chapter four

Lurid Clouds of War

‘If the motherland was in danger, so was the Commonwealth.
If Great Britain went to her Armageddon we, as Britishers, would go with her.’

— Sir John Forrest, minister in Australia’s first federal parliament

The morning of Saturday 22 July saw bright sunshine burn off the dawn mist. By mid-afternoon, when Charles Bean ventured up to an advanced post near Pozières Trench to sketch the lay of the battlefield in his diary, it had ripened into ‘bright hot day’. As Bean worked forward, he observed that the Anzacs who sheltered nearby in shallow red-earth trenches were in good spirits.1 Looking back, it is hard to fathom how these men, who would soon be called upon to kill others without hesitation — to shoot them at close range, drive a bayonet through their bellies, or bludgeon them to death — could feel this way. Although, according to Bean, outwardly the Anzacs displayed good spirits, what emotions did they experience privately? As each minute passed and they edged closer to their reckoning, did they feel a heightened sense of anxiety, apprehension, or fear?

Private Walter Wright, 4th Battalion, revealed his state of mind in a letter he wrote some time before the battle: ‘Can’t help wondering what fate holds in store for me. Will my luck go west? Whatever it is I guess I’ll take what is coming to me.’2

Captain William Donovan Joynt, 5th Battalion, remembered one soldier expressing the unease felt by many: ‘Well, I suppose others before us have gone through the same ordeal and come out of it all right. But I wonder if they felt fear and did they overcome it?’3 Joynt summed up the prevailing emotion among his men as fear of ‘being afraid’.

Lance-Corporal Douglas Horton, a 26-year-old schoolteacher from Mittagong assigned to the 2nd Battalion, describe how his platoon attempted to pass the time by singing songs and swapping jokes. Behind the lightheartedness, Horton sensed a quiet confidence within his platoon, noting: ‘Every man was sure of himself and being sure of himself was sure of the man next to him.’4

To occupy themselves and possibly block out unsettling thoughts, the soldiers packed and repacked their haversacks, shaved, wrote letters home, watched the bombardment, or tried to snatch some sleep. Some huddled together and played hands of Housey-Housey and Crown and Anchor. Others lay in the grass, watching the aeroplanes circling overhead or the odd lark fluttering about the scarred fields.5 ‘The Battalion was restless all day,’ summed up one battalion history. ‘No one could settle down.’6

Each soldier prepared for battle in his own way. Some kept crumpled copies of Henry Lawson’s stirring verse ‘The Star of Australasia’ inside their pocket-sized diaries.7 Reading the verse must have helped to fortify their resolve. Lawson, the ‘grey dreamer’, didn’t write soft and soapy poetry; his verse cut like a farmhouse axe. He prophesied: ‘I tell you the Star of the South shall rise — in the lurid clouds of war.’8 He promised them all — clerks, jackeroos, labourers, or drovers — that one great battle was their destiny, and after it their exploits would be remembered for the next 1000 years.

‘The day is near when Australia’s boys will once again be given an opportunity to show the World what we are made of,’ wrote Lieutenant Harold Malpas in a letter before the battle. ‘Tomorrow we hope to be on the road to Berlin …’9

Arthur Foxcroft would have been sitting quietly among his platoon cobbers, scribbling notes in his diary, which records: ‘We are getting ready for our first big battle … We are to take Pozières and must not retire unless beaten back in hand to hand fighting and must not fire a shot unless forced to.’10 Other soldiers, like Arthur Thomas, immersed themselves in writing what they knew could be their final letters to loved ones. ‘This is my last letter before going into a stunt,’ he explained to his wife and children. ‘God bless you, all my loved ones; pray hard for me.’11

Some ‘cleanskins’ observed the grim Gallipoli veterans — many of whom were distinguishable by the Australian flag tattooed on their arms, as well as brown, leathery skin cured by the Asian sun — for clues on how to prepare for battle. ‘The boys at Gallipoli made a name. Now we’ll make one too,’ vowed Bendigo boy Private George Londey.12 The veterans sat quietly; a nod here, perhaps a quiet word there, would have guided the ‘cleanskins’. Underneath their seemingly calm exterior, they were probably equally anxious. Nothing on Gallipoli would have prepared them for what they were about to confront. ‘You can’t tell me that all the troops do not feel fear,’ remarked one Gallipoli veteran as he watched the heavy barrage falling upon Pozières. ‘They must!’13

