossible, or possible only to a very much greater force.’ Yet Hamilton ‘had not the strength either to give that plan up, or to tell the War Office that the plan must be given up.’

Years later, Bean was asked for his assessment of the Murdoch Gallipoli saga. Although he had disapproved of Murdoch carrying Ashmead-Bartlett’s uncensored letter to Asquith, he had no doubt of the importance of Murdoch’s own letter to Fisher:

Keith felt that the Australians were being sacrificed . . . and he wrote his letter with the sledgehammer phrases—often massive over-statements—which were typical of his writing in controversy. But there was much truth behind them—the troops had no great confidence in Hamilton; he had not the crude strength for such an enterprise . . . coming on top of lack of success in the great efforts of April–June and in August, and of the current division in the British Cabinet as to whether a thrust from Salonica did not offer better prospect than a continuance on Gallipoli, Murdoch’s letter was, I should say, the main agent in bringing about Hamilton’s fall.

Inevitably, this led to evacuation, with plans being drawn up over a month later under Hamilton’s successor, General Sir Charles Monro. Bean was informed on 14 December, as winter storms and wild seas began lashing the peninsula, uncovering bodies and washing away dugouts. Snow fell, and Bean tried to keep warm as best he could, even walking about all day in an attempt to keep his blood circulating. Gallipoli was desolate, and every bit as bad as Murdoch had foreseen.

The long months at Gallipoli had brought changes in Bean’s thinking. When he first arrived in Egypt his regard for the Australian troops was already high; the experience on the peninsula had taken this regard to another level while tarnishing his view of the British army. As well, his politics were now changing. He discussed the issues one night with Brudenell White:

We both notice that the Australians here can be picked out on the instant by their faces—a little hard, but the strong, lined individual faces which men get who stand and think by themselves. The Australian discipline is for orderliness—to get an operation through in an organised manner. The British discipline has a different reason—to make men go forward because they are told to do so. Our men we have to send forward trusting to quite a different principle—we rely on the strong, independent willed men carrying on the weak one . . .

The two men then turned to politics. White evidently wanted to discuss a comment by Bean to the effect that what he had seen since Suvla was ‘making a Socialist of me.’ White said: ‘It’s not making me that, but I’ll tell you what I should like to tell the people of Australia—what, if I get the chance, I shall tell them some day—and that is that they are right in the main thing: they may be wrong in the details . . . but I’m sure they’re right in this in giving every man a chance, a good, equal chance.’

Having celebrated his thirty-sixth birthday at Gallipoli, Bean, with the help of artists, worked towards compiling a book on Anzac for the troops. Men contributed drawings, stories and verse to what would become The Anzac Book, a collection of soldiers’ satirical and sombre accounts of their experiences at Gallipoli. Bean himself was so moved by having to leave Gallipoli and the graves of the Diggers who would stay there forever that he wrote a verse, ‘Non Nobis, Domine’, for the book.

Someone saw fit to burgle Bean’s dugout and steal his camera. ‘There will always be these prowlers—they are mostly men who would do just the same in peace time,’ Bean reasoned. Major Tom Blamey lent Bean his own camera, enabling him to capture the Light Horse playing cricket at Shell Green, and other troops enjoying a ‘smoking fatigue’.

On 19 December Bean marked his last day at Gallipoli, noting ‘incinerator fires going dreamily’ and a big fire still smoking. He saw a red glow in the sky from burning stores at Suvla. On board the Beagle, he steamed fast into Imbros, where he dictated a cable for the Australian newspapers describing the evacuation. ‘Now we must do one for Ross,’ he told Arthur Bazley, aware that Malcolm Ross was lying ill on a makeshift bed in the ‘Chateau Pericles’. Without further ado he began drafting a cable for the New Zealand papers that went off in Ross’s name.

Bean then left for Lemnos, where, with a letter of introduction from Birdwood, he boarded the Aragon, the luxurious headquarters of the British high command. While he enjoyed the chance of a hot bath, good food and a sumptuous bed, Bean saw first-hand just why it was so hated by the troops. The staff were supercilious, and the officers were ‘brushed and polished gentlemen’ who seemed to look down their noses when the battered boots and worn gaiters of staff from Gallipoli ‘come along the decks on one of their rare (and not much relished) visits to this abode of luxury.’ He had no doubt that it did not make for good staff work to have the headquarters ‘in such luxurious surroundings . . . and so far from the scene of action.’

Having worked on Boxing Day on The Anzac Book, Bean packed his gear and, with Arthur Bazley, sailed on the Wahine on 31 December 1915. Zig-zagging to avoid enemy submarines, the ship headed to Malta and then Marseilles before going on to London. Bean took with him his all-important diaries—twenty-five of them, plus a dozen notebooks. They were, in many cases, the only records available dealing with the battles of Gallipoli. In his diary he noted:

These diaries have been a weight on my mind—and so have my photos—I shan’t be happy till I get them to a safe place, the diaries duplicated and the photos printed. A single shell or a submarine could destroy 9 months hard work and the best records we have of the Gallipoli campaign.

If Murdoch’s letter had helped bring a disastrous campaign to an end, then Bean’s diaries were the daily record of how the Australians had fought. The two men’s paths would continue to cross.

21

A question of discipline

The differences between Gallipoli and the Western Front struck Bean immediately. In January 1916, within weeks of leaving the Dardanelles, he made a preliminary tour of the French battlefields. What he noticed first was that the tension along the firing line did not compare with Gallipoli. There was little sniping, but German guns were bigger, shells seemed to contain more explosives and shell holes were more numerous. He noticed the strained look on the French women as they went about their business with shells exploding nearby. The sight of French soldiers walking through the towns with their families surprised him, as did seeing children with identity discs on their wrists. He noticed the guns hidden in straw haystacks and in bombed-out houses; the trenches were dug not amid the desolation of Gallipoli but in green fields. The British journalists he met told Bean about his mate Harry Gullett, who was already in France, working as a war correspondent. They greatly admired him, telling Bean that he had accompanied a sniper out in front of the Allied wire one night and taken cover in a crater, where he stayed all night. This would be a very different front—if this was where Bean and the AIF were to be posted next. Rumours abounded, but there was nothing official.

On the morning of 21 January, Bean drove through the bitter, driving wind to Boulogne to catch the boat for a rough crossing to England. The boat was crowded with officers and men going on leave. At Victoria Station in London, he noticed the faces of anxious wives, parents and sisters peering over wooden barriers, waiting. ‘Perhaps people when they met were a little extra tender with these men with their muddy boots and their rifles. But the country really took them to itself as part of itself. They were “home” for 7 days from the trenches.’

Bean found that his brother Jack had been transferred to a new job organising a temporary convalescent hospital for the 10,000 Australian troops recovering from wounds in London. The aim was to stop them being ‘at a loose end in London,’ and Jack was working on a paper warning them of the dangers of venereal disease.

Bean met up with Gullett and other colleagues in London. Meetings followed, including with the newspaper baron Lord Northcliffe, who damned the Asquith Government. ‘His mind is made up already that the men who lead this government can do nothing that is right,’ Bean noted, adding that Northcliffe clearly wanted ‘strongly expressed dissatisfaction to come from Australia at this time because that is the one thing that would overthrow the government.’ He thought Northcliffe displayed the ‘decisiveness of the man who is ignorant.’

Keith Murdoch had arranged that meeting, and he, too, earned a character assessment from Bean, who saw him as ‘simple in his way.’ Murdoch was a young Australian of ‘the aggressively patriotic type’ who made ‘a religion of his Australianism’ and boasted of it everywhere. ‘He is wholly Australian and nothing except Australian.’ Bean believed that this new breed would make Australia and Australian ideas a great force in the world. ‘Old Murdoch is a little slow footed like myself, heavy in his ideas. But he simply lives for Australia.’

Murdoch’s role figured prominently in Bean’s talks with the Colonial Secretary, Bonar Law, with whom he also discussed Gallipoli. He concluded after this meeting that the Murdoch letter had given ‘a very powerful statement of one side of the case,’ albeit an overstated one. ‘But Murdoch believes in impressing people by overstatement. I don’t. His idea is if you don’t overstate a case, your punch won’t go home and you might as well not have spoken,’ Bean concluded.

After meeting Bonar Law, Bean had no doubt that Murdoch’s visit was far more important than a visit by Lord Kitchener to Gallipoli on 13 November 1915 amid the furor that the letter sparked. ‘The Cabinet could not get a definite opinion out of Kitchener, one way or the other. During his visit to Gallipoli—one day he would cable in favour of withdrawing—the next day he would cable the other way. There seems no doubt, also, that he does not tell Cabinet the whole truth about the war.’ A few months later Murdoch wrote to Bean about the affair, saying he had been rather hurt to hear that Brudenell White and, he presumed, Birdwood believed he had been wrong to write the letter. He urged Bean to tell White, ‘Lloyd George and Bonar Law have both told Hughes that Hamilton’s recall and the evacuation both resulted from my letter.’

As he observed London, both its people and its politicians, Bean was pondering how best to raise reinforcements to fight the war. He had noticed a sense in France that every healthy man who wasn’t at the front had something to explain. ‘One can’t help contrasting the agonised call for recruits which stares you in the face wherever you look in England with the quiet absence of any such effort, or the need for it, wherever you go in France,’ he noted. Until now, Bean had not supported conscription, but with Asquith’s Coalition Government in danger of collapsing over the issue he had a change of heart. ‘What I’ve seen in England as compared with France this time has settled me as far as this war is concerned. There’s only one way. Why a man should have the right to refuse to fight for his country any more than the right of refusing to pay taxes I’m blest (sic) if I can see.’

With the AIF’s future movements still unclear, Bean returned to Egypt, where the two battle-worn infantry divisions had returned to camp. There they were joined by large numbers of fresh reinforcements from Australia. The two divisions were expanded to four, while a further division (the 3rd Australian Division) was raised in Australia and sent straight on to Britain. No sooner had Bean returned than he got an eye infection, and then a poisoned leg, after being bitten by a flea. He was hospitalised for more than a week, in which time he finalised The Anzac Book.

Out of hospital, he was in for a surprise: ‘In Cairo, who should come up the street but Bazley—fresh from London with emu feathers in his hat! It was a great blessing to have the kid back to do all one’s typing.’ Arthur Bazley may have been captured by the image of Light Horsemen with emu feathers in their hats, but he remained Bean’s much-valued sidekick. Bean was so impressed by the work Bazley did in the distribution of The Anzac Book that he suggested he consider applying for a clerk’s job, with a sergeant’s stripes and pay. But Bazley wasn’t interested, telling Bean: ‘No thank you Sir. I’ve begun this war with you and I want to end it with you if possible.’ Bean thought Bazley ‘a splendid boy.’

In early March the Australians learned that they were to leave Egypt for France. Bean noted that Birdwood had issued a letter to the men, to be read on the transports taking them to their new battlefields, cautioning them that bad behaviour ‘can ruin a country’s good name.’ Bean saw the letter as symptomatic of the failure of the British staff to understand the Australians. It was clear he believed the fault lay with them:

There is no doubt the British staff here hate the Australians pretty badly—it is the English common people who like us; with the exception of those British officers who have fought with us, the British officer does not generally like us. The Australian doesn’t salute him . . . also he is jealous of the praise we get as soldiers; and he probably quite honestly fails to understand our discipline. The New Zealander is much more like the Englishman . . . and is less of a child of nature than the Australian, and more given to . . . saluting. Therefore it is the custom of the British to contrast the New Zealander’s discipline and appearance with ours.

Bean thought saluting was much overdone, but as an honorary captain he couldn’t escape it himself. ‘I also suffer because tho’ many of the men salute me through courtesy (and one is particularly anxious not to offend them by not answering it) many do not and there is no earthly reason why they should.’ He was conscious of not appearing to look for a salute from troops he passed in the street. ‘I hate it—but you must look at them to see if they salute—and with a chap as self conscious and sensitive as I am this makes walking up the street rather a thing to be dreaded.’

Birdwood could see trouble brewing for the Australians on another level: he was keen to get to London to try and convince the War Office that the Australian Light Horse troops remaining in Egypt should be administered by their own staff. The new commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, General Sir Archibald Murray, wanted control. Murray, who had had a physical breakdown in the retreat from Mons, loathed Australians. Bean noted that he had criticised ‘not only their extreme indiscipline’ but their ‘inordinate vanity.’ Bean thought it was true they were vain—but they had some reason to be. ‘Some of the more ignorant men suggested in all seriousness the other day that the reason why everyone was talking so openly of the Australians going to France was in order that the Germans might hear that the Australians were coming and might throw up the sponge or at any rate be intimidated,’ Bean wrote. Murray, though he would prove incompetent, won control. Bean’s sarcasm reflected deep contempt for Murray. ‘The truth is, I expect, that though Murray dislikes us he wants us there in Egypt for Egypt’s sake. Well, they needn’t waste these troops over there. Let them send a few of their English terriers from the big towns to Egypt. This force is too good for that—too high spirited for a sink of a place like Cairo.’

Bean was also critical of the new Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir William Robertson, who had turned down a push for a distinct Australian Army. ‘He didn’t see that it served a useful purpose—and the fact that we were a nation and wanted to fight and carve our history as a nation didn’t go for anything with him,’ Bean wrote, explaining that Robertson’s attitude was, ‘What’s the use of a separate staff for 120,000 men?’ Bean saw that the AIF had ‘grown into an army and it has become a very big job indeed.’ The AIF had to be handled differently; Australia was a nation in its own right and the British did not understand Australians had their own ideals and character. To Bean’s relief the Australian government refused to budge over its desire for an Australian Army, forcing Robertson to give a commitment that it would happen—at some unspecified time in the future.

Bean clearly wanted to see the AIF operating with greater independence—and, not surprisingly, he had no doubt that White should be playing a senior leadership role and promoted to major-general. ‘White is the big Australian soldier,’ he asserted, the only man on Birdwood’s staff with a ‘creative brain’. If he had a fault it was ‘trying to keep his finger on everyone’s business.’ He fancied this would wear White out; nonetheless, it would be ‘the British Empire’s loss and Australia’s more than his if they fail to put him to his full use before the war is over.’

Bean sailed with the AIF from Egypt, complete with a kapok lifebelt in case of U-boat attack. Drama, though, came not from an enemy submarine. On deck one morning, Bean was jolted when the ‘man overboard!’ cry went up, and shortly after thought he saw something khaki coloured in the water as the ship was laboriously swung around. A lifeboat was lowered to search. ‘Everybody was sinking in spirits—the idea of leaving him out there, perhaps watching us turn to leave him fighting for life was more than anyone could contemplate,’ Bean wrote. Shortly after, someone shouted, ‘There ’e is,’ and pointed to a figure in the water. The crew in the lifeboat eventually dragged him aboard, one of the sailors attempting artificial respiration on the lifeless shape in the bow. ‘The white bundle showed no sign of movement,’ Bean wrote. ‘The man was dead. He had been a prisoner—for drunkenness on the ship; he asked his guard for leave to go to the latrine and as he went deliberately jumped overboard.’ It was just one of many suicides, but it left its mark on Bean.

There were 3500 men on board Bean’s transport—mostly ‘strong rough-tanned Australian faces, some of them fresh, many of them battered and all of them frank’—and they were all angry with the soldier who jumped. He had endangered them all. For Bean, the death was a reminder that not all casualties of war were on the battlefield. While such a death was just one more tragic statistic, it underlined a clear reality: that the trauma of war was indeed affecting soldiers. This was what Bean and the men on the ship sensed with the drowning suicide of one of their comrades. In reality, he was just as much a victim of war as those who died of physical wounds. While Bean put it simply that the dead man ‘probably was half mad at the time,’ it indicated that he was beginning to comprehend the toll that war takes on the mind.

And how could he not? With more than 8000 Australians dead because of Gallipoli, he knew how vulnerable men were to bullets, shrapnel and bombs, and debilitating disease. He had been shot himself and narrowly missed death or serious injury on several other occasions. He may have been a non-combatant but he understood just how deadly the front line was. And now he would be encountering a new and different enemy that in many respects would prove to be even more lethal.

22

Counting the bullets

Bean knew Flanders well. He had come to know every inch of the battleground of Waterloo as a boy. Now, on 25 April 1916, he was there, reflecting on where he had been one year earlier. He knew that this was a day that would long resonate in Australia’s history. His memory was of ‘churning slowly along through the half moonlight and just nearing the coast of Imbros’ on the way to Gallipoli. This first anniversary of the Anzac landing was being marked everywhere in Australia and New Zealand, and everywhere there were Australian and New Zealand troops engaged in the war.

Bean had gone with the 1st Division to Sailly, near Armentières, in northern France. The focus of the campaign facing I Anzac Corps would involve a thrust near Amiens where the French and British sectors met on the banks of the Somme River. The Australians Bean was with marked the first Anzac Day with an extra issue of rations and cake, while he and the New Zealand correspondent Malcolm Ross strolled along a canal to an estaminet where they bought two bottles of champagne. Surprised at their good fortune in finding the wine, they ‘drank the health of all Anzacs at dinner.’ They did so against the backdrop of distant guns that, from nine o’clock that night, boomed continuously near Richelbourg or Neuve Chapelle. But there was a contrasting sound that also captured Bean’s attention: ‘As I stood in the open doorway just now I heard above it all the first nightingale—her perfect single repeated piped note simply filling the woodland. It was answered from every side through the woods. Today, also, for the first time this year I heard the cuckoo.’ These were sounds of nature that would become increasingly rare along the Western Front in the coming months and years.

But for Bean, such occasions were integral to the way he recorded the daily life of men at war. He was nothing if not methodical and meticulous. Ashmead-Bartlett had him pegged: ‘Oh—Bean—I think he almost counts the bullets.’ This was truer than he realised, for at Anzac Cove Bean admitted to trying to count the number of rifle shots he heard per minute as he compared one night’s activity with another’s. By the time he arrived in France Bean had honed his skills as a war correspondent. His main concern was to observe as widely and accurately as possible all aspects of the AIF’s operations. To preserve his observations he kept a careful diary, filled with details of operational plans, notes and sketches of operations. He had quickly realised that drawing sketches and discussing them with men who had seen action was an aid to getting accurate information. To further ensure accuracy, he interviewed commanders and troops after engagements, and surveyed the ground both before and after battles. But in doing this he knew he had to be cautious about what men said immediately after battle. He also sought to make his own observations as objective as possible.

Bean still took care not to breach military censorship. One of his methods was to use a technique he had developed in books such as On the Wool Track. This involved blurring elements of the story, as he explained in his diary on 11 May 1916 shortly after arriving in France and sending off two articles. His approach with cables such as these was to keep ‘the details perfectly true, but alter and mix up the place names and dates of ‘left’ and ‘right’ so that it is perfectly impossible for anyone (even myself after a short while) to identify the real trench or section of line and yet the story is perfectly true.’

With his diary entries, however, Bean felt no such caution. He was withering in his assessment of the Anglican clergyman and chaplain Walter Dexter, an Englishman who had fought with distinction in the South African war. Dexter had been a master mariner before he turned to the church, and had served in the diocese of Melbourne since 1910. He was one of the first Anglicans to seek appointment as an AIF chaplain and his background fitted him superbly for the task. On Gallipoli he proved himself brave and practical; he was well liked by the troops, although, it would seem, they were at best largely indifferent to religion. Bean, however, saw him as ‘a good regimental padre perhaps but quite unfitted for the job of senior chaplain.’ He was ‘full of gossip and scandal—and how White is so misled in him I don’t know.’

No Australian politicians had ventured to Gallipoli, but in London and on the Western Front a visit was not an uncommon occurrence. Among the early visitors were Prime Minister Billy Hughes and the man he had replaced as Australia’s leader, the new High Commissioner to London, Andrew Fisher. They both visited the Australians at Sailly on 1 June 1916. Immediately he saw Bean, Hughes chided him for not having written to him when he was in London. ‘Goodness knows I was rushed enough, but I ought to have done it—and he is clearly hurt,’ Bean wrote. Fisher chimed in, wanting to know if he had the camera that the War Office had assured him would be sent. That it hadn’t arrived prompted an outburst from Fisher: ‘Well it’s disgusting, disgusting—they’re just fooling us—it’s disgusting that they can’t treat us the same way as Canada.’

Fisher knew the Canadians were allowed to take their own photos in France. The War Office had been fobbing off Bean. Because of pressure from the Anglo-Canadian newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Daily Express, the Sunday Express and the London Evening Standard, a Canadian staff captain was allowed to take photos. Bean, on the other hand, had to rely on the borrowed services of British official photographers. It had been different on Gallipoli, where he had taken more than 700 photos. Bean was happy to have Fisher on his side in this argument with the British. In his diary, he wrote:

He’s a real straight good friend, is Fisher—and a sincere friend of mine now. But he is too hot-headed—and it makes him tackle his objections in the wrong way. He becomes indignant at the first obstacle and gets people’s backs up. He feels strongly, too, that he has not the power which he had as Prime Minister; that Hughes is the power—and people will not act for the High Commissioner.

Bean noted that Fisher’s predecessor as high commissioner, Sir George Reid, ‘was always a humbug but a rather wise one,’ who nonetheless had far more influence than Fisher: ‘And then there comes this little genius Hughes; a man of stronger morals than Reid, and less than Fisher; a statesman of some foresight, I think; perhaps a man of one idea.’

Such observations made Bean pause to reflect: ‘It seems to me that I take away a lot of people’s characters in this diary—and leave my own. God knows it’s weak enough—jealous, self centred, only moderately clean—and sometimes I think that if it is clean this is more because it fears public opinion than for any love of healthiness.’

Bean’s relationship with Hughes went back to his early days on The Sydney Morning Herald, and it was clear that it remained strong. Just how strong was underlined that night at dinner with divisional staff, when Hughes treated Bean as an old friend, going up to him again and again, taking him by the lapels and talking of ‘books or anything’. Bean took immediate advantage of this, urging Hughes to write to the Commander-in-Chief, Douglas Haig, to support his request to take photographs. ‘I told Hughes he could help me in one way by writing to General Haig that I was the trusted servant of the Australian Government, that I was charged by them with writing the history of the Australian part in this war; and that the government would be glad if I were permitted to take photos for the purposes of that record under any safeguard thought proper—in the same way as had been permitted to the Canadians.’ When Bean heard that Hughes had done as he requested and written to Haig, he wondered if he could be accused of pulling political strings. ‘I don’t think so, if Australia wants the photos she has to ask for them,’ he reasoned.

Bean had already begun to think as a historian, seeing his main task as the collection of material for the history of the AIF he would write when the war was over. Photographs would be essential, but with the Western Front much closer to Britain than Gallipoli, censorship was much more restrictive there. For the first year of the war correspondents were barely allowed to visit the battlefields, and photographs were initially banned outright. With new commanders and pressure for more recruits, the British policy began to change in 1916. Because of Beaverbrook’s influence, the Canadians were early beneficiaries, but until the British agreed to the appointment of Australian official photographers Bean was dependent on the intermittent services of the British official photographers.

Among them was Ernest Brooks, an experienced newspaper photographer who had been the Admiralty’s official photographer on Gallipoli. With no official photographer present when Hughes arrived at Sailly, Brooks was sent urgently to cover the visit. He did so with a cine cameraman, Edward Tong. Bean took Brooks and Tong to photograph Hughes with General Birdwood, but spending a week with them was an unpleasant experience: he and Brooks clashed repeatedly over Brooks’ practice of faking photographs.

For Brooks, ‘faking’ was a legitimate way to maximise visual impact, but Bean—who knew him on Gallipoli—was critical of the way he had staged photographs there, including a picture of a Turkish sniper dressed up in branches like a tree. ‘He got a Turkish prisoner on Imbros with two Australians from the field bakery standing on either side of him with bayonets fixed. His picture has been printed everywhere and is taken as a proof of the wild stories about “men as trees moving”; it half convinced me when first I saw it,’ Bean wrote. And he faked a second picture of a ‘charge of the Royal Naval division at the Dardanelles,’ showing an officer leading men out of a trench up into the Gallipoli hills. Bean recognised the hill as not being on Gallipoli but at the back of the war correspondents’ camp on Imbros. Despite being a proven fake, the photograph would continue to be used in the decades ahead.

Bean watched Brooks closely ‘to prevent him getting up somewhere where he would be sure to be killed and to prevent him from faking.’ Somehow, though, Brooks persuaded one major to get all his men lined up behind the parapet—at imminent risk to their lives if the Germans had seen them—with bayonets fixed, looking as if they were going to charge over shoulder to shoulder. Bean told him afterwards that he would have to speak to the staff about that photo. ‘It is an absurd fake,’ Bean wrote, ‘no-one in his senses would ever get men packed behind the line like that.’ Brooks argued disingenously that ‘It can’t be a fake until it’s developed.’ Bean believed that Brooks had got the job through being a friend of the King and Queen, as their private photographer. ‘And this is the sort of rubbish the government sends us as its “official” photographer who may be trusted,’ he wrote, adding that he also had to help carry photographic gear. ‘I shall get through my five days with him pleasantly if I can but never again.’ As the week went on, the tension between Bean and Brooks escalated:

Brooks was grumbling this morning at only being allowed to take ‘cushy’ stuff and not the sort of pictures that editors want. ‘They won’t print a picture of a sentry looking over a trench,’ he said. Of course they won’t, so long as he supplies them with faked charges and sham battles . . . this ‘official’ British photographer. I told him straight we won’t have faked pictures—and he objected to that word and there was a row. Since then I have been dragging him round much as you might lead a bad-tempered bull by the nose. I don’t know how long I shall be able to stand it—only two days more.

Bean even considered the extraordinary step of resigning. ‘I cannot carry out the work in the manner in which I believe the Australian recorder ought to,’ he wrote. The implication that he and Malcolm Ross could not be trusted to take photos left him frustrated.

Brooks, however, did confirm to Bean the double standards of the War Office: while it was denying Bean permission to take photos, it had Brooks instructing the Canadian staff officer on the art of photography.

As he ruminated on the problem of organising the photographic record, Bean faced his own reportorial challenges. On 7 June, he was sitting in an anteroom at 1st Division headquarters at Sailly when a chuffed Brudenell White commented to him: ‘Well that was a very successful little raid last night, Bean.’ This was the first Bean had heard of it. White continued: ‘. . . our 7th Brigade raided their trenches and brought back three prisoners and killed twelve.’ This was the first Australian raid on German trenches on the Western Front, and Bean was intrigued to hear the story. The raid involved the 7th Brigade’s 25th, 26th, 27th and 28th Battalions and, while successful, had involved tough fighting. After killing soldiers from a Prussian infantry regiment and taking prisoners, the Australians came under shellfire as they returned. Two of them were killed and four wounded. Bean recorded what happened next:

One of the prisoners, when the scouts wanted him to move, would not face the German shrapnel. He lay down and squealed and struggled—so, as they had no means of keeping him quiet, and did not want to shoot, they cut his throat. Two more of the six men who were originally taken prisoner did not seem to understand what was required of them—at any rate they didn’t do instantly what was required of them—and were shot on the spot.

Bean noted that the Australians brought ‘one little fellow’ back because, as they said, ‘He was too young to kill.’ Such morally charged incidents would always be contentious. Indeed, on Gallipoli Bean had refused to publish unsubstantiated claims of Turkish atrocities—something for which he was criticised. He knew that allegations without proof were worthless. When his report of the Western Front raid was published in Australia a week later, there was no mention that the Australians had cut the throat of a German soldier or summarily shot two others.

Bean wrote that the Australians were unimpressed with the quality of the Prussian prisoners they captured. ‘Only one of the enemy dashed for his rifle and he was immediately shot.’ When he came to write the Official History, Bean did not mention these details. While no wartime censor would have allowed through reports that might cast the actions of Allied soldiers in a questionable light—something Bean well knew—it was Bean’s decision alone to self-censor the Official History. Such were the challenges and contradictions of pursuing truth in a war that was rapidly changing every notion of what that meant.

In this whirlpool Bean was not surprised when many Anzac officers and men sought him out to ask that he not exaggerate what they had achieved. ‘As if I ever did—but I know what they mean.’ Nor could he put the Murdoch letter behind him. In mid-June he raised the letter with White, and discussed the role of the media in war. White said he believed in the right of the press to criticise. As Bean noted in his diary:

. . . he thought that if Murdoch got Hamilton removed he might also have tried to get Asquith and his friends removed. ‘You know my opinion, Bean,’ said White. ‘I think they ought to have been put on their trial for undertaking that expedition—I do honestly,’ and he grew red with warmth as he said it. ‘Hamilton may not have been a success but we know that if he had had the help which these generals here have—the ammunition and guns and so on—if they had backed him up as they backed up other generals he would have got through.’

When the British raised the idea of Bean being commissioned, to make him an official photographer, White opposed it. If he had accepted, Bean would have to give up writing about the war—he could be photographer or reporter, but not both. Bean loathed being in a ‘half false position’ as an honorary captain and thought about quitting his correspondent role, but White believed it was important for Bean to have the freedom to criticise when the war ended:

He agrees that the best thing I can do afterwards is to tell the people the truth. At the same time he thinks it important that I should take photos. I too, would not like my freedom hampered. I rather like, also, feeling that I get nothing out of this war—neither pay nor promotion nor decorations nor even fame (for the Australian government won’t have my letters published in England until they have appeared in Australia—which of course means never).

It was not in Bean’s nature to chase fame or, for that matter, fortune; nevertheless, he was as keen as any journalist to see his work published. To some extent, circumstances had conspired against him at Gallipoli, particularly with the delay in approval to write and send despatches. Then, some Australian papers had stopped taking his copy. There was also his personality: he had little of Ashmead-Bartlett’s knack of seizing the reader’s imagination, nor was he as active and ambitious as Keith Murdoch. His strengths lay, in recording facts and events accurately and in detail.

Driving Bean was his commitment to the men of the AIF. A few days later, a delayed Anzac honours list was gazetted in London that said Bean had ‘greatly distinguished himself by carrying in wounded under fire on several occasions.’ In his ‘half false position,’ Bean was not eligible for a medal but his courage was nonetheless recognised by a mention in despatches.

Within days Bean’s diary would take a very different turn.

23

A new prism

A messenger woke Bean urgently on the morning of 30 June 1916. He and Malcolm Ross were to go immediately to the Hotel Belfort at Amiens, a four-hour drive to the south. Their driver took them through the colliery district of Lillers and then up into rolling hills and through towns and villages that were all under military occupation. British police controlled the traffic everywhere, just as they might in Piccadilly. A policeman slipped them through the first gap in the line of traffic. Approaching Amiens on a long, straight road dating back to Roman times, Bean saw that all the side lanes were packed with ‘strings of waiting motor lorries,’ and then streams of transports heading east.

Arriving at the hotel, he and Ross found correspondents from Britain already there. Among them was John Buchan, a director of the publishing house Thomas Nelson and Sons, who would gain fame as a novelist. Bean thought him ‘a natty little chap of the British civil servant type.’ Lieutenant C.R. Cadge was appointed as press officer to Bean and Ross for the events that were about to unfold. Hell was about to break loose on the Somme. Their destination was a communications trench near the village of Bray, not far from the Somme and about 1000 metres from the firing line, from which they could witness the Allied advance. ‘I was looking forward to it and so was Ross,’ Bean wrote. They headed off to watch the preliminary bombardment.

Since 25 June the bombardment, which Bean noted involved two siege batteries formed from the regular Australian garrison artillery, had methodically smashed the German defences. At one time, he wrote, every gun and howitzer would fire rapidly with high explosive for twelve minutes on all the villages, following this fire with shrapnel to catch any German troops trying to flee.

Accompanied by Cadge, Bean and Ross came to a valley below which was the town of Albert, dominated by a church tower with a broken statue of the Virgin Mary. To the right of Albert was a village that Bean could see clearly—Mametz—which the Germans held. They returned to Amiens for dinner before going out again that night. ‘It was a weird drive out—we could have no bright lights,’ Bean wrote.

They came upon infantry moving up through the dark, and threaded their way slowly alongside them. Bean could hear the strains of ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’. Not all the men were singing; others remained silent. Bean could not help wondering what the officers were thinking. ‘They would, for a certainty, lose half their numbers within the next week—unless it was all a big bluff; and it was too far gone for that.’

From their position behind Albert, Bean saw continuous flashes on the horizon, between four and six per second. It seemed ‘a somewhat diffuse bombardment,’ which he thought was mostly shelling rather than shrapnel fire. ‘Our sense of proportion had been disturbed by the bombardments we had lately seen from underneath the projectiles—here we were far behind them.’ The bombardment was the opening phase of a plan to destroy Germany’s manpower reserves from the next day, 1 July. At the same time, the aim was to draw German forces away from the French fortress of Verdun, which had been under siege since February in a battle that would claim up to a million casualties by the end of the year.

At 5.30 a.m. Bean was left in no doubt that the main attack was on. He grabbed a cup of coffee and a bun at a small cafe opposite the hotel and waited for the car that was to take him and Ross to their observation trench. Bean heard the first of three or four big guns fire—‘and then in came the others with the banging as of a hundred packing cases all being bundled along at once . . . It was as though four men with two huge drumsticks each were banging as hard as they could the sides of some huge iron tanks.’ Bean wanted to watch the infantry go over, but it was not possible from their location. He was full of admiration for the photographers who were in the front trench—one of whom had the leg of his camera tripod shot away. ‘By Jove they did their duty,’ he noted. ‘I wouldn’t have liked to try it, personally.’

Bean and Ross returned to the hotel for breakfast and a briefing from the press censor, who said: ‘Well, everything is going well. We have attacked the Germans on a front of 25 miles, ourselves and the French. We have captured the German frontline on that front, north and south of the Somme. Many prisoners have been taken and so far we have had only slight casualties.’ They went out again later that morning, and could see the bombardment continuing. Bean described ‘huge shell clouds on various distant parts of the horizon, some white, some pink, some black.’

Later in the day Bean talked to one of the 150 German prisoners who had been captured. Bean, who did not smoke but always carried cigarettes to hand to soldiers, gave the Germans some smokes. ‘They seemed terribly glad of them. Our men were standing round looking at them rather as if they were animals—but not spitefully.’ Bean’s party drove to a casualty clearing station near Querrieu, passing ambulance after ambulance, all moving at the same even pace—‘gliding along through the country quietly, smoothly, such as a moving staircase glides. Each has four bunks like a ship’s cabin and from behind the car you can see the men’s feet sticking out. It is surprising what a very great number of men are wounded in the feet or in the left arm. Of course the really serious cases you don’t see. They lie out there in No Man’s Land and die.’

Unknown numbers of the men Bean had passed during the previous night were likely among the 60,000 British casualties from that first day of the Somme offensive, a third of whom were killed. By day’s end, 1 July 1916 would enter history books as the most disastrous day in the history of the British Army. There were some successes, though. On 2 July Bean walked along a trench until he reached Fricourt Wood, about 5 kilometres east of Albert, which had been captured that day. ‘One’s heart was lightened as it is when one arrives at a cricket match and finds that your own team has got a real good start on the other side—180 on the board and only one wicket down. Clearly we had taken Fricourt.’ The next day Bean went into the ruined town to be greeted by the sight of live bombs, tangled wire, abandoned trenches, blankets, helmets and dead soldiers:

Before we realised it we found ourselves passing through our own wire and across what was once No Man’s Land—then on through the shattered remnants of the German wire to the dust heap of what once was Fricourt. It reminded one more of a municipal dump than anything else—heaps of tumbled bricks and mortar with big craters all through them, some about as big as a fair sized room.

Nearby, Bean saw that the village of La Boiselle ‘was smoking gently’ and German shells were falling on the northern part of it. From this he judged that British forces had taken the village. Scanning the area through his field glasses, he could see bodies lying there. The Somme offensive was in full swing, but while there were big gains in some sectors there were virtually none in others. The cities, towns and villages of northern France that Bean had known in childhood were being destroyed before his eyes for little gain.

To Bean, the role of the Australians seemed to be lost on British officers, who could not see past their hidebound prejudices. What irritated him most was criticism of his batman, Arthur Bazley. An Anglo-New Zealand officer disapproved of Bazley’s performance as a waiter in the mess. Bean thought it inconsequential that he didn’t ‘shine’ as a waiter. Bazley, he knew, had ‘the better brains’ of the two. But the officer continued his complaints, leading Bean to quip, ‘Well in fact the Anzac Corps is so putrid that I wonder some of you fellows belong to it.’ The officer would not be swayed from his criticism of Australian discipline, prompting Bean to assert that the Australian would never be trained to matters they regarded as unessential:

Of course the Englishman will because he is afraid of his officer—stands in awe of him as an acknowledged superior being of a different class. But the Australian doesn’t stand in that sort of awe of his officer because he is of the same class as his officer—there is no social difference, therefore that motive doesn’t work with him to the same extent, but in place of it you get the intelligence of the whole force (and the whole nation) at work, and not only of the officer class.

Bean agreed that there was merit in smartness and cleanness but had no doubt that, at Gallipoli, there was no comparison between the personal cleanliness of the Australians and that of the Tommies. Bean hammered the point that in Australia, public opinion was ‘against great care being devoted to a man’s personal appearance.’ It was regarded as unessential. To Bean, the British soldier was ‘apt to carry the regard for dress and unessentials to a most vicious extreme.’ He had become so fed up with the criticism and condescension of the British officer class that he wrote in his diary, ‘if this sort of attitude keeps up I shall leave the mess.’

Bean was critical of the British decision to use the Australian troops in piecemeal fashion. ‘They will never understand that we fight twice as well as a nation—all together with Australians or NZ round us,’ he wrote. His disillusionment had been building for several weeks, especially after hearing vague talk of ‘some future offensive.’ He had wondered in late May if the British people had any idea of the difficulties that this would involve. The public’s attitude seemed to be that if a big offensive failed to break through, then the Russians or the French would succeed next time. There was ‘a tendency to look elsewhere for success’ and not to organise properly when the Germans were doing just that. ‘The only efforts at economy one hears of are a Daylight Saving Act only because Germany adopted it first,’ he mocked. What particularly angered him was the amorality of the merchant class, whose only interest in the war was the effect it could have on their businesses and personal fortunes. The risks they took were insignificant compared with all those in the trenches ‘offering their lives for an ideal.’ The contrast for Bean was stark:

I think of a fair head which I had seen matted in red mud, of young nerves of steel shattered beyond repair, of a wild night at Helles, when I found, stumbling beside me in the first bitterness of realisation, a young officer who a few yards back had been shot through both eyes.

. . . if the British nation, or the Australian nation, because it shirks interference with its normal life, because it is afraid of State enterprise, because of any personal or individual consideration whatever, lets this struggle go by default, and by an inconclusive peace, to the people which is organised body and soul in support of the grey tunics behind the opposite parapet, then it is a betrayal of every gallant heart now sleeping under the crosses on Gallipoli, and of every boyish head that has reddened the furrows of France.

After the heartbreaking deaths he had witnessed, Bean was bitter that the troops were being let down on the home fronts. ‘In Heaven’s name, if you wish to win, if you have in you any of the ideals for which those boys have died, cast your old prejudices to the winds, and organise your staying power. Organise! Organise! Organise!’

A few months earlier as Gallipoli drew to a close, Bean had told White that what he had seen there was turning him into a socialist. Now, in France, the organised strength of the German forces had convinced him that Britain and Australia could not afford to let the fear of ‘state enterprise’ hobble the ability to strike back effectively. The deaths he had witnessed were affecting the philosophical and political prism through which he was seeing the war. Victory would require everyone to contribute their fair share. He was determined to ensure that the contribution, the sacrifice and, ultimately, the memory of the dead should not be obscured by individual selfishness or greed.

Bean was in a unique position to record the effect of the war on Australia and on the way its people saw themselves. Key elements of these profound changes were already appparent. But for the moment, he had to focus on the Australian role on the Somme. Nothing could have prepared him for what was about to happen.

24

A monumental folly

The first Bean heard of Fromelles was a casual remark by an officer at breakfast on the morning of 20 July 1916. He had been up writing late into the night at his billet in the village of Contay and was a little late sitting down to eat. ‘The 5th Division had their little show last night,’ the officer said. Bean was to have focused on the 1st Division that morning as it prepared for battle at the Somme, but immediately decided that he should go to the 5th Division, 100 kilometres to the north. He would ‘run up there for the day.’ General Birdwood had assured him that nothing would be happening with the 1st Division ‘for 24 hours at any rate.’ Brudenell White lent Bean his car and told him the last news he had heard out of Fromelles was that ‘our men were all in the German trenches and holding on there.’ Another officer chipped in, ‘I think they’ll keep them.’

The 5th Division had been the last of the four Australian divisions to leave Egypt. It had been formed there under the command of Major General James McCay, who had returned to active duty after being wounded at Gallipoli. McCay, who had commanded the 2nd Infantry Brigade at the landing at Gallipoli, had again proved himself to be a martinet and an unpopular leader—partly thanks to a march he ordered the 5th to undertake across open desert to the Suez Canal. When the division arrived in France in July, it had gone straight to the front line in Flanders after the three Australian divisions of I Anzac Corps—1, 2 and 4—had been sent to the Somme. More troops were needed for the looming battle at Pozières, a small village in the Somme Valley. When the 5th Division replaced the 4th at Armentières on 12 July, it was the most inexperienced of the Australian divisions in France. The area it occupied, the sector from south of Armentières to Bois-Grenier, was commonly called ‘The Nursery’, as it was used for training new arrivals in trench warfare while holding the line. It was comparatively quiet, however, because both sides seemed to recognise that advance either way was impossible at that point.

At nearby Fromelles, the Germans held their front line far more lightly than elsewhere. British troops had fought there fourteen months earlier, taking 10,000 casualties, but it seems little had been learned from that disaster by generals who were inclined to see soldiers as expendable. On 8 July General Sir Charles Monro ordered Lieutenant General Sir Richard Haking’s XI Corps to prepare a scheme to break the enemy line so as to distract German attention from Pozières. Haking, often described as an ambitious ‘thruster’ and bully, proposed the capture of Aubers Ridge, including the villages of Aubers and Fromelles, rating the chance of success as ‘favourable’. What veteran divisions under their command had been unable to achieve the previous year Monro and Haking now expected two inexperienced divisions to manage with virtually no warning and under vastly more difficult circumstances. However, as Bean wrote, McCay was gratified that his division, the last of the AIF to arrive in France, would be the first to face serious action.

Amid growing misgivings at GHQ, both Monro and Haking gave assurances that all was well and said they opposed cancellation or postponement. Haking’s plan provided for a gas attack followed by an infantry attack to capture the Sugar Loaf salient—a German stronghold—and about 2000 metres of German trenches to the south. The plan for doing so did not materialise. Finally, at a conference on 13 July, alternative plans were put forward that to Brigadier General Harold ‘Pompey’ Elliott, commander of the AIF 15th Brigade, were ‘a wretched hybrid scheme, which even might have been termed an abortion.’

As he would later make clear to Bean, Elliott was profoundly concerned. He thought the operation inadvisable because preparations would be rushed, the artillery was inexperienced, and No Man’s Land was too wide—up to 400 metres in places. Elliott’s men would also have to advance opposite the formidable Sugar Loaf. As well, Haking underestimated the artillery and munitions available for the attack. Elliott met Major H.C.L. Howard, a visiting staff officer from Haig’s headquarters, and took him forward to a post in No Man’s Land. Visibly moved, Howard said the attack would prove ‘a bloody holocaust.’ Elliott urged him to go back to Haig and say so. Howard promised he would. Whatever Howard may have said to Haig, the attack was delayed but not cancelled and the attack was fixed for 19 July.

Despite the clear logistical shortcomings, an AIF artillery bombardment in preparation for the attack went ahead on the morning of the 19th. Because of inadequate equipment and insufficient time for the artillery to become familiar with the battlefield, the bombardment failed badly, and the German machine guns remained in place on the Sugar Loaf. The Australians would assault over open fields crisscrossed with drainage ditches and in the face of heavy machine-gun and artillery fire. As Bean would later write:

Suggested first by Haking as a feint-attack; then by [General Herbert] Plumer as part of a victorious advance; rejected by Monro in favour of attack elsewhere; put forward again by GHQ as a ‘purely artillery’ demonstration; ordered as a demonstration but with an infantry operation added, according to Haking’s plan and through his emphatic advocacy; almost cancelled—through weather and the doubts of GHQ—and finally reinstated by Haig, apparently as an urgent demonstration—such were the changes of form through which the plans of this ill-fated operation had successively passed.

The 5th Division was given the task of taking the German trenches, its orders being to link up with a depleted British territorial division, the 61st, which, although short of manpower and training, was responsible for the Sugar Loaf salient. The Australians’ senior Methodist chaplain, James Green, later commented that there was ‘no enthusiasm among the troops, for, although they were eager to fight, it was felt that we had not sufficient knowledge of the intricate system of saps and trenches.’ Three days of wire cutting with guns preceded the attack and, with the sun still high, and three and a half hours of daylight still ahead on the 19th, the first wave of Australian troops crossed the parapets at 5.45 p.m., the remaining two following on schedule.

Having advanced through the German fire, the Australians were confronted with the difficulty of swampy ground, and the German second-line trenches indicated on their maps could not be properly identified as the Germans had flooded them. Because the Germans had pulled their men back from the front line, resistance became greater as the Australians advanced under heavy fire. Two parallel roads led to the front, but the Germans swept them with machine-gun fire. Men fell in droves under the murderous enfilading fire. The order to retire was given. According to Green, ‘When the fight was over men lay about in a battle stupor.’

Today, the Sugar Loaf barely seems a blip in the distance when viewed from the fields lying in front of it. But when Bean reached 5th Division headquarters at Sailly at about 1.20 p.m. on 20 July, the fields at Fromelles were far from a rustic scene. When he inquired about the battle, an aide-de-camp told him, ‘It’s all over, you know, we’re back in our own trenches. We’ve had an awfully rough passage.’ That was an understatement. Bean began piecing the horrific story together a few hours after the slaughter ended. To him, the sight of the Australian trenches ‘packed with wounded and dying, was unexampled in the history of the AIF.’ As Bean put it: ‘In one night and the hours preceding it the 5th Division had lost 5533 men, of whom 400 were prisoners.’ Among these were 1917 men who were either killed outright or died from their wounds.

Bean joined the stunned survivors in the mess, taking first-hand accounts of the debacle that had decimated the 5th Division. Among those he talked to was Brigadier General Edwin Tivey, commander of the 8th Infantry Brigade. ‘Poor old Tivey looked quite overdone—with eyes like boiled gooseberries,’ Bean thought. Tivey had been up for two nights and, just before meeting Bean, had been through his trenches where German shelling had killed or wounded ‘quite a fair number of men.’ Bean noted that the one thing of which Tivey seemed anxious to assure himself was that his brigade had tried as hard and had done as well as the brigades in Gallipoli. He told Bean: ‘Men who were at Anzac said that the shellfire in Gallipoli was child’s play to this.’ After talking to other Gallipoli veterans, Bean had no doubt it was, even at Lone Pine. ‘And Tivey said to me simply: “1700—that’s about as heavy as some of the brigades lost at the landing, isn’t it?” And so it was.’ Bean had no doubt that the 8th Brigade, though it had come back, ‘fought as well as most of the Anzac troops ever did.’

Shocked to his core, Tivey was looking for anything positive at all to cling on to, and comparisons with Gallipoli provided the yardstick for his men’s performance. Tivey was not alone in looking wretched—Pompey Elliott did too when Bean saw him. ‘Old Elliott was dead asleep’ when Bean called, but Major General McCay had come in and woken him up. Elliott, who had predicted the debacle, was already grieving for his men. ‘When Elliott came out I felt almost as if I were in the presence of a man who had just lost his wife. He looked down and could hardly speak—he was clearly terribly depressed and overwrought,’ Bean wrote. Elliott, like White, had predicted that the attack would be a monumental folly.

Bean thought that McCay was anxious about an order that he and Elliott had given to two companies of the 58th Battalion to provide support between the 14th Brigade and the British. McCay explained that the British had reported at 9 p.m. that they had captured the cap of the salient—and so Elliott, with his full approval, sent in two companies of the 58th to fill in the gap. As Bean noted of the explanation in his diary: ‘The men went through the long grass and low scrub and were going finely when machine-guns got them and laid most of them out. McCay explained to me they had to be put in to that gap as the 61st Division reported that it was in. As a matter of fact it never had the cap of the salient.’ The so-called ‘gap’ was never there.

Bean returned to Contay that night after filing his story from headquarters at Amiens. ‘I believe the Censor passed it,’ he noted. However, the censor wouldn’t allow him to describe the bombardment as ‘intense’ because of First Army objections to such descriptions. Bean also noted: ‘They say that the official communiqué calls it an “important series of trench raids’’—what is the good of deliberate lying like that? The Germans know it was an attack—they have numbers of our wounded as prisoners.’ Bean would later comment in the Official History that the communiqué had shaken the faith of the troops in statements from GHQ whose policy was that the ‘severity of this reverse’ should be concealed from the British public. But at least—unlike other correspondents—Bean had detailed accounts from the men at the front, and this would be invaluable for his Official History in comprehending the magnitude of what happened at Fromelles.

In his 420-word story, which appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald four days later, Bean was clearly hampered by what he could get past the censor. Certainly he could not damn the British as he had in his diary for lying about the battle. His story attempted to find some positives in the debacle. Bean, like other correspondents, knew he had to censor himself. His story provides an insight into British military censorship in the Great War:

AUSTRALIANS ATTACK TRENCHES.TEMPORARY SUCCESS. TAKE 200 PRISONERS.

Yesterday evening, after a bombardment, an Australian force attacked the German trenches south of Armentières. The Australians on the left seized the German front line, and passed beyond it to the further trenches on the first system.

In the centre the Australians carried the whole of the German first system, and reached more or less open country. On the right, the troops had to cross a much wider stretch between the trenches, where the Germans held a very strongly-fortified salient.

The Germans were ready for the attack and had managed to save a number of machine-guns from the bombardment. In spite of very brave efforts, the troops on this flank were unable to cross the ground between the trenches, and only managed to reach the German trenches at isolated points. From these they were driven out.

This enabled the Germans to concentrate the fire of all sorts of artillery on the portion of the trenches captured. The Germans battered down their own trenches where they were occupied by our men.

They also turned water from a channel down the trench on the left flank, and the Australians there, shortly after reaching the trenches, found themselves standing in water which was rapidly rising and waist high.

They endured a tremendous bombardment until early the following morning, when, after eleven hours in the captured position, such Australians as retained the small remaining portion of the German line were ordered to retire.

By dint of very brave work, the engineers and infantry in the working parties had managed to get communication trenches dug completely through to the German trenches. Those trenches were dug under very heavy shell fire. This work enabled the troops to carry out their retirement with a loss which is slight when the extraordinary difficulty of the operation is considered.

Among the last who returned to our trenches were eight men who said they got lost behind the German trenches, and had been wandering about till daylight in the country in the rear of the front line.

Our troops, in this attack, had to face shell fire which was heavier and more continuous than was ever known in Gallipoli.

Many of them had never previously been tried. The manner in which they carried the operation through seems to have been worthy of all the traditions of Anzac. At least 200 prisoners were captured and several machine-guns. Many Germans were killed. The losses amongst our troops engaged were severe.

A journalist of Bean’s skill would have known that the lead to the story was in the final sentence, yet he had no option but to bury details about the Australians’ severe losses—and write it all in flat prose of the kind he would have abhorred during his Herald days.

In most of the British press, the fight was described in a handful of lines, and was variously called ‘a lively skirmish,’ ‘a stirring attack’ or ‘a big raid.’ Bean alone among correspondents at least went to the scene of the action. Among those he talked to in the mess that day was Colonel Harold Pope, commander of the 14th Brigade. Bean knew Pope from Gallipoli—he had been chatting with him when a bomb blew off a dead Turk’s leg and spattered him with gore. Pope’s reputation after Gallipoli was strong; he was a respected senior officer who had given his name to the ridge at Gallipoli known as Pope’s Hill. The day before the attack, Pope wrote in his diary: ‘Have done everything possible that I know of for tomorrow.’ He directed his part of the attack until he received orders at 5.40 a.m. to withdraw his brigade, which was isolated and in a desperate situation. Pope knew that more than 2000 of his men were either dead or wounded. In the mess room, Bean thought Pope ‘had been refreshing himself after the strain’ when he asserted: ‘Well, we were the only brigade which didn’t come back till we were told to.’ This, Bean noted, was ‘said with meaning.’ Bean thought Pope ‘was rather contemptuous about Elliott and the 15th Brigade,’ and he ‘rather disgusted me by the boastful way he talked’—rather too scathing an assessment, given the trauma of the previous twenty-four hours.

Bean’s meeting with Pope gave him a forestaste of tensions in the 5th Division and the AIF that were heightened in the aftermath of the battle. At 3 p.m., soon after talking to Bean and exhausted, Pope fell into a heavy sleep, from which McCay, his divisional commander, tried to wake him at 4.30 p.m. Failing to do so, McCay concluded that Pope was drunk. Next day he demoted and dismissed him—even though he acknowledged that Pope ‘had behaved with skill, courage and energy during the whole operation of 19/20 July.’ Pope protested his innocence and won the support of six other officers who, he said, were ‘all satisfied McCay is wrong.’ A doctor also told him his explanation was ‘entirely consistent with medical science.’ Pope went to General Birdwood with a request for a court-martial where he could produce witnesses to confirm his sobriety. Birdwood, anxious to avoid scandal, refused.

Feeling ‘very rotten’, Pope accused McCay of intimidating unnamed others. He rebuffed overtures for a compromise unless McCay withdrew the imputation that he had been drunk. McCay refused and Pope was sent back to Australia, with his AIF appointment terminated—just as Birdwood was about to promote him to Brigadier General. However, he refused to give up the fight to clear his name, taking his case to the Australian Government. He also wrote to Bean, clearly wanting him to back his defence that he was not drunk. Pope, of course, could not have known that Bean had made a note to the contrary in his diary. Bean did not become involved. While Pope admitted having drunk some whisky with fellow officers immediately after the battlefield trauma of Fromelles, he vehemently maintained that he was not intoxicated.

Few would criticise him for having a whisky in such trying circumstances. For Bean, however, the issue was more likely what he believed Pope’s ‘refreshing himself ’ gave rise to—boastfulness. This was his complaint with John Monash—self-promoters would never wash with him. Monash was surprised at Pope’s downfall, and intrigued when he heard that Pope suspected his anti-Australian brigade major, N.K. Charteris, had white-anted him to McCay over the incident. Monash concluded that McCay ‘must have changed greatly for the worse.’

