Bean urged the creation of the Australian War Records Section in 1917 to collect material for the post-war history, and revisited the peninsula in 1919 with the artist George Lambert and photographer Hubert Wilkins. Lambert was able to make sketches for two large paintings, depicting the landing at Anzac Cove, and the charge of the Light Horse at the Nek: both are in the AWM. The now familiar Bean style continued in the twelve main narrative volumes of the official history published between 1921 and 1943, six of which Bean wrote entirely himself. Unlike the rather collaborative nature of the British Official History, Bean's was written much more from a single individual perspective. Indeed, much was based on his diaries and papers, Bean having secured a guarantee that his work would not be censored by the Australian military authorities. As in his journalism, Bean carefully selected his evidence and chose simplification and generalisation over wider analysis. It was a chronicle more than a history, from which the higher perspective of strategy, and of higher command decisions, was largely absent, being incidental to his main purpose. Because Bean mixed socially with Anzac officers rather than the other ranks, he also tended to assume that the latter shared his generally favourable view of Australian officers. Australian faults were noted on occasion, but unsavoury behaviour was treated as far from serious and, invariably, the Anzacs were not to blame.
Bean, therefore, told only part of the truth about the character and conduct of the Anzacs. In fact, there was more resistance to initial recruitment efforts in Australia than is sometimes supposed. Some 22 per cent of the first cohort of the AIF were British-born as opposed to Australian-born. Moreover, Australia was one of the most urbanised societies in the world in 1914, only 14 per cent of wartime recruits being employed in agricultural occupations. Yet, the Anzac ‘myth’ was predicated upon a supposed ‘bush ethos’ deriving from ideas of ‘mateship’ and egalitarianism. It was certainly the case that Australian soldiers generally had a jaundiced view of the British army, and that the view that Australians were undisciplined was equally widespread amongst the British military leadership. Quite often, the Australians were poorly trained and badly led, with a considerable social gulf between officers and men. Indeed, the New Zealanders were arguably more efficient by 1918 with greater staying power, and certainly suffered from fewer disciplinary problems. Nonetheless, the AIF did have the advantage of maintaining rigorous physical standards, and of the reasonable familiarity with firearms resulting from the introduction of compulsory military training before the war. Certainly, too, the AIF undoubtedly drew strength from a notion of being different from the British. In fact, command over the Australian corps became symbolic of independence of spirit, the Australian authorities also refusing the attempts by the British High Command to extend the death penalty for disciplinary offences to Australians on the same basis as applied to British troops. Ultimately, the Australian, Sir John Monash, was elevated to the command of the Australian Corps in May 1918: ironically, Monash was of German extraction and wrote letters home to his father in German.
Underlying divisions within Australian society deriving from class (defined by income), religion and national origin were to become even more pronounced during the subsequent referenda on conscription in October 1916 and December 1917. Those most likely to oppose its imposition were Labor voters, Catholics and those of Irish extraction; those most likely to support it were women, males of military age and recent migrants. On both occasions, conscription was rejected: by the narrow margin of 72,476 votes in a poll of 2.5 million in 1916, and by a larger margin of 166,588 in 1917. The controversy over the first referendum split the Labor Party, and Hughes was compelled to create a national coalition with the Liberals in January 1917. Ironically, the secretary of the Anti-Conscription League was John Curtin, who would introduce conscription as Labor prime minister in the Second World War. In some respects, opposition to the war and, later, to conscription was economic in character. It reflected the increase in unemployment and short-time working at the outbreak of war, and the subsequent fears that conscription would further denude the rural labour force. It did not, therefore, reflect anti-war feeling as such, and there was a certain belief that a just war would find its own recruits without compulsion.
Bolstered by the sense of the heroism of its soldiers, increasing dominion independence for Australia, New Zealand and Canada was recognised in part by the attendance on occasions of Hughes and his Canadian counterpart at Cabinet meetings when in London. The South African statesman Jan Smuts joined the War Cabinet itself. Australia, Canada and New Zealand all insisted on a place at the post-war peace conference, and were duly represented both within a British Empire Delegation and by their own delegates, as well as being recognised as separate signatories of the Versailles Treaty. Increasing refusal by the dominions to automatically follow the lead of the British government in foreign policy, as they had in 1914, was also soon to be demonstrated. During the Chanak crisis in September 1922, Australia and Canada both declined to support any war in the face of resurgent Turkish nationalism. Australia's interests were no longer necessarily those of Britain, even though this did not become abundantly clear until the Second World War.