Late in the afternoon, officers inspected their platoons to make sure that each man had everything he required — ammunition, gas masks, wire cutters, and signalling flares. After a late tea, rations were issued and water bottles filled. Under a glaring sun, the laden troops marched in single file toward the firing line, taking only the occasional breather to wipe the sweat from their flushed faces.14

Although the staff officers and commanders responsible for orchestrating the looming battle were many miles behind the front line, their diaries, letters, and memoirs reveal that they experienced emotions similar to those felt by their troops. At I Anzac Corps headquarters, White paused from his work to write to Ethel. His letter indicates that his immense responsibilities, combined with feelings of homesickness, had drained him. ‘Ethel, you must pray that I may endure to the end,’ he wrote.15

Meanwhile, outside the corps headquarters, 21-year-old Lieutenant John Treloar sat in one of the tents pitched on the château’s lawns. As supervising clerk, he would play a critical role in the battle by overseeing the Central Registry, responsible for distributing all orders, intelligence, and memoranda flowing in and out of the corps. It was a 24-hour-a-day job — the Central Registry’s messages fired the war machine. Treloar’s diary, mostly recorded in shorthand script, shows a thoughtful man — it describes how, as he sat sorting through piles of correspondence, he could see ‘flashes of the guns preparing for the attack’. Treloar had served on Gallipoli and had a ‘goodly number’ of friends in the fighting units; he felt anxious about how they would fare.16

At about the same time, Gough gave one last briefing to Paul Maze at Reserve Army headquarters. Gough, as an army commander, could not witness the attack firsthand, so Maze would be his eyes and ears. ‘I could feel his keenness as he was explaining things on the map,’ wrote Maze.17 Gough wanted him to remain in close contact with the attacking troops and to make sketches illustrating the lay of the land. This meant that Maze would be going over the top with the Anzacs.

Meanwhile, at divisional headquarters at Rue Pont-Noyelles in Albert, Hooky Walker and his staff feverishly completed their final preparations. His staff were not only responsible for coordinating the movements of their own troops, but also for liaising with a huge supporting ensemble of formations, each critical to the attack’s success. Many things had to go right for Hooky’s plan to succeed; only a few things needed to go wrong for it to fail. Hooky told Bean that he feared his beloved 1st Division would be ‘knocked out’ in the attack.18 Amid the frenetic preparations, Thomas Blamey sought higher guidance: ‘God grant me a clear brain to plan and think for it.’19

Birdie’s diary shows that late in the afternoon he visited Hooky to check the preparations. That evening, he dined with a friend from Gallipoli days, Lieutenant-General Aylmer Hunter Weston, whose VIII British Corps had almost been completely wiped out on 1 July — a feat that Birdie, no doubt, would not care to emulate.

As Birdie dined with Hunter-Weston, Bean worked his way along a series of ‘lonely’ roads and shallow trenches toward Sinclair-MacLagan’s 3rd Brigade headquarters, located in a dugout somewhere near the village of Contalmaison. On the horizon he could see bursting shrapnel that resembled the bright flashes of a match striking flint. Bean, who was travelling alone, heard a voice from the shadows: ‘Anyone going from here along the road is to prepare for gas.’ As Bean fumbled with his gas mask, he wondered whether he would ever find the dugout from which he hoped to monitor his first big European battle.20

Long, grey shadows cast themselves across the battlefield; the last patches of lingering sunlight disappeared. The attack would commence in a few hours.

The burning question, looking back on the eve of this important battle, was why did so many Australian men find themselves about to be thrown into battle against Germany, the undisputed world military superpower, to capture a tiny village — why did Australia, a minor outpost in the Southern Hemisphere, feel compelled to fight someone else’s war? To answer this, we must return to 1914.

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, by a Serb nationalist in Sarajevo, Bosnia, was first reported in Australian newspapers on 29 June 1914. The importance that Australians placed on this event was reflected in the Monday edition of The Sydney Morning Herald, which devoted the same column space to the murder as it did to England’s thrashing of Australia in a rugby league Test in Sydney. The historian Ernest Scott, in Australia During the War, indicated that Australians, possibly preoccupied with the pending federal election and Norman Brookes’s quest to win the men’s singles title at Wimbledon, didn’t appreciate the country’s gradual drift toward war.21

On 29 July, the British government sent a cablegram to Australia, warning: ‘See preface defence scheme. Adopt precautionary stage. Names of powers will be communicated later if necessary.’22 The cablegram was a prearranged signal that war was likely, and an instruction to implement certain steps in a defence procedure laid down in 1907 by the Committee of Imperial Defence. Australian prime minister Joseph Cook met with his cabinet on 3 August and agreed to despatch 20,000 Australian troops to support the British government in the event of war. A cablegram informed London of Australia’s proposal; on the next day, Britain accepted the offer.