Years later, the Official History, Bean’s only comment about the incident involving Pope was to record that after Fromelles there were changes in several Australian commands, including that ‘Colonel Pope, on disciplinary grounds not affecting the control of his brigade during the action, was returned to Australia.’

Pope’s determination to clear his name eventually paid off. In a letter to Defence Minister George Pearce, Birdwood noted that Pope had ‘done excellently while heavy fighting was actually going on, but he appears to have lamentably and completely broken down afterwards, which makes his continuing to carry on as a brigadier out of the question.’ However, he told the Minister that he backed Pope’s right to clear his name. When Pearce saw Pope, he agreed that doubt existed about the events of 20 July and gave him command of a troopship back to Britain, with an interview with Birdwood on arrival. On 16 February 1917, Pope accepted Birdwood’s offer to command the 52nd Battalion with his original rank of lieutenant colonel, and in late March he once more led men to the front line.

On 21 July 1916 McCay published a special divisional order in which he wrote that he had ‘great pleasure’ in releasing complimentary remarks from General Haig and the commander of the 2nd Army, General Sir Hubert Plumer. McCay congratulated ‘all ranks in the Division who have so gallantly maintained the Anzac tradition.’ Haig wanted the men to ‘realise that their enterprise has not been by any means in vain and that the gallantry with which they carried out the attack is fully recognised.’ Those who survived knew the emptiness of these words. Many Australians could barely contain their anger at the debacle.

Bean defended McCay over his performance at Fromelles—not least his decision to stop an armistice arranged with the Germans to collect the dead and wounded from the battlefield. Bean acknowledged that the wounded lay in No Man’s Land, ‘tortured and helpless’ among the dead, ‘within a stone’s throw of safety but apparently without hope of it.’ For the men, he wrote, ‘knowing that a mate—his living body the prey of flies and ants—is being slowly done to death within two minutes of the succour’—was a horror. Efforts were made to secure formal ratification of an impromptu truce arranged with the Germans by two Australians of the 8th Brigade. McCay, however, disallowed it in accordance with Haig’s specific order forbidding such agreements, and Haking and Monro backed the decision. Bean wrote that upon McCay’s order reaching the front line, the stretcher bearers were stopped from going out. He commented that even if McCay disagreed with the settled policy of his chiefs, he could not disobey their orders. ‘A great part of both the nation and the army would probably have favoured a policy more rigidly consistent with the principles of chivalry and humanity, for which the Allies genuinely stood, but a divisional general can hardly be blamed for rigid adherence to the orders of the commander-in-chief.’ However, as Pompey Elliott’s biographer, Ross McMullin, has pointed out, under military law, McCay was entitled to authorise a local suspension of arms without his superiors’ ratification.

Although Bean mentions McCay in a negative light at several points in his diaries—going so far as to say at one point that he was ‘wildly unpopular throughout the AIF’—he treated him carefully in the Official History. He cast him as a scapegoat and asserted that ‘the blame for the enterprise was thrown upon an unpopular but entirely innocent leader, General McCay,’ who was no more responsible ‘than the humblest private in his force.’ The troops saw it differently. After Fromelles, the men under McCay’s command despised him, not just for his failure to agree to the truce but also for orders during the fighting. McCay became the ‘Butcher of Fromelles’. Even his headquarters staff were unwilling to work for him.

After the Official History was released, Bean received a letter from a Melbourne Herald reader about the ‘Fleur Baix blunder’: ‘In my battalion there were 67 (sixty-seven) answered the roll call out of 1000 (one thousand) men. General Sir J. McCay will never be pardoned by the men lucky enough to come through unless he can make a frank statement, and let us know who was responsible.’ The letter was signed ‘Ex Non-Com, 60th Battalion.’ Bean responded to the Herald, defending McCay and asserting it was clear that the ‘Ex Non-Com’ had not read the account of Fromelles in the History. If he did he would find that McCay ‘was never in a position to know “Who was to blame”—he never had access to the higher records.’

The letter coincided with one from McCay to Bean giving thanks for defending him. McCay wrote that he would have been ‘a wooden creature’ if he had not ‘felt the hurt of the persistent calumnies that have hung about my name.’ He went on: ‘I would be still wooden, did I not fully recognise, not merely your vindication of me in your pages, but also the generous warmth of your words. To be vindicated is one thing, to be absolved in the way you have adopted is another, and a better one. From my heart I thank you.’

McCay’s personal bravery and intellectual qualities seem not to have been in doubt, but it has been suggested that as a divisional commander he may have been promoted beyond his capabilities. Birdwood, for example, would not support any bid to promote McCay after the summer of 1916. By then it was clear that he was unable to get on with his senior officers. Increasingly McCay became such a liability that Birdwood told Pearce he had ‘a tendency very often to rub people up the wrong way.’ It would seem that Bean alone had a good word for him.

Few, though, disagreed with Bean’s identification of the real culprit at Fromelles—the ‘reckless’ and ‘loose thinking’ of British ‘Higher Staff ’ and in particular, Sir Richard Haking, the General Officer Commanding XI Corps. In his report, Haking patronised the Australians, attributing the failure solely to the newness of the infantry and ignoring his own culpability for the slaughter. Indeed, he portrayed it as a success, saying ‘officers and men displayed a fine spirit throughout the attack and drove back the enemy with true British vigour.’ He continued: ‘I think the attack of the Australian Division which was new to fighting out here, was carried out in an exceptionally gallant manner . . . I am quite sure that on the next occasion when the Division is ordered to attack it will distinguish itself even more than on this occasion. I have nothing but admiration for the fine fighting spirit displayed by Commanders and all ranks in the Division. The artillery work turned out even better than I expected though many of the batteries had had very little experience.’

Bean would have none of this. He noted in the Official History that the objective Haking had set for his force proved to be a series of abandoned and water-filled trenches and ditches. ‘The attacking troops were possibly unfortunate in meeting a German division of pre-eminently excellent morale,’ he wrote, ‘and the insertion, through inexperience, in McCay’s orders of the clause ordering the troops to vacate the first trench after they had cleared it, undoubtedly contributed to the causes of failure.’

Bean dismissed the operation as entirely counterproductive strategically. Within a few hours of the battle, the infantry attack had achieved precisely the opposite effect to that intended. ‘An artillery demonstration, as suggested by Haig’s staff, might have avoided all this loss and have led the Germans to apprehend that a bigger attack was being prepared. But now they knew the operation to be a mere feint, and if they had previously any doubts as to the wisdom of “milking” that front for reserves for the Somme, the fight had actually dispelled those doubts.’ In allocating blame to the British, though, Bean was critical of not just the staff but also the British 61st Division, which partnered the Australians, contending that ‘the Australian soldiers tended to accept the judgment—often unjust, but already deeply impressed by the occurrences at the Suvla landing—that the Tommies could not be relied upon to uphold a flank in a stiff fight.’

It could be argued that this was too harsh a judgement, as both divisions were untried before Fromelles. Thus two inexperienced formations had to carry a hurriedly developed battle plan—an unwise combination that invited the ensuing defeat. While Bean clearly identified British mistakes in the 118 pages he devoted to Fromelles in the Official History, the single chapter on Fromelles by Captain Wilfrid Miles in the British official history covers just seventeen pages and assigns blame to no one. Instead, Miles wrote blandly but accurately that: ‘The pity of it was that the action need not have been fought. To have delivered battle at all . . . betrayed a grave under-estimate of the enemy’s powers of resistance.’

Bean took the story of the battle from the level of the generals to that of individual soldiers and assessed the decisions and effects in considerably greater depth than did the British version. To the British, Fromelles was a relatively minor action. But Bean realised the immensity of it for Australia, for the battle crippled the 5th Division. Not until the end of the summer, when it raided the German trenches frequently and successfully, did the division regain its full effectiveness. For Bean, though, the Somme was far from over.

25

The giant mincing machine

The men in the trenches outside the village of Pozières in the Somme valley were in great heart. Bean watched as they cleaned rifles, read Australian papers or just yarned. Some boiled tea on little trench fires. Many were getting what sleep they could. ‘I believe we are going to hop over to see Fritz tonight,’ one said to Bean. Just two days after the disaster at Fromelles, a still shaken and angered Bean had had little time to think through what had happened. Yet here he was, observing preparations for a new Australian battle.

There had been continual, steady shelling at Pozières for days, and in the near distance Bean could see a flat stretch, covered with a low crop of grass and thistles, through which ran a railway the Germans had built; then a low, shredded thicket hedge; and lastly, Pozières, along the old Roman road between Albert and Bapaume.

The 1st Australian Division was to attack from the south and advance in three stages to the road through the centre of Pozières. On the left the British 48th Division would attack some communication trenches still held by the Germans west of the village. On the afternoon of 22 July 1916 the Australians bombarded the village, with Bean noting, ‘our heavy shells were tearing at regular intervals into the rear of the brickheaps which once were houses, and flinging up branches of trees and great clouds of black earth from the woods.’ Such was the ferocity of the bombardment, Bean reported, that a German letter found the next day was addressed ‘In Hell’s Trenches.’ As the Germans suffered, the Australians waited for their attack to begin. As he so often did in portraying Australian troops, Bean drew an outback analogy: in going about their tasks, they reminded him of men as ‘they yarned of old over the stockyard fence or the gate of the horse paddock.’

Such bucolic serenity could not last. The yarning stopped when shortly after dark that night Bean witnessed the ‘most fearful bombardment’ he had ever seen. ‘As one walked towards the battlefield, the weirdly shattered woods and battered houses stood out almost all the time against one continuous band of flickering light along the eastern skyline.’ Shortly after midnight the 1st Australian Division’s 3rd and 1st Brigades attacked. The difficulty, Bean observed, was ‘not to get the men forward, but to hold them’ in what was a complicated night attack. The first trench they reached was full of dead Germans. Parties of Australians went through the trees and into the village, pushing so close to the fringe of their own shellfire that it wounded some.

Bean took a car along the Fricourt road and reached a ridge from where he could see the battlefield on every side. ‘The battle seemed ever so far away over the wide world and between me and it there was nothing except the face of the misty earth and the figure of some solitary transport ahead on the lonely road,’ he wrote. Out of the car, he heard the jingle of mule chains behind him when suddenly there was the long drawn hoot of a horn. He thought it must be a gas alarm. He kept going and heard someone warn to prepare for gas, and have gas helmets ready. Bean fumbled with his, got it ready to put on, and kept going down a hill. He soon ‘got into a soft sweet aromatic smelling air’ and wondered if this was gas. He asked someone in a dugout, who replied that he had a sprained ankle. The man had been told to take a pigeon basket back to British 2nd Brigade headquarters, and Bean had no doubt that the sprain was ‘pure funk’ and that the man was afraid to go alone amid the shelling and the gas. He offered to help with the basket and they went together. As they got down the hill Bean had no doubt they were getting into gas and, fearing ‘a deadly injury to one’s lungs,’ put the helmet on. His companion urged him to get into a trench beside the road. Bean hesitated. ‘It seemed to me a bad place for gas—a low trench—but perhaps he knew. So I got into the trench and followed him—he knew the way—I had no idea of it.’

With his helmet on, it was ‘almost deadly dark,’ and Bean could not see. He could just make out the lurid flash of gas shells on the other side of the road, and it made him hurry even though he knew he faced suffocation if he overexerted himself. ‘I could hardly hear my breath in and out. The only thing was to lie down in the trench and rest till I got it again. I knew I mustn’t take the helmet off. Really I thought then I was done. I didn’t know the way. I seemed to be going into a shrapnel barrage. I didn’t know if I should ever get back my breath, and I couldn’t see and yet didn’t dare take off the helmet.’ However, as he lay down his breath came back and he decided to move back onto the road, which he soon realised was better than the trench. ‘The first men that passed me seemed to have masks on like inquisitors; but presently two came by with no masks—I tore mine off at once. Clearly it was not bad enough for a mask there.’ Bean became separated from his companion, but soon found he had reached 2nd Brigade headquarters. A British runner was assigned to take him to the Australian 3rd Brigade headquarters.

With shells bursting on the left-hand side of the road, Bean and his guide stuck to the right. But they reached a point where, with shells simply raining down, they faced a 50-metre sprint to safety. ‘The pellets were striking the road and knocking fire out of the stones. Numbers of shell just whizzed over the road and exploded beyond. There seemed to be no chance of getting across just then so we waited. I do not know if it could have been done with a 50 per cent chance. I fancy from what I have learnt since that it could have been done with perhaps only 20 per cent.’ Bean decided to wait, and at last the shrapnel seemed to abate. ‘It seemed to me our chance, so I told my guide we’d run for it and we did. I beat him. As we got to the other side shells were showering overhead again, but some bank protected us.’ Bean found himself among a crowd of perhaps twenty men, with some dead and wounded. Two or three gas shells had just exploded and before he could get his helmet on he got two breaths of the gas, which immediately sickened him. Fortuitously, he had come upon 3rd Brigade headquarters. He blundered into the mouth of foundations and found a long flight of steps leading down to a deep German dugout. Downstairs, he found the 3rd Brigade commander, Colonel Ewen Sinclair-MacLagan, and his entire staff, sitting with gas helmets on, ‘as solemn as owls round the table.’ Sinclair-MacLagan invited him to join them. ‘I could hardly believe it—the end of the adventure had arrived.’ Still wearing his gas helmet, Bean began writing his notes for the night.

The 1st Division’s only failure was not capturing the strong German second-line system (known as the O.G. or Old German, Lines) on the crest. But here the Australians met trenches and shell craters. Bean saw that these conditions were new to the Australians, who found it difficult to be sure where their objective was or what point they had reached. The two trenches they sought were virtually unrecognisable, in some places no more than a depression among the deep holes and mounds of thrown-up earth. The shell-swept landscape reminded Bean of a choppy sea.

He noted that as daylight gradually spread over the ‘bleached surface’ Australians could occasionally be seen walking about among the trees and through part of the village they had been ordered to take. He watched as they consolidated their hold on the village and cleared out snipers from ‘half-hidden lurking places.’ A patrol bombed some dugouts, from one of which appeared a white flag waving vigorously. Sixteen prisoners came out.

That afternoon Bean went again to the battlefield and saw the victorious Australians smoking German cigars or donning the shiny black spiked German helmets while they dug. They knew they had achieved a striking success. A main buttress of the German line had been broken. Bean wrote a cable, wishing people in Australia could have seen what he saw:

Up and down a certain wandering track, far behind the battlefield, came a stream of traffic. Those going up the track were great, cheery, strong-faced fellows, with a trotting gun team, whose easy-limbed drivers looked as if the men were part of the horses. Down the same track came men limping, in twos and threes, slowly. They were wounded, from the great battle, but they held themselves with a sort of stubborn erectness, which said as plainly as in words, ‘Let nobody pity me.’ Some were smoking, others quietly yarning over the events of the wild night before, but I saw scarcely a single man who looked the remotest degree sorry for himself. ‘I hope I’m not going to lose my fingers,’ said one youngster with a shattered hand. ‘I reckon I ought to be good for a number of the beggars yet. I can’t be sure I got even one last night.’

Bean watched as the Germans mounted a determined bid to regain Pozières on the morning of 24 July. Heavy shells burst continually amid shattered trees or in brickheaps, and the whole place was intermittently hidden by mist from great black and brick-red bursts. All day this continued on and off.

Yet through this inferno our troops steadily carried out the day’s duties, and much more besides. I know this to be no exaggeration, because I saw it myself. The cooks, engineers, pioneers, and water-carriers are all doing their normal work as if things happening around them were mere street incidents. At one moment when the air was thick with flying fragments a call went for stretcher bearers. The din continued with varying intensity. One had almost forgotten that call when a big Western Australian passed the mouth of the hole in which we were squatting. ‘Anyone ask for a stretcher bearer?’ he said. The Australian stretcher bearers have a wonderful reputation to live up to. As far as I have seen, they are preserving it completely by the way they move through the heavy shellfire of the German barrages.

Bean overtook a dejected-looking corporal walking painfully back, naked to the waist except for about half a dozen separate bandages. He was wearing a German shrapnel helmet on his head. ‘I might be worse,’ was all he said when Bean asked him about it. ‘You have got a fine souvenir out of it, anyway,’ Bean said, looking up at the helmet. ‘Some bloke put it there,’ he replied.

After they had taken Pozières, Bean watched as the Australians sat on the doorsteps, smoking. Others were still clearing out the remaining Germans. ‘They would roll a bomb into the cellars and, when a German bolted, would bayonet him. They walked freely in the village at first. Even after 6 days a German could be heard moaning in one of the cellars, but they couldn’t find him.’

While the Australians enjoyed success, the British attack east of the AIF gained no ground. General Haig’s third big effort on the Somme had—except in the Pozières sector—failed completely. The cost to the Australians was high: by the time 1st Division was relieved on 27 July it had suffered 5285 casualties. Bean talked to ‘one youngster from New South Wales, working like a tiger’ who was buried three times. He continued working until the third time, when he collapsed, telling Bean: ‘I don’t think I can manage it again.’ While their stoicism was clear, the men were at pains to tell Bean: ‘For God’s sake, don’t make us heroes. We can stand anything but that.’ Bean took this seriously, writing soon after:

Steadfast until death, just the men that Australians at home know them to be; into the place with a joke, a dry, cynical, Australian joke as often as not; holding fast through any that man can imagine; stretcher bearers, fatigue parties, messengers, chaplains, doing their job all the time, both new-joined youngsters and old hands, without fuss, but steadily, because it is their work. They are not heroes. They are just ordinary Australians doing their particular work as their country would wish them to do it. And pray God Australians in days to come will be worthy of them!

Ideas were forming in Bean’s mind about these ‘ordinary Australians’, building on the prewar conclusions he had drawn about them and the respect and admiration they were now owed as standard-bearers and role models for the nation.

When the 1st Division finally withdrew, the troops were exhausted. Bean observed that when they reached bivouac in Vadencourt Wood, and had washed and rested, they were strangely quiet, far different from the Australian soldiers of tradition. ‘They resembled rather boys emerging from long illness, many lying quietly apart in their blankets, reading books, smoking, or writing home letters.’

The 2nd Division was quickly in action—sooner than it should have been, owing to pressure from the commander of the British Reserve Army, General Hubert Gough, whom Bean thought a ‘thruster’. Gough was eager for speed. The division’s commander, Major General Gordon Legge, and his staff had no experience of operations on the scale that now faced them—which Bean concluded was a disadvantage in view of the pressure from Gough to hasten the start of the attack. For once, Brudenell White, Birdwood’s chief of staff, put aside his own doubts, and the assault on the O.G. Lines was ordered for 12.15 a.m. on the 29th.

Pozières and its surrounding fields by now were little more than an expanse of desert. Bean described the village ‘so pounded by shell-burst after shell-burst that the powdered debris of houses and earth was spread like ashes six feet deep over the surface, as featureless as the Sahara, and level except for the shell-craters which lay edge to edge—like the scratching of gigantic hens in an endless ash heap.’ Each fresh salvo flung up rolling clouds of this dust and rearranged the craters. Except for two fragments of German concrete bunkers, every vestige of building above ground level eventually vanished. Pozières had simply become an open space, marked vaguely by tree-stumps, but with no other sign that a village had been there. Names such as ‘Sausage Valley’—where Bean wrote his diary 7 metres underground in the headquarters of his friend 6th Brigade commander Brigadier General John Gellibrand—reflected the grim reality of what the countryside had become. He noted, perversely, that the German battalion commander, who had previously occupied the room, had turned it ‘into something like a well upholstered little railway compartment—dark wooden battens, stone coloured wallpaper, electric light fittings,’ and a bunk. Such were the microcosms of civilisation that remained.

The 2nd Division’s first attack failed to breach the O.G. Lines. The fire from the German machine guns was lethal. The 5th Brigade was pinned to the ground. In the 7th Brigade the 28th Battalion, just north of the main road, came up against wire entanglements. Some men tried to cut the wire, others wrenched at the stakes, and many were killed, the division losing some 3500 men. Haig was disparaging, telling Birdwood, ‘You’re not fighting Bashi-Bazouks now.’ The comparison with undisciplined Ottoman mercenaries stung; Legge and I Anzac Corps staff resolved to do the job properly.

As they prepared for a new assault six days later, Bean drove through the ash heap that was Pozières and around the Australian front line. For about half the journey he passed through deserted trenches along which the dead lay in batches of up to a dozen. Soon there was not a soul in sight, only the powdered grey earth of the craters with a wooden pathway through. He turned back and followed the goat track to the right. The sight horrified him:

There were only blackened dead—and occasionally bits of men—torn bits of limbs unrecognisable along it. I walked on for 5 minutes without seeing a sign of anyone till I came to a gradually improving trench—quite deserted—peopled only by dead men half buried—some sitting upright with bandaged heads—apparently little hurt except for the bandaged wound—others lying half covered in the little holes they had scratched in the trench side.

He went on over battered trenches and into intact trenches, hurrying to avoid machine guns, which could have caught him any time. Wherever he left the trenches there were dead men. The feeling was eerie, with no sign of life. ‘Everywhere were blackened men—torn and whole—dead for days,’ he wrote in his diary.

A day later Bean happened upon a chaplain and a sergeant hastily burying twenty-four men. The bodies had to be out of the way of the troops going in. ‘It does not encourage new troops to see a sight like that,’ Bean commented. ‘They simply turn them into the nearest shell hole and cover them up. No time to get identity disk . . . so these poor chaps go down as “missing” unless someone has their disk already.’ With the new 2nd Division attack imminent, Bean understood the military logic behind the burial party; he knew more men would die that night when the 2nd Division went in.

All day on 4 August Bean observed the ‘terrible sight’ that Pozières had become, smoke from shell blasts blotting out the landscape. Pozières was an ‘insatiable factory’ of hideous wounds, an abattoir. ‘The men are simply turned in there as into some ghastly giant mincing machine.’ They had to stay there while shell after huge shell descended with a shriek close beside them, each one an acute mental torture. Each shrieking, tearing crash brought a threat of instantaneous ‘ghastly wounds’, as if saying, ‘I will rend your flesh and pulp an arm or a leg—fling you, half a gaping quivering man like these that you see smashed around you, one by one, to lie there rotting and blackening like all the things you saw by the awful roadside, or in that sickening dusty crater.’ Every few seconds men in the trenches felt the instant fear, ‘with a crash that is a physical pain and a strain to withstand.’ Bean understood the trauma of such an experience, and why it would leave men quivering wrecks no matter how brave they were.

That night, the 2nd Division’s careful planning and preparation paid off. Bean wrote that there was enough dim moonlight to make out the landscape. The same troops from the previous week’s failure made the attack, he noted, ‘because there was a determination that they, and they alone, should reach that line.’

The troops captured both O.G. Lines. South of and astride the Albert–Bapaume road, the O.G. Lines had been so thoroughly obliterated by prolonged shelling that the Australians ended up advancing beyond their objectives. Bean saw that the shelling crushed or blocked the deep dugouts where the Germans had tried to take cover in the trenches. Such was the pounding that some of the German companies had lost half their men.

When day broke Bean saw before the Australians a wide, flat stretch of hilltop with a line of hills in the distance. Far down the slope there were Germans moving. ‘And in the distant landscape they saw the German gun teams limber up and hurry away with the field guns which for a fortnight had been firing upon our men,’ Bean wrote. From their vantage in the O.G. Lines on the eastern edge of the Pozières ridge, the Australians now looked over green countryside.

With the 2nd Division relieved on 6 August, the 4th Division was next into the line at Pozières as the Germans planned their counterattack. The incessant artillery bombardment continued before they attacked at dawn on 7 August. The fighting was brutal but the Germans failed to regain the lost territory and, importantly, Hill 160. It would prove to be the last German attempt to retake Pozières.

As Bean had witnessed, the destructive power of artillery now dominated the battlefield: shrapnel tore men to pieces, high explosives blew them to bits and destroyed trenches. In the fighting around Pozières the AIF suffered 23,000 casualties, more than 6700 of whom died. Pozières was a costly battle for the Australians, but in the face of murderous shelling and fire, the gains were significant. They had pressured the Germans for the first time and forged a salient into German territory and could look at the back of the German lines—something that neither the British nor French armies had accomplished. But as Bean later put it, the Pozières ridge was ‘more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth.’

26

The war gets personal

‘Jack is in France! Heard from him today,’ Bean noted excitedly in his diary. In late July 1916, Jack had recovered sufficiently from his Gallipoli wounds to be posted back to battlefield duty and was working at a hospital just 20 kilometres away from Pozières, at Warloy-Baillon. Finding time to catch up was the problem. They would do so within the month, but under circumstances neither would have preferred.

As the battle of the Somme rolled on into August, the Australians fought their way north towards the German-held Mouquet Farm, about 2 kilometres north-west of the high ground near Pozières. The aim was to gain control of Pozières ridge so as to force a gap in the German lines, behind the salient that had developed around the German-held fortress of Thiepval. Again, the AIF’s 1st, 2nd and 4th Divisions were involved in the attack. Bean found himself at breakfast in Sausage Gully when Captain Hubert Brettingham-Moore, of the 15th Battalion, came in:

. . . his face covered with dust but his bright eyes gleaming under it—dirty, with his equipment hanging towselled round his neck and waist and his revolver stuck loosely in his pocket. Wounded in the thigh (he didn’t know this) and in the back and in the hand, sufficiently to make it difficult for him to sit and slow to walk. Tired, over-wrought, excited, but still with a winning smile under all the brown dust, [he] kept on saying, ‘Oh, they ran, they ran. Look sir, if I’d had twice the number of men I could have held the place against anybody.’

Brettingham-Moore, a gallant young Tasmanian, described to Bean how, behind Mouquet Farm, he had killed ten Germans after jumping into a trench. He was in a state of frenzied excitement, clumsily overturning his porridge as he talked about his exploits. ‘What he wanted was tea. He asked eagerly for a second cup and pushed aside half a very tasty sausage. He couldn’t sleep when we gave him the chance to lie down before breakfast.’

Bean made a camp in the old trenches at Bécourt Wood, on the edge of Sausage Valley, and though by mid-August he knew every inch of that devastated sector, he continued to make, as his batman Arthur Bazley would later say, ‘just one more trip’ to the front line to see how the Australians were faring. As the fight for Mouquet Farm wore on, Bean walked up the Bapaume road one morning. Rain had made the chalk surface slippery and he climbed into a trench. As he inched his way along, a German sniper shot at him, the bullets snapping past just over his head. He climbed into a shallow ditch that branched off the trench and was pounded by shell after shell, unprepared for what he had stumbled upon:

Dead men’s legs, a shoulder, now a half buried body stick out of the tumbled red soil—bodies in all sorts of decay, some eaten away to the skull; blackened with the dried black skin drawn back from the teeth, eyelids dried thick and flattened like those of a mummy. There was a German—perhaps more in the bottom of the trench so that it cannot have been used of late unless he were a prisoner killed by a shell burst.

The sniper was one thing; as these mangled bodies testified, shellfire was another. Bean had little cover from shrapnel. One gun was throwing small high-explosive shells close by to the left. ‘I really began to think again that I was in a bit of a quandary.’ Bean managed to keep low and crawl about 20 metres along the trench. He waited a minute and made a run for it. ‘It is not nice to think of getting hit in those sort of places when you are quite alone because unless you can crawl to safety the chances are no-one will find you at all—especially if a shell half buries you.’ Horror was becoming routine. A few days later he came across some signallers as they fixed up broken wire along a trench:

And there lying in the bottom of the trench, just as they had fallen the night before, were three men of the 10th Battalion. One poor chap had his tunic and shirt torn bare by some piece of shell and you looked down past the bare white skin of the chest almost to his backbone—his whole body had been ripped open. He was bent back almost double . . . I can’t bear to think of these things. Another had his skull broken in just like an eggshell. A third lay peacefully there like a wax figure on which the dust had long settled—waxen, drawn, thin white lips slightly opened and eyes shut—almost as if he were lying leaning against the wall of the trench with both arms thrown out listlessly. Others that we came across you could hardly tell for dead—they might have been living men sleeping on the floor of the trench—and indeed the living were sleeping just near to them . . . One is apt to think that it is callous of the battalion to leave these men lying about. But the living are worn out by the morning—the dead are dead.

•

Bean felt anew the heavy burden of responsibility as observer and reporter of the extraordinary events that now involved the Australians. He had a story to tell, but once again he ran into the dead hand of British military censorship. At the start of August his cables to London were suddenly stopped. A fortnight went by with no change. What Bean read in the British newspapers left him frustrated, as the Australians were receiving little recognition for what they had achieved. From his diary, it is also clear that Bean operated much more at the front line than the British war correspondents—and that some resented this, for it clearly showed them up:

Reading the English papers you would imagine that the Australians had been assisting the strong territorial divisions, between whom they were squeezed, to move forward and steal a portion of German front. The other war correspondents none of them come within shellfire—much less rifle fire—and they simply don’t know, I suppose. With all the fuss that the Daily Mail makes over the Eyewitness accounts of its representative, the first occasion when he got within shell range in this battle was when I took him to Fricourt and we didn’t stay there long. Every one of them is free to come where I do if they want—and goodness knows I’m careful and nervous enough; but they don’t, and the consequence is I suppose that they don’t actually know what we have been doing.

Bean was quick to point out that in the previous three weeks the British had recaptured Delville Wood and had got into the edge of Gillemont Farm, near Cambrai. Except for those two moves, the only place where they had advanced was where the Australians ‘practically dragged a small portion of them on our flanks incidentally to our advance.’ The British saw Pozières ‘as the hardest nut to crack,’ but in three weeks the Australians had ‘utterly cracked that nut.’ But the Australians could not advance much further until the British did something. ‘We have fought the greatest battle in our history and one of the greatest in theirs—but not a suspicion of it would you get from the English papers.’

Bean met with the chief press censor, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Hutton Wilson, in Amiens. On one level, he learned, his articles had ‘been a little too full lately—too many exact particulars,’ such as ‘we attacked at 6 o’clock.’ Bean responded that surely the Germans knew such details, but was prepared to concede that perhaps Hutton Wilson was right, and that useful conclusions could be drawn from his exactness. But the issues went deeper. Bean learned that Hutton Wilson was aware that he was the ‘official’ correspondent with the AIF; the problem was that the British would not allow any news other than information from GHQ to be called official. Bean told him this could be easily and quickly fixed.

He was wrong. When no despatches appeared, he re-affirmed to Hutton Wilson his position as‘the Australian Government’s Eyewitness.’ He also wrote to Captain Henry Smart, the newly appointed controller of the Australian Military Office in London, who secured War Office approval for Bean’s despatches to be released—but only on condition that the his name did not appear. The War Office attributed this to ‘jealousy of the other war correspondents.’ In Amiens, Bean learned that the Reuters correspondent Herbert Russell had complained that he [Bean] supposedly had more ‘privileges’ than the others. ‘Little Hutton Wilson must have seized on this to bolster up his nervousness about my despatches,’ Bean concluded. ‘The result of it all has been to stir up Hutton Wilson to get onto me about my status. He has definitely decided that I am not a captain—which merely meant that I have all sorts of small advantages which went with the title.’

Bean believed there was also another reason—that GHQ wanted to downplay Australian achievements, preferring to talk of success by British forces. He dismissed this as ‘a miserably foolish decision,’ and asserted: ‘They put us in to fight the brunt of this battle and the AIF has done it—broken itself and broken the kernel of the fight opposite to it.’ Bean was convinced that in future dealings, it would be best for Australia ‘to be independent of these British people; and allies rather than dependents.’ Australia was the stronger race, with better morale, and ‘we should get more respect out of them.’ At present, the British did ‘not realise how much we do for them.’

There was more to it than Bean realised. Until 1917, Dominion forces were generally given credit in British press reports. But when German propaganda started to pick up on these reports, alleging that Britain was getting the Dominions to fight its battles, the British censors—on government orders—stopped distinguishing between Dominion and British troops by calling them all ‘British’. Australian resentment at being denied credit would only grow.

Whatever hold his British connection may have had on Bean, it was eroding. He was frustrated and disillusioned with the way he and the story of the AIF were being repressed by the British military hierarchy. Bean’s commitment to ‘the truth’ was also being compromised—and, indeed, undermined by correspondents who, rather than joining the troops at the front line as he did, relied on the dubiously accurate official communiqués. To Bean, this was poor journalism.

Bean’s style of journalism meant committting the facts to his diary as each battle unfolded before him. He daily recorded events on the battlefield as well as his own personal interactions not just with the men but also with the senior command. Such discipline meant facts were less likely to be lost. It also allowed him to ‘debrief ’ himself daily, providing an outlet for emotions and frustrations that could easily remain bottled up. He was witness to so much horror; writing down his reactions undoubtedly helped in dealing with it. Thus, while sympathetic to the men in the trenches when he went among them and shared their experiences, he was also able to maintain the professional discipline needed to do his job.

There were times, however, when this protective shell was challenged. He knew many of those who died; some were casual acquaintances whom he’d met over the years in Sydney and elsewhere, but others were closer, which made the diary entries much more personal. Such was the case on 7 August when Bean heard that his friend Charlie Manning had been killed along with three other officers the night before as they came out of the line. Charlie was an Anzac veteran and barrister Bean had known in Sydney. He and his comrades from the 24th Battalion were killed when a shell burst on the dugout in which the battalion staff sheltered. Bean was deeply affected. ‘It is horrible. He was Owen’s associate before me and I knew him well.’

Amid this trauma Bean was happy to run across his cousin Lieutenant Leo Butler, of the 12th Battalion. Leo had grown up in Hobart and entered the Butler family’s legal firm as a lawyer. They had become close on the school holidays that Bean had spent at the home of his mother’s family. Leo had always been there on the wharf to welcome the Beans when the ship arrived, and again to farewell them. To Bean, big, genial and generous Leo had always been ‘a man of the open air, the tennis court, the cricket field’ who was never quite suited to the family office. But as a soldier he was a born leader. He was ‘a very perfect gentleman, from the crown of his curly head to the soles of his great boots.’

Leo was a relatively old recruit when he enlisted at the age of thirty-two. He arrived in Egypt in April 1916 and a month later sailed for France with the 12th Battalion. From Pozières on 26 July, he wrote to Bean and arranged to meet a few weeks later. ‘He was the same big Leo of the tennis court or the camps on Sandy Bay Beach,’ Bean wrote after their reunion. Leo said his battalion would be attacking Mouquet Farm the next day, 21 August. Early on the 22nd, with mist still hovering over the landscape, Bean went to the lines and found the trenches had been blown to pieces by shelling. At battalion headquarters he heard a voice say, ‘Hallo Charlie!’

It was Leo. I was awfully thankful to see him, because I knew how wild the night had been. He told me then that he had not been over with troops who attacked . . . We stayed yarning in the half dark on the lower steps of the narrow low stairway into the dugout, and then Leo had to go off and see about getting rations to his platoon. When we left some time later I passed him sitting under the parapet of the trench nearby with a line of six or eight others, squatting with their backs against the front of the trench, talking . . . They were to come out that night. The battalion had got a little more than its objective, and one felt very happy about them, especially to have seen Leo safe after that night. ‘See you in a day or two,’ we said as I left.

This was Leo Butler’s first experience of action at Pozières, but he and his men penetrated the farm and bombed the dugouts. Late the next day, they went into action again, only to immediately face a ferocious German barrage. Just before nightfall, as shells rained down, Leo gathered his platoon to lead them out to relieve men digging in the front line at Mouquet Farm. He never made it: a piece of high-explosive shell came scything in, severing his left leg below the knee and mangling toes on his right foot. By the time he was carried back to the safety of a trench, Leo’s stretcher was saturated with blood. He told one of the officers that all day he had felt that something was going to happen to him.

The battalion’s doctor arrived about midnight and gave Leo an opiate to send him to sleep. At dawn on 23 August, two stretcher bearers carried him the 3 kilometres back to a horse ambulance, which took him to the dressing station further back, and then to hospital. Leo’s good friend from Hobart, Dr Guy Bailey, was in charge of the hospital but did not recognise him until after he read the patient’s ticket. Leo’s left leg was amputated at the hip, and he lost two toes from his right foot. When Jack Bean saw Leo after surgery he was not in pain and his voice was strong, but he was restless from the severe loss of blood. Jack realised his cousin’s condition was critical, not least because circulation in his right leg had stopped. It too might need amputation. Jack saw Leo later that night and thought he was doing well. Yet just an hour later, twenty-six hours after being wounded, he died.

Next morning a devastated Jack drove over to his brother, bringing the news: ‘Leo is gone,’ Bean wrote in his diary. ‘It is too sad and dreadful for words.’ Leo’s funeral took place at the Puchevillers hospital cemetery at 3 p.m. the next day. Jack and Charles were in the small party of mourners at the graveside, in the corner of a wheatfield overlooking wide, undulating country, as Bean noted, ‘far away from the guns, with rows of great trees topping the distant hills and the peaceful cultivated country between’:

As the service was proceeding, the rough wooden coffin clearly covering the frame of a splendid man (for it was bigger even than most solders’ coffins) lying there under the Union Jack—the sun shining on the wheatfields and three aeroplanes wheeling through the sky in the distance near the aerodrome, two French farming people came by; a middle-aged woman in a blue Holland dress carrying some sort of big pewter can on her arm, and a man, over the middle age, with his scythe fresh from the mowing. The man took off his cap and leaned on his scythe, and the woman stood there on the road while the chaplain read. Then I saw her going away, dabbing her eyes, and the man went too, to his work.

Leo’s younger brother Angus had just arrived in France, and they had planned to meet. Instead, Bean sent him a telegram with the news and then drove over to Beauval, about 30 kilometres north of Amiens, where Angus was based with his field company. He took with him Leo’s possessions. Leo’s battalion, fresh from the fight at Mouquet Farm, was also there. Bean saw that they were ‘holding as much drink as they could with reasonable orderliness. Indeed there was no disorder but a big percentage of the men were very full. I don’t blame them. I should have felt inclined to get drunk myself.’

As summer ended and the autumn rains set in, turning the Somme battlefields to mud and the roads to crater-riddled bogs, there was little light on the Western Front for Charles Bean.

27

No way out

‘A chance scrap of iron flung at random on the hillside in front of Mouquet drives a course right through to the furthest end of the world.’ Bean included such details in his letters to his family in Hobart about Leo Butler’s death. He wanted to soften the blow and give a more personal account than the formal notification ever could. His father, Edwin, replied, ‘Your letters about Leo were a great treasure to his parents—and they appreciate the thoughtful care with which you give them all essential particulars. How few of the bereaved are able to learn so much of their departed ones!’ Edwin’s letter continued on a different subject:

Over here, as you probably know, we are on the verge of a tremendous crisis—next Saturday is Referendum Day, and things look very black. The Labor leaders, those at least who favour compulsory foreign service, have been cast out by their various union collaborators.

Mob orators are working on the emotions of the crowds in the Domains and public parks, and if returned soldiers attempted to speak they were hustled—even wounded men. New South Wales and Queensland seem to be terrorised by rowdies, and the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] have been causing fires in the Sydney shops and warehouses. The weak spot seems to be the women’s vote, for the agitators appeal to their emotions.

The letter reflected Edwin’s stance as a middle-class patriot to whom nothing was more important than the defence of the Empire. The issue of conscription had sparked the most divisive debate in Australian history. There was no doubting where the Bean family stood—just as there was no doubting Charles Bean’s own sentiments. After the immense number of casualties at Fromelles and Pozières, he fervently believed in conscription. The voluntary system had broken down as the war dragged on. Germany already had conscription, as did France and Britain, which had introduced it in January 1916. Six months later, New Zealand had followed suit.

Having returned from London to Melbourne in mid-1916, Prime Minister Billy Hughes was also convinced of the need for conscription—and the press and Liberal Opposition agreed. In April, Defence Minister George Pearce had said the 233,000 volunteers to date had been a good effort, but he changed his mind after Hughes’ return. He told the senate that voluntarism was no longer adequate. Hughes committed himself to the cause with his usual passion. But in the months he had been in England large sections of the Australian trade union movement and members of the Labor Party had hardened their attitude against conscription. Securing a bare majority in the Labor caucus, Hughes announced that a plebiscite would be held on 28 October 1916 to decide whether single men without dependents should be called up.

Hughes framed his plea for conscription in terms of a compact between citizen and state. In his ‘Manifesto on Conscription’ of August 1916, he argued that the citizen had a duty to serve the nation in times of war. Unwisely, Hughes used the Government’s powers under the Defence Act at the start of October to call up men between twenty-one and thirty-five for service inside Australia. This stoked fears of a creeping militarism and also antagonised those in the target age bracket.

While Bean favoured conscription, he saw the politics surrounding it as anything but simple. In early September 1916 he was critical of suggestions to break up the Australian 3rd Division and farm out its members to other, under-strength divisions. He argued that a division was ‘a living unit—a body with hands and limbs, all of which have to be moved by nerves just as a human body has to be; and therefore to break it up is like carving up a living tree.’ He could see the political charade involved: ‘Mr Hughes is very anxious to have conscription adopted in Australia against the wishes of his party and a tremendous argument would be: “Look, recruiting is so bad that we have had to do away with the 3rd Australian Division—and split it up amongst the others.”’

Bean had no doubt that Hughes was ‘working hand in glove with [the British Prime Minister, David] Lloyd George who is also a politician and therefore crooked.’ Lloyd George was ‘as anxious to force conscription in Australia’ as Hughes. Bean believed the two Welshmen had engaged in a conspiracy—possibly before Hughes returned to Australia, or by subsequent cables—to have the 3rd Division broken up. While the War Council had decided this, the AIF hierarchy in France had been wondering why their divisions could not get their full reinforcements. As Bean saw it, there were 13,000 reinforcements in England after all the drafts sent up to that point. Brudenell White made it clear to Bean that he was strongly opposed to the division’s break-up. ‘He is very angry because it is not a straight thing to do,’ Bean wrote.

A day later, Bean left France for England on a fortnight’s leave, White having asked him not to mention the issue in his cables. In London he sought out Keith Murdoch, who told him Bonar Law had confirmed to him that the break-up of the division was intentional. Bean was outraged, thundering in his diary: ‘It is crooked, crooked, crooked—it is a deceit on the Australian people and I believe they would see the need for conscription without it. What a foul mess this politics is!’

On the boat to Boulogne, Murdoch told Bean that Hughes was anxious to know how the conscription vote would go in France. They discussed the Labor Party’s split over the issue. Bean was in disbelief: ‘How a socialist man who believes in preference to trade unionists can put it to his soul to oppose conscription I cannot see.’ He even thought the Opposition leader and former Prime Minister Joseph Cook would help the outcome by pressing the pro-conscription case, even though his advocacy was only making trouble for Hughes. Such was Bean’s failure to read the divisiveness of the political debate that he ruminated in his diary:

I should have said that the vote on conscription here would be 95 per cent in favour of it. It means some relief to the men here—and others doing their bit. I told Murdoch so. He was rather doubtful. He had heard in England from Australian soldiers of a certain undercurrent of feeling against it. The argument used was: ‘We have been fighting England’s battles for her; we don’t see why we should ask more of our people to come over here and fight them.’

Following the furor over the Gallipoli letter, Murdoch had developed strong connections to the British political and military elite. His mentor was Lord Northcliffe, proprietor of The Times and the Daily Mail, who had been impressed with the Gallipoli letter, which chimed with his own views and which he could use for his own political ends. Northcliffe soon became a major influence on Murdoch’s developing ideas about journalism, politics and the exercise of power.

Murdoch set himself an ambitious program in London. He spent ten hours a day running the cable operation, for which he also wrote. After September 1915, he wrote a weekly, and sometimes bi-weekly, column, ‘Diary of the War’, in which he described the conflict’s current state as best he could from London and analysed the British and international politics of the war. Foremost in Murdoch’s mind was to present positive reports of Australian achievements on the Western Front. He persuaded Lord Northcliffe to visit Australian troops in France in 1916 and write about their achievements. A month after Pozières, Murdoch lobbied Birdwood to dictate a letter to him about the successes of Australian troops in the battle so he could cable it to the Australian press. Birdwood was sympathetic but declined. Murdoch also made further use of his Gallipoli experiences by writing, anonymously, the Anzac number of the Times History of the War, using the occasion to firmly implant the Anzac legend in the British mind.

Murdoch was an astute judge of public sentiment, including among the troops. He asked Bean if he had heard any grumbling against Birdwood lately. Bean thought it curious that several people had asked him the same question. He took this to be an indication of a ‘certain feeling at the moment.’ He concluded that Birdwood’s popularity had suffered through the belief that he had too readily offered to undertake impossible tasks.

At the end of August and beginning of September the Australians were withdrawn from the killing fields of the Somme to take over from the Canadians the southern half of the Ypres salient. In normal times the salient had been by far the most difficult and dangerous sector of the British front. Bean would later write that the decision to send them there for a ‘rest’ after Pozières added to the sense of grievance among the troops.

It was clear to Bean that the men were exhausted and were still recovering. As September drew to a close, there had been nearly 300 cases of absence without leave in the previous fortnight. Bean knew why: ‘The truth is that the men are tired after the Pozières fighting.’ In less than seven weeks, I Anzac Corps had lost 23,000 officers and men. Added to this were the 5th Division’s 5500 casualties at Fromelles. He noticed how the attrition generated a marked philosophical change among the Australians, many of whom had resigned themselves to accepting their fate on the battlefield:

This new force of ours is just realising . . . that there is only one way out of this war for an infantryman and that is on his back; either sick, wounded or dead. There is no going back to cheering crowds—no marching through the London streets and ovations in the Australian ports. They will be put at it to fight and fight again—until if not in this battle then in the next each man gets his bullet. There is no way out. They are looking down the long road straight to the end—they can see it plain enough now; and they know that there is no turning. It is a big shock to a man when he realises that.

. . . every man on this front at present knows that a single bullet wound through the shoulder is considered a prize which you could not buy for money: a ‘cushy’ one—a ‘Blighty’—every infantryman envies the man who goes home to a wound like that.

After visiting the battlefields with Bean, Murdoch cabled Hughes convinced that great numbers of soldiers were against conscription and that a majority would vote no. Bean by then also acknowledged the lack of support for conscription among the troops.

Brudenell White sought an urgent meeting with Bean. Hughes had sent Birdwood a cable from Tasmania alleging that the opposition to conscription was due to the ‘formidable intrigues of the ultra-socialists and the Fenians.’ The British suppression earlier in 1916 of the Easter Rising in Dublin had inflamed Irish Australians against Britain.

With the debate now febrile, Hughes believed that the Irish and the socialist Industrial Workers of the World were against him and, indeed, that Sinn Fein had sent agents to Australia. He concluded that everything depended on the vote among the troops in France. White told Bean that Hughes wanted Birdwood to put aside precedent and encourage the troops to vote for conscription. A big majority would help sway opinion in Australia. As Bean saw it:

White wanted me to see Birdwood and urge him to do a really big thing for the Empire, and take this step. At the moment we both took it that what Hughes wanted was a message to the Australian people. I hesitated a moment. Perhaps I am weak, I knew that White’s decision, whichever way it went, would have settled me in mine. But I have a very great fear of anyone in Birdwood’s position—a military servant of the state using his influence in a big question at the polls.

Bean clearly recognised the fundamental importance of the separation of powers in a democracy, but according to his diary, White told him he wanted Birdwood to ‘play the man,’ and to use the opportunity of doing a ‘great thing for the Empire.’ While disillusioned with British leaders and politics, Bean nonetheless was still an imperialist. He feared that defeat of conscription ‘would be a terrible smack in the face of the Empire.’ He thought that if Birdwood, as Australia’s chief military adviser, told Australians of the military necessity for reinforcements, it would have an enormous effect. White agreed, adding: ‘And get him to point out that every effort that we have made up to the present would go for nothing—would be utterly wasted—if this were lost.’ Bean assumed he was referring to Australia’s good name and new-found reputation.

When Bean reached London, Arthur Bazley had just engaged a taxi when a British officer tried to pull rank. As Bean recounted: ‘The driver wanted Bazley to turn out—but the kid said he wouldn’t. The officer spoke to the driver and the driver ordered Bazley off again. Bazley at once offered to fight him—and he came away victorious with the cab and without the fight.’

In the meeting that followed, Birdwood pointed out to Bean that what Hughes really wanted was for him to give a lead to the soldiers:

He never hesitated for a moment. I too could see at once a reason for this. If the soldiers voted NO, that would kill the question; the people at home would never vote YES if their army here voted NO. The Australian vote was to be later, after the result of the AIF’s vote was known. I fancy Hughes had arranged this thinking that the AIF would be certain to vote YES. Any way, it was no use Birdie sending a message to Australia if the AIF voted NO. The thing to do would be to get the army to vote YES.

Birdwood said there had been some high-level discussion about whether a pro-conscription message should be sent to the Australian people or troops. In the end, Bean recorded:

He got me to sit down and write, to his dictation, a message to the men saying that he wanted them to vote by their consciences and not to influence them in any way. But he added that he probably knew, better than they did, the need for reinforcements. He was sure they would not like to see any of the units—with all their traditions and history—broken up. There was a need for men. If the effort of Australia were relaxed now, all the brave lives sacrificed before would have been sacrificed in vain.

The government had told them what exemptions there were to be—they needn’t fear that the brother left at home to mind the business would be called to enlist; the men whom it would especially get were the shirkers who were at present filling all the nice fat billets which he wanted to see our men in on their return—or their relations at home.

The soldiers’ poll was to be the next day, 16 October, and Bean urged that if possible the message should be wired to France that night. When AIF headquarters said this was impossible, Birdwood had the poll delayed for two days. Bean realised that these moves were ‘very risky I am sure,’ and reflected that he should have tried harder to get the wire across to France so as to avoid postponing the poll. ‘I didn’t put my reasons strongly, though Birdwood could see that I wanted it. There it is. I hope it does the business. For I am sure conscription is right.’

With Haig’s imprimatur, Murdoch arranged for Australian representatives to address meetings of troops in France. One of them, the Agent-General for South Australia and former conservative politician Fred Young, asked the troops at a public meeting to send a resolution to Australia in favour of conscription. Young put it to them that the British held Australia in high regard and that they would lose that standing if the nation did not vote for compulsory service. Bean learned from Bazley the negative mood of the meeting:

The attitude of the men was quite clear. They said that they did not care whether Australia came first in the opinion of the British people. They wanted enough Australians left to maintain Australia’s present character after the war. They did not want so many Australians killed off that the population of immigrants flowing in should alter the characteristics of the country. They could repopulate it by immigrants but they wanted it populated by Australians. They thought Australia had given enough to the war without forcing those who did not wish to come. They knew what the war was like, now, and they were not going to ask others to come into it against their will.

Despite this, Bean remained confident that the plebiscite would be carried in Australia, predicting that support from women would be decisive. Still, he noted that ‘Birdwood’s circular to the troops did little good—rather the reverse . . . Hughes is getting as nervous as can be about it. Anything favourable from here will be telegraphed out to give Australia a lead. Anything unfavourable will be suppressed.’ Even Haig recognised the potential political and diplomatic dangers—he would only agree to send a message stating how much France and the Allies needed the Australian troops.

Two days later, after the vote had been taken in the AIF camps in France, Bean realised how wrong he had been—there was a majority of 10 percentage points against conscription. The final AIF result was 72,399 for and 58,894 against, but these figures did not reflect the mood on the Western Front. According to Murdoch, the narrow ‘Yes’ majority stemmed from the Light Horse in Egypt, who were fighting the mounted campaign they had joined up for, and the 3rd Division, which was yet to see action. He estimated that those on the Western Front voted three to one against.

‘I honestly believe their vote on the conscription issue was an unselfish one,’ Bean concluded. Nonetheless, he agreed with White that, with volunteer numbers falling in Australia, it was sad that men who were willing had to ‘come and bear all the brunt of it while the straw-hatted holiday makers, and coal strikers stay at home and enrich themselves.’

Bean soon realised that White believed he had messed up his ‘errand’ to Birdwood. ‘He thinks I ought to have got a message to the people of Australia and not to the troops; that the message to the troops may be interpreted as an attempt at exercising a dangerous influence and that the putting off of voting for two days was a dangerous matter . . . perhaps I ought to have told him plainly the dangers I saw in it.’ However, Bean believed Birdwood had done ‘nothing which was not perfectly defensible,’ and asserted his ‘perfect right to tell the men his opinion on a point so important—and he had no control whatsoever over the voting.’ Still, he believed Birdwood’s message ‘lost votes rather than gained them.’

Four days later Bean knew the plebiscite had failed in Australia—1,160,033 votes against to 1,087,557 in favour. His efforts to influence the outcome had been in vain; but after the slaughter he had seen over the previous eighteen months, he clearly believed conscription was an egalitarian solution to sharing the burden. As he now realised, mateship meant different things to different people, civilians or soldiers. And prime ministers who played with such sensitive issues risked not only splitting the government but also dividing the nation.

Labor expelled Hughes, who took Pearce and twenty-four other members with him and joined with the Liberals to form a National Labor Party government with himself as Prime Minister. Murdoch had seen the problem with Hughes’ zealotry, but Bean did not: he was just too close to the issue. Times such as this made it difficult for Bean to be an impartial observer. He may have been a noncombatant, but he was closer to the experience of war than any other correspondent. Admirable though this was, it had clouded his judgement. To underline that, opponents of conscription were now paying close attention to what he wrote about the war in Australian papers. With the conscription debate far from over, Bean was in a firing line of a different kind—being sniped at from 16,000 kilometres away.

28

Good will not come of it

The seeds of an idea that had come to Bean at Gallipoli began to take root: he wanted to find a way to honour the memory of the men lost in war. Gallipoli had been bad, but what he had seen the men of the AIF endure in the few weeks they had been on the Western Front was altogether different. The effect on Bean was profound. A sense of responsibility to these men had grown with time and experience. Beyond the official history he would write, he started to plan a national museum—but he wanted something more than just a building that housed the war souvenirs he and others were collecting.