The spirit of a new independent nationhood was also maintained in the recognition given to ‘Anzac Day’, first celebrated nationally on 25 April 1916: there had already been some ‘Anzac Day’ commemoration in South Australia in October 1915. Promoted by Hughes, Anzac Day was partly a recruiting device and partly intended to bolster Hughes's prestige: it was also celebrated in London on 25 April 1916, with a march of Anzacs through the capital to a service at Westminster Abbey in the presence of George V, and a suitably rousing speech by Hughes at the Hotel Cecil. Subsequently, Anzac Day became a particularly important event given the difficulty for relatives of visiting distant graves. Interest in Anzac Day was waning in some areas when it was revived in the mid-1920s as a popular patriotic pageant by the Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia (RSSILA), which found it convenient to draw attention to veterans’ issues. All Australian states had adopted Anzac Day by 1927 as an official public holiday, despite opposition from Labor activists and frequent debates as to whether public houses and places of gambling or entertainment should be closed. Distance added to the popularity of exhibitions of war relics in Australia, and Will Longstaff's painting, The Menin Gate at Midnight, was purchased for the AWM and Australia and widely seen on a national tour in 1928 and 1929. Australian pilgrimage to Gallipoli or further afield was beyond the means of most private individuals, and the RSSILA declined to participate in the 1928 British Empire Service League's trip to Europe in the belief that it was not sufficiently ‘Australian’. An Imperial Ex-service Association then emerged concomitant with a ‘Wattle Tribute’ proposed by the press to decorate graves abroad. The first pilgrimage set out in June 1929 for Egypt and Gallipoli, with about one hundred people taking part. Some four hundred veterans attended the unveiling of the Australian memorial at Villers-Bretonneux in the even more distant France in July 1938.
With waning interest, Anzac Day lost its initial imperial and national meaning both in Australia and New Zealand. Following protests in the 1950s against the general prohibition on sport and entertainment when Anzac Day fell on a Saturday, the New Zealand 1966 Anzac Day Act permitted such activities in the afternoons. A controversial play critical of Anzac Day by Alan Seymour, One Day of the Year, was banned from the Adelaide Festival in 1960 though subsequently performed by an amateur group in the city, and by a professional company in Sydney in 1961. From the mid-1960s to the 1970s, Anzac Day became more of a symbol of disunity, an opportunity for protest in the name of disparate causes, not least opposition to Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War. There was then another revival of interest in Anzac Day in the 1980s. This was largely driven by growing popular cultural nationalism promoted subsequently by successive federal governments, though it also became simultaneously a focus for opposition by feminists and Aborigines since it was seen, by some, as
a divisive white male symbol. By then, the memories of the last few Anzac veterans themselves had become inextricably entangled with the myth, part of the very fabric of their own recollections. The same popular impulse saw the burial of Australia's own ‘unknown warrior’, chosen from an unidentified Australian body from the Villers-Bretonneux war cemetery in France, at the AWM in November 1993, and the state funerals of the last original Anzac in December 1997, and of the last survivor of Gallipoli in May 2002. An estimated 28,000 people attended the Dawn Service – the idea of a dawn service had been initiated in Western Australia in 1923 – in Canberra on 25 April 2007, with crowds of up to 30,000 in both Perth and Melbourne.
Gallipoli has remained an annual and fashionable event for many young backpackers. Australian cricket teams en route to do battle for the Ashes have also stopped off there. By 2003, numbers at the annual Dawn Service at Anzac Cove had reached 14,000. The Australian prime minister, Bob Hawke, attended at Anzac Cove in April 1990, and both prime ministers John Howard of Australia and Helen Clark of New Zealand did so in 2000. Inevitably, motivations have changed, grief and the search for meaning having been replaced by nostalgia, wanderlust, a passion for family history, even a wish, as Bruce Scates has remarked, ‘to be connected with an event so much larger than themselves’.20 As it happens, the Gallipoli peninsula has become in part a contested space with the appearance of more and more Turkish memorials since 1945 reflecting a different national myth in terms of the role of Mustafa Kemal as Atatürk, the ‘father of the Turks’.
The promotion of Australian cultural nationalism has also been witnessed in the perpetuation of the Anzac myth in the cinema, which has had its own major influence on the popular memory of a younger generation. Thus, in Peter Weir's popular and award-winning film, Gallipoli (1981), the hoary old canard that British troops paused in their advance to make tea at Suvla Bay, while the men of the Light Horse died at the Nek, is given full prominence. In the cinematic version, there is no room for the fact that the operation was in support of the New Zealand Brigade attack on Chunuk Bair, rather than the unrelated British landing at Suvla, and that it was a wholly Australian-generated disaster. No opportunity is lost to depict British incompetence. A British officer seemingly orders a further fruitless attack on the ‘Nek’, which forms the film's climax. In reality, it was an Australian – Colonel John Antill – who ordered the attack. Only the sharp-eyed will notice that the officer with the impeccable English accent in Weir's film does actually wear Australian collar badges, a sleight of hand enabling Weir to claim historical accuracy. Weir regarded his film as a war memorial in celluloid, but it is an entirely dishonest exercise in articulating the legend and not the facts in the interests of a post-imperial generation. Bean knew the importance of the national myth, but he did not see his conscious cultivation of it as incompatible with loyalty to empire. Though the emphasis is different, however, the memory of Gallipoli and of the Anzacs still contributes to Australian national identity.
