Australians, Volume 2

by Thomas Keneally

  Bean was shocked not only at Monash’s elevation to command of the corps, but also appalled to learn that Birdwood intended to send Brudenell White to take over full time as chief of staff of the Fifth Army. He thought the corps command should go to White. On 16 May, when Birdwood’s recommendation of Monash was still only a rumour, Bean confided in Will Dyson, the official war artist, and Hubert Wilkins, the famous photographer. ‘We had been talking of the relative merits of White who does not advertise and Monash who does.’ Bean declared that Dyson said, ‘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.’ Bean and Dyson went to London to conspire with the influential Australian journalist Keith Murdoch, and the plotting would continue through the rest of May and early June. Keith Murdoch cabled Hughes to tell him that the opinion of the AIF was that Birdwood should not retain administrative command as General Officer Commanding while also commanding the Fifth Army, and Monash should not have been appointed field commander of the Australians over White. Their combined message was that Monash’s ‘genius’ was for organisation and administration, but that he lacked ‘the physical audacity that Australian troops were thought to require’. Even Andrew Fisher, now Australian High Commissioner in London, thought Monash the wrong man, but did not become a plotter.

  In response, Hughes asked long-suffering George Pearce, Minister for Defence, to postpone the decision. But he found the cabinet had already ratified the appointment. This did not deter Murdoch, who even telegraphed Hughes’ old sparring partner over the German mineral companies, W.S. Robinson of BHP, asking him to lobby the government along these lines. The Australian censors held up news of Monash’s appointment for almost a month because they suspected the decision might be reversed. Bean still believed that Monash had worked to get the generalship of the Australian Corps ‘by all sorts of clever, well hidden, subterranean channels’, but nearly forty years later he wrote in the margin of his diary, ‘I do not now believe this to be true.’ At the time, though, he presumed to groom General Brudenell White for the job which could still be taken from Monash. He wrote to White that ‘our men are not so safe under Gen. Monash as under you’.

  On 6 June, Murdoch sang his siren song to Monash, suggesting he take the London administrative role Birdwood had had: ‘You as a full General with supreme authority . . . would be the solution of many of our country’s difficulties.’ He also offered both as bribe and threat the news that his cables went out to 250 newspapers, Australian and foreign. The implication behind this could only have been that he had the power to exalt or pillory Monash, and Monash had better give up the Corps and go to London to take Birdwood’s job. Bean kept on confiding to his journal that Monash ‘cannot inspire this force with a high chivalrous patriotic spirit . . . there is no question where the interest of the Australian nation lies. It lies in making White one of its great men and makers.’

  Murdoch was so relentless that Brudenell White had to make it clear that he would not accept command of the Australian Corps if offered it. Monash was aware of the plots against him and certainly saw them as due at least in part to his Jewishness. ‘It is a great nuisance to have to fight a pogrom of this nature in the midst of all one’s other anxieties.’ It was a rare reference in his life to anti-Semitism. Birdwood would say in any case that he had absolute confidence in Monash, as did General Rawlinson, the British general within whose Fourth Army the Australian Corps was the jewel, and who declared that Murdoch was ‘a mischievous and persistent villain’.

  But even as Monash planned campaigns, particularly a battle near the village of Hamel, he did not believe his position secure. When Billy Hughes and Joseph Cook came to review the troops, not knowing that the Battle of Hamel was afoot, Monash said to them, ‘I am bound to tell you, quite frankly, that any arrangement which would involve my removal from the command of this corps would be, in the highest degree, distasteful to me.’ Hughes put his hand on Monash’s shoulder and gave him some ambiguous reassurance. That night, at corps headquarters, Bishop G.M. Long, who was in charge of adult education for the soldiers, spent hours trying to persuade Bean and Murdoch that they were wrong. Hughes, as the argument went on, did not get steadily more angry with Murdoch and Bean but with Monash himself for being importunate. But the Battle of Hamel, narrated below, partially put paid to the plotting, and the 8 August 1918 offensive against the Germans, a triumph for the corps, closed the issue. Much later Bean spoke of his and Murdoch’s ‘high-intentioned but ill-judged intervention’. That it resulted in no damage to the AIF was probably due to the magnanimity of both White and Monash.