By early August, the mood among Australians had transformed from cursory interest in European affairs to enthusiastic anticipation of war. This shift was nowhere more evident than outside the Argus newspaper outlet in Collins Street, Melbourne, on the morning of 4 August. A crowd of hundreds gathered, eagerly awaiting the newspaper’s special midday edition. The Argus reported that police on duty were unable to stop the crowd from gaining access to the delivery counter, where copies of the special edition would be handed out. ‘What’s the news, tell us the news,’ the seething crowd yelled.23

A day later, on 5 August, London sent a cablegram to all state governors in the Commonwealth, announcing that war had broken out between Great Britain and Germany. With Britain at war, so too was Australia. Ernest Scott wrote that when the call to arms came in August 1914, the response in Australia was ‘immediate, it was jubilant, and it was unanimous’.24 Yet what did Australians believe they were fighting for? The Australian government had no war aims beyond those of Britain, and theirs only made vague references to upholding the London Treaty that guaranteed Belgium’s neutrality, which Germany had violated by advancing westward through its territories. Harry S. Gullett, in his October 1914 article ‘United Empire’, claimed all that mattered was kinship: ‘There is no reasoning about it; it is not a matter of head but of heart. We have merely answered the call of race. We are fighting side by side with Britain because of our British blood.’25

Although Gullett’s sentiment may appear naive, it accurately reflected the nature of the relationship between the two countries. Australia and Britain were inextricably bound by constitutional, social, and economic links. Gavin Souter, in Lion and Kangaroo, explained that Australia was still constitutionally tethered to Britain in 1914. Australia’s constitution prevented it from making any formal treaties with foreign states; in fact, Australia had no diplomatic status abroad. The Parliament of Westminster could pass or void legislation applicable to Australia. In many matters, the prime minister and his parliament were subservient to the governor-general. If the prime minister wished to communicate formally with his opposite number in a foreign country or even in Britain, he had to do it through the governor-general and the Colonial Office. There was, therefore, no need for cabinet to discuss the merits of entering the war: London would decide this. If war was declared, the cabinet simply had to decide to what degree it would support the empire.

Constitutional bonds were underpinned by strong social links — 98 per cent of Australia’s population was of English, Irish, Scottish, or Welsh descent.26 Its national identity was closely linked to Britain’s; many people still referred to themselves as ‘independent Australian–Britons’. Schools reinforced these close ties: in 1900, every school was provided with a Union Jack flag and a recommended ceremony for saluting it; world maps were pinned to every classroom wall, with Britain’s vast empire shaded in red; and Australians solemnly observed Empire Day each year. ‘We were encouraged to believe that we were English in all respects but born and living in Australia. The word Australian was seldom if ever used,’ recalled Donovan Joynt in his autobiography.27

Australia’s economy was also tied to Britain’s. Australia’s development largely depended upon the flow of British capital. In The Anzac Illusion, Eric Andrews explained that in the 1870s, Britain was Australia’s main trading partner, accounting for two-thirds of its exports and imports.28 The governor-general summed up the net effect of these strong links in August 1914: ‘There is indescribable enthusiasm and entire unanimity throughout Australia in support of all that tends to provide for the security of the Empire in war.’29

On 15 August 1914, Scottish-born Brigadier-General William Bridges was chosen to lead the expeditionary force of 20,000 soldiers that Cook had promised Britain. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that volunteers rushed forward to offer their services.30 By mid-September, Bridges had a full complement of soldiers, who would form the 1st Australian Infantry Division of the Australian Imperial Force.

Why did tens of thousands of men leave their jobs, families, and homes to enlist in Bridges’ expeditionary force? Were they all selflessly motivated to offer their services to the empire? Although Bridges’ men were, undoubtedly, infected by a spirit of imperial enthusiasm, Jane Ross in The Myth of the Digger suggested there were also other reasons why they enlisted: some joined because they were unemployed, and a number were excited by the opportunities for adventure. The diaries and letters of those soldiers poised to storm Pozières in July 1916 suggest that Ross’s research was accurate. For Foxcroft, soldiering offered the prospect of steadier employment than farming during the severe drought of 1914. He also expressed a patriotic desire to offer his ‘services to the empire’ to ‘fight against the Germans and her allies’. Iven Mackay and Donovan Joynt were citizen–soldiers, and so joining the expeditionary force upon the outbreak of war seemed the natural thing to do, although Joynt also recognised it as the start of a ‘stirring adventure’. Similarly, the 11th Battalion history recorded that many Outback workers from the frontier state of Western Australia downed their tools and rushed to Perth to join up, filled with a spirit of adventure.31