Just what he had in mind became clear in a letter he wrote to George Pearce in November 1916. The letter concerned a ‘set of most remarkable air photographs’ that Brudenell White had just sent to the Minister. They were the daily record of the AIF’s actions at Pozières. Bean told Pearce that the photos were supposed to be handed on by 1 Anzac Corps to the corps that was replacing it in the line. However, if the AIF had followed that course with these particular photos they would have been lost and, Bean explained, there were plenty of similar photos anyway for the new corps to have. He added that when he wrote the history of the fighting at Pozières, and the photos would be most helpful. They established the exact position reached by Australian troops after every attack. He wanted to go over the photos minutely with operation orders, the reports of scouts and of brigade and battalion staffs, in order to make a precise diagram of each attack. The photos also showed the effect of each bombardment. He explained further to Pearce:

These photos will no doubt eventually find a place in some national museum, when a national museum exists. The museum will at the same time be welcome to any little relics that I have gathered, and no doubt to many interesting exhibits which others have collected. But these photos will be the most visible record which that museum will contain.

Bean advised Pearce that it was essential that maps from the war be preserved. They needed to be classified, indexed and stored in their original form. Even the most rough-and-ready little sketch was often important. If any of these maps and documents were lost they could never be replaced.

If you do establish a national museum at Canberra it would give me great pleasure, if you would care, to help to classify and describe on labels or in catalogues for the public the war exhibits there. I think such a museum would add a great deal to the attractions of the Federal capital, and would ensure a certain number of pilgrims even from the very start.

Bean’s references to “relics” and “pilgrims” had a spiritual/religious connotation that he probably intended. His vision was of a memorial not just to the Australians who had died but to their spirit. It is clear that Bean saw the memorial as both a shrine and a museum that would attract ‘pilgrims’. There was another element in Bean’s thinking: he had seen the AlF become highly professional and effective. The level of selflessness, discipline and cooperation that he observed in the Army, so raw and rowdy in 1915, left him in no doubt that the Australian nation owed a debt to these men. He wanted them remembered.

On Gallipoli, Bean had noticed many others collecting curios from the outset. He watched the Anzacs assiduously collect shells, in the process practically clearing the gullies of shell cases. The troops quickly understood the Gallipoli campaign’s historical significance for Australia, and by the time they left the peninsula most carried their own personal souvenirs.

In Australia, the pressure mounted on Pearce and his colleagues to do more to claim the history that the Australian troops were making in France. The Canadians again took the lead, establishing their own War Records Office to collect unit war diaries and to copy relevant British material that threw light on Canadian actions. They were also collecting a wide range of other material including films, paintings, photographs, memorabilia, maps and private accounts. Aware of this, Bean began urging that Australian records should also be systematically collected.

Bean’s letter to George Pearce emphasised the importance of a photographic record of the war, but from the time of his arrival in France the issue of photographs had been a continual irritant. By mid-1916, Bean saw the need for two separate photographers—one for press work, another for the official record. In his fight with the British over the right to take photographs from an Australian perspective, he was dogged. The chief of intelligence, the unpopular Brigadier General John Charteris, tried to fob Bean off, telling him in mid-1916 that the War Office had decided that no one connected with press work should carry a camera. As he was a correspondent, he came under that rule. Bean argued the principle to the extent that Charteris began to have doubts about the order’s justification.

With Bean already thinking more as the official historian, his relationship with the official British photographer, Ernest Brooks, had begun badly. The photos Brooks took—often staged—were useless for the official record. However, over time he learned from Bean who, in turn, warmed to the little Englishman, particularly his work at Pozières, where Brooks was attracted by the ‘sheer desert look’ of the country. Taking these photos took their toll, and by October 1916 Brooks was suffering from shell shock.

Bean could see that Brooks had not recovered when he arrived to take photos amid some light shelling at Mouquet Farm. ‘I’m getting quite like the rest. I don’t know what’s up with me,’ he grimly told Bean. Despite this, Bean was impressed when ‘like the good little beggar he really is he stuck to it and trudged after me to Mouquet . . . poked around the ruins and picked up souvenirs and took all the photos I wanted. Really he did come out of this a little brick. I am sorry that I have said some of the things that I have said about him. He has one qualification, anyway—a very fine pluck.’

Towards the end of 1916, the group surrounding Bean began to expand and take on a distinctly professional look. Australian artists were added to the staff, among them Fred Leist and Will Dyson. Despite Leist’s impressive reputation as a ‘plein air’ painter in Sydney and London, where he worked in the War Office and designing recruitment posters in 1915–16, Bean didn’t like his pushiness. He was protective of Frank Crozier, an artist who had enlisted with the AIF in March 1915 and served on Gallipoli as a stretcher bearer. In November 1915, when Bean called for contributions to The Anzac Book, Crozier worked on illustrations and the book’s design. In France, Crozier served under Brigadier General John Gellibrand, who, after realising his artistic ability, asked him to make sketches of Pozières. Crozier served as Gellibrand’s runner, partly so he could see a wide variety of subjects for paintings. Thus he was one of the few official artists who had experienced heavy fighting, and this experience helped him capture the human dimension of warfare—something Bean appreciated. Bean held him in high regard, writing in his diary:

Fred Leist is coming over here as draughtsman—I must say I feel a little jealous for The Anzac Book artists. They have been through the turmoil. They began at the beginning—old Crozier enlisted as a private in the infantry; and here is this bumptious chap coming straight into a job which they have asked for for ages. White is putting Crozier on Corps HQ also. Leist wrote to Birdwood that he presumed he would be promoted very rapidly. Birdwood wrote back that he could hold out no hope at all of his promotion. He may turn out a great picture; but it is the others who have seen the events.

Bean also initially had misgivings about Will Dyson, the Ballarat-born and internationally acclaimed satirical artist who had been working on London newspapers since leaving Australia six years earlier. Dyson was a strong nationalist and inquired in London about enlisting in the AIF, but found it was not feasible. With Pozières still raging, he applied to High Commissioner Andrew Fisher for permission to cross to France and draw Australian soldiers. He also wrote to Birdwood, explaining that his aim ‘would be to interpret in a series of drawings, for national preservation, the sentiments and special Australian characteristics of our Army.’ Dyson volunteered his skills, sought no pay save a slender allowance for expenses, and was prepared to hand over all his work to the Government. Fisher cabled Defence Minister Pearce, who agreed, provided the War Office approved. Birdwood approved, but it took more than two months for the War Office to do so. On 10 December 1916 Dyson was officially granted an honorary AIF commission as a lieutenant and appointed the first Australian war artist.

Crossing to France, he met Bean, who took him to the village of Montauban-de-Picardie, seized from the Germans on the opening day of the Somme in one of the few British successes on that day of carnage. Dyson’s motivation stemmed from the awe in which he held the deeds of his countrymen. As his biographer has written, observing and recording their experience was something he felt driven to do despite the obvious dangers.

Dyson’s talent was soon obvious. As Bean talked to a German prisoner, the artist sketched him. ‘Dyson is an able man at his game, I can see. He has got hold of the weary detached way in which men come out of these trenches. Anyway he has a pretty acute sympathy.’ Dyson’s drawings captured in the gloom ‘those ghosts of young men treading their pale way,’ and ‘moving like chain gangs dragging invisible chains.’ They carried with them ‘the eternal mystery of no man’s land’ as they came out of the line. Dyson wanted to capture the character of the Australian troops, and he drew them having breakfast, on sentry duty, writing letters home to Australia, and conversing with civilians in villages behind the lines.

A firm friendship quickly developed between the quiet, patrician Bean and the sardonic Dyson. Bean appreciated his new friend’s ‘magnificent intellect’. Dyson was committed to guild socialism—a political movement advocating workers’ control of industry through trade-related guilds. The controversial German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche also fascinated him. He believed Nietzsche was misunderstood. Often, as Bean and Dyson drove from one part of the front to another, with the sound of shellfire close by, they would discuss Nietzsche. Wherever he travelled with Bean, Dyson would try to get as close to the men in the front line as possible to study their characters even more than their faces. Bean enjoyed Dyson’s wit, quickly rating him as the equal of, but ‘deeper’ than, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. Importantly, they both wanted to ensure that ordinary Australians would not forget the AIF’s’ story.

In a coup for Bean, the British press photographer Herbert Baldwin was appointed as Australia’s first official war photographer. Bean set him the task of preserving pictorially the movements and actions of Australian soldiers, and the landscapes over which they fought. Baldwin was already one of Britain’s most significant war photographers, having covered the 1912–13 Balkan war and published an important book of photos of the conflict.

From the outset, Bean’s relationship with Baldwin was harmonious and productive. Baldwin began producing natural and relaxed portraits of the Anzacs and all aspects of their day. Bean soon thought him ‘a game little bird,’ whose sense of humour endeared him to the Australians. Out in the field one day Baldwin, lugging his heavy equipment, became stuck in the winter mud. Bean was amused on hearing ‘some idiot’ ask him: ‘What—are you taking photographs?’ To which Baldwin quipped, ‘No, I’m catching rabbits.’ Bean commented, ‘I’m sure he’ll do well.’

Mud was everywhere. Craters and trenches turned into freezing quagmires of deadly, energy-sapping slime. Boots and socks were sucked off in the mud, and troops dug themselves little shelters in the trenches, scooping out the banks in their search for dry earth. But, as Bean wrote, the orange clay became saturated and fell ‘like thick cream, in slabs and layers—slopped off of itself onto the floor of the trench. Men were buried like this. I heard of a man who was going through his shirt picking out the lice or their eggs from the seams unconscious of the fact that the dugout had slipped in and buried all the clothes he had taken off.’ Then there were the bloated rats scurrying along the trenches, gorging on the bodies of dead men.

In the trenches, being wet was worse than being cold. Colonel Ewen Sinclair-MacLagan, the 3rd Brigade commander, told Bean that from 21 October, when his men went into the line, until 14 November, when they came out to Dernancourt, they were never once in dry clothes or boots. When they reached their billets they could get no fuel and for days had to wear wet clothes and socks. Worse was trench foot, in which constant damp caused flesh to rot. ‘There are poor chaps coming in who will lose both feet,’ Bean wrote. A 2nd Division officer was stuck in a shell hole for four days before he was found. ‘They tried to pull him out by fastening a rope around him,’ Bean wrote. ‘In tugging it they broke his back and he shortly after died.’ One of Bean’s friends had found an Australian in the trenches, ‘standing in mud nearly to his waist, shivering in his arms and every body muscle, leaning back against the trench side, fast asleep.’ As Christmas 1916 approached, Bean could see that morale was at its lowest ebb. He did not know how anyone could live through such conditions without their spirit breaking—and these were men who only a few months before had been adding up figures in the office of an insurance company or a shipping firm, gulping down their midday coffee and roll in a tea shop in King or Collins Street. Now they were out of doors in the ‘thick of a dirty European winter,’ marching miles and miles through a bitter cold wind and driving rain, coping with knee- and waist-high mud in country that was nothing but broken tree stumps and endless shell holes—holes into which, if a man were to fall, he might lie for days before he was found, if he was found at all. Bean continued:

After many hours, trickle him, half dead with dragging his feet at every step out of the putty-like mud, into a shallow, straggling, open ditch . . . nothing but brown, slippery mud on floor and trench sides and over the country in all directions as far as eye can see. At the end of it all, put him to live there, with what baggage he carried on his back and nothing more; put him in various depths of mud, to stay there all day in rain, wind, fog, hail, snowstorm . . . and to watch there during the endless winter nights, when the longed-for dawn only means another day and another night out there in the mud ditch, without a shred of cover. And this is what our men have had to go through.

Bean spent Christmas Eve finishing off a new publication for the troops, The Rising Sun, with the hope of building up morale. Bean, Bazley and Baldwin were in his ‘office’ above the stables at headquarters. It was a big room with a tiled floor, the plaster ceiling hanging in tatters, and an asthmatic stove. This was where Bean and Bazley slept—Bean on a camp bed in one corner and Bazley on overcoats and newspapers in the other corner. Outside, there were sounds of men drinking. As the clock ticked over into Christmas Day, the sound of guns, which had been noticeable all day, became louder.

It is the way we, or the Germans, are welcoming in Christmas on the front. I must say I hate and detest the sheer sacrilege of this. I am not a religious man—I don’t know that I bear any allegiance to the Christian faith. But this day represents the birth of a very precious ideal into the world; and the observance of it is a sign of the attachment of a good part of the human race to the highest idea[l]s yet imported on the earth. We are supposed to be fighting for just those ideals against other idea[l]s which we hold vile.

And yet our shallow brained chiefs have always set themselves to refuse to allow any observance of these amenities. It is wrong, it is not what we profess; it is not right in itself, and therefore good will not come of it.

Bean strongly believed that the men needed a rest that Christmas Day, and that some were so utterly sick of the war that they did not want to fight again. ‘It is as bad as that,’ he wrote. However, the ‘shallow foreheaded British’ had ordered a late-morning strafe against the Germans—just as the generals at GHQ were having their ‘comfortable Xmas festivities.’ Even Birdwood, to Bean’s disgust, supported this and made ‘nice speeches to troops in the rear’ while the Germans were ‘retaliating on our poor chaps up in the front trenches and support trenches on the one day on which they might have hoped for some peace.’ Bean wondered what was ‘the petty mean advantage that the killing of a few Germans on Xmas Day will mean compared to the loss of a chance of refreshing our men, and the certainty of further (and deservedly) embittering them.’ His conclusion showed his state of mind: ‘Very depressed tonight by all these horrors of Xmas.’

As Bean sat in his freezing office that night, he was clearly dejected about the state of the war and its mind-numbing and morale-sapping effect on the Australians. While he had no particular religious affiliation, he was by no means an atheist. If Christianity was the ‘highest ideal’ on earth, and it was for that ideal that the Allies were fighting, then waging war on Christmas Day was, as he said, ‘sheer sacrilege.’

Exactly twelve months earlier, Bean had written his sacramental verse in The Anzac Book, ‘Non Nobis, Domine’, when leaving Gallipoli. It is difficult to read that poem as the work of an unbeliever. Indeed, it is hard to believe, despite the horrific scenes he had witnessed, that Bean would have changed his religious position in just a year.

Bean’s pessimistic mood stayed with him during that Christmas Day when he went up along the duckboards just after the German line had been strafed. It was a cheerless day, with low hurrying clouds and a cold wind. As he went among the men, he couldn’t bring himself to wish them a Merry Christmas. ‘I couldn’t—a “Good Day” as we passed was all that I could get up my throat. The other was too much of a mockery.’

But his spirits began to lift when he heard that despite everything, the men did have a good Christmas, thanks largely to the Australian Comforts Fund delivering presents on Christmas Eve. ‘Each man got something,’ Bean wrote. ‘The light that came over the men’s faces, and the warmth and pleasure that suddenly lit them up, when they got their parcels, made the occasion a treat.’ However momentarily, spirits lifted.

29

Self doubt

Leave was long overdue. He might have spent two weeks enjoying London, but Bean’s sense of duty prevailed. Instead, he gave himself a tight schedule of tracking down photographic stills and film of Pozières. In his diary for January 1917, he outlined a rough draft for a film about a battle that had shocked Australians.

Bean wanted an official film to show Australian audiences, and perhaps the British hierarchy, the extent of the sacrifice. As Australia did not yet have its own cameramen, he arranged to borrow British cinematographers, whose work he supervised. He then devoted most of his leave in London that month to editing the film and writing titles for the scenes, with the help of his colleague Captain Henry Smart. One of his goals was to get ‘the cinema photos of the Australians put together in a record and obtain some specimen scenes from the shelling of Pozières by the Germans.’ He wanted the negatives of the British official photos of Pozières and other Australian scenes transferred to Australia, as ‘our copies cannot be permanent unless we make them ourselves.’

The process involved working with the London production company headed by William Jury, a prominent figure in the British Government’s growing film propaganda apparatus. Bean examined the available British film and put together a film about Pozières. ‘It was our right to have this done and the War Office recognised that right—because they had refused to let us have our own cinematographer,’ Bean wrote. After several days’ continuous work, with Smart’s assistance, the work was completed. Bean left for France with Jury’s assurance that the film would be finished with the titles he had written before being sent to Australia. But it didn’t happen. ‘Jury let us down hopelessly,’ Bean wrote. ‘They slung together odd scraps of film—tags cut off other film and not wanted; put their own senseless titles on them; and sent this preposterous product to Australia!’ Bean saw this as ‘indifference to our needs and claims.’ He was mortified when he saw what had been sent to Australia ‘as our film!’

Bean ran into more problems when he searched for particular still photographs that he had told Ernest Brooks to take at Pozières. One of the images taken was on 28 August 1916 of Australian stretcher bearers bringing in the wounded under a white flag with a German barrage behind them. The photo had immortalised the work of the Australian stretcher bearers. There were two copies, which Bean had not seen since they had been developed and printed. As the photo was not in England Bean inquired at the censor’s office when he returned to France. The response from the staff officer, Captain Lee, riled him. ‘I think it was torn up and the plate broken,’ he told Bean. ‘We haven’t much time here for white flags—to tell the truth.’ Trying to be civil, Bean told him that the photo was a record of what Australian stretcher-bearers did under the enemy’s barrage. But Lee shot back: ‘Yes—and under the white flag!’ Bean was livid that Lee would ‘throw that sneer at Australian stretcher bearers!’ His outrage underlined the degree to which Bean had come to identify with front-line soldiers, his anger stirred by the thought of Lee ‘sitting on his bottom 25 miles away from the nearest shell splinter and eating four damn hearty meals.’

These stupid overfed fat red-tabs, enjoying their cigars in front of the fire until they drowse and their heads drop over their newspapers—they have no use for the system which enables the poor wretch groaning in a shell hole 100 yards out in No man’s land, with the ants eating his lips and eyes and the flies stinging him and the knowledge of death from thirst staring him straight in the face, to be brought in and tended. Of course they haven’t—but I’d willingly sign a warrant to make them change place with the poor wretch out there and get some atom of imagination driven into the dull matter of their heavy brains.

Bean’s position was simple: If the photo had been destroyed, then ‘Lee has done the Australian people a real injury.’ Bean was in luck—some days later he asked another staff member and was relieved to find that he had kept the photo for him. He was not alone in believing that the Australian troops needed a good rest before going back into battle, but getting the British to understand this was not easy. White, just back from London, told him of a conversation he had had with Keith Murdoch on the issue. He had confirmed to Murdoch that the Australians badly needed rest, and had told a British general that four of the five Australian divisions should indeed be rested, but the officer had fobbed him off. White told Bean: ‘They don’t recognise that our being a nation or having a national feeling counts for anything.’ Bean had no doubt that if the British wanted to make the most of the Australian effort they must treat them as Australians. ‘It is for Australia they make this great effort. They are intensely fervently patriotic . . . They must understand the best in the Australian, if he is a bit rough. I don’t know whether these things will be understood but it is enormously important for the British that they should be understood.’

Bean wrote an article, the aim of which was ‘to make the British treat us as a nation,’ and ‘to make the Australian units a little fairer to the British.’ Noting that White approved of the article, Bean wanted his views to be read not only in Australia but also in Britain. To try to ensure this, he sent the article with an accompanying note to Lord Northcliffe, asking him to help to get it published in The Times.

Bean witnessed the emergence of internal tensions within the AIF leadership that led to changes in command. Headquarters had become a hornets’ nest of petty jealousies, rivalries, clashing egos, intrigue and competing alliances. He thought Birdwood’s handling of the tensions weak, even though he remained fundamentally in Birdwood’s camp—to such an extent that he offered to put a positive spin on what was happening: ‘I told White that at any time, if he or Birdwood liked, I would write and tell Australia straight out that the changes in generals were made for efficiency.’ Such an admission underlines Bean’s closeness to White and Birdwood, and points to his willingness to write from their perspective.

At the same time, Bean was having doubts about just how much notice was being taken of his articles in Australia. With an Imperial War Conference scheduled between 21 March and 27 April 1917, Bean wrote what he regarded as a strong cable encouraging Prime Minister Billy Hughes to attend. But in the aftermath of the bitter conscription debate, Hughes faced an election on 5 May. Bean was disappointed that he would not attend the conference—perhaps more so at his failure to persuade Hughes that he should do so. ‘I suppose I overrate the value of these little cables. I notice that others clearly don’t seem to think they have as much effect as I do. It was the strongest I ever wrote, and put a point of view which I thought would be quite decisive with the Australian people.’

Not long after, a judge who knew Bean from his days in Sydney’s legal world wrote to him complaining about a lack of news in Australia about the AIF. Bean was miffed, and thought it was a ‘very exaggerated statement. I don’t think he means it to hit at me, but it does. I fancy he is right in saying that the Australian papers very often do not print my letters; why I don’t know, except that they now get them for nothing.’

There were, however, exceptions. At Korong Vale in north-western Victoria, fifteen-year-old George Lowery was among Bean’s readers. Just three months out of school and now working at the town’s post office, young George wrote to Bean asking if he would mind sending him ‘a few foreign stamps’ for his collection. He also had some thoughts on the war: ‘I am always wishing that I was 18, so that I could go to the war. Still, if this war is ended soon, there might be another that I could go to when I’m 18. These South American republics are always having a go so I might have a try there. When you come back to Australia, and if you are travelling through Victoria, will you try to come to Korong Vale, so that I can have a yarn with you.’ George was ‘pretty sure that they wouldn’t cry out for volunteers if schoolboys were allowed to go. I reckon we’d make ourselves felt if we did get there, too.’ Trusting that he might hear from the war correspondent, George included with his letter ‘a bit of wattle and a bit of scrub, which might interest you.’ Bean was touched and kept the letter with his diary.

There was another letter which Bean also kept with his diary—one from the mother of a soldier killed at Fromelles, Private Walter Garry, an infantryman from Outtrim, south-east of Melbourne. He was shot in the stomach and died in No Man’s Land. With information scarce in the official notification of his death, his mother wrote to Bean desperately seeking information, and he replied in December 1916. She again wrote to Bean assuring him that his kindness was appreciated:

I’m sure you must have gone to a deal of trouble for me, to find out so much as you did, but when I wrote I knew you would, as the Bulletin always had a good word for you. That is the reason I wrote to you. I knew you would find time to answer a heartbroken mother’s letter. My poor boy! He was so loved by all. We did think he would be lucky in the big game, as he was so lucky all through life, but as he said poor lad on the eve of his departure, ‘if I fall, dear mother, I hope it will be as a man.’

Touched by the letter, Bean made his own inquiries about how twenty-four-year-old Walter died. His mother’s grief brought the war back to a more personal level for Bean, probably reaffirming his responsibility to ordinary Australians. What others were writing, though, was a different matter. Stories based on lies angered him. After reading one such article in Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, about the capture of Bapaume, Bean noted, ‘I wonder why the censor lets it through! He knows it is not true.’

However, for Bean, the censor’s office maintained its obstructionism. Although Herbert Baldwin was Australia’s official photographer, the chief censor, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Hutton Wilson, objected when he learned that Baldwin was under Bean’s orders. He told White that he ‘trusted this was not the case,’ and that he was under the director of intelligence at GHQ. White immediately replied, and, according to Bean, telling Hutton Wilson ‘just exactly what he thought, without stopping to be discreet.’

Working with Baldwin and Will Dyson was now occupying much of Bean’s time. With a spring offensive planned, all four Australian divisions of I Anzac Corps were now in line as the winter thaw began. The battlefield was still a scene of mud and fog when, on 24 February, news came that German front trenches at the northern end of the old battlefield had been found abandoned—evidently they were retiring towards Cambrai and to the prepared fortifications of the Hindenburg Line, which ran west of the town. Patrols sent into the fog found that the Germans were also retiring on most of 1 Corps’ front. However, they were leaving a thin screen of small posts and patrols. Opposite the corps’ southern flank, and farther south, they held their positions for the time being unchanged. Bean noted that the move would entirely dislocate the impending spring offensive of the Fifth Army, but not of the Third Army, farther north at Arras. ‘But the news had magic effect,’ he wrote. ‘The German Army was withdrawing!’

Sensing a chance to gain the initiative, the troops followed the withdrawal, patrols pushing back the German screen towards Bapaume, where stronger German posts held up the advance. Nonetheless, on the night of 26 February the AIF 3rd Brigade soon gained ground and set up posts just below Bapaume.

Bean, Baldwin and Dyson were on hand for the fighting. Leaving Baldwin to take photos of a barrage, and Dyson to do his sketches, Bean went in search of one of the key trenches, Gird Trench, from which to watch the attack on Le Barque. He was shocked to see the carnage from fighting weeks earlier:

The way over was simply strewn with dead soldiers—Scotsmen, Tommies, and, I believe, Australians—right across Gird Trench and nearly up to the wire of Gird Support [Trench]. I never saw the dead lying so thickly anywhere, even I think at Helles. A signal wire gave me the way to follow, and a half-trodden track in the mud—it was of course one great puddle of shell holes, men lying on the ridges between them, men lying face downwards and head downwards into them, men on their backs, men on their sides, men half buried, many quite in the open.

When he reached the German wire and Gird Support Trench he found its duckboards sunk under the mud. But at least he found a good dugout, from where he was able to watch the barrage on the German forces, just 500 metres away. There was little response from the Germans—they were withdrawing.

Three weeks later, Bean drove through the still smouldering town of Bapaume and pushed on to the village of Beugnâtre, 3 kilometres away. Beugnâtre had just been captured, and Bean was aghast at what he saw:

It was the first time I realised how complete the German demolition had been. He was blowing down every single house as he left the villages. The side walls were blown out of them and the roofs lay flat on the ground. Beugnâtre had been utterly destroyed. He is doing it in order to refuse us billets; and in order, perhaps, to make the French people tired of the war. It is a sight which makes you monstrously angry—this fat-headed, wrong-headed race with its fixed idea that the smallest military need justifies even the greatest civil destruction. If I’m not wrong, though, he’s very mistaken in the French people.

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 minute 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 would 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.

On leave in London in July 1917, E.A. Box, secretary to High Commissioner Andrew Fisher, suggested that Bean could put the case for removing I Anzac Corps from General Hubert Gough’s command. Keith Murdoch was also involved in the discussion, and Bean realised that he and Box must have already discussed this issue, as the strongly patriotic Murdoch had wanted Gough removed from command of the Australians ever since Bullecourt. Bean noted that when Murdoch heard the Australians were going under Gough, he had said, ‘I suppose they’ll be murdered again.’

Bean told Box that he was not prepared to lobby Lloyd George to sack Gough because he had no idea if there was anybody better to replace him. Box suggested General Edmund Allenby, whom Haig had just removed from command of the Third Army. Bean knew that Birdwood and White thought Allenby ‘vile’. ‘But I told Box I wouldn’t mind telling Lloyd George exactly what happened at Fromelles and Bullecourt as far as I knew it, and that I would certainly ask for the Australian divisions to be brought together. Everyone wants it.’

Both Murdoch and Box insisted to Bean that Lloyd George would do nothing unless he saw that it would help him secure victory. He would listen to anything that would help win the war, ‘But merely that a thing was right, or that it was due to Australia to treat her as a nation—this would have no appeal to him.’ During the discussion Bean was taken aback to also hear Murdoch and Box say of Prime Minister Billy Hughes that the best way to make him act was to appeal to his own interests, which he had constantly in mind. Bean thought it was ‘perfectly nauseating to have to deal with politicians after dealing with soldiers’ who generally acted from patriotic motives. The politician, with rare exceptions, seemed to think of himself all the time; and in the case of Hughes, didn’t seem to try to hide it from his friends.

It is awful to think of Australia’s part in the war being directed according as Hughes thinks it benefits him—and that the people and soldiers only get their will through the fact that Hughes thinks it is in his interest to do what they want.

I can’t help thinking this view of Lloyd George and Hughes is too cynical—that both of them believe, at any rate, that their motive is the good of their country. Box argues that they have come to believe that it is good for the country to have them in power and so their patriotic duty is to devote all their thought and energy to supporting themselves. It is like touching pitch, getting into the dirty business.

The three decided that Lloyd George should be asked three things: to bring the AIF divisions together; get their corps staffed by Australians; and ask for Australia to have direct representation in London so that Birdwood could have direct communications with the War Council instead of always having to go through GHQ. They decided that the best strategy would be to cable Hughes seeking his support on these issues. Bean would then approach Lloyd George.

Hughes had come to rely heavily on Murdoch to represent him in London, not only on the course of the war but also on how the Australian troops were faring. On 12 July Murdoch cabled Hughes urging that he immediately consider consolidating the five Australian divisions into an Australian Corps. Murdoch assured Hughes that through all divisions there was a ‘very strong desire’ consistently voiced for the divisions to be brought together. The cable emphasised the ardent nationalism among Australian officers and men, who strenuously disliked GHQ’s policy regarding them ‘as merely British troops,’ refused to recognise Australian nationality, and even omitted them from communiqués.

Over the next couple of days Bean worked on his own letter to Lloyd George—the second part of the strategy. In it, Bean told Lloyd George there was a strong and universal feeling in the AIF, from generals to privates, for all the Australian divisions to be brought together in France. There was an intense ‘family feeling’ among these troops, which meant they relied on those in the family far more than on others, and were more anxious to acquit themselves in each other’s eyes than in any others.

You in England have an understanding of the strength of Australian nationalism as the one great motive working in our people, but I do not think that GHQ has the slightest comprehension of it, or of its value for getting the best out of our troops or our people. We know it is the strongest motive they have, by far—the obvious and only medium through which to deal with them. I think GHQ is actually hostile to it, and regards it if anything as a drawback and a nuisance that any such motive should exist; a sort of treachery to the old idea of the Empire, which I suppose naturally lingers amongst regular soldiers. The idea of GHQ I believe is that all units should be completely interchangeable. However desirable it may be it is not the fact; and it takes no account of the immense value attaching to this national pride.

Bean listed the failure of inadequate British units at both Fromelles and Bullecourt, when fighting alongside the Australians, as another reason why the AIF wanted to fight alongside their own units. He asked for two things. The first was to bring the Australian troops all together in France. The second was a personal request: to a large extent, he said, he was responsible for Australia’s national records, but he sometimes found that the Australian desire for a complete record was thwarted by incidental rules and machinery that applied to British officials who might not have the same goals. He had examples in mind:

My Government and the nation has again and again missed getting a quite invaluable set of photographs of such fights as Bullecourt and Messines because there is a rule against my carrying a camera unless I have a commission—although there is no suggestion that the photographs should be used for any except national records. It is against my government’s policy, rightly, for me to have a commission; and those records, which might have existed in your national galleries and ours are lost, because I sometimes by chance happened to be the only recorder present.

If he ran into obstacles with the British military hierarchy in his quest to build up an adequate set of national records, he asked, ‘may I write to you, who have a grasp of what our national motive means, and a word from whom can no doubt smooth out the difficulty in less time than it takes to say it?’

Bean had clearly moved beyond the role of official war correspondent. In planning his approach to Lloyd George he knew he had White’s backing, and in London he had won the support of the High Commissioner’s official secretary. After sending the letter, Bean spoke with Lloyd George’s secretary, who promised an interview with the Prime Minister. It did not go ahead. While he waited, however, Bean visited the writer and poet John Masefield, whose book Gallipoli had described what the common soldier had endured in that dreadful campaign and become a bestseller. Like Bean, Masefield was fascinated by the Anzacs and their deeds. ‘Masefield has conceived an immense belief in the Australians,’ Bean wrote. ‘He thinks these magnificent men ought to be sent back to Australia at once as it is a tragedy to have the young race killed off—he would let the old race die rather.’ They were of like mind about what they wanted to emerge from the war:

Masefield thinks, like me, that the best thing that the world can get out of the war—especially England—is a revolution. Masefield and Mrs Masefield are both at heart, and profess to be, revolutionaries. I think it is a fad of the Asquith clique, perhaps, to pretend to be revolutionary—the last crowd in the world, really, who desire anyone to rule except ‘us’—the intellectual snobs of English political society. But I think Masefield and Mrs Masefield are thoroughly sincere in their wish for the poor of England and the suppressed to come by their own.

These musings were not idle. While he was no revolutionary, Bean’s mind was fertile ground for such thoughts as he looked at how Australia would emerge from the war. His views were forming about what the war meant for a young nation, the sacrifice of men that he had witnessed, and what returning troops were owed when the war finally ended.

Yet again, though, Bean had to deal with the matter of the official photographer. Herbert Baldwin had spent the previous eight months taking still photographs and cine film under Bean’s direction, completing 540 glass-plate negatives that would come to be regarded as among the best images of the Western Front. But his health had broken down, and Bean needed to replace him.

Bean had a lengthy meeting with Haig’s chief intelligence officer, Brigadier General John Charteris, during which he raised the issue of acquiring photographic records for Australia. Brash and loudmouthed, Charteris was despised even by his own men. His efforts to fob Bean off showed how Bean’s aims as a correspondent and historian conflicted with those of the British military. Bean told Charteris that since they had last met twelve months earlier the Australians had been through Pozières, Bapaume, Bullecourt and Messines, yet opportunities for important historical photographs had been lost because of the British ban against his taking photographs.

Charteris rejected the argument, telling Bean he did not know what photographs the British had. He continued: ‘I tell you that we have all that we want to have; we have the photographed panorama taken from our front line—and as a military student I tell you that that is all I desire to have; that helps me far more than any photograph that you could take.’ Bean responded that these photos covered only a small amount of what historians would want, such as the famous trenches in which fighting had taken place and various views of Mouquet Farm—all the key battle sites captured before they were destroyed. Bean noted that Charteris changed his ground at once: ‘These photos,’ he said pointing to one of his panoramas, ‘help us to win the war, and that is all I want to do—nothing matters except that.’ He argued that his photos were enough, adding: ‘You know, no history that you can write can be of any importance except purely locally. It cannot be written from here—the real history will be written by somebody right away from the war.’ Bean said that on the contrary, as far as Australia was concerned his history would be all-important. But Charteris hit back that it could only be a record of a number of incidents and events:

I replied that although I realised the difficulty I intended to try and so study the events as to correlate them just as much as any historian would. I quite realised that it was difficult to write a war from the middle of it; and I quite realised that I might never finish this war. But I hoped I would; and if I did, I felt I was in a position in which scarcely any historian of a war had ever been—that of a man who will write about a war which he has seen all through, in which he has been in every important trench, and seen almost every important event. The illustrations and incidents would be true in detail—and it was for my country not myself that I wanted these photographs. Could not their definition of the person authorised to take photos be extended to the Official Historian.

Charteris said no, but agreed to support Bean in getting a second official photographer, who would accompany him for record work. ‘At any rate, see if you cannot manage it that way,’ he said finally. Bean couldn’t help wondering if the letter to Lloyd George ‘might not have done something.’ Bean’s quiet advocacy was being listened to. And the cable from Murdoch to Hughes was also starting to draw results, with the Australian Government wiring Birdwood that it intended to fill positions on divisional and corps staffs with Australian officers.

Bean heard that the thirty-one-year-old Australian photographer Frank Hurley, who had accompanied the explorer Douglas Mawson to the Antarctic, was due to arrive in London. Hurley would do the picturesque and press work, but a second photographer would be used for the historical records. Bean saw these as two distinct areas. In this he was ahead of the British, as they had not begun to collect the historical record on film. This was ‘an irremediable loss.’

The photographer recruited for this task was a young officer from the Australian Flying Corps, Hubert Wilkins. The twenty-eight-year-old Wilkins had almost the same credentials as Hurley—but in the Arctic rather than the Antarctic. Wilkins had filmed during the 1912 Turkish–Bulgarian war, and then joined the ill-fated 1913 expedition led by Canadian Vilhjalmur Stefansson to explore the Arctic. Wilkins survived a harrowing three years with Stefansson, but seventeen other members of the expedition died. When news of the war reached him, Wilkins sailed for England. His ship was torpedoed and sank in the mid-Atlantic, but Wilkins survived in a lifeboat and was picked up the next day. In London, he met Frank Hurley for the first time. Hurley had been through his own misadventures with Shackleton, surviving two years in the Antarctic after the wreck of the Endurance.

Thus, Wilkins, a second lieutenant, and Hurley, an honorary captain, arrived at I Anzac Corps headquarters on the Western Front to work with Bean. Hurley and Wilkins became firm friends. Although very different in temperament, they shared a taste for adventure, great tolerance for physical discomfort and no lack of courage. Each was largely self-taught and highly competent in photography. They were enthusiastic about the opportunity to record the war and furthermore, they knew how to talk to Australian soldiers. They were ideal for Bean’s project. Arriving at Boulogne late on the afternoon of 21 August, they headed to Flanders. Hurley soon thought Bean was ‘an excellent fellow and not afraid to be in any of the stunts in which our fellows take part.’

Despite success in acquiring photographers, Bean was displeased when a letter from AIF headquarters arrived informing him that the Australian Press Association had asked for a correspondent at the front, and Prime Minister Hughes had agreed. Bean was concerned that this could mean working in competition with another journalist. He believed that competition was best left out of war correspondence. He was relieved to hear that the new correspondent, Gordon Gilmour, would only be visiting the front on the same basis as Keith Murdoch.

The number of Australian journalists who had been involved in covering the war to that point was just a handful—among them, Harry Gullett and Phillip Schuler, both friends of Bean. He had known Gullett from his early days on The Sydney Morning Herald, and Schuler since they palled up on the Orvieto sailing from Australia to Egypt. There were important intersections in their careers. Bean had reconnected with Gullett in pre-war London when posted there as the Herald correspondent. Besides writing for the Sydney Daily Telegraph and The Sun, Gullett had become interested in migration, believing it to be the key to Australia’s development and defence. Through this, he became closely involved in the immigration work of Australia House and, in 1914, published in London The Opportunity in Australia, an illustrated practical handbook on Australian rural life. Gullett, like Bean, believed in the value of Australian bush life and the migration of British people to populate Australia.

When, in March 1915, the British government had decided to liberalise press access to the Western Front by allowing small groups of war correspondents to visit on short-term tours, the Australian Government nominated Gullett. His role was to forward messages to the Defence Department for distribution to the Australian press. After a year in France he returned to Australia to lecture on the war, then in July 1916 enlisted in the AIF as a gunner. Gullett’s return to England early in 1917 coincided with the organisation of the AWRS, and Bean selected him to command the subsection to be set up in Egypt, leaving later in the year.

Phillip Schuler was a friend and colleague to whom Bean owed a debt. As the Melbourne Age’s correspondent, Schuler had helped out when Bean was recovering from his bullet wound at Gallipoli, keeping him up to date on the fighting as Bean lay confined to his bunk. Around this time, after dinner at Imbros with Schuler, Bazley and his own brother Jack, Bean commented wistfully in his diary that he hoped they all survived the war, as it would ‘be something to talk and think of afterwards between us all.’

In early April 1916 Schuler quit journalism and enlisted in the Army. A short time later, before he had seen the final printers’ proofs of his book on the Gallipoli campaign, Australia in Arms, Schuler was on his way to France. His motivation for enlisting remains unclear. Certainly, he refused an immediate commission and enlisted as a private, taking a job as a driver with the Australian Army Service Corps. He and Bean met up on 2 June 1917 and had ‘a little yarn’ over lunch. Schuler had told him he was going to ‘marry a little Russian countess in Egypt after the war.’ Bean was pleased for his friend and thought this news added ‘consistency to his other good points.’

Lunch over, Schuler returned to the lines. Three weeks later, in his capacity as a driver, he was involved in fighting around Messines. During the action he was horrifically wounded, suffering gunshot wounds to the arm, face, throat and leg. He was taken to the 2nd Australian Casualty Clearing Station, at Trois Arbres, where he died and was buried. In Melbourne, those who knew his father, Frederick Schuler, editor of The Age, said he never recovered from the loss of his twenty-seven-year-old only son. The dinner on Imbros had taken on a new significance.

Moved by the death of his good friend, Bean wrote a tribute in the Australian press. He said Schuler was a ‘brilliantly handsome, bright, attractive, generous’ man whom he had come to know well on the voyage to Egypt and then at Mena camp:

He worked harder than almost any other war correspondent I ever knew. He wrote only what he saw. His letters [stories] were true, and only those who knew what oceans of false stuff have been poured on to the world in this war can appreciate what that means . . .

His power of taking in the whole situation by a survey of the movements on the hills would have made him a brilliant intelligence officer. The reports he brought back from his rambles were fuller than the official news, and truer, and his history of Anzac will always remain the classic for that period on that account. He was a boy of delicate, almost fastidious taste, fond of flowers, scrupulously neat even under conditions of discomfort, but his bravery and energy crowded his short stay at Anzac with such experience as has rarely been gained by journalists, and he held the honor of Australian journalism very high.

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 seemed 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 replacing. ‘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.

The object was so badly carried out that the result was that instead of lowering German morale and raising ours, we lowered ours by each of these battles and raised the German; and we won not an inch of ground. What excuse is the very best strategic or psychological object in the world, if the plan you pursue does not and cannot get it?

These failures contrasted with the victories of the two Anzac Corps in the three battles of Menin Road, Polygon Wood and Broodseinde. As Bean concluded, the later fighting in the wet weather doubled the casualties, which mounted to 38,000 in the five Australian divisions in eight weeks. In all, the British forces lost at least a further 212,000 men against the Germans’ 200,000 casualties. Passchendaele had eventually fallen to the Canadian Corps in five operations between 26 October and 10 November, but Haig’s hopes of the Third Ypres campaign smashing the German line before the New Year had been dashed. All he had managed was to inflict proportionately more damage on his own forces than the Germans. For Australia, this left a rising mood of disillusionment, and an insoluble problem of reinforcement. And for Bean, the setback did nothing to restore his faith in the British Army—at all levels.

33

Cultural stereotyping

The more contact he had with British military leaders, the more Bean’s contempt for them, and the class system that spawned them, grew. There were ‘society cavalry generals’ who were ‘a sort of hunting squire put in charge of 300,000 men’ and exemplified the problems that Bean believed beset the British Army. ‘Our Australians are full of the impression . . . that the present British soldier and staff cannot stand up to the Germans.’ Bean further asserted that the only troops that could be relied upon to face the Germans were Dominion troops:

The example of a determined man amongst them is what they want. The British troops lack the men with the determination to fight who are necessary to make a stern defence. Our officers and men are all talking of this; they all speak of the British retreating without putting up a fight after the first few days. When they see the British troops retiring it is the ‘same old game starting’.

In particular, Bean had in mind British generals such as Hubert Gough and Richard Haking; and the Canadians generally shared similar views about the British commanders. Furthermore, Lloyd George’s government viewed both Gough and Haking as incompetent. Lloyd George later confided to Billy Hughes—who subsequently told Bean—that the War Cabinet tried to prevent the Third Battle of Ypres but was ‘powerless against the determination of their military advisers.’ The British Army, Lloyd George told Hughes, above the rank of brigadier general, was preserved for members of the old regular Army, particularly the cavalry branch, most of whom belonged to a limited and powerful class. ‘I do not belong to that class,’ said the British Prime Minister, ‘and, if I had stepped in and stopped their offensive, they would have said that I had held them up on the brink of a great military success.’

After Passchendaele, consideration was given to replacing Sir Douglas Haig as Commander-in-Chief. The trouble was, no one was better equipped for the job. Bean was scathing of ‘the extraordinary British method of choosing men not by their capacity but by their “breeding” or tact or birth merely in some cases.’ Such a system, he concluded, was the blight of all British institutions. He believed the root cause of the poor performance of the British Army had been ‘plain as an open book ever since Suvla Bay—it is far, far deeper than the failure of this or that division or general’:

The real cause is the social system of England, or the distorted relic of the early middle ages which passes for a system; the exploitation of the whole country for the benefit of a class—a system quietly assumed by the ‘upper class’ and accepted by the lower class, so that the upper class does not have to employ brains or ability or any virtue of modern value except tact or manners in order to occupy all the positions of command; and the lower class has to exist without any hope or right of betterment in whatever hovels and slums this ‘system’ allows for its workers. The upper class remain ‘upper’ without dependence on brains, by a sort of feudal right; and the lower class has no right to develop either brains or bodies. This system is necessary to the development of ‘national’ wealth—which means the wealth of the upper and middle classes. The other class, though an Englishman would wonder what you meant if you said so, has no rights. Generals without brains and an army without physique—there you have it.

Bean was not alone in his condemnation of the British class system and how it affected the Army. In the summer of 1914 a prominent American socialist, Charles Edward Russell, on a visit to Britain watched recruits being drilled and noted the disparity between the heights of the officers and men—the former were on average five inches taller. He was struck by the poor appearance of the men: ‘the dull eyes, the open mouths that seem ready to drool, the vacant expression, the stigmata of the slum—terrible spectacle.’ Nonetheless, the Tommies made resolute soldiers even if their physical condition did not match that of the Australians. As the Germans saw it, the reality was more complex than Bean acknowledged. One report by a German officer after Fromelles commented that although the Australian officers and men were in good physical condition, ‘they seem rather deficient in military qualities. The Australian officers are inferior in every respect to the British. As is to be expected in view of their educational background, they are completely lacking in judgment as to what is important militarily and what is not.’ Understandably focused on the Australians as he was, perhaps Bean did not always have access to the broader picture.

Despite his contempt for the class system, Bean had a cordial relationship with Haig, though he thought him gauche and nervous. While their contact was infrequent, they met again during Passchendaele when Bean attended a briefing that Haig was giving for correspondents. When it ended, Bean stayed behind to ask questions relating to Australia. Haig wanted to talk, and asked Bean what chance there was of conscription in Australia. Bean said Prime Minister Hughes had not handled the issue well and as a consequence, there was enormously strong, well-organised opposition to conscription from the Irish, the Catholics and the Industrial Workers of the World. Haig had never heard of the IWW, and Bean had to explain that it was an international socialist organisation founded in the United States. Bean told Haig the one thing that would bring conscription would be if the Allies were in a tight corner.

The intricacies and tensions in the AIF’s relations with the British military hierarchy began to surface as their discussion continued. Bean’s admiration for Brudenell White and dislike of John Monash were soon on show. Haig said he was convinced that Australia was right in wishing to build up its own staff and that the nation had some very capable commanders. He said to Bean: ‘Now—er—there’s General Monash, for example. He is a very capable man. He has made a great success of everything he has touched—a very solid man.’

Bean knew that Haig had had Monash to dinner lately; he also knew that Haig had suggested to Keith Murdoch that Monash might be given the corps command and General Birdwood the administration. No fan of Monash, Bean said at once: ‘Yes—but if it meant any change in the position of General Birdwood it seems to me that it would be a great pity. General Birdwood has an independent position and standing which is of the utmost value to us—Australians trust him and he has won himself a great place with them.’ Haig said he knew Birdwood’s value but—with all five Australian infantry divisions serving on the Western Front about to combine as the Australian Corps on 1 November—it seemed to him that Australia should have a corps commander and a complete corps staff. Bean responded: ‘Yes sir—you know we look upon General White as the greatest soldier we have by a long way.’ Haig said he knew White was a ‘most capable officer,’ but he wondered why Australia had declined to promote him. ‘I said I didn’t know they had, but if so it must be that they did not know him, that he had been too close to General Birdwood.’ Bean said that White was the one man to whom no Australian soldier would grudge promotion.

Haig raised the concept of an Imperial General Staff—an idea that Monash supported and which would mean that he was answerable only to GHQ and not Australia. Bean thought there was ‘no doubt they have talked it out and Haig would be very glad to be quit of the independence of Birdwood and White.’ He told Haig there was no chance the Australian Government would agree to such an arrangement of a common service, if only because the nation would lose its best men. He added: ‘We could never keep a soldier like White if there were a common service—if our men could enter the Indian Service and the British Service we should lose all the best of them to India and elsewhere and we need them too badly.’ ‘You would get them back,’ Haig replied, to which Bean said, to bring the conversation to a close: ‘With a system of exchange we should, but not with a common service.’

Bean discussed the meeting with White, who told him of his own conversation with Haig. The British general had wanted to know why the Australians did not have a corps commander of their own, adding, ‘You know you ought to be commanding this Corps.’ White said he had replied: ‘God forbid. General Birdwood has a position amongst Australians which is far too valuable to lose.’ Haig said he knew all that; but Birdwood could have an administrative command. White replied that Birdwood’s great reputation in Australia depended on his being the fighting commander of their troops, and while Australia had a dozen men who could be as good or better administrators, there were none who commanded Australia’s confidence as Birdwood did. Bean noted: ‘Haig turned away impatiently and since then has been very short with White.’ White was clearly out of favour with Haig, while Monash had won his support—so much so that he had also taken the opportunity of sounding out Keith Murdoch, to whom he suggested that Monash should be appointed to command I Anzac Corps and Birdwood given the AIF administrative command.

The conversation with Haig raised serious issues in Bean’s mind: the need to keep up recruitment numbers without conscription; the consequent threat to keeping the AIF’s strength at five divisions, with the risk that one of them would have to be broken up to feed the other four; and, importantly, the need to keep all divisions together under an Australian staff. Given his critique of the British Army’s systemic and cultural problems, Bean saw this as a vital and urgent step towards AIF independence. He and Murdoch met eight days later to draft a cable airing their beliefs to Prime Minister Hughes. According to Bean, they both agreed conscription would make it possible to keep five divisions going; voluntary recruiting, they thought, was most unlikely to achieve this. If conscription were to be adopted, it would be necessary to assure Australia that all the divisions were together under Australian officers. Birdwood’s hand would have to be forced to get that staff because he was too loyal to his old friends to turn them out. However, he was keener than most on appointing Australians when new appointments had to be made. On the question of who should become the AIF commander-in-chief, Bean and Murdoch were adamant. As Bean noted:

Monash for an Australian C. in C. we cannot have. He is not the man. The purity and absence of jealousy and political intrigue in Birdwood’s administration, is worth anything. There is no ‘eyewash’—bluff and humbug and insincerity in it; and there is in Monash’s. White would do, but not Monash.

Besides we do not want Australia represented by men mainly because of their ability, natural and inborn in Jews, to push themselves. Monash and Rosenthal have both that quality, though Monash does not use it shamelessly. Rosenthal does.

This diary entry is notable for indications of what one of Monash’s biographers, the historian Geoffrey Serle, describes as conventional prejudices about Jews. It also reveals that Bean had wrongly categorised Brigadier General Charles Rosenthal, commander of the 9th Infantry Brigade, as Jewish. Rosenthal was, like Bean, a Protestant—he had married in the Congregational Church in Melbourne and had worked as an architect for the Anglican Church in Grafton, Armidale and Sydney. Just as Bean had categorised John Treloar as a Catholic—he was a Methodist—so, too, he had made a wrong assumption about Rosenthal—perhaps because of his name. Clearly, Bean did not like the larger-than-life and conservative Rosenthal, whose audacity at the front line won the respect of the troops he commanded.

Bean’s disdain for Monash was already evident, of course. Their relationship had soured at Gallipoli; Bean clearly had not forgotten Monash’s unethical behaviour towards him during that campaign, when he sent his own reports to his wife in Melbourne to have them published in The Argus. Bean saw Monash as a self-promoter—and for him this was a character defect. But if Bean was now blind to the honing of Monash’s abilities since Gallipoli, he had been reminded only a few days earlier that Haig held Monash in high regard. Haig, despite the criticism levelled at his performance during the war, unquestionably knew leadership qualities when he saw them. He had praised Monash, but Bean had ignored this. Not all of Monash’s peers approved of his assertiveness—among them Brigadier General John Gellibrand, with whom Bean shared a close friendship. This disapproval even extended to Monash’s great contemporary, the Light Horse Lieutenant General Sir Harry Chauvel, commander of the Desert Column in Palestine and the first Australian to lead a corps. From the sands of Sinai, Chauvel watched warily as Monash’s promotion prospects blossomed in the mud of Flanders. To Bean, if someone other than Birdwood or White was going to command the AIF, then Gellibrand was the one.

Where Monash differed from many of his peers, including White, Gellibrand and Chauvel, was in the forcefulness of his personality. He was not one for self-effacement. Those officers and Bean disliked pushiness. The future World War II AIF field marshal Tom Blamey, who was then Chief of Staff, 1st Division, saw it as a plus. Blamey thought Monash ‘had the most highly trained mind that I had to deal with in the war,’ and commented that they got on ‘most excellently together.’ Bean acknowledged that Monash had his capacities, among them a lucid mind and a knack for grasping what had to be done and explaining it. But he also had ‘such a desire to make out the best case for himself after the event, that he accepts any pretty story which is put to him.’ A truthful battalion commander therefore got less favour in his eyes than one whose battalion had not done so well but who was ‘ready to tell a pretty story about it’:

Monash for this reason has not the slightest grasp of what has happened in action—he never has had. His ambition makes him an underground engineer—he has the Jewish capacity for worming silently into favour without seeming to take any steps towards it, although many are beginning to suspect that he does take steps. Holmes was a thousand times too proud to do any such thing.

The criticism, fuelled by cultural stereotyping not uncommon in that era, sat oddly with Bean’s strong belief that all the AIF divisions should be under the command of Australian officers. With Murdoch also opposing any promotion of Monash to command the AIF, and working in tandem with Bean, the campaign was already exposing bitter divisions with no apparent sign of resolution. This was underlined two days later when Bean added that among the AIF’s senior leadership White was seen as a ‘strong determined general’ and that everyone said he was Birdwood’s ‘only possible successor.’

The matter lay unresolved as attention turned to the second conscription plebiscite in Australia. As ‘to the Polling Booth’ signs were erected in the AIF camps, Bean again remained confident that the conscription case would triumph. Certainly, earlier in the year Murdoch was doing his best with overt propaganda, including spreading the most notorious Allied propaganda fabrication of the war, the story alleging that the Germans were converting human corpses into soap. In contrast to the Australian Press Association, which virtually ignored the story, Murdoch gave it great prominence in UCS cables and follow-up correspondence.

Bean thought that on conscription, Prime Minister Hughes was ‘putting the exceptions and conditions very fairly to the men,’ and Bean had ‘a very strong impression that the vote is better here than before.’ He also believed that in Australia the crisis in the Allies’ fortunes and the great need for strong energetic action would carry the vote. ‘I have very little doubt it will go through,’ he wrote.

Yet again he was mistaken. Three days before Christmas, news reached France that on 20 December Australians had voted against conscription for the second time, by an even greater margin than at the 1916 poll. This time the proposal was less far-reaching, eschewing full conscription of able-bodied men and instead proposing to conscript men between the ages of eighteen and forty-four through a ballot system, and only in months when voluntary enlistments fell below 7000 men. The result left Bean disappointed. ‘However,’ he rationalised, ‘one is not going to hang one’s head over one’s country.’ After all, Australia, with fewer than 5 million people, had sent away as many divisions as Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa put together. However, Bean wrongly believed the result would mean the break-up of the 4th Division.