  From early June 1918 Monash had been talking with Major General Sinclair-Maclagan and Major General Gellibrand, two of his divisional commanders, about an attack to straighten out the German bulge in the Australian lines at the extreme southern end of the British army in France. Maclagan was a Scot who had been recruited for the early Australian army in 1901. He had been so exhausted, mentally and physically, by the first two days of Gallipoli that he had needed to be rested, but he soon returned to action and was a great critic of the lack of planning which went into some of the Gallipoli operations. Gellibrand and Monash were critics not only of Gallipoli but Western Front tactics and planning. Monash believed that it was time that ‘some commander on our side of No Man’s Land’ should begin to think creatively about an offensive. At the Fourth Army, of which the Australian Corps was part, there arrived a new kind of tank, and Monash thought they could be used against the German bulge in which lay the Somme village of Hamel, whose capture would straighten the line.

  Monash took the tank with an intense seriousness, to the extent that some of those who admired him would attribute to him the founding tactics which would later be used by the Germans in France in 1940, a position perhaps mocked by British historians but strongly upheld by much Australian opinion. Monash believed that the tank, by drawing fire onto itself and providing cover, would reduce infantry losses. Monash’s idea was that ‘each tank was, for tactical purposes, to be treated as an infantry weapon’, and advance level with the men. The young staff officer Thomas Blamey was one who felt uneasy about putting such reliance on tanks. The tanks had let down the Australians, he said, at Bullecourt in 1917. But Monash’s plan was different. For the first time in history each tank would be assigned to and controlled by an infantry officer. The battalions were bussed back to rear areas daily to drill with the tanks, and even to go for joy rides in them. But not only was Monash banking on the tank corps, but the tank corps were banking on him. They had never before been taken quite so seriously.

  Monash also wanted attacks by aircraft to be coordinated with the ground assault. He presented a plan for a 4th Brigade dawn assault using artillery and tanks and aircraft in an intense collaboration not previously achieved. Monash had also depended very strongly on reconnaissance by aircraft of the enemy positions and of night bombing and strafing to exhaust the men opposite the Australians. Each day until the attack a gas and smoke shell barrage would be fired, but on the day of the attack only smoke shells would be used, so that the advancing men would be uninhibited by gas masks though the Germans would probably be wearing theirs.

  Rawlinson asked whether Monash would like Americans to join the battle, and Monash asked for 2000 men of the US 33rd Division, organised in eight companies. On 2 July, two days before the attack, Billy Hughes made his visit to Monash’s sector. He was a disappointed man in that the Australian people had voted down his conscription referendums to prevent these fine men from receiving numbers of reinforcements who would reduce the wastage of Australia’s bravest. Many of the troops he visited had voted against conscription—they did not want their little brothers thrown into the furnace, they did not want their morale vitiated by unwilling young men, and the Irish Catholics amongst them were possibly influenced by opinions from home about the futility of such sacrifices for an unloved imperial government, particularl
y so after the execution of the leaders of the 1916 Dublin uprising. Private John Keneally had written late in December 1917 that ‘we are all waiting for the result of the referendum to see what sort of a time Mr W Hughes has got for his trouble. He won’t get a yes from the boys over here that’s sure.’

  That day in July 1918, though, Hughes seemed relaxed. While Cook addressed the troops, Hughes lay on the ground chewing a stalk of grass, looking up into the faces of the heroes. ‘I talked to the boys who were going into the Hamel stunt just before they started,’ said Hughes later. ‘Words are poor things to describe them, but as they stood there thousands of them armed cap-a-pie: helmets [and] full kit ready for action their bayonets glistening in the sun: an enemy aeroplane overhead being attacked by our anti-aircraft guns . . . I thought that with a million of such men one could conquer the world.’