Gallipoli led to a surge of enlistments. Lloyd Robson said that the first enlistment period (August 1914 to June 1915) was marked by minimal official efforts to stimulate recruiting, and there was an average of 9940 enlistments per month. The second enlistment period (July 1915 to August 1916) was fuelled by recruiting drives but, more importantly, by the Gallipoli campaign, which many Australians believed was the most important event in the nation’s short history. The campaign, wistfully reported in the newspapers, appealed to the imagination of Australian men. A few months after the landing, in July 1915, monthly enlistments peaked at an all-time high of 36,575 — a significant increase on the previous peak of about 20,000, achieved in August 1914. The overall enlistments for this second period averaged 14,640 per month — a 47 per cent increase on the first. According to Ernest Scott, no Australian enlisting in 1914 and early 1915 could have predicted that nearly 60,000 of their fellow soldiers in the ‘prime of life and physical capacity were marked for death, and that 140,000 more would suffer maiming, as a consequence of what had happened at Sarajevo’.32

Why did Australians place such high importance on Gallipoli and why did it motivate thousands of men to enlist? Prior to the Great War, Australians struggled to define themselves and their place in the world. Although federation had legally linked all the colonies into one commonwealth, nothing seemed to link its disparate people. There was little in the Australians’ early history, wrote Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore, that citizens could point to with pride.33 Henry Lawson, whose rousing poetry captured the nationalist mood of Australians at the turn of the century, believed that war would be the glue to bind the colony into nationhood. He predicted in ‘The Star of Australasia’ that one day the boys in the ‘city slum’ and in the ‘home of wealth and pride’ would unite and ‘fight for it [one home] side by side’.34 Therefore, on 25 April 1915, when 48 wooden rowboats beached on what was to become known as Anzac Cove, they were not only laden with Australian troops but also with the high expectations of all Australians who sought to forge a national identity.

The nine-month Gallipoli campaign gave Australians what they sought: a ‘baptism of fire’ to crown the nation’s bloodless federation. Australia’s flag was stained with the blood of 8700 boys, and their sacrifice proved that Australia was a country worth dying for. Robert Hughes believed that Gallipoli was Australia’s equivalent of Thermopylae, while Charles Bean suggested that it contributed to Australia becoming fully conscious of itself as a nation.35 Australians gleefully drank from the Anzac chalice; the nation had finally made its spectacular debut on the world stage.

The British viewed Gallipoli differently from the Australians. For them, the evacuation and Allied casualties — 205,000 — represented an unmitigated disaster. There was no grandeur in defeat. Their international prestige took a battering because Turkey, a corrupt empire thought to be on the brink of collapse, had defeated them. Politicians lost a measure of faith in their military leaders, and tightened their rein on them. The architect of the campaign, Winston Churchill, lost his position as Lord of the Admiralty, and Ian Hamilton, commander of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, never held a command of any substance again. The failure contributed to the downfall of the British prime minister, Herbert Asquith, in late 1916. The British did the obligatory post-mortems, assigned blame, and then consigned the whole regretful episode to history.

Gallipoli inspired the boy who was to become my great-uncle, 14-year-old Ernie Lee, to join up. Lee’s family came from the bush town of Mossiface in Gippsland, Victoria, where his father, Herman, ran a selection called Greville Farm. For 15 years, Herman had struggled to clear the gnarly land, but it would not give. It gradually wore him down, crippling his back and breaking his spirit.

The Great War, not farming, was what interested Lee. A few weeks after the last troops evacuated Gallipoli, he bought his first pair of long pants, caught a cable tram up Swanston Street, and presented himself to the recruiting officer at Melbourne Town Hall. On 8 January 1915, Lee completed his attestation papers: he falsely recorded his name as ‘Ernest John Jeffries’ and stated that he was 18 years old, a trained mechanic, and that his parents were deceased. Lee’s papers, which are in the National Archives of Australia, reveal that he weighed only 115 pounds and was a shade over five-foot tall when he enlisted. Within months, this ‘boy–soldier’ would find himself on the Western Front alongside Gallipoli veterans.36 Like many of the soldiers who enlisted in 1915, he had little idea of what lay in store, and how dramatically the experience would change him.