Although officers and non-commissioned officers almost universally supported conscription, the troops voted strongly against its introduction. Bean believed there were six key reasons. In his view the men believed that full reinforcements meant time in the line, whereas shortage of men had meant rest. The men further believed that the Australian divisions had been rather exploited, and had more than their share of heavy fighting. A further fear was that the death penalty would accompany conscription, and that discipline would harden. Bean knew that the troops were tired of war, and disillusioned at finding that they could do so little personally to bring victory. Bean continued: ‘They know what war is and they are disinclined to force anyone into it if he does not want to come. They rather object, some of them, to having the conscript among them and to lose the kudos of having come away voluntarily.’

After the plebiscite’s failure, Bean met High Commissioner Andrew Fisher in London, during which the former Prime Minister explained his opposition to conscription. ‘I’m not blind to the fact that conscription is logical,’ Fisher told Bean, ‘but men are not logical and you cannot rule them by logic.’ He agreed with Bean that conscription was ‘economical’ and overcame the problem of putting the wrong men in the wrong places. But Fisher said he had never believed that if conscription were carried in Australia it could be enforced, and felt there would have been ‘terrible trouble’ if the vote had succeeded. Bean admitted that there had been great trouble as it was, and added: ‘I can see your point—instead of getting the recruits they have only managed to divide Australia into two bitterly hostile camps.’ The debate had only brought ‘furious antagonism’. Fisher agreed. ‘I don’t believe that it was worth it, to get the few men extra who might have been raised by conscription,’ he said. Bean left with a clearer understanding of a man who had quit the prime ministership in October 1915 after finding the burden of wartime leadership increasingly unpalatable. He reminded Bean that his aim in office had always been to ‘keep straight and clean.’ These tenets appealed to Bean, and in his diary he commented: ‘One can see that this last has been one of the principal preconceptions of Fisher’s life—how to keep simple and straight in politics.’

•

With the conscription debate over and no hope that it would be revisited in this war, Bean’s mood was sombre; it had not improved by New Year’s Eve. As the guns broke out at midnight he realised that it was 1918. He believed it would be hard going before the year was out, and could not see the fighting ending before mid-1919. Earlier that day he had driven over icy roads to visit troops of the 56th Battalion to get their account of Ypres. He came away reminded that the infantry were ‘splendid chaps’, always hospitable and glad to see you. ‘They live so close to death, good fellows, that they have a sort of pathetic generosity. One knows very well that, of an infantry mess with whom you dine today, probably not more than 2 or 3 outside of the colonel and headquarters will get through the year without death or a wound.’

His brother Jack was one of the doctors who tended these men, and had done so since the day of the landing at Gallipoli. Bean thought Jack ‘with all his impractical ideas was a bit of a saint in his own way.’ Yet Jack, for all the heroism that had seen him wounded twice on the battlefield while caring for the wounded, was not popular with the medical command, in particular the director general of the Australian Army Medical Corps, Sir Neville Howse, VC. Jack was an idealist who put the welfare of the men above his own career. He had been passed over many times by Howse for promotion. He had also run foul of the Royal Army Medical Corps when he criticised the poor quality of chloroform being used at the hospital at Warloy, near Amiens. When Bean heard in early November 1917 that Jack had been reprimanded, he made his own inquiries, which confirmed that his brother was correct about the ‘vile’ chloroform:

Jack was right, up to the hilt; and all these generals and big people who were sitting on him were simply doing their best to squash a fellow who had no other object than to save the lives of soldiers. I know my brother—working day and night without regard for himself in spite of his smashed hand. The idea of these hidebound RAMC leaders trying to squash him and snub him down, while he is giving to the country a quality of unselfish devotion which they cannot even imagine, is one that touches me on the raw.

One of Jack Bean’s main interests was treating venereal disease among the troops. As Bean wrote in his diary, his brother wanted ‘to protect the women of Australia and our future nation against the disease, by getting the men to realise the dangers to their homes and to the race.’ Jack wanted to form a Legion of Honour in which men could enrol themselves to ‘protect the purity of our nation; against disease and against drink.’ He found no support among his more realistic brother officers, however. (Howse, who had introduced a system of practical preventative measures against VD, including packets of prophylactics for men going on leave, thought the idea mad, telling Birdwood, ‘this is a primitive instinct with men and you cannot stop it.’)

Early in January 1918 Bean was shocked to receive a letter about Jack from his friend Brigadier General Tom Griffiths—‘one which made me so angry that my heart would not stop beating for a while.’ A War Office Intelligence Corps officer had visited Griffiths to inform him that a raid on the premises of the Young India League had found papers showing that Major Jack Bean was a member of the Home Rule for India League, and had paid £1 to its funds. The raid had also uncovered a letter from him offering to help in preparing a guide for speakers on the subject. When he read the letter Bean was outraged to find that the War Office had gone to AIF headquarters in London, behind Jack’s back, with their ‘miserable discoveries’, suggesting that ‘Jack had been engaging in seditious intrigue.’

Howse wanted to send Jack back to Australia on the sick list. Bean wouldn’t have it. ‘I went straight to White and told him I’d fight anybody or anything rather than have old Jack, who has simply given his life to the service of his country, subjected to the least suspicion of the possibility of disloyal action. I said I would fight anybody, in the English newspapers or anywhere, first.’ With White’s support, and Griffiths also on side, the matter was dropped. With his influential connections, when Bean was roused he could be a formidable opponent.

34

The juggler

Frank Hurley was frustrated. He wanted to capture the terrible scope of what he was seeing on the battlefields. Hurley and Hubert Wilkins were plunged into the bloodbath of Third Ypres, where they soon became known to the Diggers as ‘the mad photographers.’ But the events were so big and so terrible that Hurley felt they were beyond his ability to capture by normal photography. His efforts to resolve this problem inevitably brought him into frequent conflict with Bean. Hurley was stunned by the scenes he was witnessing:

Everything is on such a vast scale. Figures are scattered—the atmosphere is dense with haze and smoke—shells will not burst where required—yet the whole elements of a picture are there could they but be brought together and condensed. The battle is in full swing, the men are just going over the top—and I snap! A fleet of bombing planes is flying low, and a barrage bursts all around. On developing my plate there is disappointment! All I find is a record of a few figures advancing from the trenches—and a background of haze. Nothing could be more unlike a battle. It might be a rehearsal in a paddock!

Hurley regarded the camera as an artist does his brush, seeing it as an implement to be used with imagination and ‘judicious manipulation’. He suggested to Bean that he could overcome the limitations and add realism and drama to his battle series by ‘combination printing’. The process involved combining images from two or more glass negatives into a single positive print, making a new negative by re-photographing that print, then using the negative to print the final composite photo.

In his diary for 26 September 1917, Hurley noted that he had had a great argument with Bean about ‘combination pictures’. He was ‘thoroughly convinced that it is impossible to secure effects, without resorting to composite pictures.’ But Bean was horrified, seeing the technique as a falsification of reality, and wrote that he and Hurley had had ‘a long argument.’ Bean acknowledged that he could see Hurley’s point—‘he has been nearly killed a dozen times and has failed to get the pictures he wants—but we will not have it at any price.’ He accepted that the Canadians did this to some extent, augmenting their battle pictures with shell bursts from other photos—‘but we don’t want to rival them in this.’

Hurley was not so easily brushed aside. He dined with Birdwood and White and told them his views on the virtues of composite photos, and that Bean was opposed to the idea of even allowing clouds to be inserted in a picture. He said he thought it right to illustrate to the public ‘the things our fellows are doing and how the war was conducted.’ This could only be achieved by printing from a number of negatives, or by reenactment. Birdwood promised to look into the matter.

Next day, 2 October 1917, Hurley resigned—a tactical move to ‘await the result of lighting the fuse.’ With an Australian photographic exhibition being planned for May the following year in London, before going to Australia Hurley spoke to Birdwood, who said ‘he hoped to fix matters up.’ Birdwood’s compromise allowed Hurley to show six composites, which were to be clearly labelled as such. Hurley retracted his resignation and continued to work in France until December, when he was sent to the Middle East to photograph the Australians for the exhibition. But Bean felt so strongly about composite photos that in his diary entry he failed to mention Hurley’s contribution to the exhibition. Wilkins, he wrote, ‘did the work.’

The dispute between Bean and Hurley highlights Bean’s devotion to accuracy and his determination to protect what he believed were Australia’s interests. Reality could not be tampered with—a photo should be the same as a battlefield relic. Bean objected not just to Hurley’s use of composites but to Hurley’s tendency to stage and misrepresent photographs and scenes. They were also contrasting personalities. Self-promotion and showmanship were second nature to Hurley, but to Bean they were anathema. Bean was a truth seeker in his chronicling, while Hurley sought to represent ‘realism’ in a way that the camera could not catch. After the Third Ypres campaign, Bean warmly recommended Wilkins for a Military Cross, while for Hurley it was a rather less lustrous mention in despatches.

If Bean was unhappy with Hurley, he was dismayed with the War Office Cinematograph Committee headed by Sir William Jury, and the debacle of the film of the Australians in action on the Western Front that he had helped edit with the company a year earlier. Bean had worked hard on the film, leaving ‘a thoroughly true interesting story of the Australians.’ He had left the film with Jury with only the captions to be done. Having now seen the film, he found that

about 2000 feet of miscellaneous rubbish had been put together, containing no single title that bore any relation to the ones that we had settled, in no sort of order, jumping from Fleurbaix to Pozières and back in the wildest disorder, without the faintest attempt of any sort at any comprehensible sequence of ideas. I simply felt at the end of it as though the work were hopeless and one had scarcely the strength to tackle it again from the beginning . . . In the meantime, the film which went out to Australia, was of course, a hopeless frost.

A few days later, Jury’s office contacted Bean to say they had found a part of the lost film. When Bean went to see it, Jury ‘had me in and tried to get me to say it wasn’t their fault.’ Bean noted drily that, ‘I would not do this. I fancy he has just an idea that there may be trouble ahead.’ More of the film was subsequently found, but what happened to the original film would remain unresolved. What further annoyed Bean was that Jury had been knighted that same week for ‘great services’. Jury had clearly ignored Bean’s instructions for final editing of the film—and charged Australia for the work, regardless.

At the time, Bean was settling into his new London office in Horseferry Road. Bean thought that Arthur Bazley, who was now organising the office, was working too hard, as was John Treloar. The Australian War Records Section, which Treloar ran, had a staff of about six and was growing. Treloar and his staff were the most ‘conscientious, untiring, limitless workers’ that he had ever met. Again, Bean could not stop himself from a sectarian appraisal of the staff, noting that several were Irish and Catholics. Whatever their religion, they had worked through Saturdays and Sundays, beginning early and ending late, for three years. For Bean, this meant that they had ‘quite overturned a good many old ideas about the Public Service.’ Treloar impressed him most.

Little Treloar is a Methodist, and though he will not work on Sundays, which he spends at church and in writing home letters, he works in the office from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. on other days including Saturdays, and often later and takes home work with him. He will not take afternoon tea and spends only half an hour at lunch. Bazley works in the same manner, sometimes later than Treloar. Both are doing far too much for their health.

Writing to Harry Gullett in Egypt early February 1918, Bean lamented that he had not had time to concentrate on writing the Official History, such were the administrative tasks still involved with collating records, photographs and other material. Not least among these was the future of war relics. He and Treloar were ‘fighting for all we are worth against the supposed promise of the Australian Government that the pick of Australian trophies should go to the Imperial War Museum in London.’ They were appalled at a claim by the War Office that Australia had agreed to this. Bean cabled Australia to have the consent reversed, and sent a strong cable to the press. This had the desired effect of forcing Defence Minister George Pearce to deny that any such promise had been made, nor was it likely to be. Bean was gratified when Prime Minister Hughes made it clear that all Australian trophies should go to the proposed Australian war museum.

Thus Bean’s hopes for the war museum housing these major trophies achieved the momentum he wanted. Already he was adamant that while there would be other centres and institutions, the main museum must be in Canberra. This would underline the reality ‘that our capital is a metropolis, and not merely a provincial city.’ Bean had become a nation builder, and he wanted to generate national spirit, without which ‘we shall never get the best out of our people.’ His aspirations were high: ‘We are out to make our war museum, our war gallery, and our war library, if possible, not merely fine museums for Australia, but the finest that the world contains.’

Bean was already thinking beyond the war, and beyond the creation of institutions such as the Australian War Memorial. He lobbied Brudenell White to allow newly arrived American war correspondents to inspect the Australians and write about them. His rationale was strategic: he feared that Americans knew little about Australia and after the war ‘we shall need the sympathy of America in the Pacific to the fullest extent to which it is possible to obtain it.’ Bean thought the end of the war would probably bring a League of Nations, which he saw as ‘a sort of superior parliament or council.’ In this he reflected the thinking in Britain following the release of a report in February 1918 on a so-called council of states.

Bean saw the new body resolving international questions so as to prevent wars; countries would join together to fight rogue nations in any war. His arguments went back to his prewar support for the White Australia policy, and the need for a strong navy to protect Australia’s interests in the Pacific. He now spoke of ‘the question of our relations with the Asiatic Races, which we intend to keep out of Australia.’ If this issue ended up before a League of Nations, Australia would have ‘raised up a most deadly peril for ourselves’ because the new body might not have the ‘least sympathy or understanding’ and might decide that Australia ‘must admit the Oriental Races into our country.’ Australia’s only support would come from the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and possibly South Africa. He believed it was essential for Australia and Canada to be on the same side as Britain and the United States: ‘if an English-speaking Federation is the outcome of it, bound by loose ties, representing only their interests, this would most probably be the most satisfactory solution for us in this war. It is, however, urgent for us to obtain the interest and sympathy of America, which at the present moment knows very little about us.’

On one level, Bean was perceptive in predicting that Australia would come to rely on the United States, as would occur in 1942. On another level, though, his views reaffirmed that he still saw the world in racial terms. Hypothetically, the Anglo-Saxon nations would band together to form a powerful block that would protect their particular interests. Such hegemony would underline the geopolitical and cultural predominance of an Anglo-Saxon federation over others. But getting greater American understanding and knowledge of Australia was a necessary first step. Brudenell White agreed.

On a trip back to France in the midst of these fights and flights of fancy, Bean met Fred Cutlack, who he thought had settled nicely into the job. With Cutlack’s company, he took a rare break and caught the train to Paris with the intention of enjoying a night out. On the trip down Bean reflected on the social changes that the war was bringing. Two young British women, members of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, were in the carriage. He noted that the Australians interpreted the WAAC acronym to mean ‘Warned Against All Colonials’. These young women were ‘clearly having the time of their lives in getting away from the very narrow little home circle.’ He realised that the women in this war, like the men, would never be content to return to the restrictive limits of prewar life.

That night, in Paris, Bean was seduced not just by the city but by the vibrant nightlife and the crowds at the Folies Bergère, the nightspot famous for its female nudity. He quickly saw that Parisians were living better than the British, who were, he thought, bearing the greater burden. Unlike in England, bread and most other foods seemed abundant in France. Ever the observer, he was fascinated by the crowds during the show’s interval. There was ‘every nation under the sun,’ all recognisable by their uniform. There were French civilians and their wives, sweethearts and cocottes [prostitutes, or so-called joy girls]; American officers by the score, who stood out in their khaki tunics with stiff high collars. They mingled with spruce, polished British officers. He noticed the French officers and men in their grey-blue uniforms and their peacetime blue and red. Big Yankee soldiers stood out in their long overcoats and roundel hats, reminding him of so many monks. There were Canadians, too, and a few British Tommies, who had the least money of all. Australians who were also there, a good sprinkling of them ‘in their dashing upturned hats and loose easy fitting uniform.’ They stood out from the rest by their easy, frank natural manners; their confident walk, their free unstrained enjoyment.

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 division. 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.’

Bean returned to his new quarters in an old brewery at Querrieu, grieving for Bailey and unhappy at Monash’s promotion over White. With that move, a fuse of a different kind had been ignited.

36

An assessment of character

Will Dyson, Hubert Wilkins and Fred Cutlack returned from dinner to find a dismayed Charles Bean. They had heard rumours about Birdwood leaving the command of the Australian Corps and asked Bean if he knew. That was all the incentive Bean needed. He ‘blurted out’ his news from Birdwood: John Monash was to replace him as commander of the Australian Corps, and Brudenell White would move with Birdwood to the British Fifth Army. ‘There was immediately a great consternation—war correspondents, artist and photographer sitting back around their table with their caps on the back of their heads and discussing what was best to be done.’

They talked through ‘the relative merits of White who does not advertise, and Monash who does.’ Cutlack could not understand White’s attitude. He thought White ‘must know’ he was the best man for the command of the Corps, and couldn’t understand why he did not push for the job. It seemed to him that White had let himself be overshadowed by Birdwood. Cutlack conjectured that there ‘must be something wanting in White.’ Dyson, too, focused on White’s attitude—to do the job and not worry about himself—which he saw as a weakness, but preferable to thrusting himself into the front rank. Dyson, who seems to have shared Bean’s misgivings about Jews, said during the discussion: ‘Yes, Monash will get there, he must get there all the time on account of the qualities of his race; the Jew will always get there.’ At the same time, Dyson saw something positive in this: ‘I’m not sure that because of that very quality Monash is not more likely to help win this war than White.’ Bean summed up the mood of those present—which effectively meant making ‘every effort’ to ensure White got the job because ‘Monash would leave no stone unturned and no underground channel untried—rightly, according to his lights’—to win the promotion. Fred Cutlack proposed a strategy: why not Monash for GOC AIF, and White for GOC Australian Corps? Dyson liked the idea and thought that something could be done to bring this about. According to Bean, ‘We decided that I should go to England, taking him with me, to see Murdoch and try to get this alternative adopted. Everyone was decided that if Birdwood accepted the command of an army, and outside interests, he ought not to continue in command of the AIF.’

As Bean prepared for his meeting with Murdoch, the Australian Government agreed to all of Birdwood’s proposals. Bean argued against the new arrangements in a long statement that he intended to show Murdoch. He said that if Birdwood went to command the Fifth Army he could not continue as head of the AIF, which needed its commander’s full focus. He added that the ‘universal opinion of the Corps is that Gen. White is the best commander of operations in the AIF, and that Gen. Monash’s greatest power is his administrative capacity.’ If the new arrangements went ahead, ‘White though recognised as more brilliant in active command’ would be lost to the service of the AIF to take a ‘subordinate post’ in the British Army. Bean continued: ‘The course which is obviously best for the AIF and which would have the full and immediate approval and confidence of the whole command would be for Gen. Monash to have the supreme administrative command Gen. White the supreme active command.’

Bean’s thinking was influenced by his closeness to White from the early days of the war. He respected White’s self-effacing personality, which, no doubt, he saw as much like his own. White had excelled in the planning and supervision of the Anzac evacuation, the most successful operation of the disastrous campaign. On the Western Front, it was generally recognised that he effectively ran the Anzac Corps. Birdwood might well have exercised command through regular and direct contact with the men, but his administration and organisational skills were weak and his tactical acumen suspect. White not only lacked these shortcomings but had stood up to Haig after he rebuked I Anzac Corps staff following a failure at Pozières in July 1916. In the extreme winter of 1916–17, when there was an urgent requirement to build camps, roads and railways, White understood the need to provide for the comfort and well-being of the troops. He came to wield unprecedented influence, but his reputation for getting things done may have worked to his disadvantage, as some thought he was being kept back because of his usefulness as a staff officer. Monash, meanwhile, had learned from his early performance at Gallipoli and had built a reputation in the field on the Western Front.

When Bean next met Murdoch, he found him piqued by Birdwood’s refusal to continue helping him out in France. He told Bean that Birdwood made it quite clear that the objection came from White. Bean, however, contended that White had only one object in mind and that was to stop Birdwood ‘being slandered by outsiders, generals and others’ who alleged ‘he liked to make a friend of Murdoch because he was a powerful man.’ Bean knew that this was ‘more than half true,’ but Birdwood, instead of taking responsibility for accepting White’s advice, had written to Murdoch putting the onus back on White. This was a complication Bean had not foreseen. ‘The consequence is that Murdoch is not very enthusiastic about White—apt to think he is anti-Australian or lukewarm. However I left him half persuaded.’ Dyson also went to see Murdoch about the issue and, according to Bean, ‘left him quite convinced.’ Yet another complication, which Murdoch had pointed out, was that if the two positions of administrative and active command of the AIF were split the unpopular General James McCay would ‘be after it by every underground channel open to him,’ including through his friend Acting Prime Minister William Watt. Bean knew that Birdwood had told McCay that his becoming Corps GOC was out of the question, and that Hobbs told Birdwood he would resign immediately if it occurred. Bean thought that ‘the mere fear of one man’s personal efforts ought not to drive Australia from the right track.’

Returning to France, Bean told White he was convinced that the new arrangements were wrong and asked him to pass this on to Birdwood. A few days later Birdwood sought a meeting with Bean about his objection to Birdwood’s remaining GOC. ‘He put it to me that there was not a whole day’s work for one man in the office of the GOC, AIF; that he had been promised that always, if the exigencies of the war allowed it, the Australian Corps should be in his army.’ Bean told Birdwood he could not agree. Later, Murdoch confirmed that he had wired Watt and Prime Minister Hughes as per the draft telegram, and there had been immediate action. Hughes, who was in America, had wired Watt asking him and Pearce to hold the decision up until Hughes and his deputy, Joseph Cook, arrived in London. ‘But Murdoch is afraid it may be too late,’ Bean wrote. And it was—although Australian censorship delayed publication of Monash’s appointment for nearly a month in case the decision was overturned.

With his command of the Fifth Army still temporary, Birdwood handed over command of the Australian Corps to Monash on 31 May, retaining administrative command. Two days later, Bean wrote to Murdoch, lamenting that the changes in the administration of the force and of the Corps ‘seem to have been definitely approved and accomplished . . . and there is no chance whatever that they should be altered in the direction which . . . would have been best for Australia.’ The only option was to support the changes, even though he could not reconcile himself to the loss of White. In the letter, Bean was ever the cricket tragic in portraying the situation:

That the biggest and ablest influence in [the AIF], the man who has been far more the father of it than any other, should after four years be suddenly and simply lost to it will always be, in my mind, a big mistake on the part of our Government. Still, it is done. There is no present possibility of undoing it. The team has suddenly given up, without a word, its Trumper. But Monash is a very capable man, a Clem Hill or a Bardsley. And as he is there now and further change would do no good, as things are, I intend to work loyally by him.

On 6 June Murdoch attempted to flatter and charm Monash, explicitly suggesting that if he accepted the GOC AIF post, he would be promoted to full general. He also reminded Monash that his cables went to 250 newspapers. Birdwood and Monash, however, were not to be bullied or bribed. Shortly after, Bean met Murdoch, who reaffirmed his commitment to overturning the new AIF command structure. ‘Look here old chap, I’m up to my neck in it,’ he said, adding that he was a ‘fine chap to enter a fight with!’ Bean told him that Monash could now not be replaced or removed without his own consent or it would destroy confidence among the divisional and brigade leaders. Murdoch agreed, but remained strongly opposed to Birdwood’s remaining GOC AIF now that he had gone to an outside army. Bean noted that Birdwood had written to Murdoch saying: ‘I have often told you that I foresaw that some day you would oppose me. I daresay you will beat me, but I warn you, I shall make a hard fight before I die.’ Bean told Murdoch that he ‘would be in with him in opposing that for all I was worth.’

Before he returned to France shortly after, Bean again met with Murdoch. They agreed that if Monash wanted to keep the corps no effort could easily be made to persuade Prime Minister Hughes to take any other course. Further, ‘That if necessary we would suggest White for GOC AIF, but that the ideal to be aimed at was Monash as GOC AIF and White as GOC Corps.’ Bean knew that ‘a big fight over this question’ was now inevitable, and he too was up to his neck in it. He gave Murdoch a memo for Hughes, urging the Prime Minister not to give final agreement to the changes until he had read it. Bean argued that Australia could not afford to lose White, who had been ‘more than second in command of the AIF from its birth, and who probably possesses more experience than any one else of its problems in the field.’ Many staff officers might be capable of being chiefs of staff to an army, but White’s special value was obviously to the Australian Army. He continued:

. . . It is suggested that with Gen. Monash in command of the Australian armies abroad with the rank of full general, responsible to the Australian Government for all the great questions concerning the AIF, and with Gen. White in command of the Corps, Australia would have a system under which her policy in great affairs concerning her army would he well provided for, and her active army under most capable direction.

Two days later, matters came to a head when Bean met Monash to congratulate him on his promotion to temporary Lieutenant General. The meeting was tense. Monash wanted to know if Bean had seen Murdoch. ‘I told him that I had and that I thought Murdoch was right.’ Monash responded that he had always been on friendly terms with Murdoch and that he thought it was cruel of Murdoch to attempt to deprive him of the high active field command. Haig had told him that he had every confidence in him, Monash said, and had added ‘that even if the Australian Corps had not been vacant he would have been quite prepared to give Monash a place anywhere amongst his Corps Commanders.’ Monash said he would not accept the position of GOC AIF in London and would prefer to go back to Australia than be removed from the corps. Bean told him that at this point there was no question of trying to remove him from the corps against his will. ‘I sketched to him the very big things that were to be done by a GOC AIF and that were not at present being done. The Australian Government really ought to have a big administrator in that position, and it would not be too much to give him the rank of General. White was a brilliant man for operations but was not so suitable for the administration. Monash was capable of both—the ideal thing would be Monash as Administrator and White in the Corps.’ Bean believed that Monash was ‘unquestionably inclined to consider this favourably.’ He had written a letter ‘warmly objecting to Murdoch’s proposal,’ but Bean felt ‘he was more than half swung round in this conversation.’

Later, Bean saw Birdwood’s adjutant general, the gruff Thomas Dodds, who, although a strong supporter of the ‘Australianisation’ of the corps command, told Bean he was ‘not happy about having Monash in the Corps and not White.’ He was not happy about losing White because ‘the Corps and the men in it would be safer under White than under Monash.’ This accorded with Bean’s view. Dodds told Bean that Birdwood, after his appointment, had cabled Australia that if the Government thought he must give up the GOC-ship on taking on an army, he would give up the army. The Australian Cabinet had wired back agreeing to his keeping both. Bean noted that although this ‘alters our obligation to Birdwood very considerably,’ it did not mean the changes should go ahead. Bean left for London to lobby Hughes, admitting to ‘constant anxiety of the campaign’ on which he and Murdoch were embarked. He took heart from Murdoch, who was ‘a strong chap,’ but he knew the coming days would be tough.

Hughes sought Bean’s and Murdoch’s opinions of Birdwood, saying the British general ‘did not strike me as a man of great intellect’ but as someone ‘relying more upon social arts.’ White, on the other hand, did impress Hughes with his intellect, and Monash was ‘a man of very considerable capacity.’ Hughes made it clear to Bean and Murdoch that his overriding aim was to do what he thought best for Australia—‘for the force and the men in it.’ That night over dinner he told Murdoch that Birdwood must, in Australia’s view, take either the AIF or the Fifth Army.

Bean and Murdoch agreed that the problems facing the administrative command of the AIF were so great that it must be separated from the operational field command, and that Birdwood could be offered whichever role he wanted. But Bean was sure he would take neither. At the back of his mind was the conviction: ‘The Corps and the men in it are safe with White; he will put great ideals into it and the spirit of real devotion. Monash is a man of very ordinary ideals—lower than ordinary, I should say. He cannot inspire this force with a high chivalrous patriotic spirit—with his people in charge it would be full of the desire to look and show well . . . There is no question where the interest of the Australian nation lies—it lies in making White one of its great men and makers.’ Bean’s reference to Monash’s ‘lower than ordinary ideals’ probably reflects Bean’s rather moralistic attitude to the general’s well-known affair with Lizette Bentwich in London.

Monash wrote to his wife about the intrigue aimed at removing Birdwood from the position of GOC AIF: ‘. . . they want me to take it, and hope to bribe me with the offer of further promotion. But there are very strong reasons why I should proceed very cautiously before delivering myself in this way into the hands of this particular clique.’ A few days later he wrote again, saying that the intrigue was gaining momentum and ‘taking all sorts of subtle forms.’ This included ‘putting about a propaganda that Brudenell White, being a professional soldier, would be better fitted for this job, and that it would be in Australia’s best future interests that he should get the appointment’:

My own personal view is that I cannot relinquish the Corps Command, until I have made a proved success of it, without impairing my prestige and, further, without a certain amount of infidelity to [Birdwood]. I propose, therefore, to fight them on their own battle-ground and to insist upon retaining the Command of the Corps. In this battle I possess of course very many, and very strong cards, and some of them are trump cards,—among which is my undoubted belief that both [General Henry] Rawlinson and the Chief [Haig] will see me through.

Rawlinson played a clever game, keeping his true feelings well hidden from Monash. Shortly after the war, when Rawlinson thought that Sir Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, might oppose his appointment as Commander-in-Chief in India, he wrote to his former Chief of Staff of the Fourth Army, Major General Archibald Montgomery: ‘I read him as a clever, slippery, creepy crawley jew who will always back you if he thinks you are winning and have no scruples about sticking you in the back if he thinks you look like a loser . . . He is clever and intelligent but his knees knock together when trouble is about. Edwin is not unlike Monash! We know how to manage his sort.’

Monash regarded fighting the intrigue as ‘a great nuisance . . . in the midst of all one’s other anxieties,’ but he held a virtually unbeatable hand. Hughes decided to visit the AIF in France towards the end of June before making any decision. He would see both Monash and White while there. On hearing of this, Bean wrote to White ‘the strongest appeal I could think of. No other general has failed to come round to our side when we explain what are the reasons for the change—they are every one of them so far convinced that we are right. It is a great confirmation of our opinion to see how they all come round to it.’ In the letter, Bean acknowledged the ‘division of opinion that there is between us,’ saying this was the first time such a schism had occurred.

And I say that in the interests of our old Australian soldiers, and to our country, it is not fair of you to leave them nor of General Birdwood to have suggested that you should do so. You and I know and General Birdwood knows that our men are not so safe under General Monash as under you . . . I know the character of you two—the plus and minus in each, and I know and I think you should know that it is not fair of you to leave our men . . . You know as well as I do that you would put a higher ideal into the Australian Corps than General Monash is capable of.

The letter finished, he caught a taxi to the post office to ensure it would make the next mail to France. ‘I was happier when the letter was gone, for to my mind the case is so convincing that it must carry its way even with White.’ Bean knew that White, once he had made up his mind, rarely changed it—and his mind was made up.

37

An ill-judged intervention

If Monash needed an ace to play, it came at the attack at Hamel. Prime Minister Hughes and his deputy, Joseph Cook, arrived at Monash’s headquarters, at the village of Thérouanne, in northern France, on the eve of the battle. Bean observed, ‘Old Monash certainly has his arrangements well made.’ Bean sensed that he and Keith Murdoch were being outplayed. ‘It was of course a very anxious day for Murdoch and me. We knew that there would be a great offensive conducted against our suggestions for the command of the AIF—and there was.’

Monash had in support Birdwood, Rosenthal and MacLagan. He had taken both Hughes and Cook to see the Canadian Corps the day before. Bean knew this was probably ‘not unconnected with the matter, for Birdie has always used the Canadians as an argument for keeping the command of the AIF in France. He says that their experiment of a separate GOC in London failed miserably.’ Monash ensured that Hughes and Cook, in their visits to the various brigades, were duchessed by commanders. Of these, John Gellibrand was the only one ‘that thinks exactly the same way as we do.’ Gellibrand, Bean said, ‘asked whether Hughes wanted his advice as a soldier or a citizen.’

The talks Hughes had with officers left him ‘seriously shaken’. He found little or no support for the arguments put forward by Bean and Murdoch, to whom he said: ‘Well, I haven’t met a single one of them that thinks as you do. They all say the same thing. You tell me there are men who think the other way—where are they?’ Murdoch replied that of course the men he had seen all supported Monash, as he had made the arrangements. Hughes concluded that Bean and Murdoch had misled him. Bean felt ‘pretty blue’ about the whole situation.

Just how well Monash was out-manoeuvring them became clear when Bean and Murdoch heard by accident that Monash and most of the divisional commanders had written to Defence Minister Pearce rightly protesting against Murdoch’s interference and upholding the present arrangements. One of them, Major General Sir Talbot Hobbs, described Monash as ‘a commander of very great ability and exceptional energy and experience, who enjoys absolutely the complete confidence and respect of the AIF as a fighting leader.’ Meanwhile, in the Middle East Harry Chauvel was penning a different view to his wife about the changes—and about Monash in particular. During the war they had established a working relationship, one that would continue in the years ahead, but there was a great rivalry between them. Chauvel held concerns about Monash, writing that the infantry wanted a leader who knew his job and would ‘not sacrifice them unnecessarily. I don’t of course know how things stand at present but when I knew the Australian infantry they would infinitely rather be led by [White] than [Monash].’ A few months later Chauvel told his wife he regretted that Monash had behaved—as he saw it—so objectionably. He snidely implied that Jews were acceptable as long as they were discreet. Given responsibility or authority, he felt, their racial faults became clear. Such anti-Semitism was clearly pervasive in Anglo-Australian circles at the time.

As the attack at Hamel began, on 4 July 1918, Monash had reason to be confident. Although a relatively minor battle compared with previous operations on the Western Front, it was notable as the first ‘set-piece’ operation that Monash planned and carried out as Corps commander. The action would be represented as a model combined-arms attack, though the method had by then become common in the British Expeditionary Force. Using aircraft, artillery and armour in effective combination with infantry, the attack was completed in ninety-three minutes—three minutes longer than Monash had planned. The Australians advanced the line almost 2 kilometres across a front of 6.5 kilometres and in the process took 1600 German prisoners and more than 200 machine-guns, trench mortars and anti-tank weapons—at the cost of just over 1000 casualties.

Monash’s reputation soared. The day before the battle he gave a briefing which Bean found impressive: ‘There is no question that the old man gave us, as always, a very able discourse indeed. Very few men could have done it. The thing had been planned with a thoroughness . . . every particle of the plan down almost to the action of companies, being known to the commander of the corps.’ Bean would hear from Gellibrand years later that after Hughes consulted them, and following the success at Hamel, Gellibrand, Glasgow, Sinclair-MacLagan and Rosenthal had met to discuss Monash’s appointment. ‘McLagan was the only one who possibly thought him inefficient—that is he thought Monash was lacking in military knowledge. The others recognised that at Hamel he had given proof of his capacity—he was comparatively speaking unknown before; but was reputed to have been successful sometimes and unsuccessful at others. They agreed that no action should be taken to unseat Monash—if he lacked in anything the team would pull him through.’

There had been a last-minute hitch at Hamel—an order had come that all the American troops were to be withdrawn. Monash, as he explained to Bean, immediately went to the Fourth Army commander, General Henry Rawlinson, and warned that if the Americans were withdrawn he would cancel the attack. No Australian, he said, would ever fight beside an American again if this occurred. He gave a 6 p.m. deadline. Rawlinson, who wanted to go ahead, was upset. He said to Monash: ‘But you don’t realise what it means—do you want me to run the risk of being sent back to England—it is worth that?’ ‘Yes I do,’ Monash replied. ‘It is more important to keep the confidence of Australians and Americans in each other than to preserve an army commander.’ When Haig was told of the dilemma, he said: ‘Of course the fight must go on—and the Americans stay in it.’ So the four companies of Americans stayed where they were.

The attack over, Bean dined with Monash three days later while the band of the 9th Brigade played in the front garden of the imposing Château Bertangles, 8 kilometres from Amiens. After dinner Bean walked quietly around the grounds with Tom Blamey, Monash’s Chief of Staff. The atmosphere was charged:

Blamey urged me, with surprising feeling, to keep this question of the GOC AIF above personalities—to make it a question of the interest of the AIF simply, and shun all suspicion of intrigue by playing with all the cards on the table. He has an exceedingly great respect for White’s character—a noble character, he said. And he told me that he, in his own case, had tried to model his line of conduct upon White’s. I know what he meant. White, because he was such a valuable officer, was passed over and so incidentally remained in the background—not given command; and he absolutely wiped himself out of the picture.

At around the same time, Murdoch had a long talk with Monash, telling him bluntly his position. Monash said that if he now lost the corps command—a post to which every soldier aspired—he would be seen to have been ‘stellenbosched’, or sacked without losing rank. He wanted ‘fighting honours’, as he called them, and when he had them he would be well content to take up the administrative command. Monash wanted to keep the corps command until war’s end, then move to the administrative command of the AIF. Bean saw the wish for battle honours as an ‘utterly wrong motive for the commander of the Corps.’

Murdoch met White, and they strolled through the gardens of Birdwood’s headquarters for more than two hours late at night discussing the issue. In a letter to Bean, Murdoch wrote that White told him he was ‘not straight to try and advise the Government differently to their responsible advisers.’ White said he ‘didn’t like this press and political influence in the affairs of the AIF.’ Murdoch thought White’s reasons were ‘small’—that he could not face many officers in the corps if he were made GOC in place of Monash. White told him that the matter was already referred to by some as ‘the intrigue by White’s friends,’ and said he would only take the command under protest and with Monash’s approval. Years later, Gellibrand told Bean that after he had joined Hughes in the Federal Parliament, Hughes told him ‘he had practically offered White the command of the corps but White would not take it.’ This fitted with Bean’s own knowledge at the time.

When Bean and Murdoch met White a fortnight later, White bluntly refused to discuss the issue of the GOC AIF. ‘I opened it,’ Bean wrote, ‘but it did not flourish—a long awkward silence and Murdoch turned the subject.’ Whatever hopes White may have had about getting the appointment, the manoeuvring by Bean and Murdoch was utterly counterproductive to his chances. The very personality traits that would have made him an attractive choice for the job were the same ones at play in his refusal to be party to their intrigue. Perhaps Bean and Murdoch outsmarted themselves by failing to understand that they were not ‘the responsible advisers,’ however great their influence was elsewhere.

In the event, Hughes offered Birdwood the option of remaining as administrative head of the AIF provided that he relinquished his command of the Fifth Army. Birdwood consulted Haig, who advised him to accept the offer but ask to continue in his Army command until 30 November, as important operations would be in progress until then. Monash was therefore confirmed as the corps commander, and Birdwood kept the administrative command.

Bean commented that Birdwood had ‘not the first idea of organisation—he could stand up for the Digger but he could not provide for him.’ Bitterly disappointed that White had been overlooked, Bean wondered what would now happen for him. Murdoch also wrote to Birdwood, pointing out the consequences of accepting the AIF command—his aim being to encourage Birdwood to decline the post. Bean thought this showed that Murdoch was ‘a very strong determined man—he has done a thing that I never could have done.’

Monash felt likewise about Murdoch, writing to his wife that he was anything but ‘a mere pressman.’ Already Monash saw parallels with Lord Northcliffe, whose newspapers had brought down the Asquith Government in 1916. Murdoch was closely associated with Northcliffe, whom Monash regarded as the most influential man in the Empire:

It is not too much to say that Murdoch, as far as Australian public affairs are concerned is a little Lord Northcliffe. He has the greatest possible influence with Mr Hughes, and indeed it is to him that Hughes really owes his political existence—Murdoch has intimate knowledge of most Imperial, and all Australian affairs and, both in his own person and in the great interests which he represents, he wields very enormous influence.

Bean’s relations with Monash now plummeted to their lowest level. He saw that Monash was ‘very angry with me.’ Blamey took Bean aside and told him he would be sorry to see any sort of feud develop between the two. Bean observed that with the forceful Murdoch, who told him directly what he thought, Monash ‘kept on fair terms,’ saying that he did not mind plain talk. With Bean, however, the situation was different. ‘Monash has less respect for me—he is very dissatisfied with the publicity that he is getting, and has always been a man who would have liked to have his own publicity in his own hands. I often think he would like to get rid of me if he could—of course he would; I sometimes think that he will try, but Keith doubts it.’

Monash was critical of Bean’s reporting of the victories he had achieved since taking command of the corps. Hamel had been the beginning of a series of successful operations by the Australians as part of a broad Allied offensive across the Western Front that continued until and beyond their last battle in October. The battle of Amiens on 8 August had been crucial. Allied troops under Haig’s command—predominantly Rawlinson’s British Fourth Army, which consisted of the Australian Corps under Monash, the Canadian Corps, and the British III Corps—attacked the Germans. The Australians and Canadians spearheaded the operation. Monash gave them the key objective of capturing enemy artillery in the first phase so as to minimise the potential harm to the attacking forces. The Allies won a significant victory. The Germans recognised that the war was effectively lost; the German leader, General Erich Ludendorff, later called it ‘the black day of the German Army in the history of the war.’

Four days later, King George V knighted Monash on the battlefield, the first time a British monarch had so honoured a commander in nearly 200 years. When Murdoch arrived a few days later, Monash showed him a photo of the investiture ceremony, saying: ‘Bean kindly arranged for it to be taken—I did not know anything about it of course.’ Murdoch related this conversation to Bean, who was unimpressed. He noted in his diary that Monash was, an ‘old poser’, but added—perhaps a little grudgingly—that he was ‘a most capable man.’

At a briefing for the Australian correspondents some days after the battle of Amiens, Bean realised that Monash ‘was pretty grumpy with me.’ Bean attributed this to a story in The Times officially thanking the Canadians for their effort in the current offensive, but not mentioning the Australians. Bean believed that Monash held him responsible for this omission, even though, like Monash, he was displeased at the lack of recognition the Australians received. A few days earlier he had told White of ‘the bitterness which one had met with everywhere’ about the way the fight had been portrayed as a British battle in which Australians and Canadians ‘had a share.’

As the Allies prepared for the final battles, Bean listened as Monash told the men ‘he was not asking them to fight for patriotism or public interest . . . they would increase their reputation as fighting men.’ After the war, Bean accepted that in this decisive phase, Monash had been right to work his troops to the limit of their endurance, but he thought Monash’s appeal to prestige was self-serving. In a ‘confidential and personal’ note to himself some years later, he tried to explain his thinking towards Monash:

What guided me was the knowledge that Monash’s chief motive was ambition, and that the lives of his troops and the greater interests of his side were not his paramount cares. Or at any rate, his ambition, I believed, would weigh heavily in the scale whenever it came to a decision. With White, whose capacity was in some ways greater, those interests would be absolutely safe. Monash’s selection was largely justified by his great successes in August and September; but I do not think he was the man to handle men—for all his great qualities he was not, I fancy, quite straight and courageous enough.

In early September, there were four AIF divisions fighting together for the first time in 1918. Bean thought Monash believed that the Germans were ‘being shattered by our constant blows,’ and that the AIF would go on delivering these blows as often as they could get the troops fit to make them. Bean continued, acidly: ‘Six days rest and a bath, in John’s opinion, restores the elasticity of a division and makes it quite ready to fight again. The troops are not tired—“a little footsore”, was John’s comment . . . To him the inducement is to make out that every bit of fighting is vital.’

Indeed, the Australians went on to achieve a series of victories against the Germans at Chignes, Mont St Quentin, Péronne and Hargicourt. After Mont St Quentin and Péronne it was clear that relations between Monash and Bean had not improved. Murdoch and Gilmour told Bean that Monash was angry. He thought his whole artillery was ‘seething with indignation because [Bean] said that our guns were quiet on the evening when we were watching the German transport on the roads south of Péronne.’ They added that Monash had said Bean ‘ought not to write merely what I saw, because I could not see the whole.’ Monash had also said something about lack of imagination. Bean noted in his diary: ‘All of which means that John, as he told Murdoch, would like to see the fighting written up with a lavish hand—not too much accuracy, as he himself told both me and Murdoch—in the fashion of some of the old war correspondents. “What a pity that we haven’t an Ashmead-Bartlett,” he said once to Murdoch.’

Monash was not necessarily alone in his assessment of Bean’s reporting. During these final operations, Will Dyson told Bean of overhearing some Diggers discussing his despatches. Some of them reckoned that Bean did ‘the right thing in sending them the dinkum story,’ but others thought that while ‘That might be all very well for the historian . . . the War Correspondent ought to put a little more glory into it.’

Monash had his ways of exacting a little revenge. In September, he kept Bean in the dark over arrangements for the visit of a group of Australian newspaper editors and proprietors, including John Fairfax and Bean’s former Herald editor Thomas Heney, only at the last minute inviting him to meet them. Bean was not invited to the lunch Monash was to host, and saw this as a slight.

John told me he was sorry that there was no room for me at lunch and hoped that I would come in at 2. I said that I intended to be there at 12 when they arrived, if it made no difference. He asked if I thought of going round with them and said he had no objection to my attaching myself to the party if I wished. On the strength of this I came in with them when he received them. J. looked very black, I thought. Murdoch and Gilmour came in too. We went over to our cottage for lunch, and then, with [Will] Dyson, went out with them in the afternoon. John tried very hard to block our plan of taking them out with us tomorrow.

Bean and Monash continued to cooperate uneasily. There was no choice; each needed the other. Bean would be writing the official history and Monash was making it with a series of brilliant tactical operations that cemented his reputation as a soldier. When Bean went to see Monash to discuss his plans for attacking the Hindenburg Line, professionalism ruled. Monash stood before a map marked by circles and semi-circles that protruded from the AIF line, and told Bean that if he promised to keep the matter confidential, he would show him the plans. Bean would later conclude that to Monash, battles were ‘simply a problem of engineering.’

Under Monash’s command, the AIF 1st and 4th Divisions were part of the attack launched predominantly by the British Fourth Army at dawn on 18 September. The 6800 Australian infantry took 4300 prisoners. With Monash also commanding American troops, the Australians played a key role in finally breaking the Hindenburg Line on 29 September, and then again on 5 October—the last action in which Australian troops would take part. The capture of Montbrehain village meant the Hindenburg Line was completely broken.

Bean called it ‘one of the most brilliant actions’ of Australian infantry in the war. However, with the loss of thirty officers and 400 men, he considered it unnecessary. Military historians such as Peter Pedersen have agreed with Bean, arguing that the village could have been taken easily and with fewer casualties if it had been included among the objectives for a much wider operation. The origins of the action seem unclear. Controversy over Montbrehain aside, the achievements of the Australian Corps under Monash were great. At a cost of 21,243 casualties, a quarter of whom were killed, the Corps had taken 29,144 prisoners, 338 guns, and countless machine guns and trench mortars, and had liberated 116 towns and villages.

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 from 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.

Planning the development of the cities in which most Australians would live was critical. Australia had advantages over European nations: its towns were still comparatively small, little reconstruction was needed, and there was plenty of cheap land. Nevertheless, development needed to be controlled or the comparison would become unfavourable.

When Bean had toured the outback before the war he had found much to praise but also a deal to deplore—the drinking, the loneliness and boredom, the scarcity of women and consequently of families, and the absence of culture. He did not want the admirable people he found in the outback to forgo the benefits of civilisation simply because of their remote location. Moreover, if country life was more desirable than city life, the nation would be better off if it encouraged citizens to live in the country. This could only be achieved—and the traditional flow from the country to city could only be reversed—by a national endeavour in education, entertainment and local government.

Much of what Bean wrote echoed his pre-war views on town planning and the benefits of rural life. There was also, of course, the familiar theme that Australia was an Anglo-Saxon nation needing to build relations with the western United States, Canada, New Zealand and perhaps South Africa. But the war had given him renewed purpose and certainty of the correctness of his beliefs about Australia’s development.

Bean was not alone in thinking about postwar reconstruction. The publisher George Taylor anticipated him with his magazine Soldier, which picked up similar themes in Australia from 1916, and the educationist Meredith Atkinson in 1919 published The New Social Order: A Study in Post-War Reconstruction.

But Bean was also thinking about a memorial to those killed in the war. In his vision, it would stand on a Canberra hill—‘still, beautiful, gleaming white and silent, a sacred reminder throughout all ages of the men who really created the Australian nation.’

Hardly an Australian family was untouched by the war. In their grief, Australian communities would find it difficult to share Bean’s enthusiasm for a new beginning for the nation. For Bean, though, utopian idealism was entirely compatible with homage to the dead. But there was another dynamic: in writing at length about the war, he was subconsciously confronting the horror that haunted him. The writing would give him a means to deal with it—and it would be a long journey.

Part Three

After the nightmare

. . . one could not go through that experience without questioning the morals, the religions, the education, the political systems, the ideals that were responsible for what one saw, and seeking all the time for a clear line through all the tangle.

Charles Bean, The Straight Line

39

The bush backwater

As he toiled away on the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, the bush was a natural haven for Bean. It was also a place where he could heal emotional wounds after the years at war.

His chosen retreat was Tuggeranong, an old sheep station in the Tuggeranong Valley flanked by the Murrumbidgee River and the Brindabella Ranges in the Federal Capital Territory, as the Australian Capital Territory was then known. The Australian Government had bought the property three years earlier, but the eighteen-room homestead, complete with a convict-era stone barn, remained empty. As the nation’s capital was the site Bean envisaged for the Australian War Memorial, it offered a rare opportunity.

Tuggeranong—an Aboriginal word meaning ‘cold plains’—would provide the quietness that Melbourne could not. Victoria Barracks, where the Defence Department initially provided an office for Bean, was a magnet for returning Diggers, from generals to privates, who would drop in daily for a yarn. Such interruptions had brought his work nearly to a standstill. Tuggeranong was quieter. A daily mail train between Cooma and Queanbeyan, which stopped at a siding about 3 kilometres away, was its main connection to the wider world.

The Government had appointed Bean to the role of official historian on 12 February 1919, for a five-year period, terminating on 30 July 1924, at a salary of £1200 a year. After a preliminary inspection in July 1919, Bean had decided that this fine old homestead was suitable in every respect for his purposes. A couple of months later Bean boarded an overnight train in Melbourne and travelled to Yass, where a Defence Department car was waiting to take him the 100 kilometres to Tuggeranong homestead. The countryside was ravaged by drought, decades of overgrazing and a rabbit plague. Thousands of hectares lay treeless from bushfires and ringbarking. This was the harsh landscape that had captivated Bean since 1904; this was country he could commune with.

Before returning to Australia Bean had visited Gallipoli, where he retraced the steps of the Anzacs and inspected the field of battle as the Turks had known it. He was not going to leave anything to speculation when writing his history.

There had been many puzzles about Gallipoli, and all the time he was on the Western Front Bean had interviewed men who had fought there, trying to solve them. From these conversations—more than 200—Bean had become certain that the accepted story of the Anzac landing was far from the truth. And it was not just the landing. There were so many other questions that he knew he had to go back to the peninsula.

Yet another motivation was to collect relics. Unlike on the Western Front, where the Australian War Records Section had collected truckload after truckload of relics from the battlefields, there had been no systematic approach to preserving relics at Gallipoli. Another part of Bean’s task was to survey the Australian graves and advise the Australian Government on how they should be laid out and maintained.

Among those who joined Bean on the eight-man Australian Historical Mission were Harry Gullett, Hubert Wilkins, George Lambert and John Balfour. Bean also took with him Lieutenant Herbert Buchanan, who had been in charge of the Australian Corps’ mapping section in France, and his assistant, Sergeant George Hunter Rogers, to draw necessary maps. The final member of the mission was engineer Lieutenant Cyril Hughes, who had been seconded from Egypt to the Imperial War Graves Commission. The commission had been set up after the 1917 Imperial Conference with responsibility for the graves of all British and Dominion soldiers in all theatres. Hughes had already been on Gallipoli for two months as part of the commission’s work when Bean and his party left London.

They set off by ship in late January 1919, stopping at Malta and Lemnos, where Bean inspected Australian graves on the two islands. At Lemnos, low grey hilltops were faintly visible on the horizon. Bean knew what they were at once. ‘They were the hills of the Dardanelles, and at that moment I, for one, was poignantly homesick for them,’ he wrote.

Arriving at Gallipoli in mid-February, Bean retraced the steps of the Australians, collected relics and inspected the graves. The weather was bitter, with snow and blizzards, as the group set out northwards from the Narrows, along a track winding through scrub, towards the rugged mass of high ground that had been the Anzacs’ goal. Where the Lone Pine had once stood, the Turks had erected a white obelisk. Bean was fortunate to have the help of a young Turkish officer, Major Zeki Bey, the commander of a Turkish regiment who had seen much of the fighting and been wounded on the day of the landing. They talked at length in French as Bean strove to understand the Turkish perspective. Bean was impressed. ‘I had never dreamt of being able to obtain information of the Turkish side from an authority with such experience,’ he said. ‘The answers of Zeki Bey to my questions proved absorbingly interesting from the start, at least to us Anzacs.’

Setting up camp in a green valley on territory the Turks had held, Bean was swamped with recollections: ‘I could still see two of them, with their bronzed cheeks and khaki skull-caps, peering foolishly towards us over a water cask under a low brush roof.’ However, there was something new: the sound of jackals. He also noticed that local Turks had removed crosses from graves in some cemeteries, probably for firewood. Now many graves were unmarked.

He went on with Wilkins and Lambert, on horseback, to find the Australian trenches, still much as the Anzacs had left them. The posts that the Anzacs had fought over—Steele’s, Courtney’s, Quinn’s, Pope’s Hill and Battleship Hill—Bean scoured them all. He collected bullets and kit for the museum. The bones and tattered uniforms of men were scattered everywhere, and he checked to see if they were Australian or Turkish. Skulls and bones—mostly of Turks—lay exposed in crevices and gullies. Amid this renewed evidence of the slaughter that had occurred there, Bean had his own memories:

Naturally I was eager to discover, if possible, the niche where I had lived, worked, slept and eaten, from the first month of the campaign to the last. From the middle of the Beach we turned up Anzac Gully. Several ledges, one of which I recognised with fair assurance as the site of General Birdwood’s old shelter, were on our left. We clambered two hundred yards up the washaway to the two tracks or ledges, one above the other, that used to hold the old 1st Division’s staff. They were still bordered by the row of niches that had contained the offices and bivouacs. There, 150 feet up, each of us used to sit at his evening meal, looking out on those glorious sunsets over the sea and the distant mountain tops of Imbros and Samothrace, with the hospital ship in the Cove below us like a beautiful memory of peace, and, closer in, the crowded beach. The shelters were now just holes in a bank, bereft of the roofs of waterproof sheet or iron, and of the biscuit box furniture. I found it hard to pick out which hole had been mine.

In his report about the war graves at Gallipoli, Bean noted that Cyril Hughes’ party had so far located and identified 2500 Australian graves, and would locate at least 80 per cent of those of which there was any record. However, much greater resources were needed, such as labourers to carry out remedial work on graves and paths. This was urgent because both storms and returning inhabitants would inevitably destroy graves and relics. Bean recommended that the cemeteries be planted with ‘certain Australian plants, but so as to avoid alteration of the appearance of the battlefield,’ and he added: ‘The site contains, besides the graves, the most wonderful battlefield in the world. It is also a vast store of relics ranging from lifeboats and gun-carriages to innumerable shell fragments from which the local proprietors will make profits unless the Australian Government anticipates them.’