  On the day before the battle, half the Americans were withdrawn, to their great chagrin, but then later in the afternoon Monash learned that General Pershing did not want any American participation—the motivation seeming to be an unwillingness to have Americans commanded by anyone but Americans. As Monash said, ‘The whole of the infantry destined for the assault at dawn next morning, including those very Americans, were already on its way to its battle stations.’ Withdrawing the Americans would mean abandonment of the battle, he argued. Monash asked Rawlinson, the Fourth Army commander, to stand firm. Rawlinson replied, ‘Do you want me to run the risk of being sent back to England? Do you mean it is worth that?’ Monash claimed to have responded, ‘It is more important to keep the confidence of the Americans and the Australians in each other than to preserve even an army commander.’

  The withdrawal of a thousand of the men from the 33rd American Division was beyond his control, but it challenged his belief that once a plan was finalised it should not be interfered with. A thousand Americans remained, distributed by platoons amongst the three Australian brigades that would be making the first assault. In the small hours of 4 July the Australians and their intermixture of Americans went forward into an as yet un-churned no-man’s-land and lay down in the grass and the crops which had been sown there. A ground mist which mixed with the smoke shells helped create an even greater screen for the advance. At the appointed second, the infantry rose up—many of them lighting cigarettes—and with the tanks behind them walked forward behind the creeping barrage.

  It was all over in ninety-three minutes, Monash would later exalt. It was the perfect set piece battle of the war. One participant wrote, ‘It wasn’t a battle at all—just a Sunday morning stroll through the park. No rifle fire, no machine gun fire, no shell fire, no casualties, nothing at all.’ But it was not so in all parts of the line. There were 1400 casualties—tragic enough, but light for France—and 800 of these Australian and American casualties were walking wounded. The tanks came back festooned with cheering wounded. The forests of Vaire and Hamel woods had fallen to the 4th and 11th Brigades, the first line of the advance, and the 11th and their tanks captured Hamel village itself. Sixty tanks were sent forward and only three were temporarily disabled. The advance ‘gave us possession of the whole of the Hamel Valley, and landed us on the forward or eastern slope of the last ridge, from which the enemy had been able to overlook any of the country held by us’.

  Hamel became the model for all other operations of the corps. It was the first battle in which the experiment of using aeroplanes for the purpose of carrying and delivering small-arms ammunition was tried. Until then it required two men to carry one ammunition box of a thousand rounds which a machine gun in action would expend in less than five minutes. These carrying parties had to travel probably not less than two or three miles, often across country open to fire. Each plane carried two boxes of ammunition as well as bombs (grenades), and they could be released by hand lever, and thus dropped by parachute. Captain Lawrence Wackett of the Australian Flying Corps trained the fliers on how to make such a drop. Each machine-gun crew, upon reaching its appointed locality, spread upon the ground a large V-shaped canvas—V for Vickers machine guns. After some training, the pilots could drop the ammunition from a height of at least 1000 feet to within 100 yards of the appointed spot. Wackett’s method introduced what Monash called ‘an obvious economy in wounds and lives’.

  The Supreme War Council in Versailles were riveted by this victory. French Prime Minister George Clemenceau visited the 4th Division and told them how they had astonished the continent of Europe by their valour, and when they cheered, declared, ‘Des jolies enfants.’

  The Australians followed up the victory by relentless patrolling. In case the Australians felt they were being overused—and they began to suspect it—Monash addressed every brigade in the Australian Corps, explaining how by comparison with other soldiers their workload was not excessive. Monash, not a modest man, declared that the effect of Hamel ‘was electric . . . it stimulated many men to the realisation that the enemy was, after all, not invulnerable, in spite of the formidable increase in his resources which he had brought from Russia. It marked the termination, once and for all, of the purely defensive attitude of the British front.’

  WAR AND ART

  There were a number of official war artists appointed to the AIF, all Australians who happened to be in England. They included Will Dyson, George Lambert, John and Will Longstaff and Arthur Streeton. But one fine unofficial artist, Iso Rae from Melbourne, was caught in France by the war, in the art community of the coastal town of Étaples.

