Bearing Witness

by Peter Rees

  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 an
d 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 busin
ess.

  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.