Bean returned to Egypt, then embarked for Australia. During the voyage he worked on papers for the war history and also for the war museum, of which he was to be temporary director. Arriving in Melbourne on 6 May, Bean was quarantined because of the Spanish flu epidemic before travelling to Hobart to stay with his parents, whom he had not seen since October 1914.

Returning to Melbourne, he quickly found that his work had not gone unnoticed. Lunches were held in his honour. At one, given by the Institute of Journalists in Sydney, the New South Wales Premier, William Holman, praised the manner in which Bean had worked, saying he had enormously enhanced the reputation of Australian journalism. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, Holman said that:

No man at the front representing the Press had carried away a greater reputation for unflinching courage and for trustworthiness. In Mr. Bean, not merely did they have one who had brought to the task of war correspondent the new ideas characteristic of a young nation, but he had brought also a sense of devotion and a determination to be truthful, no matter at what sacrifice or personal risk. That was characteristic of Mr. Bean. (Applause.) There was another point, the extraordinary absence of the provincial outlook. He (Mr. Holman) believed that no single writer whose work he had been able to identify had shown a greater grasp of the problems and a clearer understanding of the war situation than Mr. Bean.

The Herald’s proprietor, John Fairfax, with the memory of his visit to the Western Front under Bean’s guidance the previous year still fresh in his mind, said the Diggers had told him of the conscientious manner in which Bean had carried out his duties, and declared that if he said a thing it could be relied on. There was no man who had such inside information and knowledge.

The machinery for the Official History and the War Memorial began to fall into place during 1919. A year earlier, the Government had been persuaded when Bean wrote to Defence Minister Pearce:

I believe that our country men are capable of any achievement, provided high, unselfish, national incentive can be encouraged in them . . . Australia has lost thousands of her best and finest men, but I believe that the history of them, and the appeal which their lives will make to young Australians, through galleries and museums, and, not least the histories of our country, will be the greatest of several great results of their sacrifice.

On his return to Australia, Harry Gullett was appointed as the proposed War Memorial’s first director. It would be a brief appointment, for the following year he accepted Prime Minister Hughes’ invitation to become director of the Australian Immigration Bureau. John Treloar would succeed him in the post and hold it for the next thirty years. Bean was appointed to the Memorial’s governing committee.

The Official History was Bean’s immediate focus, and when he first submitted a proposal in August 1919, he confidently expected that the whole work would be completed within three years, four at most. Harry Gullett was appointed to write Volume VII, on the Light Horse in Sinai and Palestine. It was proposed that a small committee of experts would read the proofs and edit any statement they thought was libellous. Bean wrote to the Government that neither he nor Gullett would agree to this, and threatened to quit. ‘I would not spend the portion of one’s life that will be occupied in writing this book, if it were not a book in which one could tell the people of Australia anything which one is convinced they should be told,’ Bean wrote bluntly.

The Government suggested that Bean and the writers of planned single-topic volumes indemnify it against any successful libel action. Bean pointed out that he had been a practising barrister before he became a journalist, and ‘under this agreement I must lose all my means before the Government can begin to suffer.’ Hughes agreed ‘entirely’ with Bean’s argument, and the matter was settled—albeit with a continuing problem over censorship of Volume IX, on the Royal Australian Navy.

The government accepted Bean’s proposals for the History, and he was now ready to begin what would become a monumental task. Among those joining him at Tuggeranong was Erskine Crawford, his secretary. Crawford had worked for the Department of Home Affairs in Canberra as a clerk in 1913 and saw service in Rabaul with the Australian Naval and Military Expedition Force before enlisting in the AIF in February 1917. Later that year he went to Egypt to join the Camel Corps but became ill and in July 1918 was sent to London to join the War Records Section after Bean apparently intervened on his behalf. It seems Crawford was a friend of Bean’s, as his cousin, Joan Butler, who also knew Crawford, remembered receiving letters from him during the war. The background to the connection is hazy, but Crawford apparently at one stage worked for The Sydney Morning Herald. Bean was evidently impressed by Crawford’s ability as a writer—he was an accomplished music critic and author of three plays. According to Arthur Bazley, it was Crawford who suggested Tuggeranong homestead as a place to write the Official History. Bazley was appointed librarian, and John Balfour assistant historian. And there was one more interesting appointment: young George Lowery, who had written to Bean during the war, joined them soon after as a junior clerk and typist. According to Bazley, the ‘eager tone’ of his letter during the war had so impressed Bean that he offered him a job. Initially, Bean had four draftsmen, but within a few weeks this was reduced to one.

At the end of October, with numerous crates and boxes and map cabinets containing the first batch of records—those from Gallipoli—as well as books and newspapers and their private goods and chattels, the team travelled to Tuggeranong with some apprehension about how the move to the relative isolation of the bush would turn out. To Bean, he had a ‘small picked team’ that he regarded ‘more like a family.’

Bean, with his keen sense of economy, saw the potential for frugal but healthy living for himself and ‘the small team of youngsters.’ Two housekeepers and a handyman lived on site, there was a large vegetable garden and a productive orchard, and Bean was anxious to acquire a cow or two and some sheep. ‘With the price of meat what it is we can make a real saving,’ he told a local official. Lieutenant Colonel John Goodwin, Surveyor General for the Commonwealth, who oversaw the disposition of Federal Capital lands, promised to get him some draftsmen’s tables and stools from the nearby former Molonglo internment camp. At Bean’s request, Goodwin arranged for all the storage tanks on the property to be filled by pump from Tuggeranong Creek ahead of the coming fire season. Bean asked for the old shearing sheds adjacent to the homestead garden to be demolished because of the smell. A decade earlier, while touring sheep stations for On the Wool Track, Bean made no mention of the smells from the shearing sheds. Since the war, there is no doubt that Bean had become more sensitive to both sound and smell. In his idiosyncratic way, he often in his diaries described the sounds of bullets whizzing above his head and shells exploding nearby, and he made reference to the stench of death at both Gallipoli and France, which nearly made him sick.

From the Tuggeranong homestead there were clear views of the distant Brindabellas, which Bean found uplifting but also distracting. To work, he moved his study to a room with a different outlook. Colonel Arthur Butler, who would write the medical history of the war, later recalled visiting Bean at Tuggeranong. At 6.30 ‘on a glorious spring morning, with the air piquant with an exhilarating freshness such as only uplands like these of the Federal Territory can give, and the sun perhaps 20 degrees above the horizon on the Queanbeyan hills,’ Butler walked from the Tuggeranong siding to the old homestead. He was struck by ‘a profound sense of the glamour and beauty of Australian scenery.’

In this quiet bush backwater Bean, still often wearing his Army uniform, now set about his task of writing the history of the AIF not only as a closely researched narrative but as a study and celebration of what he saw as the Australian character. The drowsy sheep paddocks of Tuggeranong could not have been more different from the focus of his narrative—Gallipoli and the Western Front. But, as Bean would soon find, even quiet backwaters can hold surprises.

40

The Nipper

A ‘mastoid problem’—that’s how it all started. Otherwise Charles Bean would never have become captivated by Sister Effie Young. He was admitted to Queanbeyan Hospital with complications of the virus. ‘The matron was away and I was the patient of Sister Ethel Clara Young, then acting matron,’ Bean wrote in the private diary that had lain idle during the war years and which he picked up again in the winter of 1920.

Someone snapped a photo of Bean in his Army uniform seated in the sun on the hospital porch steps with a bandage around his head, with Sister Young in her nurse’s uniform sitting beside him. He wrote to his parents after the infection, which gave him an abscess on his neck, had healed. He said he had been so comfortable in hospital during his two-week stay that he hardly wanted to leave. He singled out Effie’s care of him. ‘They have looked after me most splendidly at this hospital—especially the little sister who is acting-matron during the matron’s absence. Perhaps I was a bit of a favourite of hers and she has been a favourite of mine—one of the sweetest and most natural girls I have ever met. I shall miss all this attention.’ Effie was subsequently invited to Tuggeranong for a tennis party. Romance blossomed.

At the rambling homestead, Bean was enveloped in his own thoughts as he sought to make sense of the questions he had posed himself. He had boxes and boxes of records, his own diaries and vast personal experience. Out of this complex mix he sought to write the first volume, on the Gallipoli landing.

But he knew the issues went much beyond this. How did the Australian people—and the Australian character, if there was one—come through what he believed was the universally recognised test of this, their first great war? Second, what did the Australian people and their forces achieve in the total effort of their side of the struggle? Third, what was the true nature of that struggle and test so far as Australians took part in it? Bean also wanted to know what guidance Australians or others could obtain from this experience for future emergencies. These would all be issues that the history would have to confront.

Arthur Bazley, after five years of close association with Bean, was well placed to analyse his approach. As he saw it, Bean tackled these questions as much from the viewpoint of the front-line soldier as from that of the Commander-in-Chief. Bean believed that, so far as possible, responsibility for the events he was to describe should be attributed to the men actually responsible—at least sufficiently to prove that responsibility for important decisions, which the official reports tended to ascribe to on commanders, also lay with their subordinates. As Bazley commented:

This decision—and the conviction that many instances of self-sacrifice, of devoted endurance and bravery would never be heard of unless they were recorded in these volumes—meant the furnishing of more detail than had been put into a war history, at least in modern times. A further reason which rendered necessary much detail was to ensure that the Australian history should be accepted as authoritative overseas as well as in Australia.

The sources on which Bean relied were many and varied. At one time he drew up a list of the main ones. They included the war diaries of the Australian military units and formations; orders and instructions; reports of operations; despatches; thousands upon thousands of signal messages; statements made by prisoners of war on their release; copies of or extracts from British, New Zealand, Canadian, American and French operational records in which their troops and Australians were engaged; soldiers’ diaries and letters; his own diaries and notes; printed books and journals; maps and air photographs; and large collections of official and private photographs.

Such was Bean’s focus from the moment he moved to Tuggeranong and settled into the sparsely populated community of the newly designated national capital, whose ‘temporary’ Parliament House would soon be built a mere 20 kilometres away. Bean installed a pianola and a billiard table which provided the staff with entertainment; regular tennis matches took place on the ant-bed tennis court which the men had restored, and a concrete cricket pitch was laid down in an adjoining paddock. Bean, along with his staff, local graziers, farmhands, schoolteachers and schoolboys, formed the Tuggeranong Twisters Cricket Club under John Balfour’s captaincy to play in a competition that stretched from the Tuggeranong Valley to surrounding towns and villages. For a diversion in summer, they killed snakes that came too close to the homestead on their way to the creek.

And then he met Effie. They soon became inseparable, enjoying picnics and drives in his Ford Model T tourer, playing social tennis and even attending local balls, one of which was at the Queanbeyan Hospital. Bean wrote to his mother about it, telling her he did not get to bed until 3.30 a.m. and that his ‘favourite nurse’ could not get there until halfway through:

You will have guessed, Mum dear, that little nurse Young, who was acting matron when I was in hospital, has more than a light attraction for me as she has for all those who come into her influence. My doctor and his wife treat her as if she were their daughter, and the Roman Catholic Padre here as well as many others (a very fine chap) is more fond of her than any of his own flock. I don’t know if she will ever marry me, but I am pretty sure that I should never marry anyone else—if it were anyone, now, it would be she.

As he approached his forty-first birthday, Bean was in love. Effie was his ‘little nurse’, and he suddenly found himself in a social whirl. In early October 1920 he wrote to his mother that ‘The last word of the last chapter of Vol. I was written this week. I am now on the preface and tomorrow shall be revising other chapters. It is splendid to think that all the records up to a certain date can now be put away, and will not be needed again. It has been a very heavy job and I shall be glad of the holiday.’

Bean was swept along by romance with ‘my dear Nipper,’ as he called Effie. She had been born in 1894 at Narrandera, in southern New South Wales, the daughter of a police sergeant later posted to Tumbarumba, in the high country on the western edge of the Snowy Mountains, 200 kilometres away. When Effie’s father died in 1909, her mother ran a boarding house to support the family of four boys and four girls. Effie spent four years at the Goulburn Hospital from 1915 training to be a nurse, and on graduation moved to Queanbeyan Hospital in February 1920. Her references show that she quickly won respect as a capable, reliable and keen nurse who was well liked by doctors and patients. Her formative years had clearly been a struggle and could not have been more different from Bean’s. But if Effie lacked Bean’s sophisticated knowledge of history and world affairs, she had a sunny disposition that he, like many others, found captivating. She had not the education of the women in Bean’s pre-war Sydney circle; however, she came from the bush and represented those country values that he so valued among the men who, to him, constituted the archetypal Digger. It is not hard to see how, with the shadow of war still fresh in his mind, he would be drawn to Effie—an attractive woman, who through her nursing knew something about human suffering, and who had returned servicemen among her patients.

The courtship ignited a long-suppressed side of Bean’s personality. During the war he had imposed a strict discipline upon himself. The focus of his life had been the business of war, with no room for frivolity. He had been abstemious in every sense of the word, but now he was revelling in the warmth of a woman’s affection. Less the sharp-eyed war correspondent, he was more the starry-eyed romantic. ‘You are constantly in my head, Nipper,’ he wrote to Effie, ‘and I long for the time when we can just sit down quietly together or with our friends and have a quiet chat whenever we want, and a good big hug. When I’m tired especially, Nip, I want you more than ever.’ He could not bear the thought of being without her. But she had doubts. Bean’s cousin, Joan, by now a young woman, stayed with her mother at Tuggeranong during this time. She later recalled that Effie ‘turned him down—two or three times, and Charlie was pretty floored by it. He had to get away for a while.’

While Bean would not hear of Effie not agreeing to marry him, she had her own reservations about her suitability. She admitted to him that she felt she was ‘a very lucky girl to be getting such a dear old boy . . . I really thought it was so silly of Dr and Mrs [Christie] to think you would fall in love with me as I thought you would like a more learned and well to-do squatter’s daughter, but I hope to make you as happy as my dear Mother and Dad were.’ Arthur Bazley soon noticed what was happening. He noted in his diary in early August 1920 that Bean had taken ‘a special liking to one of the sisters’ at Queanbeyan Hospital. He was now spending his spare time in the nearby town, and ‘things seem to be going in the usual direction.’

In October 1920 they became engaged, which meant that Effie had to resign. She didn’t like the idea of leaving the hospital, but Bean sought to reassure her. ‘You’re going to marry me in the end, so you won’t have to say good bye to Queanbeyan even when you do leave the Hospital.’ Perhaps echoing directions she had given him in hospital, Bean continued: ‘My advice is . . . make your mind to marry me after not too long a wait; shut your eyes and swallow very hard and it won’t seem too bad a medicine, Nipper, it won’t really.’

Bean wrote to his parents, excited about his proposal to Effie. ‘I don’t think either of us will ever face the prospect of parting again so long as we live. There is nothing announced, but I go up to her mother’s place for a week in December; and if all is right then we shall be soon married and come down and see you. I am very happy and so I think she is.’ He also wrote excitedly to Effie’s mother, Agnes, telling her ‘how happy and lucky’ he felt to be taking her daughter as his future wife. He believed that Effie was ‘a sweeter, better and more unselfish girl’ than he deserved, but he vowed to make her a good husband and believed that they would be very happy.

We are very unlike one another in some ways: but we have many common interests. Effie has all the qualities I most admire—the qualities which my own mother has; and as I have always admired my mother above every other woman, I fell in love with Effie very nearly at first sight; I shall be just as much in love with her when I die . . . I hope and feel sure that you will find that this daughter has fallen upon happiness. And I do hope that besides making her a good husband I shall be able to make you a good son.

In December 1920 Bean visited Mrs Young at Tumbarumba and found her ‘a simple kindly, sweet natured woman,’ who had struggled hard to keep her family going in tough, cold country. In a letter to his parents about the visit, he said she lived in ‘a simple old home, but I love that sort of thing as you know: indeed I do not know a happier holiday outside of one with one’s own family than that breezy jolly healthy country life up there.’ Perhaps Bean saw in his future mother-in-law’s straitened circumstances something of the ability to cope with adversity that had fascinated him since his early visits to the outback.

During the tumult of falling in love, Bean was still contending with the Official History. He wanted to be married to Effie when it appeared:

The issue of Vol. I will be one of the big events of my life, and, I think, of yours, Effie dear; and we ought to be together for it. It may not meet altogether with praise—there may be, very likely will be, some criticism amongst it, because it is a true book; but whether there’s praise or criticism we ought to share it; and it would be a great delight and pleasure to have you beside me then.

The fact that Effie was fifteen years younger than Bean could explain the use of the term ‘nipper’, which is clearly a term of endearment in their correspondence—Effie adopted it in signing off letters to him. Perhaps for Effie, Bean, with his store of knowledge and university education, was something of a mentor. Bean certainly seems to have felt this. As they tried to settle on a date for the wedding, he wrote to Effie about the invitations and sought to allay any concerns she might have. ‘The letters after my name are M.A., B.C.L. (Oxford). Though I never use them (Master of Arts, and Bachelor of Civil Law). I don’t bother about them—they make no difference to what you are and that’s the only thing that matters.’ Perhaps as further reassurance, he wrote: ‘Oh Nipper darling, I do so often get tired and I do want you to talk to and stroll round the place with you, or to have quiet evenings on the verandah, or in our sitting room, there. When we’re married I don’t think one will get so fagged.’

When Bean’s parents met Effie later they warmly embraced her into the family—but Edwin Bean clearly felt that her education was lacking: he gave her lessons on the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, and the history of Canada and India. Bean left no doubt that social and educational differences did not matter to him. Their being together was the only thing that did.

He intimated that writing the history had already taken its toll on him, telling her that it was ‘a rather strained old husband that you’ll be getting, Nipper darling, like a bat with a sprung handle at present.’ But with give and take they would be very happy. He also tried to imagine what would happen if they didn’t marry. He felt that each of them, to varying degrees, would experience emptiness. Effie would go from one hospital to another and ultimately ‘some nice young chap would have snapped you up.’ For him, though, there would be only misery:

I would have gone on working every day and every night getting more and more musty, with no interests outside one’s work—and it would have taken a long time to have got over this crash, if one had ever done so. Do you know, as I walked home tonight, after getting your letter dear Nipper, the thought kept on cropping up in my mind—and I couldn’t have realised it could arise—‘well, the history’s all right anyway, now.’ I must have been thinking in the back of my brain, without realising it, that the history was uncertain so long as I had not your help in life.

With a new Sister appointed to replace her, Effie began to focus on the forthcoming change in her life. ‘I am a very lucky girl to be getting such a dear old boy. Of course it will be strange to be out of hospital but my time will be better filled and I’m not going to let you pour [sic] over the History for hrs at a time. You will have to come and talk to me very often, I’m afraid, but it will be better for you, my dear.’

When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle visited Sydney and caught up with his wartime acquaintance over dinner, he told Bean: ‘That’s a sweet little girl you’ve annexed, Bean.’ Bean’s brother, Jack, agreed, writing: ‘To me in many ways those simple uncramped country girls are far more attractive than your city girl who often, however nice, yet has a shell of artificiality.‘

Bean kept pressing Effie for a firm date for the wedding, and it was finally set for 10 a.m. on 24 January 1921, at St Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney. About twenty people attended the ceremony, which was conducted by Albert Talbot, the Dean whom Bean had known as an Army chaplain during the war. Jack Bean, his best man, cabled their parents in Hobart, who had been unable to attend, that the ceremony was a complete success. Jack said he had been ‘the nervous and excited one’ while Charles had been ‘as cool as a cucumber’ even though Effie was half an hour late. Jack continued: ‘You can’t fluster these old soldiers, Chas is quite a typical Anzac, they have had so many crises to face that their nerves become like steel. I realised the exceptional strength, purity and thoughtfulness of Chas’ character in a way I had never done before.’ Charles Bean undoubtedly had shown ‘nerves of steel’ during the war, but he would never have seen himself as a ‘typical Anzac’. Still, his brother’s view underlined their close relationship, and his insights into his character.

A wedding breakfast followed at a city restaurant before the newlyweds drove off to the Blue Mountains and Jenolan Caves. Bean’s younger brother, Monty, commented in a letter to their parents: ‘Dear old Chas needs someone to look after his comfort and I feel sure that Effie will do so splendidly and she will also prevent people imposing upon him as they do at present.’ Later that day, after they arrived at their hotel at Mt Victoria, Bean also wrote to his parents that ‘It was a really charming little wedding. Everything went right. When the small choirboy sang “Love one another with a pure heart fervently” I nearly cried for all the old memories it brought back.’

They honeymooned for three weeks before returning to Tuggeranong and the newly built independent married quarters that Bean had requested. New furniture arrived from Sydney and transformed the house. They engaged a young maid, and Bean went back to work proofreading chapters and working on the last of the volumes, XII, the photographic volume. Later that year Volume I was finally released, and Effie was there to share the moment.

What Bean did not see coming was the reaction of Erskine Crawford, his secretary. Crawford was unstable; he drank heavily and, according to Bazley, his behaviour caused tension in the household well before the marriage. Bazley thought Bean showed great tolerance towards him. As Bean’s romance with Effie had deepened, Bazley noted in his diary: ‘Crawford his bachelor friend, is rather anxious about it and I think he foresees himself a bit cut out before very long . . .’

Bean believed that Crawford had ‘great literary abilities’ and acknowledged later that he had suggested many improvements in the style and content of every chapter of Volume 1 of the Official History. Further, he had completed the onerous job of indexing the work.

According to Bean’s cousin Joan Butler, Bean had helped Crawford ‘through some stiff alcoholic crisis.’ But Crawford was ‘devoted to Charlie, [and] he never forgave him marrying Effie—it split the association.’ Joan remembered: ‘Poor old Crawf, as Baz used to call him at Tuggeranong, Charlie’s devotion to Effie hit him hard.’ She recalled staying at Tuggeranong with her mother one time when Crawford ‘went on a bender’ and her mother had to ‘take him in hand and get out of him where he had planted his bottles. One was found in the hedge near the front gate, and a couple down near the creek. My mother stuck to him all day.’

Disappointing though this must have been for Bean, marriage was just the panacea he needed.

41

Bluff and double bluff

George Robertson, the brusque and autocratic owner of the publishing house Angus & Robertson, was aghast. He had just read the draft first chapter of the first volume of Bean’s Official History—and felt like getting drunk, or so he claimed. Robertson’s gut reaction to what he had read would have an immediate and profound impact on the writing of the Official History.

The largely self-educated Robertson considered booksellers to be as much engaged in educational work as headmasters and university professors. He regarded bookshops as cultural centres. Tall and stolid, with black hair and beard, he was an imposing figure. As an employer he was controlling and stubborn, with a short fuse. He published some of the biggest names in Australian literature, among them Banjo Paterson, Henry Lawson and Norman Lindsay. He revelled in battling the egos of his writers. In the small world of Australian publishing he was someone to be reckoned with—especially as he had the contract to publish the Official History. And therein lay the problem. In a letter he wrote in April 1920 after he finished reading Bean’s first chapter, Robertson dismissed the effort. He noted that when Bean first handed him the manuscript he had only looked at the first paragraph, which he thought was acceptable. However,

On the following Sunday night I read the first chapter—and did not get to sleep until 4 a.m.! He told me his secretary had come up to Sydney and got on the bust. Is it any wonder? Only that the wherewithal was lacking and the pubs closed, I’d have done the same! Bean is what our dear friend Henry Lawson calls ‘a Wanterwriteandcan’t’.

Robertson’s letter was to Arthur Jose, who had been associated with Angus & Robertson for many years as a writer and editor. He was also a close friend of Bean’s, whom he had known since their days as early members of the Australian National Defence League. Robertson sent Jose a copy of the material and added, ‘The bare thought of having to lick 6 vols of such jejunery into shape is enough to drive one out of business!’ Jose was not so critical of the material. He thought that ‘the bulk of his stuff will be editable without too many tears.’ Jose may have been influenced in his opinions by the fact that Bean had approached him to write the naval volume of the official history. However, he agreed that the first part—a kind of introduction to the complete history—was as bad as Robertson had said.

In theory, Robertson was obliged to publish whatever material the Defence Department sent him; the department, after all, was paying Bean and his team to write the history. Some volumes were to be sold at a guinea (one pound, one shilling) each and others at eighteen shillings. Potential buyers were invited to subscribe, and were assured that the history would not be subject to censorship. That assurance, Bean said proudly, was unique to Australia.

Robertson dwelt on the matter for two months before writing to Bean to deliver his blunt assessment: in Chapter 1 Bean had ushered Australia into the war ‘with slipshod journalistic talk, misconceived and misbegotten.’ The chapter had simply dismayed him.

Your first chapter would lead the discerning public to think that you do not know what to say, and that, if you did, you could not say it . . . The chapter would suggest that you have no conception of, and no power to discharge the historian’s duty in the highest. Of orderly disposition of matter, resulting from previous digestion and reconception of raw material: of dignified arrangement of language . . . there is no sign.

Bean admitted he was mortified by the criticism, but he remained civil when replying to Robertson shortly after: ‘I count myself fortunate to have had a publisher so conscientious and a friend so courageous as to write it.’ Bean said he had re-read the first chapter and agreed it wasn’t as good as it should be. ‘I suppose five years of continuous work at the front and then in Melbourne without a holiday made me somewhat dull,’ he admitted. Courteous though he was, however, Bean was not going to be stood over. While asserting that he didn’t think it likely that he would ever see ‘eye to eye with you over your suggestions,’ he assured Robertson he would rework the introduction to the history.

Over the next few months—as his romance with Effie Young blossomed—Bean rewrote the manuscript, and by mid-December it was ready to be sent to the publishers. When Robertson saw the proofs of the book in March 1921, he remained horrified. He wrote to George Swinburne, chairman of the Defence Department’s business administration board, to say that he and his assistant, Fred Shenstone, had been dealing with the proofs and they agreed that from almost every viewpoint it was ‘a shocking’ piece of work, which if published ‘would expose the Commonwealth to derision.’ He was convinced Bean had undertaken a task that was beyond him. Robertson continued: ‘My duty is clear, I just do what I can to prevent the Commonwealth from being exposed to indignity. I esteem Mr Bean highly, and wish to act so that a minimum of pain shall be inflicted on him. What I think should be done is to submit the proofs to someone who knows how history should be written . . . and take his advice. Do you concur, and will you move the Minister concerned to take action?’

Born in Essex in 1860, Robertson had come to Australia aged twenty-two, and from the time he began regular publishing in 1895 he had been determined to show the world that Australians could write and produce books that were the equal of any published elsewhere. By the time the war ended, he also felt the need to do something to repay the country that had been so good to him. As he wrote to Swinburne: ‘It is admitted that the Australians can fight—why not show the world that they can write?’ A strong streak of nationalism was thus driving both Robertson and Bean.

Approached by Swinburne, Defence Minister George Pearce duly raised the matter in Cabinet, with the result that Bean was summoned to Melbourne. He met with Prime Minister Hughes, who told him he fully agreed with Robertson that the introduction must be rewritten. Despite Bean’s objections, Hughes urged him to have Professor Thomas Tucker, a retired professor of classical philology at the University of Melbourne and Robertson’s choice as a reviser, take the work in hand. A chastened Bean then wrote to the publishers saying that ‘after conference with Mr Hughes,’ he would recast the first chapter.

Bean believed that this was the only alteration the government wanted in the volume, and there was no mention of handing the proofs over to Tucker to revise. Bean still rejected the thought of anyone editing his work, and told Robertson that if he could not have the final say over the text, he would ‘regretfully tender my resignation to the Minister.’ This was a game of bluff and double bluff. Bean saw Robertson’s demands as akin to censorship, and having endured it countless times during the war was determined never to do so again. But Robertson was unimpressed, again writing to Swinburne and complaining that Bean’s writing was unworthy not just of the Anzacs but also of the Prime Minister, ‘who, after all, must take responsibility.’ Robertson upped the ante, telling Swinburne that all Bean knew of the philosophy of history could be written on the back of a postage stamp. If the task were to be left in Bean’s hands, ‘then we shall formally request to be relieved of the work of publication.’ This was nonsense; Bean’s education had ensured he was familiar not just with the works of ancient historians such as Herodotus and Thucydides but also the great Victorians, Thomas Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle, and the military historians William Napier and Alexander Kinglake.

Bean’s first proofs went to Tucker in May 1921. In an assessment of Bean’s work, Tucker praised his gift for ‘clear orderly narrative,’ and acknowledged ‘a certain picturesque and panoramic vision.’ But the overall quality of the writing was ‘high-falutin’ in tone and temper, ‘inflated in style, and rather puerile in general.’ Bean’s expression was ‘often unfit, and sometimes sheerly ungrammatical.’ Apart from the introduction, there was Bean’s lack of a ‘nice sense of English.’ Tucker ascribed this to Bean’s background in journalism: ‘What may perhaps stand in transitory journalism will not always stand in monumental history.’

Tucker recommended that the whole history should be handed to a literary reviser or editor, who would not edit the facts but would ‘watch the language and expression throughout, so that the work may appear free of vulgarities, ambiguities, or obscurities, may be grammatically faultless, and may exhibit a lucid and consistent punctuation.’ The editor would rewrite the introduction, and recast any paragraphs ‘which appeared to him to fall below the proper level of style and tone.’

Robertson sent a copy of Tucker’s report to Bean and urged him to take Tucker’s advice. He hadn’t asked Tucker if he would undertake the work, he wrote, but thought he would be interested. ‘Do put an end to all this trouble by approaching him yourself,’ he told Bean, ‘do it this week and I’ll for ever call you Blessed!’ Robertson’s plea hit home and Bean did as requested, writing to Tucker the next day. To Robertson, Bean said he was amenable to having a ‘capable literary friend’ look over each volume—but only to make suggestions. ‘The final decision must rest with me,’ he said. ‘In regard to the introduction, I am prepared to discuss this with anyone whom you may suggest, and to give the fullest weight to his views. But the decision and the work must be my own.’ There, Bean drew a line: ‘Beyond this I am afraid I cannot go. If I were asked to do so I would regretfully tender my resignation to the Minister.’ The stakes were high, as the future of the Official History was now in play.

Tucker agreed, and set out the editor’s role as he saw it: ‘In all matters of fact, in all questions of arrangement and manipulation of the narrative, and in respect of all that is substantial in what you write, you cannot be subjected to revision.’ The issue, however, was not this but ‘one of literary style and tact maintained on a sufficiently high level of expression and lucidity.’ Whoever revised the work would ‘alter nothing except the English, and only then in cases where such alteration was desirable in your own interests.’ Tucker said that he could only undertake the work if ‘I felt that emendations of mine—made to the best of my knowledge and taste, and in a spirit of entire goodwill to you—would be accepted in all cases in which they in no way misrepresented you. I should not propose any gratuitous or vexatious meddling.’ They met soon after and reached an agreement.

Robertson was mollified, telling Bean his arrangement with Tucker was the best news he had heard for a long time, and added: ‘Had it fallen out otherwise, I intended to inform Mr Pearce that on publication of your first volume I should endeavour to secure its withdrawal from sale by causing the matter to be fully discussed in the House of Representatives. See what you had nearly brought me to!’ Robertson couldn’t resist trying to have the last word. But the standoff was over, and Tucker was given a free hand to correct and rewrite.

Bean allowed Tucker to do as he thought fit—‘tuckering’, as Robertson called it—and was pleasantly surprised by the results. After checking final proofs on 3 July, Bean noted that Tucker’s work was excellent. ‘His corrections are one long lesson to me in the nicety of English and fine points in the meaning of words. He has struck the jerkiness out of my style—a jerkiness I have often noted and not liked, but could not account for. He pointed out the cause—that I have got into the way of leaving my sentences unrelated to one another. I know that this was done in the conscious effort to be short and simple.’ This had worked in writing news stories for the press, and fitted with his vow at Oxford to write simply and clearly for readers of ‘average intelligence’; but writing history was another matter.

When Volume I, The Story of Anzac, was published shortly before Armistice Day on 11 November 1921, Bean generously thanked Tucker in his preface to the edition: ‘His work, of value to the nation, and the public spirit which induced him to undertake it, the writer desires here warmly to acknowledge.’ Privately, Bean wrote to Tucker to acknowledge his role in the positive critical reception of the Official History. Aided by Tucker’s editing, Bean wove a story of emerging consciousness of nationhood in the plain prose that had marked his journalism from the start.

Covering the period from the outbreak of war to the end of the first phase of the Gallipoli campaign on 4 May 1915, the 650-page book came in a cover that one military reviewer described as the colour of dried blood. Bean’s own diaries and notebooks—all 226 of them, complete with his own experiences and notes of what other people told him—formed a larger part of his sources for this and the second volume of The Story of Anzac than they would for the four volumes on France that would follow. Volume II would take another three and a half years to complete. As with its predecessor, the dearth of formal records from the Gallipoli campaign meant Bean had to rely almost entirely upon his private diaries and upon notes of his conversations with officers and men at the time and afterwards.

Glowing reviews met the publication of The Story of Anzac. The reviewer for the Sydney Daily Telegraph lauded it as a great work that ‘enshrines the birth of our tradition.’ The reviewer in the London Observer called the book ‘Australia’s Iliad and Odyssey.’ Writing in the Manchester Guardian, General Sir Ian Hamilton—effectively reviewing his own performance—thought also of Homer: ‘As a war record the book is in a class by itself. The story is one of minor tactics; of Homeric struggles of twenty men as they dwindle down to half a dozen.’ Hamilton wrongly assumed that the author must be British by birth: ‘Mr. C.E.W. Bean . . . is well known to be as clean and straight a man as ever Australia imported from the Old Country.’

One old soldier who was not so happy was Bean’s friend John Gellibrand, who was miffed at being described as an ‘unkempt figure, going about his work in the barracks, causing mild amusement to the clerks.’ Bean had added that some officers treated Gellibrand with contempt because of some fixed ideas, and that the clerks thought him eccentric. Gellibrand rebuked Bean, telling him: ‘Personal remarks are as a rule odious and the present ones are no exception. How would you like me to publish what I think of you and your personal appearance and habits.’

When The Story of Anzac from 4 May 1915 was published in 1924, Australians had a complete narrative of the campaign. But not everybody was impressed—among them Wilfred Kent Hughes, who had served at the headquarters of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade, commanded by his uncle Frederic Godfrey Hughes. Unhappy with Bean’s account of the ill-fated fighting at The Nek, which reflected poorly on his uncle, Kent Hughes asked Bean to give the sources for some of his statements. Bean wrote back sharply: ‘You cannot be serious in expecting me to disclose to you the names of those living persons on whose statements this story is based.’ The journalist in Bean was never far away—sources were to be protected.

Such criticism aside, Bean had written not only a history but a study and celebration of the Australian character. The Australian, he wrote, ‘was becoming to some extent distinguishable from the Englishman in bodily appearance, in face, and in voice. He also displayed certain markedly divergent qualities of mind and character.’ In Australia, men passed for ‘what in themselves they were worth.’ Socially, he asserted, ‘the Australian people came nearer than perhaps any other to forming one class without distinction of birth or wealth.’ In Egypt, the Australians had been surprised to discover themselves so much bigger than the pink-cheeked lads from Manchester cotton mills, who ‘looked like children.’ To the Australians the British soldiers were naive, deferential and unworldly.

Bean dismissed the campaign as a disaster, doomed in London by poor planning before a single man went ashore; yet he believed it had been a triumph for the Australians, whose rugged virtues helped them face terrible adversity. The reason the Australians had hung on during the first days after the landing ‘lay in the mettle of the men themselves. . . . Life was very dear, but life was not worth living unless they could be true to their idea of Australian manhood.’ Bean believed that herein lay the essence of the typical Australian—whether he was a squatter or shearer, a doctor or a clerk. And these were people, for whom the Official History was written.

42

Censorship, tragedy and farce

Harry Gullett did not mince words: he would have nothing to do with Professor Tucker touching his manuscript on the Light Horse in Sinai and Palestine. He thought Tucker’s literary style was ‘cold and pedantic,’ and ‘as warm as frozen fish.’ Gullett—whose background, like Bean’s, was in journalism—threatened to withdraw his manuscript and send his payment back to the Defence Department. Gullett and George Robertson didn’t like each other, so acceptance of Tucker as an editor was never likely.

But Gullett did grudgingly agree to let Arthur Jose edit his book. Angered by the ‘thousands of trivial and unnecessary suggestions’ that Jose made, however, Gullett threatened not only to withdraw the book but to publish it independently. The fact was that having joined the Australian Immigration Bureau in Melbourne, he was overworked.

Gullett was determined to keep the book as much as he could to his own vision, even if this brought him into conflict with Bean’s desire to show a particular Australian nationalism. In a letter to Bean, a more down-to-earth Gullett wrote: ‘I did not accept, owing to sheer incapacity, your suggestion to stamp the early chapters with some high moral purpose and peculiar Australian psychology. I failed to discern such things in the Light Horsemen. As I saw it their campaign was to a remarkable extent one with a casual sporting purpose to which they bent all their high intelligence and endeavour.’

Jose’s revision and Gullett’s objections, together with the demands of his new job, caused delays in production of the volume. Printing and mapping difficulties further exacerbated the problems. And then there was the matter of the Surafend massacre, on 10 December 1918. The incident had followed the murder of a New Zealand trooper by an Arab thief while the Anzac Mounted Division was resting near the Jewish settlement of Rishon Le Zion. When General Headquarters failed to act, New Zealand and Australian troops took matters into their own hands and demanded that the local sheikh hand over the murderer. When this did not happen, the men—with British artillerymen joining in—took their own retribution.

The precise number of casualties in the massacre is unknown, but various accounts put it between thirty and sixty men killed or badly injured. Others put it even higher, but suggestions that some Arabs were castrated and thrown down a well are unsubstantiated. Next morning, GHQ finally acted—but not against the Arabs who had allegedly hidden the killer. Each brigade in the Anzac Mounted Division immediately convened a Court of Inquiry, but the men closed ranks and professed ignorance of the whole incident. Arab survivors failed to identify any offenders, nor could anyone else. General Allenby, commander of the Allied troops, confined the Anzacs to their tent lines. On parade, he said that ‘they were murderers and cowards and by killing the Bedouin had taken away the good name of Anzac.’

In writing the history of the campaign, Gullett knew he had to deal with the incident or be accused of a cover-up. He wrote to Bean about the issue, saying that Brudenell White, who was now Chief of the General Staff, and the Defence Minister and Defence Department secretary ‘were all strong in favour of dropping it:’

They object not only to the affair itself but also to the reflection upon the Australian Government. I agree entirely with you that it should come in in some shape or form, but I am not prepared to deal with it in a small way. It should either be complete or it should be dropped, and I will take an opportunity of publishing the story as it stands and explaining that it was omitted from the history under protest. I think this is the only proper course.

Alarmed, Bean wrote to Gullett, saying he believed the Surafend incident had to be included ‘because some reference or other to it is sure to get into future histories; and it will appear to have been hushed up.’ He also wrote to White, saying he had heard that Gullett had ‘omitted all reference to Surafend and to the impression prevalent among the Light Horse in Palestine that they were neglected by their government. I do not believe that this is the right way to solve any objections to those two references, and I am writing to Gullett asking him if he will have the matter reconsidered.’ White immediately sought to reassure Bean, but it was clear that he was sensitive about the incident. ‘I did not wish Gullett entirely to omit all reference to the Surafend incident, but I thought that his very detailed appendix was neither necessary nor in the same good taste as the remainder of his criticisms. I think that he might in the text say briefly all that is necessary to record the matter and I will speak to the Secretary to this end.’ White also disagreed with the suggestion that the Government had neglected the Light Horse in Palestine, but conceded that it was ‘not wholly satisfactory’ that Birdwood had been the commander of troops and based in France when an independent GOC might have been better. Bean’s commitment to freedom from censorship cleared the way for Gullett to tell the full story.

However, all this meant that the Christmas sales Bean had hoped for in 1922 were lost, since Gullett’s volume, Volume VII,

The Australian Imperial Force in Sinai and Palestine 1914–1918, did not appear until April 1923. The historian H.M. Green rated Sinai and Palestine behind Bean’s work. It was, he wrote, ‘much nearer the conventional than Bean’s and . . . much more obviously the work of a journalist than Bean’s . . . the reader has not the same feeling of being part of the experiences described.’ Gullett’s ability did not transcend that of a good journalist nor was he as sharp an observer as Bean. Green criticised the banalities and clichés of Gullett’s ‘overcoloured’ style, which nevertheless was ‘light and fluent and seldom dull . . . a capable example of its kind.’

Arthur Jose was a key player in the Official History, not just with Gullett’s volume but also with the naval volume that Bean wanted his old friend to write. Bean wrote to the secretary of the newly established Navy Department, George Macandie, that Jose was ‘one of the greatest of Australian living authors—and the greatest Australian historian.’ But his involvement challenged Bean’s determination that there should be no censorship, for the Naval Board’s conception of an official history was one that expressed government-approved views. This was at odds not only with Bean’s wish but with the Government’s promise that the official histories should be free from censorship.

No one was better placed than Jose to write the naval history—since September 1915, he had been writing a history for the Commonwealth Naval Board as well as undertaking intelligence work. But delays upset the publication timetable. Jose’s volume was pushed back and by the end of 1920 he was hard at work editing the Australian Encyclopaedia for Angus & Robertson.

In June 1921 Bean complained to the Acting Naval Secretary, Captain Alfred Treacy, that Jose did ‘not know the extent of the nature of the censorship to be exercised.’ He reminded Treacy that the official history was supposed to be free of censorship and that Jose’s dealings with the Naval Board were ‘quite different’ from what he and Prime Minister Hughes had agreed to. The only censorship Bean would accept was of technical secrets, inventions and some battle tactics. He would not accept attempts to restrict Jose’s reasonable arguments and conclusions. ‘The nation requires the historians above everything to be free, even, if necessary, to criticise the authorities of their own or any country,’ he asserted.

Bean also complained to Defence Minister George Pearce, who, in turn, wrote to the Navy Minister, W.H. Laird Smith, reminding him that the historian’s contract specifically stated that the government would ‘not censor or alter the national Histories as written, annotated or edited by the Historian.’ Pearce said that despite this he understood from Bean that the Naval Board had informed Jose that his work was to be subjected to what might amount to rigorous censorship. Laird Smith was a weak minister, and heavily influenced by the Naval Board; its members remained unrepentant. Laird Smith told Pearce the Naval Board believed they could ‘not agree to give official recognition to the opinions which are based on insufficient knowledge of the facts, and are produced by a gentleman who, by training and experience, is perhaps not properly qualified to form a sound judgement.’ The only course open to the Naval Board, said Laird Smith, was to require Jose to amend his manuscript accordingly.

To Bean, there was a principle at stake from which he could not budge. In a letter to Pearce, he rebutted the Naval Board’s view of what constituted an official history, pointing out that the principle the Australian Government had adopted in regard to the Official History was different from that adopted by the British.

The British Government is not pretending to publish a completely frank account of the war, but is preparing an ‘intermediate’ or ‘popular’ account under certain conditions of censorship. This is quite in accordance with the traditions of the British War Office, but the work is not one in which it would be possible for the Government to obtain the services of the leading British writers . . . no leading author would consent to spend years of his life after the war in writing a history which was not to be of permanent value.

Bean pointed out that the Australian Government, in reaching its position on freedom from censorship, had acted ‘in complete consonance with Australian principles.’ In Britain, a ‘hush-up’ policy was the norm. Jose had no doubt what the problem was. As he told Bean, any true history of the early months of the war would reveal negligence by the British Admiralty. ‘I know that pukka Australian naval officers have read and approved of my work; it is the imported element that is trying to suppress it.’ Indeed, former Royal Navy officers holding senior positions in the Australian Navy were behind the push for censorship. (The First Naval Member, Rear Admiral Percy Grant, the Second Naval Member, Captain Charles Hardy, and Commodore John Dumaresq, who was Australian-born, were all former Royal Navy officers.)

Unlike the Army, which had emerged from the war its own master, the Navy was widely seen as being under British influence. Criticism of the Navy increased when news began to leak of the fate of Jose’s naval history. The Naval Board, however, remained intransigent, asserting its ownership of the history. In October 1921, Bean sought to reassure Jose, telling him that the more the histories were read, ‘the stronger will become the public dislike to censorship except within necessary limits.’ He promised Jose that when he finished the manuscript, he would ‘throw all my weight, both with the PM and with the other ministers, into obtaining you as far as possible freedom from censorship.’

The opportunity came sooner than expected. On 3 November 1921, Laird Smith blundered in the House of Representatives. Questioned about the naval volume, he said that only after the complete manuscript had been received would the issue of censorship be considered. In fact, the Naval Office had had eight of Jose’s chapters for twelve months, and its internal review had found that the draft was ‘not suitable for publication’ and should be referred to the Admiralty—the very body which Jose had strongly criticised over its ineffective management of the Australian Fleet in the Pacific. Perhaps fearing his influence, the Board banned Jose from showing the draft to Bean. However, soon afterwards the Navy Department was subsumed into the Defence Department. Pearce, although no longer Defence Minister, was given responsibility for deciding the extent of censorship. Few of the Naval Board’s key objections were upheld, giving Bean and Jose a crucial victory.

Ironically, it was not the Royal Navy officers but Bean who most effectively censored Jose’s history, by moderating his acid pen and altering his more critical opinions ‘to avoid offence.’ Bean wrote, ‘I think we must be particularly careful to be within the limits of truth when criticising outside governments and authorities . . . In criticism, while stating the case strongly and clearly, we have to avoid [being aggressive].’ Jose responded tartly. ‘I do not always see eye to eye with you about criticism of persons in authority, and the mistakes made in the early months were in some cases so glaring—and might have been disastrous—that it is worthwhile using the strongest language to guard against any repetition of them in future wars. Further, my language ran the gauntlet of a hostile Board—and was deliberately reinstated by Pearce, so that I had thought it censor-proof.’

After the publication of German naval histories, Bean extensively altered Jose’s draft. With Jose now in Britain, documents continued to trickle out from the Admiralty, causing further delays. In London, Jose was beginning to wonder whether he would recognise the volume when he saw it again. Volume IX, The Royal Australian Navy, 1914–1918, finally appeared in September 1928, and Jose generously acknowledged Bean’s many improvements.

Bean was faced with the challenge of writing four more volumes himself—the story of the AIF in France—while working as general editor for not just the volumes by Gullett and Jose, but also volumes on other important areas of the war. His close friend, Fred Cutlack, was writing Volume VIII, The Australian Flying Corps in the Western and Eastern Theatres of War, 1914–1918. Bean knew the book was in safe hands and thought it ‘excellent’ when it was published in 1923. However, with Volumes X and XI the story was far different.

Volume X, The Australians at Rabaul. The Capture and Administration of the German Possessions in the South Pacific, was entrusted to Colonel Seaforth Mackenzie, a lawyer who worked in the Federal Attorney-General’s Department in Melbourne. A published poet, he was regarded as a minor literary figure. In 1915 he had been appointed the senior legal officer with the Australian forces in German New Guinea, and served two terms as acting Administrator. Writing about events in which he was involved complicated his task, but he was optimistic that he would be finished by September 1920. However, that month he told Bean he would not be submitting the manuscript until December. The material he had collected, he explained, was ‘so excellent’ that he hoped Bean would agree that the delay was worthwhile. Little did Bean realise that a pattern had been set: Mackenzie named a deadline he could not meet, gave a brief reason for delay, and set another date which was also unrealistic.

In 1922 Mackenzie became principal registrar of the High Court, and the same pattern continued, with the same excuses. Bean became exasperated as the completion date for the volume was pushed further and further back. By March 1922 relations between the men had become fraught, and Bean said that if he did not receive manuscript within ten days, ‘I shall have to propose to the Minister for Defence the name of another writer for this volume, a step you will realise, I should on many grounds be exceedingly sorry to take.’ This did not work either. The best that Mackenzie could do was to offer to provide the manuscript by instalments. Mackenzie wrote to the Defence Department Secretary, Thomas Trumble, undertaking ‘to deliver the whole of the manuscript of the volume not later than 30 June 1922.’ The department warned Mackenzie ‘that the time had gone by when any idle promises would be tolerated and that he must fulfil his promise otherwise the matter would be placed in other hands and his reputation would thereby be tarnished beyond repair.’

Three years later, the position remained unchanged. By then, Mackenzie was using all the evasion and deception in his repertoire to avoid sending Bean the final chapters. Bean rebuked him, warning that he could not spend any more of his time ‘in making apparently useless appeals.’ His only recourse now was to inform the Minister and arrange for a new writer to complete the volume.

This time Mackenzie did post the second-last chapter, but requested a further few days to complete the final chapter. The matter dragged on into 1926. Bean warned Mackenzie in mid-February that his final chapter and passages were urgently needed. Mackenzie promised to travel from Melbourne to Sydney to meet Bean—but didn’t turn up. ‘Much regret,’ he telegrammed Bean, who was so exasperated that he appealed to the Minister ‘to do something.’ Finally, in October 1926, he received the last chapter—five years after the first instalment.

There was a final irony to Volume X: in 1926 Mackenzie had purchased three overvalued ex-German coconut plantations in New Guinea, borrowing heavily for the deposit. By 1932, with eight court judgements for debt against him, he owed £19,000 to the Commonwealth for the plantations and another £7000 for money lent and accumulated losses. On 28 August 1936 he was charged with forging and uttering seals of the High Court. Found guilty, he was sentenced to four and a half years’ jail, thus bringing to a close the tragi-farce of Volume X.

The story surrounding the writing of Volume XI was sheer tragedy. It involved Bean’s former editor at The Sydney Morning Herald, Thomas Heney, who had been chosen to write the story of the war on the home front. Bean had not originally envisaged that the history would include such an account, but William Watt, the Acting Prime Minister, and George Pearce urged him on. Watt, on the recommendation of the Repatriation Minister, Edward Millen, selected Heney as author. Bean went along with this, but with some reluctance. When Heney was commissioned, in October 1919, Bean believed the manuscript would run to around 120,000 words—a relatively small volume—and thought it should take no more than nine months to write. But Bean had underestimated the complexity of the task involved and the time it would take.

When Heney’s first chapters arrived in June 1920, Bean was unimpressed. He wrote to Heney, saying he had to be frank with all contributors to the history: ‘In several important matters in the chapters already submitted this volume takes no account of the evidence and data which is surely now available and upon which the history for the sake of completeness ought to be based. The result is that it lacks detail and does not give the reader the information which I think he could be entitled to expect.’ Bean cited the Premiers’ Conference at the beginning of the war, and the question of enemy subjects. He said Heney appeared to have relied only upon newspaper accounts on these two issues, and failed to use official papers. As well, Heney had devoted ‘too much space and attention to what happened outside of Australia,’ his chronology was flawed and his prose was ungrammatical.

Heney was miffed, telling Bean there was not room for everything. ‘The art of being a bore is to say everything,’ he wrote acidly, asserting that ‘to a reader even ten years hence what matters is the action taken and its result, not the steps and considerations antecedent to action.’ Bean rejected this view of history outright. ‘I do not think that we can ignore the steps and considerations antecedent to action. Logically that would reduce a history of the war to a statement of the terms of peace.’

Bean sent Heney’s manuscript to Defence, telling the department it was not ‘nearly up to the standard required of writers of this history.’ The most serious defect was ‘the skimpiness of its matter and the amount of irrelevant writing contained in it. But the publishers are almost certain to damn it also upon its style which is almost beyond remedy.’ Bean hoped that Heney would rectify the problems, ‘but you will see by Mr Heney’s reply that it appears uncertain whether he will do this.’ He wanted the issue to remain confidential, as Heney was ‘an old friend of mine, formerly my own editor, and a man to whom I owe something and for whom I feel a considerable respect.’

Bean sensed he had hurt Heney’s pride, and he was right. Heney wrote to him again, denying that his work was compiled with ‘scissors and paste, cut out of old newspapers.’ Relations were becoming strained, and meanwhile Heney had taken on a new job as editor of the Brisbane Telegraph, which would further reduce the time he had to work on the volume. When shown the manuscript, Tucker told Bean it needed stringent revision. Tucker declined the job, explaining that only when he came to the actual revision did he realise ‘how atrociously bad’ much of the manuscript was. The work was ‘puerile, mawkish, loose in construction, padded and written in a style unworthy of any man of letters.’ He reminded Bean that as the history as a whole would be judged on its weakest part, Heney’s work might undermine the entire project.

After Heney became editor of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph in 1924, his work failed to improve. Bean was blunt, telling Heney in mid-1925 that ‘In its present condition I cannot send the book forward.’ The manuscript did ‘not sufficiently interpret the soul and spirit of the Australian people under their great test.’ Bean accepted that while the time frame might have been too short, ‘the book cannot be rendered adequate by more editing.’ Another author was needed to complete the book. ‘I cannot pass Mr Heney’s book in its present condition,’ he told the Defence Department.

He approached Ernest Scott, Professor of History at the University of Melbourne, who initially declined, leaving Bean with little choice but to persevere with Heney. He began working in Melbourne on the government files he had so far ignored. The revised manuscript still fell short of Bean’s standard. When White read the work he told Bean it was ‘neither record nor history.’ It was, he wrote, ‘merely a newspaper article—and not much better founded than the usual newspaper product.’

Then Heney’s health failed, a misfortune he blamed on the work he had had to do in Melbourne. In March 1928 he gracefully resigned, placing all his notes and the entire manuscript at Bean’s disposal. Bean turned again to Scott, who this time accepted. In July 1928 Scott submitted a draft plan of the book that Bean described as ‘very workmanlike’. Unlike Heney, Scott made the official record his starting point, making almost no use of Heney’s material. Scott even insisted on doing all the research anew.

Bean had to accept that the home-front volume would be further delayed. Adding to the problems was that he and Scott differed in their attitudes to Britain: Scott was an imperialist who believed that Britain’s interests were Australia’s interests, whereas Bean was a nationalist whose Holy Grail was the ‘Australian Ideal’ that the war had fashioned. Again Bean misjudged the scale of the task, estimating that Scott should complete a manuscript of 240,000 words in a year. Bean thought that at the end of the book, the reader should ‘understand the Australian attitude and outlook—our independence and habit of thinking for ourselves.’