  One of those children of the gold rush, Iso had been born in Melbourne in 1860 and became a student at the National Gallery School of Melbourne. There she became friendly with Tom Roberts, John Longstaff, Frederick McCubbin and others. In 1887 she moved to Paris with her mother and sister, and there was influenced by the work of the post-Impressionists. Her work would resemble theirs, with bold dark outlines and flat areas of colour. In 1890 the three Rae women moved to Étaples, a fishing port at the mouth of the River Canche in Picardy, where there was an artist’s colony of Australians, British and Americans, ultimately frequented also by a much younger and notable Australian artist, Emily Hilda Rix from Ballarat. Rix was also accompanied by a sister and their mother.

  Iso and Emily drew and sketched the Picardy landscape over which the coming horror of the war would play out, and were both exhibited in the Paris Salon and in London. But the outbreak of war drove most of the Australians out of Étaples. The Rix women moved to London, where in 1916 Emily married Major George Nicholson, an Australian soldier who was killed later that year. Iso Rae’s mother was sick, however, and it was considered best not to move her. As the first winter of the war spread its gloom over the Channel Iso’s sister wrote, ‘We are, I believe, the only English in this town now . . . many women went.’ In that grim Channel town now transformed by the demands of the war, and in France in general, Iso Rae would become one of only two Australian women artists to document the war in France. The other was Jessie Traill, who was working in the military hospital in Rouen.

  The British army base camp at Étaples, in which Iso worked for the Voluntary Aid Detachment of the British Red Cross in one of the YMCA huts, was enormous and was served by railways, roads and canals and, above all, by cross-Channel transports connecting camps in England to the southern and eastern battlefields of France. Through Étaples travelled British, Canadian, Scottish and Australian forces. Wilfred Owen, the war poet, described it as ‘a vast, dreadful encampment. It seemed neither France nor England, but a kind of paddock where the beasts are kept a few days before the shambles’. But in Iso’s hands it became almost attractive.

  She had little time now for studio work. Canvases and oil paints were difficult to obtain. So she resorted to pastels on paper to record the unearthly camp and all the men, anonymous, hugging themselves in overcoats, who passed through it. One of Iso’s 200 or more superb pastels of the place shows troops arriving at the Anzac camp in June 1916, another troops queuing in front of t
he rudimentary camp cinema at night. She also depicted German POWs working in the Anzac camp, building a new station platform, Tommies playing football, and men bound for Blighty whose pyjamas were marked NYD for ‘Not Yet Diagnosed’—shell-shock cases, in other words. In 1916 Iso’s mother died, but her daughters stayed on in Étaples until 1932 when, alarmed by Hitler, the sisters moved to England.

  Jessie Traill was born in 1881 to an affluent family who lived in Brighton, Melbourne, and is said to have decided to become an artist after meeting Tom Roberts painting on Black Rock Beach. She had studied French at a school in Switzerland and was a rugged young woman, travelling alone by boat to Java via New Guinea in an attempt to achieve an artist’s perspective on Asia. She and another graduate of the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, Jessie Evans, volunteered in the Great War as Red Cross Princess Alexandra Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses in France, and they worked in hospitals around Rouen for three and a half years. Here Jessie Traill had the same problem as Iso Rae—the volunteer nurses were worked hard, and for long hours. But in her free time, Jessie depicted life in the rear area, damaged young men emerging from the killing machine and fresh young men about to be fed into it. She was also an activist, raising money for the reconstruction of a small village near Rouen. She would later be described by the art historian Sandra Lanteri as ‘a bridge to the Australian modernists of the post-war era’, and in the 1930s would make extraordinary etchings of the building of the Harbour Bridge, which stand honourably beside the more famous paintings of the unfinished structure by the Australian Impressionists Grace Cossington Smith and Roland Wakeland. She would also paint in Central Australia a decade before it was considered a fit place for artists, let alone women.