Bearing Witness

by Peter Rees

  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 hi
s 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 tumbl
ed 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.