As with Heney’s work, Bean played a major role in the final shaping and writing of the book. He believed he had no choice if the volume was to be saved, and warned Scott against allowing a justifiable charge of bias that, Bean said, would ‘wreck the history.’ Fuelling Bean’s concern was the lack of an account of the motives of the anti-conscriptionist case. He was able to draw on the views of former Prime Minister Andrew Fisher and others to overcome the problem. Scott had no choice but to agree—but he refused to agree to a photo of the anti-conscriptionist leader Archbishop Daniel Mannix in the book. Bean was no fan of Mannix anyway.

In rewriting Scott’s work to make it politically acceptable, Bean explained that he had exercised all his ingenuity ‘in the endeavour to preserve the points made by you, and at the same time to steer clear of rocks upon which I am certain we should strike.’ One such instance occurred with former Prime Minister Billy Hughes, whom Scott had quoted as saying that the Germans were ‘a nation of liars.’ Hughes was still a minister in Prime Minister Joe Lyons’ Government, which was concerned not to offend Germany amid a fragile world peace. Bean was not sympathetic to the Government’s position, asking ‘what importance do we attach to what Hindenburg or Hitler said of us in 1914–1918?’ Nonetheless the statement was amended and Hughes was quoted as remarking, a little more diplomatically, that ‘the Germans were entirely untrustworthy.’

Volume XI, Australia During the War, was finally published in December 1936, seventeen years after Heney began it. Bean was no doubt relieved by the favourable reviews and good sales that followed. But in his private diary, he noted that the volume ‘gave me a great deal of trouble—it required infinitely more work than we could expect him to put into it for £500 and there were many big gaps and many inaccuracies which Johnny Balfour discovered. Johnny did splendid work there.’ And there was still the matter of the further four volumes he had undertaken.

43

In his own hands

Aside from the rupture with Erskine Crawford, who subsequently left the property, and would die in late 1924, life at Tuggeranong homestead offered a balm after the horrors of war. There was a pattern and a rhythm that came with the country environment. Tuggeranong was on a party line that included the surrounding Woden, Lanyon and Cuppacumbalong stations between Queanbeyan and the village of Tharwa. A horse and sulky ran the mail daily. The Beans, Bazleys, Balfours, and George Lowery, who had by now married the Tuggeranong schoolmaster’s daughter, formed a small community of young married couples enjoying life in the bush. Babies were born, and domestic staff came and went. There were tennis parties and dances to attend, cricket and picnics by the banks of the nearby Murrumbidgee River, interspersed with moments such as fishing the too-curious son of the local butcher out of the septic tank.

Embarrassing as it was, this ranked as a mere inconvenience compared with another experience for Arthur Bazley. Because the house was lit by carbide gas, a new gasometer had to be installed immediately. Within a few months the cylinders began to jam, and two mechanics from Queanbeyan came out to fix the fault. Bazley recalled that they had just dismantled the unit and laid the cylinders on the ground when he walked past. The cigarette he was smoking sparked an explosion that left him with a burnt and blackened face and missing hair and eyebrows. He convalesced for the next three months, a ‘sorry sight’ to behold on the verandah.

Arthur Jose and Fred Cutlack visited on several occasions to discuss their work with Bean, quickly fitting into the household’s ways. Jose was tall and round, with a straggling moustache; the group quickly realised that his occasional tendency to pomposity was only a veneer, and besides, he played the piano well. Cutlack could be irascible at times. He happened to be in the office one morning when Professor Tucker’s edited copy of his manuscript arrived in the mail. Among his writing habits was use of the phrase ‘owing to’ this or that, and Tucker, who had changed the phrase on several occasions, apparently became annoyed at its repetition and finally commented in the margin, ‘Australians are too fond of owing.’ This was too much for Cutlack, who grabbed a pencil and scrawled beneath Tucker’s comment, ‘And so are some professors of cheap sarcasm.’

Bean on the whole was content with his rustic environment. In 1923 a recurrent kidney ailment flared up. He was warned that the harsh climate of Tuggeranong could exacerbate his health and he might have to move to a warmer place. Bean was filled with sadness; he loved this fine old-fashioned homestead. Memories of courtship and newly married life with Effie, and of writing the Official History, gave Tuggeranong special significance. In May 1924, his condition deteriorated and he was told he might need surgery. This was serious news. Bean noted in his private diary: ‘. . . as risk attached to it Effie and I decided that we would go to England in order to obtain a further diagnosis.’ He noted that this would enable him to take Effie on the trip that he had always promised her. Knowledge that the Government had extended his contract for another five years relieved the financial pressure. And the Government had also agreed to pay his passage. Bean was thankful. ‘Most generous,’ he wrote in his diary.

On 9 July 1924 the couple drove to Sydney to board the American liner Ventura. They would sail to the United States on the way to Britain. Effie noted that her husband had ‘signed both our wills in case we go down at sea.’

They arrived in San Francisco twenty days later, Effie having suffered from sea sickness for much of the voyage. The city did not impress Bean: ‘wretched music—all jazzes and fox trots; everyone with a car but not much culture, one would say.’ They took the train to Chicago where Bean was stunned by ‘the most squalid slums that I have ever seen.’ In New York, they went to the Ziegfeld Follies. Bean was unimpressed: ‘it was mainly a display of naked women—sometimes being flung about by Eastern men—the sort of thing that has become excessively boring and very commonplace and vulgar at that.’ He left America thinking it was ‘that most jingoistic of all countries.’

On the voyage to Britain, Bean spoke to a German who wanted to know if Australia would return to Germany its lost colonies in the Pacific. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ Bean told him. ‘They are too important for us, from the point of view of keeping Asiatics out.’ Clearly, six years after the war, he still held to his pre-war attitudes. On arrival in London, Bean met with his surgeon, who advised him to have his right kidney removed. The surgery took place a week later, on 29 August 1924. For his initial convalescence, Bean took Effie to stay at Brentwood, and they eventually left in mid-November for France. He showed Effie the Somme battlefields, before they went to Paris and the Riviera, then sailed back to Australia.

Finally returning to work at Tuggeranong as autumn settled on the valley, Bean realised that the climate, just as he had been warned before his surgery, was indeed now too cold for him. Family members recall that he always felt the cold, wearing winter underwear even in summer, and wool socks that Effie knitted. ‘It was a case of changing our location then or never,’ Bean wrote in his diary. On 1 April 1925 he was given approval to move to Sydney and set up office in ‘a beautiful warm sunny room’ at the Army’s Victoria Barracks. He and Effie moved to a house in the leafy North Shore suburb of Roseville. With Volume II published a few months earlier while he was still in England, Bean began work on Volume III, the first of the four he would write about the AIF in France. In April 1926, he and Effie, who was now studying music at the Conservatorium, moved to Bellevue Hill.

•

At Victoria Barracks, Bean’s work on Volume III involved heavy use of British military records. To help with this, Tas Heyes, who had been attached to the AWRS in London in 1918, was sent to Britain in 1924 to collate and copy files. He became the Australian representative on the military historical section of the Committee of Imperial Defence. Tracking down files was a frustrating job. Heyes often found them marked ‘out’ and impossible to trace further. In some matters, Heyes found it more effective to use the status of Australia House to ask for records rather than doing it himself. He told Bean there had been a conference regarding a despatch from him which the British had interpreted ‘as reopening the whole question of access to records.’ Heyes understood that the decision the meeting had reached meant that ‘copies or lengthy extracts of secret documents could not be allowed to leave the country but that facilities, similar to those granted to their own historians, would be placed at your disposal for you to make notes on the condition that you would agree to submit your manuscript to the British authorities before publication.’

As Volume III, The Australian Imperial Force in France, 1916, covered the disastrous British planning that led to the terrible loss of Australian lives at Fromelles, it was inevitable that Bean would run up against British sensitivities. It was a fight that, as he acknowledged in correspondence with returned Diggers, was ‘a very difficult battle to describe with accuracy, as the accounts are so contradictory.’

Bean’s treatment underlined the differing approaches that he and his British counterpart, Sir James Edmonds, took. The correspondence between them on the draft chapters of their respective histories highlighted this. Edmonds believed most Dominion forces exaggerated their performance, and he in turn was criticised for his ‘grudging’ praise of them. He was critical, too, of Dominion historians, who he thought lacked the necessary knowledge of staff work, and who were too concerned with protecting the reputation of their respective countries to write an informed history. Edmonds put Bean in this category, asserting that he ‘conceives that everything happening to the Australians is unique and unparalleled.’ As official historian, Edmonds’ approach was to write a description of events that largely ignored praise or criticism of British leadership. This has been widely seen as a way of protecting the reputation of senior British commanders and the General Staff.

The underlying tension between the two men emerged when Edmonds read Bean’s draft on Fromelles. Lieutenant General Sir Richard Haking was cast as the main culprit. Bean ridiculed Haking’s contention that the newness of the infantry was the sole reason for the failure. He conclusively showed that, as planned, the operation had no chance of success. Edmonds attempted to defend Haking on his past record and in September 1927 offered to send drafts of Bean’s Fromelles chapters to him. Haking did not reply, and Edmonds finally informed Bean that the general had no wish to comment on the battle, adding, ‘I don’t think he was much use after his wound . . . in 1914.’ And yet Haig had entrusted Haking with a senior command in important operations two years later.

The British censors’ description of Fromelles as merely ‘some important raids’ had enraged Bean at the time; this was starkly untrue. However, Edmonds defended the understatement, saying people did not need to know the truth. It was difficult to know how much a democracy should be told, but ‘from the purely military point of view, the less the better.’ Edmonds’ disregard for the public’s right to know was underlined in a subsequent letter lecturing Bean: ‘Your history should be educative, and the more you inculcate that one gives one’s army the best chance if one refrains from demanding information, the better you will serve your country.’ Edmonds also chastised Bean for including the doubts entertained by British staff officers at Fromelles, asserting that their opinions should not be disclosed because the general was the one man responsible and his staff were ‘servants to him.’ But to Bean, staff officers’ private and personal views were essential to an understanding of the war.

Edmonds’ remoteness from reality was further highlighted by his rejection in Bean’s Pozières drafts of his account of the shelling. According to Edmonds, in his four and a half years in France he had experienced many heavy barrages, but ‘I neither saw nor heard of any of the scenes you describe . . . How many Australians in point of fact became “insane”?’ As he had observed French and Belgian troops endure bombardment as a matter of course, he wondered if Australian soldiers were more nervous than they. This, he asserted preposterously, was what the text seemed to imply. He concluded that, ‘it was all due to lack of self-control, which is fostered by discipline.’ Bean acidly noted that Edmonds had ‘never been in a real battle.’ He dismissed the comments as typical of ‘the General Staff attitude—exactly as it was in the war; it is almost too laughably mistaken to be worth a reply.’

Another figure Bean offended was General Hubert Gough, one of the notable British failures during the war who had been sacked in 1918. Shown the drafts, in which Bean accused him of impetuosity, he was indignant, if not delusional. ‘I was not ‘‘temperamentally’’ addicted to attacks without careful reconnaissance and preparation, as the conduct of all my military operations fully bears out, including this one,’ he complained in remarks that Edmonds forwarded to Bean. But Bean refused to back down, telling Edmonds that Gough’s ‘pressure was always for speed in trench operations, in which speed could only be a danger and of little value.’ This drew a remarkable admission from Edmonds that Bean was correct. ‘For Gough I had no brief after 1916. Up to that time, he was, I think, first-class as a division and corps commander, but his gifts of energy and dash were out of place in command of an army. I and Peyton [Military Secretary] told Haig this, but Haig was perfectly infatuated with him.’

Edmonds did manage some praise, lauding Bean’s summing up of the Somme campaign as one of his finest chapters. He argued, however, that Bean’s analysis of Haig’s strategy dealt inadequately with its effect on the German Army. Edmonds contended that on the Western Front, there was no alternative to battles of attrition. Justifying Haig’s strategy, which had led to needless slaughter and left Australians angry and disillusioned, Edmonds asserted that it was misleading to depict the battle as a struggle for ‘bits of ground’ as Bean had done. He challenged Bean to nominate what the Allies’ strategy should have been. ‘In a long war with sides very evenly matched . . . nothing but the slaughter of its men will bring one side to its knees.’ Such callousness had outraged Bean during the war. Nonetheless, he would stay on good terms with Edmonds, who provided—perhaps unwittingly at times—insight into the British military machine.

As per his usual arrangement, Bean showed the proofs of the volume to Brudenell White, who thought the Pozières chapters constituted ‘the most remarkable historical record of war it has ever been my fortune to read.’ But White also criticised what he saw as a change in Bean’s perspective. He took issue with Bean’s ‘scathing’ references to higher staff, commenting: ‘I think it excessive to ascribe to an individual actor the making or marring of an action.’ But Bean did not substantially alter his opinions.

With the final proofs for Volume III approved, Bean waited for the book to be published. No doubt relieved to have it completed, he settled back to enjoy Christmas 1928 with Effie—an occasion marked by a happy event. Just before Christmas, Effie’s niece, nine-year-old Joyce, came to live with them. This was a family arrangement, as the Beans were unable to have children of their own. Mumps was thought to have been the reason. A year later, on 13 December 1929 after they had bought Arthur Jose’s house at Lindfield and moved in, Joyce’s adoption was registered by the New South Wales Child Welfare Department. As Bean noted in his private diary, Joyce had become ‘our little girl.’ He was a devoted husband already, and now would be a devoted father. A gap in their lives had been filled.

A tennis court in the backyard became a focus of Sunday social gatherings with family and local friends. Bean tried building a retaining wall for the tennis court, but it was too thin and had to be anchored by iron rods. Family members recall Bean dressed in long white trousers, a Clifton College tie around his waist as a belt, and a white silk shirt with the sleeves half rolled up. In his diary, Bean noted that Effie was a good tennis player—‘probably the best of us really, with an excellent back hand drive.’ Family members also recall that Effie was the ebullient one at these gatherings, her husband happily quiet in the background. Bean encouraged Effie to take painting lessons under the respected artist Thea Proctor, and to continue her study of the piano.

Through these years, their marriage remained close, and letters between them were full of affection. ‘I am counting the days for my hubby to get back—I don’t like him away a bit, but it really would be dreadful to go on through the world, day after day, without my greatest love . . . That taken away would see a very tiny bit of me left. However I must say I think we shall be a long time together,’ Effie wrote from Lindfield to Bean who was in Hobart visiting his mother. In another letter, she urged him ‘to get all the sleep you can—to rest your nerves and brain, darling—it does all the thinking for everyone.’ And Bean reciprocated these intimate sentiments. ‘Just as the ship left,’ he wrote on another voyage to Hobart, ‘I went up on deck and I thought I saw you on the wharf . . . I waved but I don’t think you saw me . . . was most regretful at having missed you . . . Nothing in the world would have satisfied me so well as to have you here. The longer I live, the more true that is.’

The Lindfield house was located in a semi-rural setting, with an outlook westwards over mostly undeveloped bush. A rail service gave Bean easy travel to his office at Victoria Barracks. The location fitted with Bean’s philosophical commitment to cities built around bushland and open spaces. He had wasted little time in taking up these themes after returning in 1919 from the war. As he had outlined in his book In Your Hands, Australians, he wanted progress associations and town planning to give Australians ‘the healthiest and prettiest towns.’

Dr Jack Bean, who lived close by, had a vision of postwar reconstruction similar to that of his elder brother. By now heavily involved with Theosophy, Jack likewise espoused city planning, physical training and education reform. He wanted eugenic examinations and, having seen the curse of venereal disease during the war, wanted free treatment for it. Although sympathetic, Charles Bean was not a Theosophist himself. However, he joined Jack’s social welfare club and became an executive member. Through the Parks and Playground Movement, which he founded in 1930 as an offshoot of the Town Planning Association, Bean came into contact with suburban progress associations, local tree lovers’ leagues and a wide group of prominent Sydney conservationists. Among them was the designer of Canberra, Walter Burley Griffin, who, like Jack Bean, was a Theosophist and who lived in the nearby suburb of Castlecrag. Griffin once joined Bean on a tree inspection tour for an endangered cypress species.

Deriving from his belief that the prowess of Australian soldiers came from their rural backgrounds—a view challenged since by historians such as Lloyd Robson who showed that only a small proportion listed occupations in primary industry when they enlisted—the Parks and Playgrounds Movement’s aim was to make the city a little more like the country for city dwellers. Bean believed that Australia’s city-bred soldiers had been nearly as good as country men because they had mostly grown up with gardens, fresh air and playgrounds, which meant they were unlike the ‘weedy and weak’ Tommies, with minds ‘as stunted and small as their bodies.’ Given gardens, beaches, playgrounds and fresh air, ‘the youth of Australia will see to his own exercise.’ Bean wanted Australian cities ‘to provide for every detail of health—of exercise for the body, brain and will.’ The New South Wales Government was sympathetic to these arguments, and took steps to provide more land to extend playgrounds in schools.

Despite the time and effort needed to work on the Official History, Bean managed to do as he had urged when he started work on his book in Cannes—he took matters into his own hands. In the process, he began an important change in his thinking, becoming more concerned about environmental challenge than racial heritage.

44

The ghastly spectre

Bean was taken aback—the Official History was under threat. He had published Volume III in April 1929, with three more volumes still to come. In October 1929, the share market collapsed, ushering in the Great Depression. By 1930 the Australian Government was looking for budget cuts. Treasurer Ted Theodore considered stopping the Official History. Bean was given only a few days’ notice to prepare a statement arguing for the half-finished history to continue. He realised that the story to which he had devoted the past fifteen years was now at risk.

In his memo to Cabinet he pointed out that other countries involved in the war were publishing official histories to record the military lessons of the conflict and to establish responsibility for successes and failures. The main object of the Australian history was to establish the truth about the nation’s participation in the war. The effort of Australian soldiers in 1918 had definitely affected the ending of the war, and it was on this that the influence of Australia at the Versailles conference and the status of the Dominions in the League of Nations were largely based. But unless the facts could be established by scholarship and careful documentation, Australia could not hope that its claimed achievements would ever be accepted. He continued:

The achievements of our light horse in Palestine would never have been accepted if Volume VII had not been published. The influence of the Australians in the Battle of Amiens and the breaking of the Hindenburg Line will never be recognised in America or England until established, as it will be, in Volume VI. The authority of Volume I definitely averted certain belittlement of the part played by Australians in Gallipoli.

Bean explained that the Australian history had now passed 1916, and was ahead of the British, American, French, Canadian and German histories. He asserted that the Official History had achieved precisely the aims intended. It had won international recognition of its truthfulness and scholarly authority and was used by the other war historians as a trustworthy reference. He added: ‘The librarian of the leading war-library in Great Britain has called it “the best of all the war histories”, and I hold scores of letters and reviews from all over the world to much the same effect. I do not propose to publish these, but they can always be produced if desired, and would probably prove very gratifying to the Australian Government.’

Six days later the Defence Department wrote to a relieved Bean, assuring him that the Government had spared the Official History from the budget axe and agreed to its continuation—but only because the money required ‘to offset breaches of contracts and agreements involved would have at least equalled the cost of completing the History.’

The Depression shook Bean: his own salary, fixed by contract, was unaffected by the reduction imposed on public servants, including his staff; but he insisted that his pay be cut too. The mass unemployment of the 1930s worried him deeply. He had flirted with the idea of socialism in his discussion with Brudenell White at Gallipoli and supported the Russian Revolution. That line of thinking had gone no further, but now in this new and depressing environment he became interested in planning to reduce inequalities.

If that interest was theoretical, Bean still had to deal with the practical. Budget cuts were also targeting government works, including the Australian War Memorial. The AWM had been Bean’s conception, emerging from the horror that the AIF endured at Pozières in 1916. Arthur Bazley later recalled how, after days tramping the Pozières battlefield and visiting units in the line, he would roll out Bean’s blankets in the trenches on the edge of Bécourt Wood and Sausage Gully. ‘We used to sleep feet to head . . . [and] on a number of occasions he talked about what he had in his mind concerning some future Australian war memorial museum,’ Bazley wrote.

Back in 1918 Bean pictured in his mind the Memorial, ‘on some hill-top—still, beautiful, gleaming white and silent, a building of three parts, a centre and two wings. The centre will hold the great national relics of the AIF. One wing will be a gallery—holding the pictures that our artists painted and drew actually on the scene and amongst the events themselves. The other wing will be a library to contain the written official records of every unit.’

He expanded on this after the war, seeing the building as testimony to an event that would ‘always be the greatest episode in our nation’s history,’ and as Australia’s memorial to its dead. As such, it should be Greek in style, a ‘temple worthy of their memory . . . a simple building of pure style in white Australian marble on a white stone terrace,’ and set among dark Australian trees to ‘express for all ages Australia’s sorrow and reverence for those who fell in her Thermopylae.’

The building was to be located at the foot of Mount Ainslie—a site that Walter Burley Griffin agreed was appropriate. To Bean, the War Memorial would assert and reinforce the independence, strength and progress of Australia, domestically and internationally. However, since the Memorial would be a symbol of national unity, he spoke of neither secularism nor religion. As a ‘temple’ to commemorate the AIF, he imagined the building as a spiritual space for all Australians, regardless of faith. Above all, he wanted it to inspire a deep reverence for the men of the AIF, and ‘embody for all time for our children the great national tradition of the Australian Imperial Force.’

Bean also had to manage fraught dealings between the AWM management and George Lambert. Bean thought Lambert had an ‘erratic temperament’, but cautioned that if too much pressure was applied he might abandon the Palestine pictures he was doing. Bean undertook to act as an intermediary, drafting a letter ‘strong enough to make Lambert realise we consider the position serious, but worded in such a way as to leave him no cause for ill-feeling.’ In the letter, Bean said he had convinced the management that Lambert and Will Dyson were the artists ‘most seized with the almost sacred nature of the work.’ Lambert was won over, saying by telegram that Bean understood ‘the type of bloke I am’ and completing his commissions—albeit some years later.

With the help of the AWM director, John Treloar, Bean worked hard to keep the concept in the public mind throughout the 1920s. Finally, the Government held an architectural competition in 1927, but this failed to produce a winning entry. However, two entrants, Sydney architects Emil Sodersten and John Crust, were encouraged to collaborate on a joint design. The result would not be in the pure Greek style that Bean had envisaged, instead drawing more strongly on Byzantine traditions.

In evidence he gave to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works on the project in 1928, Bean praised Sodersten’s concept for a building of the ‘general appearance of Sancta Sophia, at Constantinople’ that rose to a central dome. In a letter to Treloar in February 1929, Bean suggested that the entrance to the Memorial needed an inscription that epitomised the principles for which Australians had died. It should impress on the visitor that they had given their lives ‘to protect the weak by ridding the world of war and militarism and replacing the rule of brute strength by that of reason and of right.’

While such an inscription never found a place in the Memorial, Bean’s clear intention was that the building was to inspire a sense of responsibility and duty to the nation.

He was also adamant that the Honour Roll not show military rank. ‘I feel strongly that inclusion in the Honour Roll is given for one reason only—that these men all made the one equal sacrifice,’ he wrote to Treloar, who, along with the AWM board, agreed.

Prime Minister Stanley Bruce inaugurated the Memorial on Anzac Day 1929, just before the Depression struck. In Federal Parliament, there were calls for expenditure on it to be cut back. The newly elected government of Jim Scullin announced, just a month after the share market collapse, that it had ‘decided temporarily to suspend operations in connexion with the War Memorial.’ Treloar accepted that a start on the building could not be made for two to three years—and such would be the case.

As work on the project slowed, Bean was caught up in an incident involving Sir John Monash. In what seemed like a lapse of judgement, Monash agreed to ‘write’ a series of articles for Smith’s Weekly. After lengthy interviews, the journalist Eric Baume wrote the articles under Monash’s name. Smith’s Weekly had been founded in 1919 and was directed to a mainly male and ex-serviceman readership. It championed the cause of the returned soldier in brash and irreverent style. Monash’s articles caused a furor. In defending the Digger from criticism in various books published after the war, he inadvertently offended many others. A concerned Bean penned a letter to Monash advising him to repudiate the articles as his work. He continued:

I think they went down with a certain number of the more or less unthinking and less well-educated members of the AIF, but I could hardly tell you how many ex-soldiers and officers of the other sort have spoken to me about them and expressed themselves as puzzled or astonished that this style of thing should have come from a great commander of the AIF.

Bean was concerned that the articles implied there was nothing worthwhile outside the AIF, but he was quick to suggest that Monash could not have been ‘prey to that ignorant self-conceit,’ unlike the author of the articles. However, ‘I would urge you, for the sake of your own reputation . . . to be cautious in your interviews with the press, and . . . give them something that we can all feel is really worthy of your great calibre of mind and of the very great position which you occupied.’

Bean wanted Monash to know that his ‘frank reply’ was written with goodwill towards him ‘and solely from care of that precious thing which you and I and some others have to some extent in our keeping—the great name of the AIF.’

Responding, Monash acknowledged that he was ‘very much indebted’ to Bean for his ‘helpful and understanding’ letter, and that he had been right to take strong exception to aspects of the articles, and that ‘I greatly appreciate your entire goodwill towards myself.’

Monash tried to bluff his way out of the situation, distributing a statement to senior officers and secretaries of the RSL and service clubs in each state requesting that his ‘disclaimer of the language and many of the sentiments’ in the articles be made widely known. It all backfired when Smith’s Weekly refuted Monash’s disclaimer by reproducing his editorial amendments to the manuscript.

Around the time Monash’s predicament arose, Bean had to deal with the unexpected resignation of Professor Tucker, in February 1930. He was worn out and his health was suffering. He wrote to Bean to let him know of his ‘admiration of the thoroughness of your researches, your skill of narrative, and your manipulation of such a mass of perplexing material. Also I greatly admire your judicial attitude towards both sides and your fairness to officers and men on our own. As a writer myself, I know the labour and conscientiousness required by such a work as yours.’

Bean had come to appreciate just how much Tucker had improved the writing of the volumes so far published. He wrote back acknowledging his indebtedness. ‘To follow your corrections of my draft chapters has been a sort of liberal education, and, once I realised the need, an unmixed pleasure, but, more than that, one has come to rely on your support and, if ever an awkward question arises, to say “Leave it to Professor Tucker—if he passes it, it will stand.” Now that we are deprived of that comforting solution, we shall, I am afraid, have sometimes to play for safety.’

Bean pressed on with the writing of Volume IV—a volume covering 1917. Under the arrangement with Sir James Edmonds to exchange draft chapters, the different approaches they took to writing their official histories came to a head over comments Edmonds made on Bean’s drafts for this volume. A letter from Edmonds called it a ‘corps history’, saying: ‘the draft chapters do not seem to me to be up to the standard of your published volumes, and, as regards matters touching the higher command are really outside the scope of an ordinary corps history, they seem to me sometimes to be misleading.’ Edmonds continued:

We all feel that the historian of the AIF could afford to be a little more generous in his allusions to British units and formations. You are now aware perhaps that the home troops regarded the Australians and Canadians as the spoiled children of GHQ, who were given most rest, the pick of the fighting pitches and most of the praise—not that it was grudged. What they envied most was the corps formations of the Dominion divisions which gave them many advantages.

To have his history reduced to ‘a corps history’ incensed Bean, as did the absurdity of Edmonds’ allegations about the treatment and praise accorded the Australians and Canadians. Edmonds belittled Bean as unqualified to comment upon the workings of the higher command, and said he was guilty of bias against British units. Finally, he dismissed Bean’s view ‘that colonial life and conditions produce, on the whole, a stronger fighting people.’

Bean was indignant. He rejected the assertion that the Australians were given ‘the pick of the fighting pitches,’ questioning whether any impartial observer would consider such places as Pozières, Mouquet Farm and Bullecourt as such. Bean was dismissive of Edmonds’ view that matters concerning the higher command were outside the scope of the Australian history. ‘If you do not recognise that the Australian official history of the war is more than an “ordinary corps history”, then you will forgive my saying that it shows me that, far from having written too strongly, I must make my points even more clear in future chapters, and this I will endeavour to do,’ he wrote bluntly. Such a view, Bean continued, was symptomatic of the attitude that prevailed during the war and which was responsible for most of the difficulties that arose between the British and Australians. He reminded Edmonds that Australia ‘voluntarily entrusted her forces to British commanders and staffs’ and that the wisdom or otherwise of decisions made by them affecting Australian troops was ‘a matter of proper concern for the Australian Official History.’ Analysis of this could well influence whether such cooperation might in the future be deemed ‘unsuitable’.

British commentators, he went on, wished the Australians to admit that their successes were also partly due to their being in ‘homogeneous formations which gave us all sorts of advantages.’ The British, he claimed, really wanted Australians to admit that their reputed success was ‘due to these advantages arising from chance and from supposed favours,’ and not to the fact that ‘colonial life and conditions produce, on the whole, a stronger fighting people.’ He took Edmonds to task over his rejection of this: ‘You Englishmen, however, are constantly impressing upon us that these chance advantages were the root of the matter; and this I believe to be radically wrong and untrue.’

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.’

For all those years he had been the detached observer, processing events, trying to make sense of them as he pursued the truth of the campaigns. Now, probably for the first time since 1914, Bean felt somewhat directionless. Overlaying this was a sense of dismay at the outbreak of another world war.

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.

Bean saw no joy in the ‘jazz and crooning coming from a hundred radio stations nearly all churning out the same cheap stuff,’ or the ‘persuasive rubbish with which broadcasters try to mislead us into thinking one shop better than the next.’ There were ‘floods of cheap novels; comic strips; talkies,’ and ‘streets plastered with posters, often prurient, aimed at raking in every penny that can be caught by pumping suggestive notions into half-developed minds; at every turn some showman or salesman trying to shout louder than the next; handbills and headlines of the yellow press . . .’ His mood was dark and angry, pessimistic about the direction he saw Australia taking. The hopes he had held in 1919 had turned to ashes. So disillusioned was Bean with the Australian political system that, probably with memories of the Depression still fresh in his mind, he considered socialism a reasonable alternative:

It is socialism that brings the nearest approach to social equality . . . in a capitalist society wealth tends to be the basis of public worship, and the striving after fashion furnishes the leading motive for a great part of civilised humanity, sending it along the wrong rails to ends not worth reaching, in a socialist state those urges are reduced to an almost negligible influence by the removal of great distinctions of wealth.

Nonetheless, Bean was realistic. He recognised that socialism had disadvantages, not least being inadequate incentives for efficiency and progress. He also feared its effect on national character, particularly through the erosion of initiative and independence. For these reasons, he rejected socialist government for Australia. In passing, he noted that ‘even in Russia women are not immune to the lure of cosmetics and to the vogue of silk stockings.’ Frivolities, luxuries and pretensions were distasteful to Bean. Also distasteful were the privileged positions that the Communist Party and the secret police held in Russia—in reality, a ‘class’ in a supposedly classless society.

Bean had seen from his early outback travels just how necessary the state was in Australian development. State intervention brought justice, equality and social and economic development, and he supported this. He was thus sympathetic to the Labor Party, believing that it offered perhaps the greatest hope for achieving equality. However, he believed that Labor had betrayed its calling by becoming a parliamentary party rather than staying outside the party system that he deplored because it stifled versatility and individuality.

However, Bean accepted that in Australia plans for the whole nation could not be made unless the Federal Government, and not merely the separate states, had power to make them. He had no doubt that for planning to be effective it must be a federal responsibility. For this reason, he supported the constitutional reform proposals in the Curtin Government’s 1944 referendum to extend federal powers, speaking in their favour at a rally in the Sydney Domain.

Bean recognised that there was no perfect system of government. He strongly favoured freedom for the individual in a society defined by planning and universal education. He saw education as the solution to the world’s ills. He also began a reappraisal of his views on immigration, which he suggested now called for the frankest realism. ‘We must . . . adjust ourselves to the truth that the possibility of our maintaining a claim to racial superiority has passed beyond recall,’ especially in view of the achievements of the Chinese under ‘the magnificent idealism’ of the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. Having reached this conclusion, he advocated in 1943 a gradual relaxation of the White Australia policy on the grounds that ‘a degree of intermixture increasing in the long run’ was virtually inevitable.

Bean had several other books in mind to follow the relative success of War Aims of a Plain Australian. Among them was one he planned to call The Straight Line. This would be a companion edition to War Aims but would explore the foundation of his belief system. It would be about the search for truth, because truth meant freedom, and this could only be built on universal education. He saw himself as a patriot with ‘progressive ideals’. But being a patriot would not prevent him from reassessing where fault lay in war. Since the Great War he had been convinced that right was on the side of the Allies. But in his jottings for The Straight Line, Bean wrote: ‘No one nation is solely responsible for many of the wars in which one nation only is accused. E.g. Germany in WWI and II. Japan in WWII. It is a matter of degree in WWII for example our shutting out of Japanese goods as well as immigrants was a factor which would have driven any of us towards war had we been Japanese.’

Bean’s ardent belief in moral right had gone; he now saw grey where previously there was largely black and white as he gave vent to a conscience that, as he put it, had been twenty-three years on the sidelines. The certainties that had governed his life for so long were now being challenged and reappraised. ‘I believe that millions of my countrymen and others are longing for a straight line through the tangle,’ he wrote. His aim was to build on the themes of War Aims. Among them was the issue of competing political systems. In these notes, Bean concluded that there were no absolutes in politics.

Around this time he read Darkness at Noon, the 1941 novel by the Hungarian-born British author Arthur Koestler. The book’s disillusionment with Soviet Communism influenced Bean’s thinking. ‘Basically you cannot have absolute individualism or the absolute state. Every system, in practice and in theory, has to be a mixture: the differences are only in degree . . . There are only shades of grey . . . The happiness of mankind depends on its approximation by degrees, however small, to one side of the light scale or the other.’

Bean saw that totalitarianism was not the answer, either. However, there would always be a ruling class. The danger was that if people were not protected, exploitation would follow. ‘Society has, probably always, rested on a balance, even though the balance may be heavily tipped sometimes in one direction, and is probably always see-sawing,’ Bean wrote. In attempting to negotiate his way through the quagmire of political ideology Bean became ensnared in oversimplification: the very ideologies he was trying to come to terms with were engaged in a titanic struggle that was far from finished.

He wanted to marry this to his own conclusions drawn from the Great War, where the AIF’s experience ‘had shown what we could do given a common purpose.’ In a draft preface to The Straight Line, he wrote that, ‘in one way perhaps I saw more of its battles than any other man’.

I feel that anyone who took part had the right to question the whole structure of the system of which war is a part; has the right to question capitalism or religion or patriotism or paganism or whatever they believe to be a precondition of war. The problem forced itself on one from the first. In Gallipoli I could see no farther than that good must somehow surely come from so much courage and loyalty. But one could not go through that experience without questioning the morals, the religions, the education, the political systems, the ideals that were responsible for what one saw, and seeking all the time for a clear line through all the tangle.

Bean wrote a draft chapter in which he appeared as a character named John Percival after the great British educator and moral crusader who had strongly influenced Bean’s father, Edwin, and Bean himself. Percival was, of course, in the ‘Arnold Tradition’ of education. However, if Arnold’s educational philosophy emphasised character, then Percival’s stressed a sense of social mission: creating a new world for the masses. Bean was such a social missionary. He had set out his ideals in In Your Hands, Australians which he had reaffirmed War Aims of a Plain Australian, and had been disillusioned when they had not been wholeheartedly adopted.

In creating the alter ego ‘John Percival’—even armed, at Third Ypres in 1917, with Bean’s trademark telescope—he was identifying with the moral philosophy that drove Percival. As he wrote:

Again and again on Gallipoli or in billets in France John had thrashed out with his messmates the kind of Australia they might make if only Australians devoted their brains and vigour to planning it as they planned operations in war . . . the new towns planned and old ones replanned by applying—or inventing, where necessary—the principles of town-planning to Australian conditions of climate and social equality.

John . . . wrote a small book in which he crystallised their hopes for that dreamland which it would soon be in their hands to make or mar. ‘We should have a generation or two free for the improvement of Australia,’ he thought . . . ‘The League of Nations should ensure us peace for present lifetime—and if in that time we can’t build something like the Australia that we all want, we don’t deserve to possess her.’

Bean’s sense of frustration was evident. Perhaps, in the task of bringing his disparate ideals, hopes and memories together to find a straight line to a new future, he lost his bearings in an ideological sense—as he believed Australia had. The book would never be finished.

46

About turn

Two events just over a year apart had a lasting impact on Bean in World War II. Both occurred in Canberra, within a few kilometres of each other, and they stirred contrasting emotions. A few months into the war Keith Murdoch, by now a newspaper baron and the newly appointed Director-General of Information, asked Bean to come to Melbourne to establish a liaison system between the armed forces and the press. Murdoch had been appointed to the job on the advice of Federal Government Minister Harry Gullett, who then suggested that he approach Bean. Their old friend Sir Brudenell White had been recalled from retirement to become the chief of the general staff, underlining the close links that these men had forged in the Great War.

Bean’s job would be to facilitate contact between the chiefs of staff of the Army, Navy and Air Force, and the press, and ease the flow of war information. In mid-1940 he and Effie flew to Melbourne for a nine-week stay to establish the new system. He saw daily confidential cables from the British Government and other secret papers, and at conferences in Sydney and Melbourne passed on to the press background information on the war.

On the morning of 12 August 1940 Bean flew to Sydney for his second press conference there. At the same time, White, Gullett and two ministers in the Menzies United Australia Party Government—the Army Minister, Geoffrey Street, and the Air Minister, James Fairbairn—also left Melbourne to fly to Canberra for a Cabinet meeting. Along with six crew, they died when their Lockheed Hudson crashed and burst into flames as it prepared to land at Canberra airport.

When he arrived at the Information Department in Sydney, Bean was given the news. ‘It was unbelievable that four of the noblest of Australia’s leaders—two of them among my dearest friends—had perished in that dreadful moment. At first, in that office, the information about White was uncertain. When presently, after hoping against hope, I learnt the truth, for me a light went out.’ Their friendship stretched back to 1914, when White had been one of the first officers Bean met in Melbourne after his appointment as official correspondent. In the years after the war White, at Bean’s request, had read nearly every chapter of Bean’s own six volumes of the Official History, except those pages that referred to him. Bean regarded White’s comments as invaluable. Only the final volume lacked White’s critique.

Given Australia’s involvement in a new world war, the Government sought Bean’s advice on arrangements for an official history, and in 1940 he urged the appointment of an editor for the series. Bean stressed that it must be free from censorship, reassuring the Government that in the twenty-three years of work on the Official History only three points had been queried, and they were easily settled by conference between the minister and himself.

Meanwhile, John Treloar had left his position at the War Memorial after being made head of the Information Department. Taking charge of the military history section at Army Headquarters, Treloar began establishing a collection of war relics and documents. Sent to the Middle East, Treloar kept pushing for the Government to make an appointment for the official war correspondent position. He discussed the two main contenders with Bean—Sydney journalists Gavin Long and Kenneth Slessor. Treloar was not convinced that Slessor was the right person for the position, saying he was lazy and had ‘a wrong conception of his job as official correspondent.’ Slessor had made no attempt to collect war records by interviewing the men as Bean did. ‘I am afraid that Slessor is not likely to be a strong candidate for this appointment. I think he would be keen to have it, and more or less assumes he will get it, but as far as I can gather he is making no serious effort to qualify himself for the task and so forge strong claims,’ Treloar wrote to Bean. In a letter shortly after, he added: ‘I believe Gavin Long would be a better choice as editor. He is more solid and hard-working, and I think has a greater regard for exactness.’

Bean also had reservations about Slessor. In Canberra, he met with the commander of the 2nd AIF, Tom Blamey, now knighted and holding the rank of Lieutenant General. He was unlikely to hear anything positive from Blamey about Slessor, as the correspondent had become the commander’s enemy through his reporting in the Middle East. Bean told Treloar that Slessor, as the official war correspondent, ‘had the ball at his feet if he wanted it.’ But he doubted if Slessor had compiled any records. Bean thought the job may have to go to someone more adept at collecting information, and suggested Long be given the appointment.

Yet another war correspondent—the broadcaster Chester Wilmot—sought out Bean. Before leaving for the front, Wilmot met Bean, who told him that the war correspondent’s role went beyond reporting to Australians at home. Occasionally, said Bean, a good war reporter should use his access to those in high command to represent the views of the men on the ground. Wilmot did not forget this, and when he later came across serious mistakes in Crete and in Greece, as well as the indolence of many of the headquarters staff in Cairo, he took the matter to the then Commander-in-Chief, Sir Archibald Wavell. While Wavell appreciated the information, it was the start of tensions with Blamey.

Blamey’s appointment to AIF commander had been one of White’s first acts, but Bean immediately detected widespread criticism—though not public at the time—of the decision. Bean’s friend and biographer Dudley McCarthy has suggested that with his perception and capacity for detailed observation, Bean would have noted from their first contact in the Great War that Blamey kept to himself, made few close friends and would have been ‘a bad man to cross.’ Bean’s misgivings about Blamey surfaced in comments after the war noting his reputation as a bon vivant, and that he had ‘undoubtedly been reckless of his reputation and his record’ in the inter-war years when, as Victoria’s Police Commissioner, he had left his badge in a brothel. He was subsequently sacked after an attempt to cover up the shooting of a police officer.

Bean noted that the Attorney-General and External Affairs Minister, Dr H.V. ‘Bert’ Evatt, was critical of the Official History of the Great War. Evatt had told him there would be ‘many historians’, if only the records were preserved. With the Government in no hurry to make an appointment, Bean refused to let the matter rest and continued lobbying Prime Minister John Curtin. Finally Bean won his support, and the War Cabinet agreed to appoint Gavin Long on Bean’s recommendation.

Bean and Long were similar in background and temperament. Both were the sons of clergymen and both had attended All Saints’ College in Bathurst. Both had been journalists early in life for The Sydney Morning Herald and both were appointed official war correspondents, Bean in 1914 and Long in 1939. Both were eyewitnesses to the wars about which they later wrote. Long adopted many of Bean’s research and writing methods and would offer his authors the same firm but generous guidance that Bean’s colleagues enjoyed from him. And like Bean, Long would eventually write a one-volume summary of his war history.

But not everything went smoothly. Chester Wilmot, who was selected to write the volume on the siege of Tobruk and the battle of El Alamein, wrote to Bean following publication of his book The Struggle For Europe with his official history volume not yet completed. He wanted to acknowledge his indebtedness for Bean’s advice. ‘You always drilled into me the importance of structure and of bringing together both sides of the story, and I think that what you taught me is very evident in the construction of the book and in the writing,’ Wilmot said. In the same letter he criticised Gavin Long’s first and second volumes, To Benghazi, and Greece, Crete and Syria, the first as needing more work, and the second for being ‘unduly ready to condemn’ the British command in the Greece, Crete and Syria campaigns.

I know the British historians think he has been too precipitate in his judgements, and has not taken the opportunity of finding out all of the facts on the controversial issues . . . I have put them quite bluntly to Gavin personally and by letter, but I hope that you will read his TS [typescript] with a critical eye and will endeavour to restrain him from submitting to pressure to bring out volumes before they are ready.

Clearly, Wilmot believed that Long had not been assiduous in following the Bean template. Wilmot never produced his volume: he died a few months later in a plane crash over the Mediterranean Sea.

With Bean preoccupied with the final stages of his last Official History volume, and caught up in lobbying over arrangements for the writing of the history of Australia in World War II, the Australian War Memorial neared completion. John Treloar, as the Memorial’s director, stayed in close contact with Bean during the inter-war years. When the history encountered difficulties in the 1930s, Treloar had arranged for the Memorial to take over publication and distribution through a government order scheme. No two men had worked more closely on gathering the records and history of the AIF, but when the vision for the Memorial was finally realised, Treloar was in the Middle East.

After the opening ceremony, on 11 November 1941, Bean wrote to Treloar, noting that everyone wished he could have been there. This was apt, because if Bean was the visionary, Treloar had been the institution’s guiding hand, establishing it and keeping it going during the 1920s and 30s. Bean told him Curtin’s speech was ‘just right, and the ceremony very impressive,’ and that there had been ‘very great appreciation of the Memorial from every side.’ Treloar replied that it was appropriate that the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 and the Australian War Memorial should be finished together. ‘The two were closely linked and I am glad that it was so.’

In Treloar’s absence, Bean became unhappy with the performance of the Information Department, which he had left shortly after the fatal plane crash in August 1940. Under the control of the Labor Government’s Postmaster-General, Senator William Ashley, Bean objected to the department’s radio ‘blurbs’ or ‘flashes’. He saw them as propaganda against the Germans and Japanese; in particular, he objected to the inflammatory, racist vilification of the Japanese. What upset him was the adoption of the very methods and arguments Australia was supposed to be fighting:

Reasonable statements of fact and argument, noble appeals to emotion, based on truths which most of us feel to be vital, carefully accurate disclosures of idleness, wherever it is relevant, in our enemy’s aims or methods, are all to the good. But the mere calling of names and making of faces in the effort to raise hatred—which is what these two-minute outbursts amount to—is not merely disastrously below the dignity of a civilised people, but will do us untold harm, wherever it reaches the ears or eyes of men and women with any culture.

A few days later, with no sign of change, Bean stepped up his criticism of the department’s ‘bad propaganda’. He wrote: ‘Apart from the direct damage to the moral cause for which we stand, the psychology of these outbursts is wholly bad. They remind one of nothing so much of a small frightened boy loudly bragging to keep his spirits up.’ Bean pointed out that he had ‘studied the Australian soldier for twenty-seven years, and I say without hesitation that there is nothing he so hates and despises as this sort of “skite.” A chief mark of the Digger is that of talking little and acting strongly.’ He believed that to use extremist propaganda while engaged in a war against a vicious racialist ideology was to court moral defeat. Such philosophical niceties, however, did not endear him to the Queensland Digger, which judged him to be ‘dangerously close to the people who want Australia to pull her punches.’ Bean’s changing ideas on race were not necessarily in keeping with contemporary opinion.

After the war ended, and as he watched appalled at family disruptions caused by the repatriation of non-European evacuees to Malaya, Bean’s ideas changed even more rapidly, and he advocated an immigration quota system which would have the dual aims of preventing dislocation caused by indiscriminate immigration and of avoiding offence to other races. He advocated a quota system that could be ‘entirely effective in safeguarding the economic interests on which it is based, without insistence . . . on a quite senseless colour-line.’

This was an about-turn for Bean. In his youth he had described a multiracial society as ‘that mixed horror.’ On the contrary, he now believed that positive benefits would flow from a more heterogeneous population produced by mixing various races. He dismissed ‘talk of the evils due to cross breeding’ as ‘very like the kind of trash that Hitler spoke.’ He recalled Harry Freame, the half-Japanese who was ‘the finest scout’ in the 1st AIF, a man who had devoted himself to Australia, who received the first Distinguished Conduct Medal at Anzac Cove and who, he believed, should have been awarded a Victoria Cross. Freame had headed a soldier settlement through the peace years until he died. He also recalled Trooper Billy Sing, the part-Chinese soldier who was ‘the most famous sniper’ of the 1st AIF. The Australian experience was that those who had been ‘living and working among us with the friendship and goodwill of their Australian neighbours, grows not into a Fifth Column, but into a steadfastly loyal community of the utmost value to its adopted nation in war and peace.’

Bean’s attitude to race had undergone a fundamental change by the end of World War II. He had entered the Great War with an evolutionist view of the world, but he had seen that war brought no benefits; it only killed the ‘best men’ and encouraged antisocial qualities. Bean entered the 1920s and 1930s fearing war, fervently supporting the League of Nations, and even supporting appeasement of Hitler to avoid war. However, the rise of Nazism and anti-Semitism brought home to him the evils of racism, and by the end of World War II, confronted with the horror of Hitler’s ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish question’, Bean understood that there was no such thing as racial superiority. The one thing missing from Bean’s advocacy on race relations was inclusion of the Aborigines. The Great War had scuttled his plans for a series of articles about Aborigines after a visit to outback South Australia, and he never revisited the issue.

Nevertheless, in his early writings he despaired about the survival of the Aborigines in the face of a clash of cultures. He acknowledged their achievements in a harsh country, and accepted that wrongdoing on both sides characterised early encounters and bloodshed between Aborigines and Europeans. He lamented the displacement of Aborigines from traditional lands and recognised that European Australians had an obligation to acknowledge the Aborigines as the country’s original inhabitants.

47

Back among old diggers

Effie Bean saw it first: Charles Bean would sit in silence at the dinner table, abstractedly chewing each mouthful thirty-two times. This had become his custom. If not at the dinner table, her husband would retreat to his potato patch or weed the lawn, devoting an hour to each square metre. During these long, bleak silences, Effie told the historian Denis Winter, Charles reflected on good friends who had not returned or the Western Front’s bleak crater-fields. Effie understood.

Four years at the front had given Bean a horror of war that affected him for the rest of his life. He had witnessed shocking injuries and still carried a bullet in his thigh. He had buried his cousin along with countless friends and acquaintances. On his return to Australia in June 1919, General Sir Brudenell White acknowledged Bean’s bravery: ‘That man faced death more times than any other man in the AIF, and had no glory to look for either. What he did—and he did wonders—was done from a pure sense of duty.’

It is inconceivable that Bean would not have suffered a degree of traumatic stress from these experiences. But he was there to do a job, and his professional discipline undoubtedly helped inure him to the events he recorded in his diaries and in cables back to Australia. He debriefed in these diaries, whether fulminating against generals, politicians, artists or fellow correspondents. His character analyses could be withering and the observations insightful and gripping. But he wrote little about his own experiences where his life had been often at risk; these were the diaries of a professional observer at work.

While so many men returning from Gallipoli and the Western Front had sought solace in alcohol, Bean instead had focused on work: writing and editing the Official History volumes, checking and cross-checking his diary entries, notebooks and, with his staff, the more than 21 million pages that John Treloar’s Australian War Records Section had accumulated. Between 1919 and 1941, Bean sent out more than 10,000 letters seeking information, in which he said he felt that it was ‘one’s duty to the AIF to make this history as accurate as it can possibly be made.’ Then there were the 60,000 questionnaires sent out to the next of kin, 45,000 of which were filled in and returned. The intensity with which Bean approached this work over so many years, together with the intellectual detachment required, perhaps gave him some protection. He had seen too much, however, to avoid post-traumatic stress altogether.

Ted Le Couteur, the son of Bean’s adopted daughter Joyce, was at university, and full of questions about philosophy and psychology that he would discuss with his grandfather on walks at Collaroy. ‘He wasn’t a person who forced his views or attitudes on to anyone. One thing I will always remember, I asked him about war and he immediately shut up. I think he may have said, “I prefer not to talk about it”.’ Ted concluded that Bean ‘was probably the most inappropriate person in a way to be a war journalist because he hated aggression, he hated violence, he hated war and the things that war brings out. He was such a gentle man that in retrospect I just can’t imagine him being involved in that sort of stuff.’

A few years earlier, in September 1955, Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies had arranged for a lifetime honorarium of £10 a week to be paid to Bean in recognition of his contribution to the nation; this was later increased to £25 (about $700 in 2013). Bean noted at the time: ‘if Effie outlives me she will receive £20 per week. This was unasked for and entirely unexpected and a great relief.’ Bean’s comments were heartfelt: his wife understood the personal toll that the war and the subsequent years of writing the Official History had taken. Her vitality and effervescence provided a counterweight to his introspection.

During these postwar years, Bean wrote four books. Disappointed that the Official History had failed to reach a wider readership, he wrote a short history of Australia’s war effort, Anzac to Amiens, published in 1946. Gallipoli Mission followed two years later, telling the story of his return to Gallipoli at war’s end. In 1950 he published Here, My Son, a history of private boys’ schools in Australia. Education was at the core of Bean’s beliefs for improving society. Bean went to school in England at a time of vibrant philosophical change in the British school system. Primed by his father’s experience under John Percival, Bean’s own values for the rest of his life were shaped by these years.

After meeting Percival at Oxford, Bean had been critical of Britain over Boer War concentration camps. Importantly, in 1912, when Bean was The Sydney Morning Herald correspondent in London, he returned to Clifton College to hear Percival explain that his aim had been ‘to turn out, to serve its country in every walk of life, a steady stream of men made competent by a rather broader training, modest, industrious, fit to sympathise with the needs of a modern democracy, and fearless to face the right and wrong in the social problems of this age.’

Bean thought this an inherent truth about the British, because ‘every day and hour the country reaps invaluable good from it.’ He theorised that the public school system was the most important institution in Britain because it turned out men ‘who have on the whole this distinguishing feature—that they will do their work in life not merely for the sake of the reward, but for the sake of the work itself.’ This was not so evident in Australian professionals who, schooled in Australia, had not been steeped in ‘this scarcely conscious sense of public duty.’ For Bean, to write the Official History was to fulfil this commitment to ‘public duty’.

Bean’s final book, published in 1957, was Two Men I Knew, in which he paid tribute to General Bridges and General White. He also revised On the Wool Track and The Dreadnought of the Darling. All his books, including those written on behalf of the nation, had not made Bean wealthy. He noted in his diary in 1947, for instance, that he had eaten into his capital to the extent of £600 (more than $37,000 in 2013). His brother, Jack, offered to help—‘when he thought my health was under strain, to bring up Effie’s income and mine to an amount that would clear us of worries by giving us £212 a year.’ In May 1947 Bean was appointed Chairman of the ABC’s Promotions Appeal Board, which meant Jack’s financial support was no longer needed. Perhaps unwittingly, Bean had taken literally the words of his mother, Lucy, about her then six-year-old son: ‘I do not want to see you a rich man, or man holding a leading position, so much as to see you a good, charitable man.’ And above all, she had wanted him to pursue truth.

Against this background, Bean revisited comments about John Monash he had written on 1 June 1918. The general, he had said, had worked to get command of the Australian Corps ‘by all sorts of clever well hidden subterranean channels.’ With a shaky hand and spidery handwriting, he now wrote alongside that assertion: ‘I do not now believe this to be true.’ This was an important mea culpa on an issue that had sat uncomfortably in the background since the Great War, and it came as he re-evaluated his views on the question of race. He would never, though, place Monash in the same league as Brudenell White.