Ashmead-Bartlett, who had begun the process of myth making, returned to working for the Daily Telegraph in 1919. He was elected Conservative MP for Hammersmith North in 1924, but renewed bankruptcy forced his resignation two years later. His polemic, The Uncensored Dardanelles, was published in 1928. He died in Lisbon while covering the Spanish revolution for the Telegraph in May 1931. Bean, who subsequently declined a knighthood, continued to work on his official history, and to promote the AWM. During the Second World War, he worked for the Department of Information. He became Chairman of the Commonwealth Archives Committee in 1942, and Chairman of the Board of the AWM in 1952. Between 1947 and 1958 he was also Chairman of the Promotions Appeals Board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Respected throughout Australia, Bean died in August 1968.
CHAPTER 4
THE MAN AND THE HOUR
Lloyd George's Appointment as Minister of Munitions, 26 May 1915
ON THE morning of Friday, 21 May 1915, there were shocking headlines in the Daily Mail: ‘The Shells Scandal. Lord Kitchener's Tragic Blunder. Our Terrible Casualty Lists.’ The accompanying story proclaimed that soldiers’ lives were being sacrificed because the British army did not have enough artillery shells to fight the war effectively. Such was the iconic status of Kitchener as Secretary of State for War that a copy of the newspaper was promptly burned outside the Stock Exchange, subscriptions were cancelled, and sales nose-dived. As the newspaper's owner, Lord Northcliffe, confided to his fellow press baron Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook, he had failed to ‘realise the extent to which the War Secretary had retained his prestige with the man in the street’.1 Northcliffe had wanted to force Kitchener from office, but the ramping up of press agitation in the ‘Shells Scandal’ followed rather than precipitated a major change in the government direction of the war. That change itself made Britain the first of those states at war to attempt any systematic reorganisation of industry geared to winning the war.
Certainly, Northcliffe had already laid the groundwork for a public campaign for change. On 7 April his other title, The Times, had suggested that there had been an ‘extraordinary failure of the Government to take in hand in business-like fashion the provision of full and adequate supply of munitions’. Three days later, the newspaper opined that the government ‘ought to have insisted on instant organisation of the whole of our national resources’.2 Then, on 14 May, The Times printed a telegram from its military correspondent, Charles à Court Repington, directly attributing the failure of the British offensive at Aubers Ridge (9 May) to a lack of shells. In reality, it was a convenient excuse for the failures of Sir John French's over- ambitious expectations of a breakthrough, and French detested Kitchener: Repington had been staying with French and was fed his version of events.
On Saturday, 15 May, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher resigned as First Sea Lord over his differences with the First Lord, Winston Churchill, and profound disillusionment with the Dardanelles campaign. Churchill, who had brought the 74-year-old Fisher back from retirement as First Lord in 1914, described him as a decayed and ruined castle keep, in which ‘its imperious ruler dwelt only in the special apartments and corridors with which he had a lifelong familiarity’.3 Fisher tired easily, but his mind remained vigorous, and his discontent with the erosion of naval strength in the North Sea for the sake of the Dardanelles worried him more and more. It might be added that he had not expressed his opposition openly, his silence in the counsels of war echoing that of the Chief of the General Staff, Sir James Wolfe Murray, memorably nicknamed ‘Sheep’ Murray by Churchill. When HMS Goliath was torpedoed off the Dardanelles on 12 May, Fisher demanded that HMS Queen Elizabeth be recalled. Churchill claimed that ‘Jackie’ Fisher had actually simply walked out of the Admiralty building and gone missing for several hours that Saturday morning. Fisher was tracked down to a room in the Charing Cross Hotel, when Asquith ordered him back to the Admiralty. Beaverbrook on the other hand said that Fisher, when meeting the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, in the street, had told him he was resigning. Lloyd George then sent for Asquith and, though unable to persuade Fisher to stay in office, they did manage to get him to go back to the Admiralty building: Fisher had threatened to resign on at least eight occasions already. Either way, a petulant Fisher promptly locked himself in his office, and refused to answer the door until an old friend and former First Lord, Reginald McKenna, now Home Secretary, glimpsed him peering through the blinds. McKenna had no better luck persuading Fisher to remain, and he departed for Scotland. Subsequently, Fisher sent Asquith quite ludicrous demands for complete control of the navy as the price for returning to the Admiralty. It was an extraordinary way to leave office in the midst of war.
Alerted by a cryptic note from Fisher, the Unionist leader Andrew Bonar Law saw Lloyd George at the Treasury on the Monday morning, and went on to meet Asquith in Downing Street. He agreed to join a new coalition government. It has sometimes been suggested that the 62-year-old Asquith was temporarily unhinged by the unexpected n
ews that his confidante, Venetia Stanley, the 26-year-old young woman with whom he was infatuated, had resolved to marry one of Asquith's own younger ministers, Edwin Montagu. Diffident and lethargic though he was as a war leader, Asquith was an astute party leader intent on clinging to office. He feared that he might lose the general election that would have been due ordinarily at the end of 1915. Bonar Law, too, was apprehensive of fighting an election on an out-of-date electoral register, and with local constituency organisations weakened by enlistment of party agents, and contacts between MPs and constituents also eroded by enlistment of MPs and constituents. He was also aware of the growing unrest among his own backbenchers at their leader sustaining a Liberal government through ‘patriotic opposition’. It suited both men, therefore, to enter a coalition.
The Making of the First World War Page 9