Bean became chairman of the War Archives Committee, which Prime Minister John Curtin had convened to preserve Australia’s World War II records. Thus the foundations for the National Archives of Australia were laid. Additionally, he was appointed chairman of the board of the Australian War Memorial in 1951. John Treloar died shortly afterwards. With Gullett already dead, Bean was the last of the founding group. In reality, there had been sharp differences between Treloar and Bean since 1943, on what relics were to be collected, and on the pace of change. And with Treloar gone, there was suddenly a shortage of men with intimate knowledge of the internal operations of the AWM. Bean had recognised that the job was getting too big even for Treloar, who worked eighty-hour weeks. With Treloar having delayed appointments, the institution was understaffed. As Michael McKernan wrote in his history of the War Memorial, no one knew how Treloar had proposed to complete the Roll of Honour, how he had intended to classify and display World War II relics, and what building extensions he had in mind. Bean suggested that Arthur Bazley, who had been Acting Director from 1942 to 1946, needed to be brought back from his position at Immigration ‘at the earliest possible moment.’ Better than anyone, Bean knew that Bazley had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Australia in the Great War and wrote to the Public Service Board supporting his former batman. But it was to no avail; the government appointed Acting Director Jim McGrath to the directorship. Bazley undoubtedly had the better claims for the position and thought of appealing. Bean said he would support him, but added that he was impressed by what he had seen of McGrath. Bazley did not appeal.

Bean and the board had allowed Treloar a relatively free run, but Bean now decided to play a more active role in the AWM’s operations. He directed McGrath to establish a Plans Committee—something he had urged Treloar to do nine years earlier. The committee would set priorities and devise strategies to complete and develop the AWM. Bean also undertook the first survey of the 1914–18 relics collection—only to conclude that many of the collection’s most valuable items could not be found. He was surprised by the failure to show an important Australian invention, the periscope rifle, a device that had saved the lives of many Anzacs at Gallipoli by virtually ending the threat posed by Turkish snipers. Bean wanted the story told but knew that no periscope rifle had survived the evacuation. He also knew that the then External Affairs Minister, R.G. ‘Dick’ Casey, had made a sketch of a periscope rifle while at Gallipoli. He wrote to Casey and, based on his notes, ordered a replica to be made for display. Although it was not authentic, the replica told an important part of the story of Australians at war.

Bean also found himself mired in controversy and out of touch with public sentiment. With the reopening of the Japanese Embassy in Canberra, Bean ordered the removal from public display at the Memorial of the World War II surrender sword and table. He was being courteous, wanting to improve Australian–Japanese relations, but did not reckon on the critical public reaction. His decision ran counter to his own concept for the War Memorial after the Great War. The display was reinstated.

As chairman, Bean had the task of conducting Queen Elizabeth through the Memorial during her visit to Canberra in 1954. According to members of the Bean family, the Queen offered him knighthood, which he declined—as he had done in 1940. He had also refused a CBE in 1920. Bean had written to the Governor-General in 1940 expressing his appreciation but explaining why he refused the first knighthood offer:

I have for many years held that in Australia the interest of the nation would be best served by the elimination of social distinctions, so far as is reasonably possible. Though I have the greatest admiration for many titled men and women (and for their work and influence) it seems to me that in practice, despite certain advantages, the system encourages false values among our people, and that our generation needs above everything to see and aim at true values. For this reason, and this only, I have begged to decline this reward . . .

To have accepted a knighthood, no matter how strongly pressed on him, would have been out of character for such a firm believer in egalitarianism. Furthermore, Bean felt that in all conscience, he could not accept a knighthood when he had done so little compared with the bravery of the Diggers in war. Bean told his assistant, Johnny Balfour, he had no regrets. ‘I don’t really mind my close friends knowing, so long as it is not generally known.’

Gradually, he resigned from his positions with the War Memorial, the National Archives and the ABC, and retired with Effie to a smaller house overlooking the ocean at Collaroy. Together, they had dinner once a month in the city. With sixty friends, they marked his eightieth birthday at a Kings Cross hotel.

By early 1963 Bean’s health had begun to decline seriously. In August, Jack Bean wrote to Brentwood School about draft chapters on a history of the school that had been sent to his brother to correct, saying his memory was failing and that he would be unable to complete the task. Their younger brother Monty Bean returned the corrected chapters five months later, writing: ‘my brother Charlie is I am sorry to say much too ill to take any part in criticising any part of the history.’

As his health and mental acuity were failing him, Bean began a note to Effie, written in spidery, unsteady handwriting:

My darling,

What is the aim which, of all aims we would most wish to see attained in our life time?’

Enigmatic though this was, it had a familiar ring to it: Bean was still in search of the truth. Effie wrote on the note later: ‘My darling’s last four lines he wrote sitting in the sunroom—he was not well enough to finish his letter to me.’

When dementia set in, at the age of eighty-four, Bean was admitted to the Concord Repatriation General Hospital, on the peaceful backwaters of Sydney Harbour, where many old Diggers also lived. Effie visited him regularly. Bean died there on 30 August 1968.

On hearing the news, Arthur Bazley wrote to Effie about his ‘beloved mentor’ and ‘second father’. He had thought back to ‘the old days at Tuggeranong and in Sydney, and well beyond them across the years from my first meeting with him in 1914, and at Anzac and in France—the years when I came to worship him.’ He paid tribute to Effie as ‘a wonderful helpmate and there was no doubt whatever that it was largely due to you that he lived to such a ripe old age.’

There was little fanfare or recognition at the funeral, on 2 September 1968, with just 200 mourners in the vastness of St Andrew’s Cathedral, the church where he and Effie had married in 1921. A section of George Street was closed, and a police motorcycle escort led the cortege when the service finished. The scene was in stark contrast to the funeral for Sir John Monash, which had drawn a crowd of more than 300,000 people thirty-seven years earlier in Melbourne. Perhaps this contrast reflects the two men’s personalities; in its own sombre way, certainly, Bean would have preferred the low-key version.

Nonetheless, there were people who thought there should have been a much grander farewell. A letter tucked away in files at the Australian War Memorial, written by an old soldier, laments the lack of honours and officials at the funeral. ‘Altogether I found the ceremony a most depressing example of the rapidity with which a national figure is allowed to fade from sight,’ the Digger wrote to Arthur Bazley. A national figure he was, and faded from sight Charles Bean had.

Epilogue

People who knew Charles Bean admired and loved him, yet over the decades he has also attracted critics who accuse him of glorifying war and perpetuating a nationalistic myth. Inevitably, there were flaws in his performance as both a war correspondent and a war historian. Nonetheless, he showed qualities that set him apart.

Philip Knightley, in his book The First Casualty, writes that almost all World War I British war correspondents identified with the war effort. Military censorship of despatches became largely unnecessary as journalists fell in with military and government objectives. The war correspondents ‘allowed themselves to be absorbed by the propaganda machine.’ Knightley says Bean was different. ‘Only one correspondent did not remain silent, and his criticism was muted by his intense nationalism. This was Charles Bean.’ Rather than reporting news, it was accurately recording the war that concerned him. ‘Somewhat to the amazement of the British correspondents, he set himself the task of visiting, on the day of the battle or soon afterwards, every important trench or position occupied by Australian troops in Gallipoli and France. He accepted little second-hand information.’ As the British correspondent Philip Gibbs observed, Bean ‘regarded it as his bounden duty to see everything with his own eyes.’

Bean may not have questioned the war itself, but he did challenge whether Britain was making the best use of the AIF to win it. As Geoffrey Serle concluded, the Official History is a work well worthy of the AIF, but it might easily have been otherwise. Bean identified with the ordinary troops, eschewing the safety of headquarters to follow the men into battle for four years. Unlike the British history, his narrative was not written for the generals but for the Diggers.

Bean’s accounts of the Anzacs on Gallipoli and on the Western Front not only challenged the traditions of military history, they set the parameters for how Australian military history would be recorded. In this they exerted a pervasive cultural influence. As the historian Humphrey McQueen has pointed out, Bean’s approach was emulated by the founders of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Unlike their counterparts with the British Dictionary of National Biography, who only wrote about the great and famous, they set out to commemorate a representative sample of society.

The twelve-volume Official History—six books of which Bean personally wrote—ran to four million words, 10,000 pages, 2250 maps and 1500 illustrations, and documented the actions and names of around 8000 men and women. Bean’s goal was to reach a non-military audience; he once confided to Gavin Long that he had never met an academic historian who had read any of his volumes.

Such is the enigma of Charles Bean—a man who was captivated by the mateship and egalitarianism that he saw in outback Australians, and then in Australian soldiers in the Great War. Mateship is necessarily a part of any army, but Bean saw Australian mateship as different. Born in the unique environment of the bush, it was sustained by the moral and social qualities he admired—characteristics that were also part of the British public school code. As he saw it, the Anzac spirit meant going straight at the job, standing by a mate, always taking a worthwhile risk, enduring hardship and refusing to give in. As Bean put it in an Anzac Day talk on ABC Radio in 1953, ‘Where officers were killed men carried on. They always found someone . . . in very many cases a private who would take them forward again.’

If the Official History volumes have never garnered the readership they deserve, that is also true of his diaries. Bean was not blind to the limitations of the diaries and of eyewitness accounts in general. As a condition of the gift of his papers to the Australian War Memorial he stipulated that the Memorial attach to every diary and notebook a caveat which reads:

These writings represent only what at the moment of making them I believed to be true. The diaries were jotted down almost daily with the object of recording what was then in the writer’s mind. Often he wrote them when very tired and half asleep: also, not infrequently, what he believed to be true was not so—but it does not follow that he always discovered this, or remembered to correct the mistakes when discovered. Indeed, he could not always remember that he had written them.

Thus while the records should be used with caution, he emphasised that he did try to ensure accuracy by widely consulting those who had seen or otherwise taken part in the events. On one level, these diaries tell the immediate story of the AIF that Bean recorded; on another they provide an understanding of his commitment to the troops and the impact of the war on him.

At Bean’s funeral service, his friend, the media executive Angus McLachlan, spoke of ‘a whole and integrated man’ in whom ‘were none of the contradictions, the conflicting values, that dwell in so many men. There were no hidden vanities lurking behind the modest exterior.’ Such was the devotion Bean won from his friends—yet he has become an arcane presence somewhere in the nation’s consciousness of the Great War, the recipient of nodding recognition that he did something great but often with little understanding beyond that.

In the wake of the Great War he was fervently determined that the young nation must avoid the pitfalls of the Old World. Bean was idealistic, even utopian, in his aspirations for the nation. In this, he could be seen as one of those rare figures who managed to affect the way Australians regard themselves and their country. Arthur Bazley, who worked closely with him for twenty-five years, could lay claim to knowing him as well as anyone. In a letter in 1939 to Bean’s mother, he praised him not just as ‘the guiding spirit’ of the Australian War Memorial, but also as ‘a practical idealist, possessed of all the noble virtues—courage, humility, honesty, selflessness, public spiritedness.’

Sir Robert Menzies once observed that Bean was a ‘man and scholar of self-effacing modesty.’ Few would disagree. Menzies also described him as ‘the greatest Australian of his generation.’ Whether others would share this view is moot; what is clear is that Bean would have disagreed. He had no doubt that the greatest Australians were the Diggers with whom he had rubbed shoulders on the battlefields. But without him their story would have been incomplete. This was Charles Bean’s unique contribution to the story of a generation of Australians who went to war. He knew the price they had paid.

As a headmaster and educationist, Charles Bean’s father, Edwin, believed that the prime purpose of education was to form character and train the mind. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)

Lucy Bean and the infant Charles, in a photograph probably taken at Bathurst, New South Wales, in early 1880. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)

Younger brothers Montague, or ‘Tig’ (left), and John, also known as ‘Jack’ or ‘Jock’ (right), flank older brother Charles in a late 1880s photo. Charles would develop a fascination with both the navy and cricket. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)

By the time he was a teenager, Charles Bean had developed his drawing skills. (Photo: C.E.W. Bean Private Collection, Australian War Memorial.)

Charles Bean, aged 15 in 1895. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)

The three brothers, Monty, Charles and Jack, as young men at the turn of the 20th century. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)

Charles Bean was admitted to the Sydney Bar as a barrister in 1905, but a legal career held no interest. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)

Charles Bean at Brentwood School, when he was The Sydney Morning Herald’s London correspondent. During the posting he covered the 1912 Ashes tour. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)

Charles Bean, official correspondent, and Dr Jack Bean, the 3rd Battalion’s medical officer, pictured together on the eve of departure for Gallipoli. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)

From the time of his appointment in 1914 to when they returned to Australia, as pictured here on the Kildonan Castle in 1919, Arthur Bazley (right) was Charles Bean’s loyal batman. (Photo: Peter and Shirley Bazley.)

A group portrait of staff and officers at Mena camp, Egypt. Charles Bean is at the far left of the back row, and Major General William Throsby Bridges, commander of the new Australian Imperial Force (AIF), is sixth from the left in the front. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)

On reaching the beach at Anzac Cove at Gallipoli on the morning of 25 April 1915, Charles Bean snapped this shot of the Australian Divisional Headquarters Staff wading ashore. (Photo: Australian War Memorial.)

On the island of Imbros, Charles Bean (front) leads the British correspondent, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, down a dusty track. (Photo: Australian War Memorial.)

Keith Murdoch (left) and Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, who both played significant roles in reporting the Gallipoli campaign. (Photo: Australian National Library.)

From this rudimentary dugout, Charles Bean worked throughout the Gallipoli campaign, leaving on 19 December 1915, two days after this photo was taken. (Photo: Australian War Memorial.)

Arthur Bazley in a German trench on the Western Front. (Photo: Peter and Shirley Bazley.)

On the back of this photo, Charles Bean wrote: ‘German shell hole fair in the road from Casualty Corner past the Chalk Pit to Pozières. This shell fell near an old German battery position just N of Casualty Corner … I got Brooks to take these photos and put Bazley into the shellhole.’ (Photo: Peter and Shirley Bazley.)

Amid the mud of the Western Front, Charles Bean watches the first Australian advance towards the Hindenburg Line at the end of February 1917. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)

Charles Bean, British author John Masefield, Australian Official Artist Lieutenant Will Dyson, and the Russian exile Alexis Aladin, contemplate the devastated old battlefield at Pozières. (Photo: Australian War Memorial.)

Charles Bean (left), and Brigadier General Henry Goddard, commander of the 9th Infantry Brigade (right), explain Australian troop operations during the battle of Mont St Quentin to Prime Minister Bill Hughes. (Photo: Australian War Memorial.)

Arthur Bazley’s photo of troops from the 24th Battalion AIF in a trench on the desolate battlefield after the battle of Broodseinde, near Ypres, 4 October 1917. On the back is written, ‘The Germans occupy the wood in the background past the sniper post.’ (Photo: Peter and Shirley Bazley.)

Charles Bean, centre, with other members of the Australian Historical Mission on Hill 60, Gallipoli, on 22 February 1919. With him is Major Zeki Bey, second left, a Turkish Regiment commander during the Gallipoli campaign who provided information from the Turkish side. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)

The first volume of the Official History finished, Charles Bean, centre, prepared on 11 December 1920 to send it to Sydney for publication. Among those from his staff with him at Tuggeranong homestead are John Balfour, second left, and Arthur Bazley, far right. (Photo: Australian War Memorial.)

Hospitalised with a ‘mastoid problem’, according to the details on the back of this original family photograph, Charles Bean is shown here on the steps of Queanbeyan Hospital. To his right is Sister Ethel Young, his future wife. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)

A disconsolate Arthur Bazley, with burns suffered in a gas carbide accident at Tuggeranong in 1920. (Photo: Peter and Shirley Bazley.)

On the back of this photo of Effie as a nurse, Charles Bean wrote, ‘Eff’s photo for me, 1920.’ (Photo: Bean Private Collection, Australian War Memorial.)

Charles and Effie Bean on their wedding day, Sydney, 24 January 1921. Jack Bean (right), was his brother’s best man. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)

Charles and Effie Bean at Tuggeranong. Bean sent this photo to Arthur Bazley, writing on the back, ‘To Baz and Mrs Bazley with all the best—this memory of 29 years ago from EC and CEW Bean.’ (Photo: Peter and Shirley Bazley.)

Arthur Bazley (left), and John Balfour (right), sort through Charles Bean’s private diaries compiled during the war. (Photo: Australian War Memorial.)

A seated Charles Bean in discussion with the official medical historian for World War I, Dr A.G. Butler (centre), and Gavin Long (left), the official historian for World War II. (Photo: Australian War Memorial.)

Charles Bean often continued to wear his army jacket as he wrote the Official History at Tuggeranong. (Photo: Australian War Memorial.)

Charles and Effie Bean with their adopted daughter, Joyce. On the right is Miss Violet Gibbins, headmistress of Osborne Ladies College, Blackheath, NSW, which Joyce attended. Miss Gibbins’ brother, Norman, died in the battle of Fromelles. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)

When the Queen Mother visited Canberra in 1958, Charles Bean took her on a tour of important relics at the Australian War Memorial, including ‘G for George’, the Lancaster bomber Australians in Bomber Command flew in WWII. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)

Aware of her husband’s failing health, Effie Bean watches anxiously as Charles Bean speaks at the opening of the Hall of Memory at the Australian War Memorial on 24 May 1959 in what was probably his last public appearance. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)

Notes

Part One

The Early Years

Prologue

The details of Charles Bean’s study were drawn from the recollections of his granddaughter, Anne Carroll, while the Australian War Memorial holds his library of books.

The ‘blood’ letter was published in The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), 15 January 1953.

Bean’s speech, ‘What England means to me,’ was an address to the Women’s League of Empire, Sydney, March 1934; AWM38 3DRL 6673/571 33/3.

The family diary entry was dated 8 August 1886.

Bean’s draft of his proposed speech to the Australian National University for the presentation of his honorary degree is held at AWM38 3DRL 6673/480.

The quote is from C.E.W. Bean, On the Wool Track, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1963, revised edn, p. 132.

The letter was from Ross Hohnen, Registrar of the Australian National University, 19 November 1958; AWM38 3DRL 6673/480.

The letter from Monash is held at AWM38 3DRL 7953/4 pt 1.

Bean’s response to the Hohnen letter was dated 13 April 1959; AWM38 3DRL 6673/480.

The story of the mule is found in Bean diary 15 August 1917.

1—Here, My son

Lucy Bean’s quote is drawn from The History of All Saints’ College, Bathurst, p. 33.

For further information on the Arnold tradition, see: Michael McCrum, Thomas Arnold, Headmaster, Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 53. Also see Dr Stephen Ellis, C.E.W. Bean, A Study of his Life and Works, University of New England, Armidale, 1969, p. 176; Justice Geoff Lindsay, ‘Be Substantially Great In Thy Self: Getting to Know C.E.W. Bean, Barrister, Judge’s Associate, Moral Philosopher,’ http://www.forbessociety.org.au/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/bean.pdf

The Bean letter regarding John Percival was dated 9 March 1918; AWM38 3DRL 7447/26. Also, regarding Edwin Bean and Percival, see AWM38 3 DRL 7447/38, item 2.

Edwin’s letter to his grandfather is quoted in Dudley McCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somme: The story of C.E.W. Bean, John Ferguson, Sydney, 1983, p. 15. Also see AWM38 3DRL 7447/38, items 3 to 4, regarding his results.

Details of Edwin Bean’s teaching job in Hobart and his courtship of Lucy Butler are at AWM38 3DRL 7447/3 to 4. Also see Bean on Brentwood; AWM PR 82/131, 2 of 4 folders; AWM38 3DRL 7447/38.

Edwin Bean’s comments about the sons of squatters are drawn from a letter, 10 May 1880; AWM38 3DRL 7447/38, item 1.

The reference to Madeline Bean’s death is drawn from the private family diary.

Edwin’s description of Charles as a ‘King Sturdy’ is drawn from AWM38 3DRL 7447/3 to 4.

Lucy Bean’s letter referring to Little Dorrit was dated 22 May 1884, AWM38 3DRL 7447/3 to 4. Her comments about Charles being observant are at AWM38 3DRL 7447/38.

The references to the Prodigal Son are contained in Bean’s Account for Effie, a memoir, in the Bean collection, Australian War Memorial, 1924. Papers of Arthur Bazley, AWM38 3DRL/3520; folder 10a of 143; also Bazley AWM38 3DRL 3520, folder 10c of 143.

The letter Bean wrote to his grandfather is at AWM38 3DRL 7447/3 to 4.

Bean’s recollections of his school years at Bathurst are contained in Account for Effie.

Edwin Bean’s letter regarding his resignation is at AWM38 3DRL 7447/38, item 1. Details of the sale of All Saints’ are referred to in AWM PR 82/131, 2 of 4 folders; AWM38 3DRL 7447/38, item 1.

2—Waterloo

Bean’s account of arriving in England, and other details in this chapter regarding his observations of England are drawn from ‘What England means to me’, manuscript for an address to the Women’s League of Empire, Sydney, March 1934, AWM38 3DRL 6673/571 33/3.

See Tasker letter, 18 October 1930, AWM38 3DRL 6673/573, and Account for Effie, for references to Latin and Euclid, and Waterloo.

Details of Bean’s visits to Brussels are in Bazley AWM38 3DRL 3520, folder 10c of 143, and Tasker letter.

The reference to British battles is drawn from C.E.W. Bean, Anzac to Amiens, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1946, p. 9.

Details of Edwin Bean’s time at Brentwood School are drawn from his book A Historical Sketch of Sir Anthony Browne’s School, Brentwood Essex, Westbury Press, Essex, undated. Also, see AWM PR 82/131, papers of Lewis Collection of Bean family papers for further details of the school’s history.

The references to lighting a fire in the bush, ‘democratisation’ of the school, and Edwin Bean’s financial losses in 1893 are drawn from AWM38 3DRL 7447/17 to 19.

3—Tempering steel

See AWM38 3DRL 7447/5 to 6 for the reference to ‘the Horse-tralians’.

The reference to Bean’s accent is drawn from ‘What England means to me’, manuscript for an address to the Women’s League of Empire, Sydney, March 1934, AWM38 3DRL 6673/571 33/3.

Edwin Bean’s advice to his son and other letters in this chapter are drawn from AWM38 3DRL 6673/902, as is Lucy Bean’s letter regarding boxing.

Charles Bean’s assessment of his cricketing abilities is drawn from AWM38 3DRL 7447/5 to 6. Also see Ellis, C.E.W. Bean, p. 12, and Michael McKernan, Gallipoli, A Short History, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2010.

Material relating to Thoby Stephen is drawn from Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell with Thoby Stephen, Hyde Park Gate News, Hesperus Press Ltd, London, 2005, pp. 53, 221, 222. Also see extract from ‘A Sketch of the Past’ by Virginia Woolf as reproduced in her Moments of Being, Hogarth Press, London, 2nd edn, 1985, pp. 124–6.

Bean’s reference to Thoby Stephen is drawn from Tasker letter. Also see Account for Effie; and C.S. Knighton (ed.), Clifton College: Foundation to Evacuation, Bristol Record Society, 2012, pp. 158–9.

Bean’s reference to honing his writing style is drawn from Account for Effie and the Tasker letter.

The reference to debating is drawn from Ellis, C.E.W. Bean, p. 12; and AWM38 3DRL 7447/5 to 6.

See AWM PR 82/131, regarding Edwin Bean’s advice to Charles.

Bean’s references to Lucretius and Socrates are drawn from ‘The ABC Weekly’, Sydney, 3 April 1948, p. 41; and AWM 38 3DRL 6673/902.

See Bazley AWM38 3DRL 3520, folder 10c of 143, regarding Jack Bean’s comments on Charles’ naval knowledge.

Correspondence from Edwin Bean to Charles was drawn from AWM38 3DRL 7447/17 to 19, and AWM38 3DRL 6673/897.

Jack Bean’s comments about his brother, his physical appearance and his future career, are drawn from Bazley, AWM38 3DRL 3520, folder 10c of 143.

4—Moral stance

Edwin Bean’s comments regarding his sons were drawn from AWM38 3DRL 7447/17 to 19.

Details of Bean’s scholarship and his tutoring job at Tenerife are at AWM38 3DRL 7447/5 to 6, as well as Account for Effie.

Bean’s account of Queen Victoria’s funeral was drawn from AWM38 3DRL 7447/5 to 6.

Details of Bean’s Oxford results were sourced from AWM38 3DRL 7447/26, 3 DRL 7447/32, and the Tasker letter.

Greenidge’s reference and reference to the Civil Service of India job are at AWM38 3DRL 6673/894.

Details of John Percival’s criticism were drawn from Graham Neville, Radical Churchman: Edward Lee Hicks and the New Liberalism; Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 192.

Edwin Bean’s assessment of Charles’ letter is referred to in McCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somme, p. 44.

5—The lure of the pen

The account of Bean’s voyage to Australia, including visits to Hobart and Bathurst, was drawn from letters at AWM38 3DRL 7447/5 to 6; also from ‘What England Means to Me’.

Reference to teaching at Sydney Grammar is included in the Tasker letter.

‘The Approaching Sea Fight. Its Place in Naval History. Why it Will Be Worth Watching,’ Daily Telegraph, 13 April 1905, p. 5.

The account of Bean’s time with Justice Owen is drawn from Account for Effie and Lindsay, ‘Be Substantially Great in Thy Self ’.

The Ben Hall story was drawn from Ellis, C.E.W. Bean, p. 14.

The letter about approaching The SMH was sourced from AWM38 3DRL 7447/5 to 6.

Details about leaving Justice Owen, attending the Sydney School of Arts, tearing up the cheque and deciding to try journalism were sourced from Account for Effie and the Tasker letter.

6—Seeds of the myth

Charles Bean’s account of ‘The Impressions of a New Chum’ is drawn from Account for Effie.

The ‘Australia Revisited’ series was published in The SMH between 1 June and 20 July 1907.

The Spectator article was published in London on 13 July 1907.

Senator Pulsford’s response was published in the Spectator on 20 July 1907.

Records for the Australian National Defence League show that Bean was noted as a member on 30 August 1907, with his address given as Wigram Chambers, Phillip St., Sydney. AWM 2DRL/1098.

The letter from Bean to his parents was sourced from AWM38 3DRL 7447/5 to 6.

The comments comparing the law with writing were sourced from a letter Bean wrote to his grandson Edward Bean le Couteur, on 23 November 1961.

7—The cub

Bean’s accounts of why he was fitted for journalism, how he came to join The SMH, and his early experiences are drawn from Account for Effie, the Tasker letter, and the private family diary.

The letter from Bean to his parents about joining The SMH is at AWM38 3DRL 7447/5 to 6.

The Montague Grover quote was sourced from McCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somme, pp. 59–60.

Bean’s explanations of his approach to writing and life at The SMH office were sourced from Account for Effie.

The Brunsdon Fletcher quote was sourced from C. Brunsdon Fletcher, The Great Wheel, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1940, pp. 131, 132.

The description of Bean at Trades Hall was drawn from Gavin Souter, Company of Heralds, Melbourne University Press, 1981, p. 110.

For Bean’s assessment of W.M. Hughes it is necessary to read the various editions of On the Wool Track—see 1910 edn, p. 225; 1916 edn, p. 196; 1925 edn, p. 187. 1945 end, p. 157; 1963 edn, p. 114—where it becomes clear he was referring to Hughes.

The description of Bean by his cousin Joan Butler was drawn from a letter in the Worth family papers, 1888–1999, Mitchell Library, MSS 6980.

Bean’s reporting of the shipping strike was drawn from Ellis, C.E.W. Bean, p. 15.

Bean’s assessment of Hughes’ role was drawn from AWM38 3DRL 6673/571 33/3.

Justice Geoff Lindsay explains in his paper the connection through the Arnold tradition between Bean and Hughes.

Reference to Hughes’ column was sourced from L.F. Fitzhardinge, That Fiery Particle, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1964, p. 207.

Bean’s account of his trip to Broken Hill was sourced from his book The Dreadnought of the Darling, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1956 edn, pp. 16–19. Also see Account for Effie for references to this and his voyage to meet the American fleet.

See Souter, Company of Heralds, p. 110 for quotes from his account of the voyage.

See Bean’s book With the Flagship in the South, with quotes drawn from pp 2, 93, 131, 122, 123, 130, 129, 133, 135, 136.

Reference to the views of Deakin and Hughes was drawn from Michael Roe, Nine Australian Progressives, University of Queensland Press, 1984, p. 19.

See McCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somme, pp. 62–3, for references to Henry Lawson and Monty Grover.

Bean wrote to his father on 5 August 1909, ignoring the criticism. AWM38 3DRL 7447/9 to 10.

8—The Sydney passenger

Bean’s report on the opening of the Kosciuszko Hotel was published in The SMH, 9 June 1909.

See Bean’s book On the Wool Track, 1963, pp. vi, vii, for his account of his doubts about the assignment on the wool industry and how he resolved them. Extracts in the chapter are drawn from the book, see pp. 2, 63, 64; also the 1910 edn, pp. 138, 139, 146, 147. Also, see Account for Effie.

Bean’s references to the Aborigines were drawn from his book The Dreadnought of the Darling, pp. 186, 187, 183, 178–80 and 182–8.

For Bean’s account of the meeting with the Afghan, see The Dreadnought of the Darling, p. 150. For his thoughts on rural life, see The Dreadnought of the Darling, pp. 212, 221, 223; On the Wool Track, pp. 80, 128.

9—Moral certainty

Bean wrote of the family’s movements and about feeling overworked at The SMH in Account for Effie.

The letter telling his parents about his London posting is referred to in McCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somme, p. 68.

Bean’s thoughts on what he had seen during his trip across the United States were published in The Salon, vol. 2, no. 10, 1914, ‘A Code for Sydney’. Also see The SMH, 27 December 1910, and 7 January 1911.

His account of the New York hotel experience is related in McCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somme, p. 69.

His thoughts on town planning and Sydney were published in The SMH, 18 March 1911, and 5 July 1912.

Bean’s hope that Sydney could still ‘turn itself into a city that will be difficult to match,’ appeared in The Salon, p. 582.

Bean’s criticism of Culwulla Chambers was published in The SMH, 11 September 1912.

Bean’s account of returning to Brentwood was given in the Tasker letter and A Historical Sketch of Sir Anthony Browne’s School, Brentwood, Essex, p. 39.

For his article on cricket’s forward and back strokes, see Lewis Collection of Bean family letters, the Brentwoodian, June 1913. AWM PR 82/131.

Bean’s account of Macartney’s innings was published in The SMH, 24 July 2012, p. 7.

For material drawn from Bean’s book Flagships Three, Alston Rivers, London, 1913, see pp. 19, 18, xii, 276, 277, 218.

See The SMH, 25 June 1912, for Bean’s views on the ‘sheriff in the Pacific.’

10—Agent of change

For The SMH’s letter recalling Bean from London, see McCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somme, p. 72.

Bean’s criticism of Prime Minister Fisher was published in The SMH, 11 February 1913, and 25 February 1913.

Bean’s comment about the benefits of good food and country air were published in The SMH on 11 March 1913.

Bean’s farewell London column was published in The SMH, 25 March 1913.

Bean’s arrival in Sydney on 22 May 1913 is confirmed in his private diary.

The town-planning article was published in The Salon, p. 581.

Reference to Bean’s circle of influential town-planning allies was drawn from Robert Freestone, Cities, Citizens and Environmental Reform, Sydney University Press, 2009, p. 31.

The Hosfstadter quote was drawn from Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R., Vintage, New York, 1955.

Bean’s reference to how a nation’s physique was affected by town planning was drawn from Account for Effie.

The account of Bean by his cousin Joan was drawn from a letter in the Worth family papers, Mitchell Library, MSS 6980.

Bean’s attitude to his work at The SMH is drawn from the Lionel Wigmore letter, AWM38 3DRL 6673/573.

The Great Rivers series began in The SMH on 30 May 1914, with subsequent articles on 6 June and 17 June 1914.

See Account for Effie for Bean’s future plans.

Part Two

The War Years

11—The booted heel

Bean’s remark about ‘the trouble in Serbia’ is drawn from Account for Effie.

Bean’s quoted War Notes were published in The SMH on 31 July 1914, 3 August 1914, 6 August 1914, 11 August 1914, 12 August 1914.

For Bean’s statement regarding the anxiety of Australians, see Official History, Volume I, p. 17. For further analysis of this, see Douglas Newton, Hell-Bent, Scribe, Brunswick, Victoria, 2014.

Bean’s quote about forthcoming chaos was sourced from his book Anzac to Amiens, p. 22.

The references to Colonel Henry MacLaurin, and the Saturday editorials, were drawn from Account for Effie.

The editorial was published on 22 August 1914.

The account of the AJA vote for the correspondent’s position is drawn from Account for Effie, and R.M. Younger, Keith Murdoch: Founder of a Media Empire, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2003, p. 53. W.G. Conley’s comment was sourced from Account for Effie.

Bean’s account of meeting Major General William Throsby Bridges and Lieutenant Colonel Cyril Brudenell White is drawn from the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 (hereafter Official History), Volume I, p. 73; and Bean’s Two Men I Knew, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1957, pp. 1, 2 and 96.

The reference to the parameters under which Bean operated was drawn from the Official History, Volume XI, Australia During the War, 1941, p. 216n.

Bean’s reference to his ‘enigmatic uniform’ was drawn from his war diary no. 82, 18 July 1917.

Bean’s letters to his parents as departure neared were sourced from AWM38 3DRL 7447/5 to 6.

George Pearce’s remarks about Bean writing the history were sourced from Younger, Keith Murdoch, p. 53.

The account of how Arthur Bazley became Bean’s batman was drawn from P.A. Selth (ed.), Canberra Collection, Arthur Bazley, Lowden Publishing, Kilmore, 1976, pp. 233–4, and a letter to his parents, AWM38 3DRL 7447/5 to 6.

Bean’s letter to his parents on 20 October 1914 was sourced from AWM38 3DRL 7447/5 to 6.

Bean wrote to his solicitor in Sydney in December 1914 about the policy the Government had authorised him to arrange. The letter is privately held.

12—A hell of a time

The quote praising Bean appeared in the British Australasian, October 1914.

The accounts by Bean throughout this chapter of events during the voyage to Egypt were taken from his war diary no. 1. In particular, see entries for 9, 15, 27 November, 3 December 1914.

For Bean’s musings on the main problems a war correspondent faced, see The SMH 2 December 1926.

The quote from John Gellibrand was sourced from a letter to Bean, 21 October 1936; AWM38 3DRL 6673/71.

For discussion on the role of a war correspondent, see A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Happy Dispatches, Lansdowne Press, Sydney, 1980, p. 65; and Ellis, C.E.W. Bean, pp. 24–5.

A copy of the booklet by C.E.W. Bean What to Know in Egypt: A guide for Australasian soldiers, Cairo, 1915, is held by the AWM. Citation no. ABN 86324426; see pp. 13, 14, 15, 16.

Bean’s war diary no. 2 provides details on drunkenness in Cairo; see 1 January 1915.

For more details on the sex trade in Cairo, see Peter Stanley, Bad Characters, Pier 9, Sydney, 2010, p. 30.

Bean’s story on the ‘wasters’ was published in The SMH, 22 January 1915.

Bean’s thoughts on firing squads were sourced from war diary no. 2, 7–8 January 1915.

See war diary no. 2, 8 February 1915 for Bean’s comments on larrikins.

The article appeared in the Sunday Times, Sydney, 24 January 1915.

The Evening Post, New Zealand, 10 March 1915, was among papers that published the responses of Boer War soldiers.

The Mitchell Library in Sydney holds a copy of the Frank Westbrook poem in the papers of Ray Heaps, driver Field Artillery Brigade, AIF 516. It is dated 20 March 1915. Mitchell Library, MLDOC 285.

Bean’s clarification was published in various papers, including The SMH on 1 March 1915.

Bean’s reference to the poem is in his war diary no. 2, 2 March 1915. See also his entries around this issue for 4 and 9 March 1915. Also see Stanley, Bad Characters, p. 35.

See Bean war diary no. 2 entries for 9–30 January 1915, regarding his comments on the troops.

His reference to ‘a hell of a time’ was published in the Sydney Mirror, 26 September 1960.

13—Play the game

Bean’s account of fighting at Suez is at AWM38 3DRL 606/116, diary entry, 13 February 1915.

His article ‘Australian Hospitals at the Front Watch a Turkish Attack’ was written on 22 February 1915; AWM38 3DRL 8039/6.

See Les Carlyon, Gallipoli, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 2002, pp. 16–17, for the description of General Sir Ian Hamilton.

Bean’s cable praising the troops was written on 26 February 1915; AWM38 3DRL 8039/6.

The article ‘A Compact Body of Men’ was published in The SMH, 29 March 1915.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116, diary entries on 8, 13 February 1915; 14, 15, 31 March 1915; 1, 3, 5 and 8 April 1915 for his problems of gaining accreditation.

Bean’s assessment of Blamey was drawn from his book Two Men I Knew, p. 96.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116, diary for Bean’s entries on sailing to Gallipoli, 10 April 1915, and references to his brother Jack, 3 and 15 April 1915.

Bean’s account of the battle of Wazzir was drawn from AWM38 3DRL 606/116, diary entry, 2 April 1915.

The reference to the Coptic Archbishop of Cairo owning the brothels was drawn from correspondence from historian Sir Ernest Scott to Bean, 12 April 1934, citing Lord Stamfordham to Sir R. Munro Ferguson, 28 May 1916; AWM38 3 DRL 7953/16, part 3.

14—Digging in

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 for Bean diary, 25 April 1915, regarding the landing.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 for Bean diary, 15 April 1915, for his thoughts on not having full accreditation.

Bean’s details of breakfast aboard the Minnewaska were drawn from his book Anzac to Amiens, p. 84.

The account of the landing was drawn from Bean’s Official History, Volume I, The Story of Anzac, 1921, pp. 258–9, 134.

See PRO CAB45/233, Dardanelles Commission Papers, and AWM38 3DRL 606/249.39 regarding debate around the landing location.

The landing was not where the mistakes of the first day ended. Despite the Australians’ early overwhelming superiority in numbers, the cautious 3rd Brigade commander, Colonel Ewen Sinclair-MacLagan, decided to dig in on the Second Ridge. He believed, mistakenly, that Turkish numbers were greater. Thus an opportunity to advance to the objectives of Hill 971 and the Third Ridge against a vastly outnumbered enemy was lost. As Bean noted, Sinclair-MacLagan did not know that on both the Third Ridge to the east and the Main Ridge to the north were parties of Australians under vigorous leaders who, in accordance with their original orders, had ‘kept going’ towards their objectives. As he wrote later, the decision to dig in at the Second Ridge and to withdraw all the advanced parties to the firing line was the action ‘which most influenced the day.’ See Anzac to Amiens, pp. 91–9; and Harvey Broadbent, Gallipoli: The fatal shore, Viking, Camberwell, Victoria, 2005, chapters 3 and 4.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 for Bean diary, February 1916, regarding White’s advice to Bridges on withdrawing.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 for Bean diary, 2 June 1915 and 28 April 1915, on the dangers he faced and the primitive conditions.

Blamey’s warning to Bean is noted in AWM38 3DRL 606/116, diary entry 28 April 1915.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 29 April 1915 for Bean’s comments on New Zealand and Australian troops.

The SMH reports on the scarcity of information were published on 29 and 30 April 1915.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 for Bean diary 3 and 8 May 1915 on the problems of getting his cable out.

Bean’s observations on Ashmead-Bartlett’s influence were published in The SMH on 9 May 1931.

See Bean, Anzac to Amiens, for his comments on the misconceptions around the landing.

15—Sideshow

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 31 January 1915, for Bean’s account of his lunch with General Monash, and his entry for 4 March 1915 regarding the 4th Brigade training.

Bean’s comment about Monash’s methodical approach is quoted in P.A. Pedersen, Monash as Military Commander, Melbourne University Press, 1985, pp. 52–3.

For Godley’s views on Australians, see David W. Cameron, Sorry Lads, but the Order is to Go: The August Offensive, Gallipoli 1915, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2009, p. 23.

For Godley’s views on Bean, see Peter Stanley, Quinn’s Post, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2005, p. 83.

Monash’s views on Godley were drawn from Carlyon, Gallipoli, p. 237.

Hamilton’s comments on Godley were drawn from the Hamilton files 7/9/1–10, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College London.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116, diary entry, 3 May 1915, for Bean’s account of the 2 May 1915 attack and the effect on Monash.

See Bean, Official History, Volume VI, The AIF in France, 1942, p. 205, for comments on Monash and the front line. Also, regarding this matter, see Peter Pedersen, The Anzacs: Gallipoli to the Western Front, Viking, Camberwell, 2007, p. 73. Also see Official History, Volume I, p. 597.

See Bean, AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entries 4, 5, 6 and 8 May 1915 for details of life at Gallipoli.

See Bean’s book Anzac to Amiens, pp. 290–1, 294, regarding Krithia.

The McNicholl note was written on 20 February 1933, and was found in the files of Dudley McCarthy held by the National Library of Australia.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 3 April, 1915, regarding casualty expectations.

The Bulletin article was quoted by Arthur Bazley in Canberra Collection, pp. 236–7.

16—Boosting a reputation

The description of General Bridges’ actions was drawn from the Official History, Volume II, The Story of Anzac, p. 129.

The account of the shooting of Bridges was drawn from Bean’s press cable, 21 May 1915, AWM38 3DRL 8039/6.

See Pedersen, Monash as Military Commander, p. 80, re relations with General Harry Chauvel.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 17 May 1915, for Bean’s account of Villiers-Stuart’s funeral.

White’s assessment of Bridges is drawn from Bean’s book Two Men I Knew, p. 75. Also, Bean’s comments were sourced from Official History, Volume II, p. 130; and Volume I, pp. 66–7.

Bean’s regard for White was sourced from Pedersen, Monash as Military Commander, pp. 53, 54.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry 18 May 1915, regarding the Turkish attack.

Bean’s comments about his change of attitude towards the Turks was drawn from Official History, Volume II, p. 162.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry 24 May 1915, regarding the truce for burial of the dead.

General John Monash’s comments were sourced from F.M. Cutlack (ed.), War letters of General Monash, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1934, pp. 37, 38.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 29 May 1915, for Bean’s account of the incident with the dead Turk.

General Godley’s praise of Monash’s men, and other Monash letters referred to in this chapter, were sourced from the Monash papers at the National Library of Australia, series 4, Personal and official letterbooks 1915–1918, folders 940–948, Box 128.

Gellibrand’s account of his conversation with Bridges was drawn from comments he wrote following publication of Sir John Monash’s book The Australian Victories in France in 1918, which are filed in A.W. Bazley’s archive, AWM 3DRL/3520 1/143.

Material relating to the issue of General Monash’s role in the landing was sourced from Geoffrey Serle, John Monash, Melbourne University Press, 1982, p. 215. Further details are to be found in battalion diaries for 25–26 April 1915: https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/AWM4/23/

Serle, in his book John Monash, refers to Monash’s criticism of Bean on p. 227.

Bean 17—The non-combatant

General Monash’s comments about casualty lists were drawn from Monash letters, pp. 48, 49.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entries on 15 and 21 June 1915, regarding Jack Bean’s wounding, and the general danger sniping posed.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry17 June 1915, for Bean’s criticism of Smith’s reporting.

Bean’s comments on Ashmead-Bartlett’s reporting were drawn from AWM38 3DRL 8039/6.

General Monash’s letter on 22 June 1915 was sourced from War Letters of General Monash, p. 52.

For the letter from Private John Sloan to his mother, 4 July 1915, see AWM PR00035.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 26 June 1915, for Bean’s criticism of the Imbros order, and his diary for 7 June 1915 regarding the Dinkum Oil.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 5 April 1915, for Bean’s comments on ‘the bright side.’

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 4 July 1915 for Bean’s views on the drawbacks of Imbros, and 6 and 7 July for the official attitude towards Ashmead-Bartlett.

Quotes from Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett in this chapter were drawn from Fred & Elizabeth Brenchley, Myth Maker, Wiley, Milton, 2005, see pp. 119, 120, 121.

Bean’s comments about Ashmead-Bartlett’s entertainment value were sourced from a letter he wrote to Hamilton, 10 May 1931, Hamilton files 7/9/1–10, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College London.

The arrival of Peter Schuler is drawn from his book Australia in Arms, Fisher Unwin, London, 1916, pp. 8, 9.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 20 July 1915, for Bean’s account of Schuler’s arrival.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 26 July 1915, for Bean’s assertion of his non-combatant status; 17 May, 2 June and 24 July for being shot at; 10 July 1915 for his reflections on Bible reading.

18—Brothers in arms

Bean’s account of the meeting with Monash was published in the Sunday Sun, Sydney, 11 October 1931.

The account of plans for the attack was sourced from David W. Cameron, The August Offensive, Big Sky Publishing, Newport, 2011.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 6 August 1915, for Bean’s account of Lone Pine and being shot.

Further details of the fighting were sourced from Bean’s book Anzac to Amiens, p. 148.

For the account of the charge of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at the Nek, see Bean, Story of Anzac, Volume 2, pp 617–633.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 31 January 1916, for Bean’s assessment of Sir Frederick Stopford.

For Schuler’s comments regarding Bean, see Australia in Arms, p. 10.

Letter, McCarthy files, National Library of Australia, 15 August 1915.

The quote from General Cox to the Dardanelles Royal Commission is cited in Pedersen, Monash as Military Commander, p. 94. For problems encountered during the action, see also pp. 95 and 102, and for Monash inviting Bean to tea, see p. 106.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 8 August 1915, for Bean’s critical assessment of Monash. Also see The SMH, 26 August 1915.

19—General failure

The accounts of the arrival of the new troops from the 5th Brigade’s 18th and 19th Battalions and their involvement in action are drawn from Official History, Volume I, pp. 739–44, and following pages.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 22 August 1915, for Bean’s thoughts on the 4th Brigade, and 23 August for reference to Colonel Chapman.

For further background for this chapter, see Tony Cunneen, ‘Slaughter of the Innocents, The Destruction of the 18th Battalion at Gallipoli,’ Australian Army Journal, Volume VII, no. 2, August 1915.

Articles by Bean on the fighting appeared in The SMH, 2 September 1915, and 14 October 1915.

Bean’s criticism of Russell and Powles appeared in Official History, Volume II, p. 744.

Monash’s criticism of Stopford was quoted in Younger, Keith Murdoch, pp. 59, 60.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 30 August 1915, for Bean’s criticism of Monash.

See Monash papers, NLA series 4, personal and official letterbooks 1915–1918, folders 940–948, Box 128, 3 June 1915, for his views on the poor quality of British troops.

For Bean’s praise of the Australian troops, see his report, dated 15 August, Commonwealth Gazette, no. 120, 30 September 1915.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 29 August 1915, for Bean’s thoughts on slums and the British race.

20—The workhorse and the gadfly

Hamilton’s reports were quoted in Younger, Keith Murdoch, p. 58.

See The Herald, Melbourne, 25 August 1915, for Bean’s account of the fighting at Lone Pine.

The censorship restrictions that Bean faced were drawn from Official History, Volume XI, 1941, p. 216n.

The quotes from Keith Murdoch and assessment of his approach to journalism were drawn from a paper by Peter Putnis, Professor of Communication, University of Canberra, ‘Keith Murdoch: War-time Journalist, 1915–1918,’ Australian Journalism Review, Vol. 33, No. 2, December 2011.

The Hamilton diary entry, 10 October 1915, was drawn from Brenchley, Myth Maker, p. 163, and the Murdoch remarks to the Dardanelles Commission from p. 164.

Ashmead-Bartlett’s diary entry for 7 September 1915 is quoted in Younger, Keith Murdoch, p. 64.

Ashmead-Bartlett’s comments about Bean’s physique are quoted in Brenchley, Myth Maker, p. 168.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 26 September 1915, for Bean’s remarks about Ashmead-Bartlett, and his own frustrations about doing his job; also the entry for 29 September 1915 regarding news that Ashmead-Bartlett had been sacked, and Bean’s further thoughts on the problems he faced in reporting; and 30 September 1915 for his views on The Age and The Argus, and possible future arrangements for journalists in wars.

Arthur Bazley was interviewed by Phillip Knightley for his book The First Casualty, Quartet Books, London, 1978, p. 431.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 2 October 1915, for Bean’s thoughts on Ashmead-Bartlett’s brilliance, and 24 November 1915 for his thoughts on C.P. Smith and Phillip Schuler.

The Lloyd George quote on Murdoch was sourced from Younger, Keith Murdoch, p. 65.

The extract quoted was drawn from Keith Murdoch, The Gallipoli Letter, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2010.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 17 October 1915, for Bean’s analysis of where the campaign had failed.

Bean’s thoughts about the ethics of the letter were in a letter, Bean to John Hetherington, 6 May 1958; quoted in Younger, Keith Murdoch, p. 74.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 2 November 1915, for Bean’s discussion with White, and 16 December 1915 regarding the theft of his camera.

Arthur Bazley recounted the story of Bean writing a cable for Malcolm Ross in an article in The Canberra Times, 31 August 1968.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 30 December 1915, for Bean’s experience of the SS Aragon, and 31 December 1915 for Bean’s thoughts on his diaries.

Of all the corps commanders Monro consulted, Birdwood was the only one to oppose evacuation—because of the ‘blow to our prestige in the East.’ When Bean learned of this nearly a year later he rejected the logic. Instead, he thought there had been ‘a sort of moral victory’ in losing only a handful of men. (Bean diary, 5 October 1916.)

21—A question of discipline

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 21 January 1916, for Bean’s account of returning from France to London, with following entries regarding Keith Murdoch from 31 January 1916, and his views, later in the chapter, on conscription. Regarding the incidence of venereal disease, Jack Bean told his brother that of those he had examined on enlistment less than 1 per cent had VD, whereas in London at the time, the incidence had risen to 10 per cent of those examined. While Jack’s enlistment figures did not reflect the extent of VD in prewar Australia, they nonetheless were an indication of the spread of VD among the troops. With some hyperbole, The Argus would assert on 4 October 1917 that VD was ‘a worse enemy than Germans.’ By war’s end, 55,000 Australian troops would have contracted VD. See Marina Larsson, An Iconography of Suffering: VD in Australia 1914-18, thesis, University of Melbourne, 1995.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 9 June 1916, for the Murdoch letter to Bean.

Reference to Bean’s hospitalisation was sourced from The SMH, 24 April 1916.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, (undated) February 1916, for Bean’s account of meeting Bazley in the street, and 12 May 1916 when Bazley told Bean he wanted to finish the war with him. Also, undated entry regarding Bean’s conclusion that the British staff in Egypt hated the Australians; entry 13 May 1916 on saluting; entries 3 and 4 April 1916 regarding the Australians going to France; undated entry February 1916 on his views about the AIF becoming a distinct Australian army, and 25 April 1916 for Robertson’s response to this. Bean’s comments on White are from undated entries in February–March 1916, while his account of the man overboard was entered on 31 March 1916.

22—Counting the bullets

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 25 April 1916, for Bean’s account of his first Anzac Day.

The Ashmead-Bartlett bullets quote appeared in The SMH, 9 May 1931.

The reference to the troops’ attitude to religion is drawn from Michael McKernan, Here is Their Spirit, University of Queensland Press, 1991, p. 30.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 4 June 1916, for Bean’s comments on Padre Dexter, and 1 June for his assessment of Andrew Fisher. See entries for 2, 3, 4 and 14 June 1916, and 8 July 1916 regarding his problems with the matter of photographs.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 7 June 1916, for details of the Australian raid and the deaths of the German prisoners, and coverage of the matter in the Official History, Volume III, p. 251. Also, The SMH, 14 June 1916.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 16 June 1916, for White’s comments about Murdoch and the Gallipoli letter.

The honours list was published on 13 July 1916.

23—A new prism

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 1 July 1916, for Bean’s reference to the opening of the Somme fighting; 3 July 1916 regarding Fricourt; also 13 July 1916 regarding the fighting on the Somme, and defence of Arthur Bazley; and 8 July 1916 for his criticism of the use of Australian troops. (Bean diary, 1 July 1916.)

Bean’s comments on the amorality of the merchant class were sourced from his book Letters from France, Cassell and Company, London, 1917; article dated 23 May 1916.

24—A monumental folly

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 20 July 1916, for Bean’s account of Fromelles throughout this chapter.

For further background, see Bean, Reveille, 30 June 1931.

The Pompey Elliott lecture was given in Canberra, 18 July 1930.

Bean’s assessment of the debacle was drawn from Official History, Volume III, p. 350.

Green’s comments were published in The SMH, 19 July 1919.

Details of the preparations for the attack, and when the first Australians went over, were drawn from the 15th Brigade diary, 19–20 July 1916, AWM.

See AWM38 3DRL 8042 item 109 for details of the Pope matter.

Monash’s comments on McCay were drawn from Paul Cobb, Fromelles 1916, The History Press, Gloucestershire, 2007, p. 168.

The reference to Pope’s change of command was drawn from the Official History, Volume III, footnote p. 447. Also, see Pearce, AWM38 3DRL 2222, series 3/3.

Pope became part of the 13th Brigade under Major-General (Sir) Talbot Hobbs. On 7 June 1917 Pope was seriously wounded by shrapnel in the right thigh while leading his battalion in the Battle of Messines. He was mentioned in despatches in December and in February 1918 was invalided home—with his name cleared.

Bean’s comments on McCay and the issue of stretcher bearers were drawn from the Official History, Volume III, pp. 438–47. Also see Ross McMullin, Pompey Elliott, Scribe, Carlton North, 2002, p. 225.

See Cobb, Fromelles 1916, p. 157, for a list drawn up by Pompey Elliott of ten blunders—three of which Cobb argues could easily be attributable to McCay and not Haking: for example, the lack of arrangement for liaison between the divisions, no coordination in the advance; hurried and insufficient preparations resulting in mistakes by inexperienced junior staff officers; and sending battalion staffs forward with the last wave before any lodgement had been gained in the enemy’s line, thus sacrificing valuable officers uselessly.

In May 1929 Bean informed Pope that he was about to give his papers to the Australian War Memorial with the proviso that they would not be for general inspection ‘during present lifetimes.’ Bean offered to remove the notes he copied from Pope’s diaries covering July 1916, but recognised that Pope might want them to remain. Pope confirmed this, giving approval for the material to go to the AWM ‘exactly as it is—whatever may be in it represents exactly the fact of the actual happenings.’ AWM38 3DRL 8042, item 109.

For the letter to Bean, 30 April 1929, see AWM38 3DRL 7953/4 part 2. For the McCay letter, 28 April 1929, see the same file.

The Birdwood letter to Pearce is quoted in Cobb, Fromelles 1916, p. 164.

Bean’s criticism of Haking and other British leaders, together with his criticism of British troops was drawn from the Official History, Volume III, pp. 445–7.

Bean’s comments on how the losses could have been avoided were sourced from his book Anzac to Amiens, pp. 235–6. Two years later, when the German trenches at Fromelles came into British possession, Bean examined the battlefield. He found that the supposed ‘third line’ of trenches, which the Australians were set to reach, though then indistinguishable from ordinary field drains, were apparently the remains of old trenches begun by the Germans a year before the Fromelles attack, but abandoned on becoming waterlogged.

25—The giant mincing machine

Material for this chapter was drawn from Bean, Letters from France, Pozières, 26 July 1916, and ‘An Abysm of Desolation’, 1 August 1916.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entries, 28 July, 29 July, 30 July, 31 July, 1 August, 4 August, 14 August 1916, throughout this chapter.

Bean’s story of the successful attack on Pozières appeared in The SMH, 28 July 1916.

Material was also drawn from Bean’s book Anzac to Amiens, pp. 237–70.

26—The war gets personal

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 22 July 1916, regarding Jack Bean’s arrival in France; also 8–9 August 1916 for the Brettingham-Moore story.

See Arthur Bazley, Canberra Collection, regarding Bean making camp at Becourt Wood.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entries, 17 and 20 August 1916, for Bean’s account of the hellish environment; 13 and 20 August 1916 for his criticism of British press coverage; 9 September for his problems with censorship; 7 August 1916 for the death of his friend Charlie Manning; 22 August 1916 for information on the wounding and death of his cousin Lieutenant Leo Butler.

For background to the British censors’ decision regarding references to downplaying Dominion army achievements, see John Williams (1993), ‘Seven Battles: The foreign press and the Anzacs’, Journal of Australian Studies, pp. 25–40.

27—No way out

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, August 1916, for Edwin Bean letter to Bean, 20 October 1916—subsequently inserted.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 9 September 1916, regarding the future of the 3rd Division; also, 11 and 23 September 1916 regarding conscription; and 29 September 1916 on how tired the Australians were.

Peter Putnis, ‘Keith Murdoch: War-time Journalist,’ contributed to the analysis of Keith Murdoch.

The reference to Murdoch’s cable to Hughes is drawn from Younger, Keith Murdoch, p 78.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 15 October 1916, regarding White’s approach to Bean and his consequent reaction; 25 October 1916 for the attitude of the troops to conscription; 20 October 1916 for his assessment of Birdwood’s circular to the troops; 30 November 1916 for his conclusion about the troops’ motivation for voting as they had; 29 November 1916 for his comments on recruitment; 25 October 1916 for his comments on his ‘errand’ and his conclusion about the impact of Birdwood’s message.

28—Good will not come of it

Regarding the national museum, see letter from Bean to Pearce, 8 November 1916; AWM 12/21/1 Part 2.

C.E.W. Bean, annotated by Arthur Bazley, ‘The Beginnings of the Australian War Memorial,’ 1959, p. 15; AWM38 3DRL 6673/619.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 22 May 1915, regarding the collection of relics at Gallipoli; 26 June 1916 for Bean’s continuing problems over photography; 11 October 1916 for his regrets about criticising Ernest Brooks; 3 December 1916 for his comments on Leist and Crozier.

For background on Will Dyson, see Ross McMullin, Will Dyson: Australia’s Radical Genius, Scribe, Melbourne, 2006, pp. 155–7.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 16 December 1916, for Bean’s appreciation of Dyson.

See Will Dyson, Australia at War—Drawings at the Front, Cecil Parker and Hayward, London, 1918, p. 30, for the commentary on his drawings.

Bean’s comments on his friendship with Dyson appeared in The SMH, 25 January 1938.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 30 November 1916, for Bean’s comments on Baldwin, as well as the appalling conditions for the troops; also 2 December 1916, 8 December 1916 and 18 December 1916 for further descriptions of the conditions.

Bean’s assessment of low morale and what the men were going through was drawn from Letters from France, 20 December 1916.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 24 December 1916, for Bean’s thoughts on religion.

For discussion on Bean and religion, see Lucy Whyte, At the Intersection of Religion, Nationalism and Commemoration: An Analysis of the Formation of the Australian War Memorial 1916–1941, A report drafted for the Australian War Memorial; 2013; and Geoff Lindsay, ‘Be Substantially Great In Thy Self.’

29—Self doubt

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 undated diary entry, January 1917, with annotated addendum 1928 regarding the film problems; 17 January 1917 for Bean’s account of his run-in with Captain Lee; 19 February 1917 on the British failure to understand the Australians; 17 February 1917 regarding Bean’s closeness to Birdwood and White; 21 February 1917 on his thoughts about the impact of his cables in Australia; 4 March 1917 regarding his despondency about his cables not being widely published; also for references to George Lowery and Private Walter Garry; 2 March 1917 for his anger at the censor over the Daily Express; and 6 March 1917 for his dealings with Charteris.

For background to German military actions in February–March 1917, see Anzac to Amiens, p. 318.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 26 February 1917, regarding events at Gird Trench; 19 March 1917 on the destruction of Beugnâtre; and 28 March 1917 regarding events at Lagnicourt.

In his diary for 26 March 1917, Arthur Bazley noted Bean’s reaction after the explosion that killed two men and destroyed his Corona typewriter. AWM 2DRL215.

30—British impetuosity

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 5 August 1917, for White’s thoughts on General Gough; diary, 9 April 1917, for the failure at Bullecourt.

For background on Bullecourt, see Anzac to Amiens, pp. 329–30.

Bean’s assessments of Haig and Gough were drawn from Official History, Volume IV, The Australian Imperial Force in France, 1917, pp. 351–2.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 8 May 1917, for Bean’s thoughts on the AIF not being independent of the British Army; 6–7 June 1917 on going through gas and the attack at Messines; 15 June 1917 for his criticism of Monash; 18 July 1917 for his praise of Holmes; 17 February 1917 for his praise of White; and 30 May 1917 for his comment on Pozières as a cemetery.

Bean’s comments about the impact of the mines at Messines was sourced from the Official History, Volume IV, p. 594, I also drew on research by Craig Deayton challenging the commonly used figure of 10,000 German dead.

On the issue of war records, see Michael Piggott, ‘The Australian War Records Section and its aftermath, 1917–1925’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 18, no. 2, December 1980, pp. 41–50; McKernan, Here Is Their Spirit, chapter 2.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 2 March 1917, for Bean’s comments on the issue of records.

31—Bean does a Murdoch

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 18 July 1917, on Bean’s plans regarding Lloyd George, and also censorship issues relating to John Faunthorpe and Hutton Wilson; 17 June 1917 for commentary on Allenby; see Lloyd George letter, 15 July 1917, attached to Bean diary 82, July 1917; 18 July 1917 for the visit to John Masefield; 20 August 1917 for his discussion with Charteris; 7 August 1917 on the decision to appoint Australian officers; and 10 August 1917 on Frank Hurley.

The Hurley quote was sourced from Hurley’s diary, 23 August 1917, held among his papers at the National Library of Australia, MS 883.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 18 August 1917, regarding Gullett joining the AWRS to be set up in Egypt; and 2 June 1917 for his lunch with Schuler.

See The Age, 23 April 2005, regarding Schuler’s death, and The Bendigonian, 13 September 1917, for Bean’s tribute to him.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 3 August 1917, for Bean’s thoughts about God and war.

32—A change of focus

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 24 August 1917, regarding the Gullett–Bean discussion on planning for the Official History, and for Bean’s thoughts about Gullett; 7 September 1917 for the discussion with White about Bean going to London; and 11 December 1917 on Fred Cutlack’s hiring.

For the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) see Anzac to Amiens, pp. 362–71; also, Frank Legg and Toni Hurley, Once More on My Adventure, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1966, p. 92, for the Hurley quote about Bean.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entries, 19, 20, 24 September 1917, for the fighting on the Menin Road, and Bean accompanying Hurley and Wilkins; 24 September for his account of worrying about Hurley and Wilkins, and also Leist and Gilmour; and 4–12 October 1917 for Passchendaele.

33—Cultural stereotyping

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entries, 10 October 1917, 12 April 1918, for Bean’s thoughts on the best troops and the quality of British generals.

For the note from Hughes to Bean, AWM38 3DRL 606/274B/1.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entries, 16 November 1917, and 12 April 1918, for Bean’s contempt for the British social system; Bean’s discussion with Haig is recorded in his diary entry for 11 October 1917.

The quote by Charles Edward Russell was drawn from Max Hastings, Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914, William Collins, London, 2013, p. 208.

The quote from the German officer regarding the inferior quality of Australian officers was sourced from Peter Barton The Lost Legions of Fromelles, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2014, p. 302.

Haig’s suggestion to Murdoch about Monash was sourced from Official History, Volume VI, The Australian Imperial force in France During the Allied Offensive, 1918, p. 188.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 19 October 1917, for Bean’s rejection of Monash as Commander-in-Chief AIF and support for Gellibrand; also Serle, John Monash, p. 397, regarding prejudice against Jews.

For Blamey’s thoughts on Monash, see David Horner, Blamey, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1998, p. 50.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 3 December 1917, for Bean’s comment about Monash’s ‘Jewish capacity’; also 5 December 1917 regarding support for White. For Bean’s misjudgement about the second conscription vote, see entry for 12 December 1917; his fears for the future of the 4th Division, 22 December 1917; his analysis of the reasons for the vote, 30 December 1917; Andrew Fisher’s analysis of the vote, 24 January 1918; Bean’s reaction to Jack Bean’s problems about treating VD, 4 January 1918, and 7 November 1917, 11 November 1917; 27 November 1917; 4 January 1918, and 13 January 1918.

34—The juggler

The quote from Frank Hurley was drawn from ‘War Photography’, Australasian Photo Review, 15 February 191, p. 164.

See Ian Jackson, quoted in The Australians’ Final Campaign in 1918, Australian Screen, http://aso.gov.au/titles/historical/the-australians-final-campaign/notes/

For Bean’s recommendations for Wilkins and Hurley, see Martyn Jolly, Australian First World War Photography, http://martynjolly.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/australian-first-world-war-photography-1999.pdf

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 6 February 1918, for Bean’s account of his problems with Jury in a letter to Harry Gullett; also 14 January 1918; 27 January 1918 for reference to the religious affiliations of those at the AWRS. In the letter to Gullett Bean also referred to the fight that he and Treloar had to keep Australian trophies from the British, which he further referred to in his diary on 1 March 1918.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 24 February 1918, for Bean’s thoughts on a League of Nations and an alliance with English-speaking nations; 16 February 1918 for Bean’s description of the night at the Folies Bergère; 4 September 1917 and 10 January 1918 regarding his support for the Russian Revolution; 3 April 1918 for his views on socialism; and 17 February 1918 for his views on Asquith.

Bean’s letter to his parents about the ‘Sydney set’ was dated 20 January 1918; see McCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somme, p. 317.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 21 January 1918, for Bean’s lunch at the National Liberal Club.

35—War on a different front

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 21 March 1918, for his reaction to the news of the German bombardment; 1 April 1918 for his account of Captain Orchard’s stunt; 4 April 1918 for his account of being shelled and briefing Pompey Elliott; and 5 April 1918 for his account of Villers-Bretonneux.

The Morshead story is related in Official History, Volume V, The Australian Imperial Force in France during the Main German Offensive, 1918, p. 301.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 4 May 1918, for Bean’s reference to Birdwood.

See Official History, Volume VI, p. 191, for the reorganisation of commands.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 16 May 1918, for Bean’s reaction to the changes.

36—An assessment of character

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 17 May 1918, for Bean’s discussion with Dyson, Wilkins and Cutlack about Monash; 19 May 1918 for Bean’s alternative approach; 26 May 1918 for Bean’s account of telling White the new arrangements were wrong; 29 May 1918 regarding Murdoch’s fear that their opposition was too late; for Bean’s letter see entry for 2 June 1918; 7 June 1918 regarding Murdoch’s opposition to Birdwood remaining GOC, AIF; 10 June 1918 for the outline of Bean’s argument, and Birdwood’s letter to Murdoch; 12 June, 14 June 1918 regarding the Australianisation of the corps command; 16 June 1918 for Hughes’ thoughts; and 18 June 1918 for Bean’s comparison of White and Monash.

For Monash’s letters to his wife, see AWM, War Letters of General Monash,Volume 2, 18 June 1918, p. 421, and 25 June 1918, p. 424, http://www.awm.gov.au/people/P10676516/#DigitisedCollection

Rawlinson’s view of Monash was drawn from Pedersen, Monash as Military Commander, p. 220.

Bean’s letter to White is quoted in McCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somme p. 336.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 28 June 1918, for Bean’s comment that he was happier when the letter was gone.

37—An ill-judged intervention

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 2 July 1918, for Bean’s account of the visit by Hughes and Cook; 7 July 1918 and Serle, John Monash, p. 325, for the account of the letter to Pearce.

For Chauvel’s views, see Chauvel papers, letters, 1 July 1918, and 18 November 1918, AWM PR00535.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 3 July 1918, for Bean’s entry on Monash’s success at Hamel, including reference to American troops, and Blamey’s talk with Bean.

For the Gellibrand letter to Bean, on 9 January 1935, which also includes reference to Hughes and White, see AWM38 3DRL 606/274B/1, folder 1918–1939.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entries, 7 July, 5 August 1918, regarding Murdoch’s talk with Monash; and 18 August 1918 for Bean’s and Murdoch’s meeting with White, and Bean’s criticism of Birdwood’s organisational abilities, and admiration of Murdoch’s forcefulness.

For Hughes’ position, see Bean’s Two Men I Knew, p. 173.

Monash’s assessment of Murdoch was drawn from War Letters of General Monash, Volume 2, 8 November 1918, p. 424, http://www.awm.gov.au/people/P10676516/#DigitisedCollection

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 2 September 1918, for Bean’s assessment of his poor relations with Monash; 17 August 1918 regarding the conferral of Monash’s knighthood; 21 August 1918 for Bean’s realisation that Monash was grumpy with him; 18 August 1918 regarding the bitterness that Bean found everywhere about the British portrayal of the fighting; and 21 August 1918 for Monash’s words to the troops.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/274B/1, folder 1918–1939, for Bean’s explanation of his thinking on Monash.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 4 September 1918, for Bean’s comments about Monash’s attitude to the men; 6 September 1918 for Monash’s Ashmead-Bartlett comment; 18 September 1918 for the Dyson story; and 3 September 1918 for the visit of the newspaper editors.

The reference by Bean to Monash, battles and engineering was drawn from Official History, Volume VI, p. 209.

Regarding criticism of the action at Montbrehain, see Peter Pedersen, Monash as Military Commander, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1985, pp. 290–292. Pedersen also comments that ‘Ruthlessness and bullying during a battle were familiar characteristics of Monash’s . . .’ This was hardly likely to find favour with Bean.

The Liddell Hart quote regarding Monash was drawn from Ellis, C.E.W. Bean, p. 87.

For White’s comments on Monash’s appointment, see AWM38 3DRL 606/276/1; folder 1928–1937.

Bean discussed his own role in the matter in Official History, Volume VI, pp. 197, 198.

For Bean’s ‘confidential and personal’ note to himself, see AWM38 3DRL 606/274B/1, folder 1918–1939; also, Two Men I Knew, p. 173.

For Bean’s comments about Monash and commands, see Official History, Volume II, p. 588; and for Monash’s brilliance, Official History, Volume VI, p. 205.

The ‘dug-out King’ reference was sourced from Ellis, C.E.W. Bean, p. 85.

Bean’s letter to Gavin Long is quoted in McCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somme, p. 282.

For Gellibrand’s assessment of Monash, see A.W. Bazley, AWM 3DRL/3520 1/143.

For Serle’s assessment of the conduct of Bean and Murdoch, see John Monash, p. 328.

38—And so it is peace

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entry, 1 October 1918, for the story of the so-called ‘corpse factory’; for Bean’s trip to Cannes see entries for 15, 16, 17, 24 and 29 October 1918.

For Donald Horne’s comments on Federation, see his book In Search of Billy Hughes, Macmillan Australia, Melbourne, 1979, pp. 42–43.

Regarding Bean and the theory that war was the supreme test of a nation’s efficiency and the sternest school of a nation’s character, Ellis, C.E.W. Bean, p. 97, refers to The Times History of the War in South Africa, Volume I, 1900.

See AWM38 3DRL 606/116 diary entries, 12–14 November 1918, for Bean’s reaction to the end of the war.

The George Long Bean referred to was the father of the World War II official correspondent, Gavin Long, and after the war was headmaster at Bean’s old school, All Saints’ College, Bathurst.

For quotes from Bean’s In Your Hands, Australians, Cassell, London, 1919; in order of pages quoted from, see pp. 92, 41, 33–6, 21–4, 53–4, 16, 30, 60.

Part Three

After the nightmare

39—The bush backwater

The account of Bean’s move to Tuggeranong homestead was drawn from Bazley, Canberra Collection, p. 238.

The account of Bean’s return to Gallipoli was drawn from his book Gallipoli Mission, AWM, Canberra, 1948; in order of pages quoted from, see pp. 32, 126, 128, 49, 55 and 70–2.

For W.A. Holman’s speech, see The SMH, 11 July 1919.

For Bean’s letter to Pearce, March 1918, see AWM 93 12/12/1 Part 1.

For Bean’s estimate of the timeframe, see Bean, memorandum, ‘Histories of the War’, 14 August 1919, MP525/1, file 5/6/48, Australian Archives, Melbourne.

See Bean memo to Secretary for Defence, 9 October 1919; AWM38 3 DRL 7953/10 part 1, for correspondence around the censorship issue.

See Bazley, Canberra Collection, p. 242 regarding the staff at Tuggeranong.

Additional material for the description of life at Tuggeranong for Bean and his staff came from Minders of Tuggeranong Homestead members Jenny Horsfield and Rebecca Lamb.

40—The Nipper

The words ‘mastoid problem’ are written on the back of the original photograph, held by Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll, of Charles Bean and Effie Young sitting on the steps of Queanbeyan Hospital.

Bean’s letter to his parents about Effie in June 1920 was sourced from AWM38 3DRL 7447/9 to 10.

Bean presented a paper to the Royal Australian Historical Society, 22 February 1938, on ‘The Writing of the Australian Official History of the Great War—Sources, Methods and some Conclusions,’ that was reproduced in the society’s journal, Vol. XXIV, 1938, Part 2.

Bazley’s analysis was sourced from Canberra Collection, pp. 242, 243.

Bean’s letters to his mother about Effie on 23 September 1920 and 4 October 1920 were sourced from AWM38 3DRL 7447/9 to 10. Other letters quoted in this chapter from the same file were dated 2 November 1920, 30 October 1920, 17 December 1920.

Effie’s background and references were sourced from Papers of Charles and Ethel Bean, AWM PR00283 Series 2/3 Folio 3.

Arthur Bazley’s comments about Bean’s romance with Effie Young, and those about Erskine Crawford later in this chapter, were drawn from his diary, 8 August 1920, privately held by the Bazley family. After Bazley’s death in 1972, his family presented Effie with a copy of his diary covering the Tuggeranong years. Out of respect for her feelings, all references to Erskine Crawford’s unhappy reaction to her marriage to Bean were deleted.

Bean’s letter to Effie professing his love was dated 12 December 1920, and sourced from Papers of Charles and Ethel Bean, AWM, PR00283 Series 2/2 Folio 2. See also letter, 19 October 1920, this file.

Effie’s letter about her doubts, 19 November 1920, was sourced from Papers of Charles and Ethel Bean, AWM PR00283 Series 2/2 Folio 2. Also, see Bean’s letter to Effie about the release of Volume I of the Official History was dated 20 December 1920; also quoted is his letter of 15 December 1920.

For details of Edwin Bean’s tutoring of Effie, see letter, Lucy Bean to Effie Bean, 25 April 1923; AWM38 3DRL 7447/26.

See letter, 19 November 1920, AWM PR00283, Papers of Charles and Ethel Bean, Series 2/2 Folio 2, regarding the appointment of a new sister.

Conan Doyle’s comments about Effie were sourced from a letter, 28 November 1920, AWM38 3DRL 7447/9 to 10; and Jack Bean’s from a letter, 26 October 1920, AWM PR00283 Series 3, wallet 7.

Bean’s desire for a wedding date was sourced from a letter, 23 December 1920, AWM PR00283, Papers of Charles and Ethel Bean, Series 2/2 Folio 2.

Monty Bean’s account of the wedding was given in a letter, 27 January 1921, AWM38 3DRL 7447/9 to 10; also see Charles Bean’s own account in a letter, 24 January 1921.

Further details of Bean’s romance with Effie, and the falling out with Erskine Crawford, were drawn from the letter by his cousin Joan Butler in the Worth family papers, Mitchell Library, MSS 6980.

41—Bluff and double bluff

For background to this chapter, see Anthony Barker, ‘Words at War’, Weekend Australian Magazine 20–21 April 1996; and Martin Ball, ‘Re-reading Bean’s Last Paragraph’, Australian Historical Studies, 122, 2003.

Robertson’s critique to Bean, see letter, 1 July 1920, Robertson–Bean Correspondence, Mitchell Library.

Tucker’s comments about the origin of Bean’s problems were in a letter to George Robertson, 9 May 1921; quoted Ball, p. 7; also Barker, Weekend Australian Magazine, 20–21 April 1996.

For Robertson’s threat about withdrawing the volume, see letter, 19 May 1921, quoted Weekend Australian Magazine.

For Hamilton’s comments, see Daily Telegraph, 28 October 1921; Observer, quoted in The Herald, Melbourne, 13 February 1922; and Hamilton in The Manchester Guardian, 20 February 1922.

The reference to the exchange between Bean and Wilfred Kent Hughes was drawn from Peter Burness’s book, The Nek: A Gallipoli Tragedy, Exisle Publishing, Wollombi NSW, 1996; p. 150.

For Bean on Gellibrand, see Official History, Volume I, p. 81. Gellibrand complained to Bean on 4 November 1921. As Bean had not met Gellibrand until divisional headquarters embarked on 21 November 1914, Gellibrand’s biographer Peter Sadler suggests that the information was provided by Brudenell White in an attempt to play down Gellibrand’s value. See Peter S. Sadler, The Paladin, pp. 55–56.

42—Censorship, tragedy and farce

For Gullett’s comments on Tucker, see Gullett–Bean correspondence, 1 June 1921, AWM38, 3DRL 7953.

As regards Gullett agreeing to work with Jose, see Anthony Barker, George Robertson: A Publishing Life in Letters, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press, 1993, pp. 140–2.

For Gullett’s rejection of Bean’s line, see Gullett to Bean, March 1921, AWM38 3DRL 7953/8 Part 1.

For story of Surafend, see Peter Rees, Desert Boys, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2011, pp. 285–90.

For correspondence around Gullett’s stand on Surafend, see letter, Gullett to Bean, 6 December 1922, AWM38 3DRL 7953/8 Part 1; Bean to Gullett, 3 December 1922, Bean to White, 7 December 1922, White to Bean 11 December 1922.

For H.M. Green’s comments, see A History of Australian Literature, Volume 1, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1961, pp. 753–62.

For Macandie’s comment on Jose, see letter, 19 November 1919, quoted in Stephen Ellis, Historical Studies, vol. 20, no. 80, 1983, p. 370.

Bean’s letter to Treacy was dated 13 June 1921; AWM38 3DRL 7953/10, Part 2 Publication of Official History, Volume IX, The Royal Australian Navy, 1914–1918.

For background to the publication of Volume IX, see Ross Lamont, Introduction to Official History, Volume IX, University of Queensland Press,1984.

For Bean’s letter to Pearce rebutting the Naval Board, see Bean to Pearce, 15 August 1921; quoted Ellis, p. 375.

Regarding the ban on Jose showing the draft to Bean, see Ellis, Historical Studies pp. 373, 374.

For Bean’s inner caution, see Bean to Jose, November 1923; quoted Ellis, p. 380, and for Jose’s response, 3 December 1923; quoted Ellis, p. 381.

Bean’s letter to Seaforth Mackenzie was dated 15 March 1922, AWM38 3DRL 7953/13 Part 1; see also letter Mackenzie to Trumble, 10 May 1922; W.A. Newman to Mackenzie, 16 May 1922; Bean to Mackenzie, 28 October 1925; Bean to Newman, 19 July 1926.

For the Heney saga, see Bean to Heney, 25 June 1920, AWM38 3 DRL 7953/15 part 1; Bean to Heney, 9 July 1920; Bean to W.A. Newman, 8 July 1920; Heney to Bean, 17 July 1920.

For Tucker to Bean, 11 July 1921; Angus & Robertson Ltd to Bean, 11 July 1921; Tucker to Bean, 25 August 1921; AWM 3 DRL 7953/15. For Bean’s rejection of the Heney manuscript, see Bean to Heney, 11 June 1925, and Bean memorandum to Defence, August 1925; for White’s comments on Heney, see letter to Bean, 21 July 1927.

For Bean’s thoughts to Scott on the volume’s aims see letter, 9 November 1928, AWM38 3DRL 7953/16; for Bean’s explanation to Scott, see Bean to Scott, 12 February 1933; also, see Bean to Garran 10 April 1934, AWM38 3DRL 7953/16 Part 2; Bean to Scott, 13 April 1934; Scott to Bean, 15 May 1933, AWM38 3DRL 7953/16; and for the Hughes matter, see letter, F. Strahan, secretary of the Prime Minister’s Department, to Bean, 4 August 1936, AWM38 3DRL 7953/15.

43—In his own hands

For the story of Arthur Bazley’s injuries from the explosion, see Bazley, Canberra Collection, P.A. Selth (ed.), Lowden, Kilmore, Victoria, 1976, p. 240.

Background to life at Tuggeranong homestead came from Rebecca Lamb and Jenny Horsfield, of Minders of Tuggeranong Homestead.

Fred Cutlack’s comment about Professor Tucker was drawn from Bazley, Canberra Collection, p. 246.

Bean commented in his private diary on the government’s decision to pay his passage to England.

For the shared diary, in which Charles Bean did most of the writing, see AWM PR00283, Papers of Charles and Ethel Bean, Series 1, Wallet 2.

For Tas Heyes’ letter to Bean, 3 September 1925, on the conditions for accessing British documents from the war, see AWM38 3DRL 7953/4 part 1.

For Bean’s comment about the difficulty of Fromelles, see AWM38 3 DRL 7953/4 part 1.

See T.H.E. Travers, ‘From Surafend to Gough: Charles Bean, James Edmonds, and the making of the Australian Official History’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, 27 October 1995, p. 15, on dealings between Bean and Edmonds.

For the Bean–Edmonds correspondence, see Peter Pedersen’s introduction to Official History Volume III, University of Queensland Press, 1982.

Brudenell White’s comments to Bean were written on 19 September 1927. AWM 3 DRL 7953/4 pt 2.

Bean’s late niece Phyllis Bauer provided information about Sundays at Lindfield in a private interview.

Bean’s comment about Effie’s tennis was sourced from his private diary.

Effie’s letters to Bean were dated 13 January 1935 and 17 December 1939; his to her, 9 January 1939. Papers of Charles and Ethel Bean, AWM PROO283, Series 2/1, Folio 1.

For reference to the Bean–Griffin tree inspection tour, see The SMH, 12 September 1933.

See Peggy James, Cosmopolitan Conservationists, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2013, pp. 79–84, for background to Bean’s urban planning activities.

See also, Roe, Nine Australian Progressives, p. 70.

For background on recruitment in city and country Australia in the first AIF, see L.L. Robson, The First AIF: a study of its recruitment 1914–1918, Melbourne University Press, 1970.

44—The ghastly spectre

For Bean memo to Cabinet, see National Archives of Australia, item number 580-2-4630.

The Defence Department wrote to Bean on 27 June 1930 to advise him that the Official History was safe.

For Bean’s expanded concept of the Australian War Memorial, see National Archives of Australia, item number 580-2-4630; also letter from Bean to Fred Cutlack, 25 April 1923, AWM38 3DRL 7953/9, part 1.

Regarding Griffin’s approval, see Peter Harrison, Walter Burley Griffin: Landscape Architect, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1995, p. 72.

For Bean’s comment about reverence, see memorandum, April 1919, AWM 93, 2/5/7.

Bean made his reference to Sancta Sophia to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works. See report together with Minutes of Evidence Relating to the Proposed Australian War Memorial, Canberra, Government Printer, 1928.

Information regarding dealings with George Lambert was drawn from letters from Bean to Gullet, 28 February 1923, and Bean to Treloar, 7 March 1923. AWM 38 3DRL 6673/302. See also Michael McKernan, Here Is Their Spirit, p. 79, and pp. 451–464.

For Bean’s views about the need for an inscription, see letter, Bean to Treloar, 6 February 1929, AWM 315 234/002/025. For the letter on the Honour Roll, see Bean to Treloar, 28 February 1928, AWM 93 746/1/2, part 1.

The suspension announcement was made by Arthur Blakeley, Minister for Home Affairs, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, Representatives, volume 122, 29 November 1929, p. 501.

For Treloar’s acceptance of a delay, see McKernan, Here Is Their Spirit, p. 147.

For Bean’s dealings with Monash over Eric Baume’s articles, see Bean to Monash, 21 May 1930; AWM38 3DRL 606/277/1.

For Tucker’s comments to Bean, see letter, 28 February 1930, and Bean to Tucker, 7 March 1930; McCarthy papers, NLA MS 7777.

For Edmonds–Bean correspondence re Official History Volume IV, see letters, 2 September 1932, 11 October 1932, and 14 November 1932, AWM38 3DRL, 7953/34, part 2.

For Bean’s comments on ‘a good war’, see letter, The SMH, 8 March 1930; for his response to General Lloyd, see letter, The SMH, 13 November 1930; for Bean’s comments on a breach of faith, see letter, The SMH, 11 April 1936; for Bean’s comments about the demagogue leading Germany, see letter, The SMH, 21 April 1933; for Bean’s comments about trusting Germany, see letter, The SMH, 13 April 1936.

Bean’s League of Nations Union article was republished in Reveille (Sydney), 1 July 1932.

For Bean’s comments on German expansionism, see letter, The SMH, 16 March 1938; for Bean’s letter recanting his position on Germany, see The SMH, 21 March 1939, and his letter warning against ‘stumbling over the precipice’ on 28 May 1936; and for his letter warning about no nation going blindly to war again, see The SMH, 7 September 1936.

45—The straight line

For Bean’s Ingleburn account, see The SMH, 15 December 1939; and for his hopes that the Germans would rise up against Hitler, The SMH, 28 September 1939.

For Serle’s analysis, see Official History Volume VI, University of Queensland Press 1983, pp. 1074–6; for the story of the last paragraph, see p. 1096.

Bean’s interview with The SMH appeared on 30 August 1941.

The Bulletin story was published on 27 May 1942.

For quotes from Bean’s War Aims of a Plain Australian, see pp. 3, 37, 38, 53, 84–5 and 159.

For Bean’s reference to ‘progressive ideals’, see AWM38 3DRL 6673/571 33/3.

For Bean’s Straight Line jottings, see AWM38 3DRL 6673/572, part 1, part 2, part 3.

See Bean’s book, Here, My Son, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1950, pp. 130, 143–4.

46—About turn

For Bean’s account of the Canberra air disaster and the deaths of Gullett and White, see his book, Two Men I Knew, pp. 221–2.

For Bean’s advice on the new official history, see AWM PRO 1618 Folder 1 of 1.

For Treloar’s concerns about Slessor, see letter, 19 September 1941; AWM PRO 1618 Folder 1 of 1; also, letter, 4 December 1941; see letter, 18 November 1941, for Bean’s support for Long.

For background to the Wilmot–Blamey story, see Chester Wilmot: War Reporter, ABC; http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2009/04/24/2551705.htm

For Bean’s misgivings about Blamey, see Two Men I Knew, p. 207.

Bean recorded the remarks from Evatt in his private diary.

For Wilmot’s criticism of Long’s volumes, see letter to Bean, 14 August 1953, AWM38 3DRL 6673/495.

For Bean’s letter to Treloar, see 18 November 1941, AWM PRO 1618 Folder 1 of 1.

See Bean letters, The SMH, 27 March 1942 and 31 March 1942, for his anger at the propaganda.

The Queensland Digger article was published on 1 May 1942.

See The SMH, 17 November 1947, for Bean’s stand against the dislocation of families; and The SMH, 22 March 1949, for his advocacy of a quota system; Flagships Three, p. 210, for his earlier position; and The SMH, 27 August 1949, on the Australian experience.

See Stephen Ellis, ‘Racism in Australia’, The Australian Quarterly, September 1972, for analysis of the change in Bean’s position on the issue of race.

For Bean’s references to Aborigines, see The Dreadnought of the Darling, pp. 178–80 and 182–8.

47—Back among old Diggers

For Effie’s account, see Denis Winter, Making the Legend: the War Writings of C.E.W. Bean, University of Queensland Press, 1992, p. 18.

The SMH published the statement by White on 9 June 1919.

For Bean’s statement on accuracy, see AWM38 3DRL 7953/6, part 1.

Ted le Couteur was privately interviewed.

Bean’s comment about the honorarium was drawn from his private diary, as were his comments about his financial situation and Jack’s help, and his mother’s comment about her hopes for her son.

Bean’s account of hearing Percival speak was published in The SMH, 20 August 1912.

For background to Treloar’s death and the issues around his replacement, see McKernan, Here is Their Spirit, pp. 200–7.

Background to Bean’s refusal of a knighthood on two occasions was drawn from family member Pam Thompson, and McCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somme, p. 390.

For Bean’s letter declining the offer, see McCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somme, and Bazley files, AWM38 3DRL/3520.

Bean referred to his eightieth birthday celebration in his private diary.

For the Brentwood history correspondence, see letter 27 August 1963; AWM PR 82/131.

For Bean’s last letter to Effie, see Papers of Charles and Ethel Bean, AWM PROO283, Series 2/1, Folio 1.

For Bazley’s letter to Effie, see AWM38 3DRL 3250, folder 25.

The criticism about the lack of recognition of Bean came from Lieutenant H.V. Howe, AWM38 3DRL 3250, folder 25.

Epilogue

For Phillip Knightley’s comments, see The First Casualty, p. 110.

Humphrey McQueen’s observations are sourced from his book Temper Democratic, Wakefield Press, Kent Town, SA, 1998; p. 10.

Angus McLachlan’s eulogy was reported in various newspapers, for example, The Canberra Times, 3 September 1968.

For the account of the logistics of the Official History, see Bean, ‘Our War History’, The Bulletin, 27 May 1942, p. 2.

For Bazley’s letter to Lucy Bean, 6 December 1939, see AWM38 3DRL 7447/9 to 10.

Menzies’ assessment of Bean was drawn from Ellis, C.E.W Bean, p. 41.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS BY CHARLES BEAN

Bean, C.E.W., With the Flagship in the South, William Brooks, Sydney, no date, 1908 or 1909

Bean, C.E.W., On the Wool Track, Alston Rivers, London, 1910, 1913; 1916 Hodder & Stoughton, London; Cornstalk Publishing, Sydney, 1925, 1927; Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1945; 1962, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1985

Bean, C.E.W., The Dreadnought of the Darling, First edition: Alston Rivers, London, 1911; Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1916; Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1956

Bean, C.E.W., Flagships Three, Alston Rivers, London, 1913; Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1916

Bean, C.E.W., What to Know in Egypt: A guide for Australian soldiers, Société Orientale de Publicité, Cairo, 1915

Bean C.E.W., (ed.), The ANZAC Book: Written and Illustrated in Gallipoli by the Men of Anzac, Cassell, London, 1916

Bean, C.E.W., Letters from France, Cassell, London, 1917

Bean, C.E.W., In Your Hands, Australians, Cassell, London, 1919

Bean C.E.W., (ed.), The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, twelve volumes, published between 1921 and 1942:

Volume 1: Bean, C.E.W., The Story of ANZAC: From the Outbreak of War to the End of the First Phase of the Gallipoli Campaign, May 4, 1915, Angus & Robertson 1921; revised, 1933; University of Queensland Press 1981

Volume 2: Bean, C.E.W., The Story of ANZAC: From 4 May 1915 to the Evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula, Angus & Robertson 1924; amended 1934; UQP 1981

Volume 3: Bean, C.E.W., The Australian Imperial Force in France, 1916, Angus & Robertson 1929; UQP 1982

Volume 4: Bean, C.E.W., The Australian Imperial Force in France, 1917, Angus & Robertson 1933; UQP 1982

Volume 5: Bean, C.E.W., The Australian Imperial Force in France: During the Main German Offensive, 1918, Angus & Robertson 1937; UQP 1983

Volume 6: Bean, C.E.W., The Australian Imperial Force in France: During the Allied Offensive 1918, Angus & Robertson 1942; UQP 1983

Volume 7: Gullett, H.S., The Australian Imperial Force in Sinai and Palestine, 1914–1918, Angus & Robertson 1923; UQP 1983

Volume 8: Cutlack, F.M., The Australian Flying Corps in the Western and Eastern Theatres of War, 1914–1918, Angus & Robertson 1923; UQP 1984

Volume 9: Jose, A.W., The Australian Navy, 1914–1918, Angus & Robertson 1928; UQP 1984

Volume 10: Mackenzie, S.S., The Australians at Rabaul: The capture and administration of the German possessions in the Southern Pacific, Angus & Robertson 1927; UQP 1984

Volume 11: Scott, Ernest, Australia During the War, Angus & Robertson 1936; UQP 1984

Volume 12: Bean, C.E.W., and Gullett, H.S., Photographic Record of the War: Reproduction of pictures taken by the Australian official photographers (Captains G.H. Wilkins, M.C. and J.F. Hurley, Lieutenants H.F. Baldwin and J.P. Campbell) and others, Angus & Robertson 1923

Bean, C.E.W., War Aims of a Plain Australian, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1943, 1945

Bean, C.E.W., ANZAC to Amiens: A shorter history of the Australian fighting services in the First World War, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1946

Bean, C.E.W., Gallipoli Mission, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1948; Halstead Press, Sydney 1948; republished in 1990 by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in association with the Australian War Memorial, with a Foreword by Bill Gammage

Bean, C.E.W., Here, My Son: An account of the independent and other corporate boys’ schools of Australia, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1950

Bean, C.E.W., Two Men I Knew: William Bridges and Brudenell White, Founders of the AIF, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1957

SELECTED NEWSPAPER ARTICLES BY CHARLES BEAN

Bean, C.E.W., ‘The Approaching Sea-Fight in the Far East. Its place in naval history. Why it will be worth watching’, The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 13 April 1905; reprinted in The West Australian, 27 April 1905

Bean, C.E.W., The ‘Australia’ series published (under the initials, ‘C.W.’) in The Sydney Morning Herald between 1 June 1907 and 20 July 1907

Bean, C.E.W., The ‘Barrier Railway’ series published in The Sydney Morning Herald (by ‘Our special Commissioner’) between 5 May and 16 June 1908

Bean, C.E.W., The Sydney Morning Herald articles upon which With the Flagship in the South was based appear to have been those attributed to ‘Our special Reporter’ on 12 August 1908, 13 August 1908, 14 August 1908, and 20 August 1908

Bean, C.E.W., ‘The Wool Land’ series in The Sydney Morning Herald (‘Our special Commissioner) published weekly between 20 September 1909 and 31 December 1909

Bean, C.E.W., ‘The Dreadnought of the Darling’ series in The Sydney Mail was entitled ‘Descriptive of a Trip Down the Darling’ and published weekly between 13 July 1910 and 7 September 1910

Bean, C.E.W., ‘The Great Rivers’ series published in The Sydney Morning Herald (from ‘Our special commissioner with the South Australian Committee’) on 13, 16 and 21 May 1914

Brown, Simon, ABC, 24 April 2009, Chester Wilmot: War Reporter, http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2009/04/24/2551705.htm

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITINGS OF CHARLES BEAN

‘Account for Effie’. Written for the benefit of Bean’s wife, Effie, when he was hospitalised in London in 1924 after kidney surgery. (Papers of Arthur Bazley, Australian War Memorial, 3DRL/3520/Folder [10a] of 143)

‘Tasker letter’, 18 October 1930. A 19-page letter Bean sent to Henry McKean Tasker, a member of the staff of All Saints’ College, Bathurst. The letter provided the principal material for an article entitled ‘Dr C.E.W. Bean’ in the 1930 issue of The Bathurstian. (Bean Papers, Australian War Memorial, AWM38/3DRL6673/573)

‘Wigmore’ letter, 16 November 1922. A three-page letter Bean sent to Lionel Gage Wigmore, a journalist at Sydney’s Daily Telegraph. (Bean Papers, Australian War Memorial, Reference AWM38/3DRL6673/573)

ARTICLES AND ADDRESSES BY CHARLES BEAN

Bean, C.E.W., A Code for Sydney, The Salon, Sydney, May 1914

Bean, C.E.W., ‘Sidelights of the War on Australian Character’, 1927, Royal Australian Historical Society Journal, Vol. XIII, Part 4, p. 209

Bean, C.E.W., Reveille, 30 June 1931

Bean, C.E.W., ‘The Writing of the Australian Official History of The Great War—Sources, Methods and Some Conclusions’, 1938, Royal Australian Historical Society Journal, Vol. XXIV, Part 2, p. 85

Bean, C.E.W., ‘The Technique of a Contemporary War Historian’, Historical Studies Australia and New Zealand, Vol. 2, April 1942–November 1943, p. 65

Bean, C.E.W., ‘I believe…’ The ABC Weekly, Sydney, 3 April 1948, p. 41

OTHER BOOKS

Barker, Anthony, George Robertson: A Publishing Life in Letters, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press, 1993

Barton, Peter, The Lost Legions of Fromelles, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2014

Bean, Edwin, A Historical Sketch of Sir Anthony Browne’s School, Brentwood, Essex, Westbury Press, Essex, undated

Brenchley, Fred and Elizabeth, Myth Maker, Wiley, Milton, Queensland, 2005

Broadbent, Harvey, Gallipoli: The fatal shore, Viking, Camberwell, Victoria, 2005

Burness, Peter, The Nek: A Gallipoli Tragedy, Exisle Publishing, Wollombi NSW, 1996; p. 150

Cameron, David W., Sorry Lads, but the Order is to Go, The August Offensive, Gallipoli: 1915, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2009

Carlyon, Les, Gallipoli, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 2002

Carlyon, Les, The Great War, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 2006

Cobb, Paul, Fromelles 1916, The History Press, Gloucestershire, 2007

Cutlack, F.M. (ed.), War letters of General Monash, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1934

Dyson, Will, Australia at War—Drawings at the Front, Cecil Parker and Hayward, London, 1918

Fewster, Kevin, (ed.), Bean’s Gallipoli, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2007

Fletcher, C. Brunsdon, The Great Wheel, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1940

Freestone, Robert, Cities, Citizens and Environmental Reform, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 2009

Gammage, Bill, The Broken Years, ANU Press, Canberra, 1974

Green, H.M. A History of Australian Literature Vol. 1, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1961

Harrison, Peter, Walter Burley Griffin: Landscape Architect, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1995

Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform, Vintage, New York, 1955

Holbrook, Carolyn, Anzac: The Unauthorised Biography, Newsouth, Sydney, 2014

Horne, Donald, In Search of Billy Hughes, Macmillan, Sydney, 1979

Horner, David, Blamey, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1998

Inglis, K.S., C.E.W. Bean, Australian Historian: The John Murtagh Macrossan Lecture, UQP, Brisbane, 1969

James, Peggy, Cosmopolitan Conservationists, Australian Scholarly, North Melbourne, 2013

James, Robert Rhodes, Gallipoli, B.T. Batsford, London, 1965

Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty, Quartet Books, London, 1978

Knighton, C.S. (ed), Clifton College: Foundation to Evacuation, Bristol Record Society, Bristol, 2012

Legg, Frank and Hurley, Toni, Once More On My Adventure: The Life of Frank Hurley, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1966

Macintyre, Stuart, A History for a Nation, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1994

McCarthy, Dudley, Gallipoli to the Somme, John Ferguson, Sydney, 1983

McKernan, Michael, Here is Their Spirit, UQP, Brisbane, 1991

McKernan, Michael, Gallipoli, A Short History, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2010

McMullin, Ross, Pompey Elliott, Scribe, Carlton North, 2002

McMullin, Ross, Will Dyson, Australia’s Radical Genius, Scribe, Melbourne, 2006

McQueen, Humphrey, Temper Democratic, Wakefield Press, Kent Town, SA, 1998

Murdoch, Keith, The Gallipoli Letter, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2010

Nasht, Simon, The Last Explorer: Hubert Wilkins, Australia’s Unknown Hero, Hodder, Sydney, 2005

Neville, Graham, Radical Churchman: Edward Lee Hicks and the New Liberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998

Newton, Douglas, Hell-Bent, Scribe, Brunswick, Victoria, 2014

Pedersen, P.A., Monash as Military Commander, MUP, Melbourne, 1985

Pedersen, Peter, The Anzacs: Gallipoli to the Western Front, Penguin, Camberwell, Victoria, 2007

Piggott, Michael, A Guide to The Personal Family and Official Papers of C.E.W. Bean, AWM, 1983

Rees, Peter, Desert Boys, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2011

Robson, L.L. The First AIF: A study of its recruitment 1914–1918, MUP, Carlton, 1970

Roe, Michael, Nine Australian Progressives—vitalism in bourgeois social thought, 1890–1960, UQP, Brisbane, 1984

Semmler, Clement, The Banjo of the Bush, Lansdowne, Sydney, 1975

Schuler, Peter, Australia in Arms, Fisher Unwin, London, 1916

Selth, P.A, (ed.), Canberra Collection, Lowden, Kilmore, 1976

Serle, Geoffrey, John Monash, MUP, Melbourne, 1982

Souter, Gavin, Company of Heralds, MUP, Melbourne, 1981

Stanley, Peter, Quinn’s Post, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2005

Stanley, Peter, Men of Mont St Quentin, Scribe, Melbourne, 2009

Stanley, Peter, Bad Characters, Pier 9, Sydney, 2010

Williams, John. F., Anzacs, the Media and the Great War, UNSW, Sydney, 1999

Winter, Denis, Making the Legend: The War Writings of CEW Bean, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1992

Woolf, Virginia; Bell, Vanessa; with Stephen, Thoby, Hyde Park Gate News, Hesperus Press, London, 2005

Younger, R.M., Keith Murdoch: Founder of a Media Empire, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2003

Zwar, Desmond, In Search of Keith Murdoch, Macmillan, Sydney, 1980

JOURNALS, MANUSCRIPTS AND PAPERS

Bazley, A.W., AWM 3 DRL 3520. Also private diary, held by the Bazley family.

Condé, Anne-Marie, ‘John Treloar, Official War Art and the Australian War Memorial,’ AJPH, vol. 53, no. 3, 2007

Cunneen, Tony, ‘Slaughter of the Innocents, The Destruction of the 18th Battalion at Gallipoli, August 1915’, Australian Army Journal, vol. VII, no. 2

Ellis, Stephen, C.E.W. Bean: A Study of His Life and Works, thesis for Master of Arts, University of New England, 1969

Ellis, Stephen, ‘Racism in Australia’, The Australian Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 3, September 1972

Ellis, Stephen, ‘The Censorship of the Official Naval History of Australia in the Great War’, Historical Studies, vol. 20, no. 80, 1983

Jolly, Martyn, Australian First World War Photography, http://martynjolly.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/australian-first-world-war-photography-1999.pdf

Lindsay, Geoff S.C., ‘Be Substantially Great in Thy Self: Getting to Know C.E.W. Bean, Barrister, Judge’s Associate, Moral Philosopher’, http://www.forbessociety.org.au/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/bean.pdf

Londey, Peter, ‘A Possession For Ever: Charles Bean, the Ancient Greeks, and Military Commemoration in Australia’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 53, no. 3, September 2007

Melrose, Craig, A Praise That Never Ages: The Australian War Memorial and the national interpretation of the First World War, 1922–35, thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of Queensland, 2004

Murphy, Kate, ‘Australian Urban Reformers and the Ideal of Rurality, 1900–1918’, Rural History, vol. 20, issue 1, April 2009

Putnis, Peter, Professor of Communication, University of Canberra, ‘Keith Murdoch: War-time Journalist, 1915–1918’; privately held

The Australasian Photo Review, 15 February 1919

Whyte, Lucy, At the Intersection of Religion, Nationalism and Commemoration: An Analysis of the Formation of the Australian War Memorial 1916–1941, report drafted for the Australian War Memorial, 2013

SELECTED NEWSPAPER ARTICLES

Anthony Barker, ‘Words at War’, Weekend Australian Magazine 20–21 April 1996; and Martin Ball, ‘Re-reading Bean’s Last Paragraph’, Australian Historical Studies, 122, 2003

Acknowledgements

Charles Bean was a meticulous man who produced voluminous records, both private and official. In working my way through them I have been lucky to have the help of many people. I would like to thank Charles Bean’s grandchildren Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll for giving me access to his archive at the Australian War Memorial and permission to use extracts from his diaries, and for making the family photo albums available to me. I would also like to acknowledge Ian Carroll for his role in facilitating the process. Anne also kindly gave me access to the private diary that Charles Bean’s mother, Lucy Bean, began before handing it over to her son for his continued use. Along with Anne Carroll and Ted Le Couteur, Charles Bean’s niece the late Phyllis Bauer also shared her memories of Charles and Effie. Another niece, Pam Thompson, also helped in this regard.

Arthur Bazley played a major role in the life of Charles Bean, and I am indebted to his son, Peter Bazley—Bean’s godson—and his wife, Shirley Bazley, for their great help in providing advice during my research, and then making available extracts from Arthur Bazley’s diaries and photos from his collection, which their daughter Nichola Bazley-Smith copied.

At the Australian War Memorial, I am indebted to Craig Tibbits and the staff at the Research Centre for their help with files. I would also like to acknowledge advice from Ashley Ekins, Head of the Military History Section at the Australian War Memorial, and Senior Historian Peter Burness. I would also like to thank Dr Tracy Bradford, of the State Library of New South Wales, for her help with access to files. Peter Sekuless also kindly loaned me books written by Charles Bean and books relevant to his life. In London, my thanks go to the staff at the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London, who kindly organised files for me.

Justice Geoff Lindsay, of the New South Wales Supreme Court, was especially helpful. Justice Lindsay made available much of his own research material, gathered for his fascinating analysis of Charles Bean’s background and brief experience in law in Sydney, ‘Be Substantially Great in Thy Self: Getting to Know C.E.W. Bean, Barrister, Judge’s Associate, Moral Philosopher’. Tony Cunneen was also helpful with background on the destruction of the 18th Battalion AIF at Gallipoli.

Dr Robert Freestone, Professor of Planning at the University of New South Wales, provided invaluable help with his insights into Charles Bean’s interest and involvement in town planning, and critiqued relevant drafts. I would also like to acknowledge the earlier insightful research on Charles Bean by Dr Stephen Ellis in his Master of Arts thesis completed for the University of New England in 1969; Professor Ken Inglis and his John Murtagh Macrossan Lecture, 1969; and the 1983 book by Charles Bean’s friend Dudley McCarthy, From Gallipoli to the Somme. All contributed to filling out my personal research.

I am indebted to the retired archivist Michael Piggott, who wrote the Guide to the Personal and Official Papers of C.E.W. Bean, for his help and advice. The eminent military historians Professor Peter Stanley and Dr Michael McKernan were ever willing to discuss issues as they arose during my research and writing. I am particularly grateful for their close and rigorous reading of the manuscript and the helpful observations and suggestions that improved the book immensely. Their guidance and generosity in sharing their great knowledge of Australian military history with me is deeply appreciated. My thanks go to Craig Deayton for his help on the question of casualties after the mines exploded at Messines.

At Allen & Unwin, once again it has been my privilege to work with Rebecca Kaiser. As always, Rebecca provided constant encouragement for a book on an Australian she strongly believed deserved much greater recognition. Likewise, the ever-efficient Siobhán Cantrill and Angela Handley nursed the manuscript through production to ensure a minimum of fuss when deadlines were tight; thanks also go to Julia Cain for her copyediting, and Liz Keenan for her ever astute proofreading.

Thank you to my daughter, Gemma, who researched material for me at the Australian National Library and the State Library of New South Wales. And finally, Bearing Witness owes so much to the support and involvement of my wife, Sue. She contributed to the final shape of the book through our frequent dinner-table discussions about Charles Bean during which she offered the acute observations of the psychologist that she is. As if that wasn’t enough, she also contributed to the editing process. For this I am truly indebted to her.

Table of Contents

COVER PAGE

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT PAGE

CONTENTS

PREFACE

PROLOGUE

PART ONE: THE EARLY YEARS

1 HERE, MY SON

2 WATERLOO

3 TEMPERING STEEL

4 MORAL STANCE

5 THE LURE OF THE PEN

6 SEEDS OF THE MYTH

7 THE CUB

8 THE SYDNEY PASSENGER

9 MORAL CERTAINTY

10 AGENT OF CHANGE

PART TWO: THE WAR YEARS

11 THE BOOTED HEEL

12 A HELL OF A TIME

13 PLAY THE GAME

14 DIGGING IN

15 SIDESHOW

16 BOOSTING A REPUTATION

17 THE NON-COMBATANT

18 BROTHERS IN ARMS

19 GENERAL FAILURE

20 THE WORKHORSE AND THE GADFLY

21 A QUESTION OF DISCIPLINE

22 COUNTING THE BULLETS

23 A NEW PRISM

24 A MONUMENTAL FOLLY

25 THE GIANT MINCING MACHINE

26 THE WAR GETS PERSONAL

27 NO WAY OUT

28 GOOD WILL NOT COME OF IT

29 SELF DOUBT

30 BRITISH IMPETUOSITY

31 BEAN DOES A MURDOCH

32 A CHANGE OF FOCUS

33 CULTURAL STEREOTYPING

34 THE JUGGLER

35 WAR ON A DIFFERENT FRONT

36 AN ASSESSMENT OF CHARACTER

37 AN ILL-JUDGED INTERVENTION

38 AND SO IT IS PEACE

PART THREE: AFTER THE NIGHTMARE

39 THE BUSH BACKWATER

40 THE NIPPER

41 BLUFF AND DOUBLE BLUFF

42 CENSORSHIP, TRAGEDY AND FARCE

43 IN HIS OWN HANDS

44 THE GHASTLY SPECTRE

45 THE STRAIGHT LINE

46 ABOUT TURN

47 BACK AMONG OLD DIGGERS

EPILOGUE

NOTES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS