BETWEEN the covers of Australia in Arms you will find that rarity in our unchivalrous age: an account of Gallipoli by a young war correspondent who believed in notions of gallantry, liberty, heroism and self-sacrifice. He followed the men into the breach to tell their story, and then, slightly ashamed of being a mere scribbler, enlisted in the infantry.
Phillip F. E. Schuler was shot dead in Flanders in June 1917, just before the battle of Passchendaele. He was twenty-seven. He left behind this minor classic of the Gallipoli campaign, published a year earlier.
Schuler came from a prosperous literary family. His father was the editor of the Melbourne Age, which eased the lad’s path to selection as a war reporter, and helped him secure a front-row seat at Gallipoli in 1915. He worked and played alongside the great Charles Bean, the official war correspondent. They met on board the Orvieto and visited the pyramids together. Bean would describe Schuler, after he was killed, as ‘a brilliantly handsome, bright, attractive, [and] generous youngster’.
The extraordinary thing about Schuler’s account of the Dardanelles is that it expresses without a trace of criticism or mockery the British and colonial effort at Gallipoli. Here is a man who utterly believed in the war and the men who led it. Most of the commanders he loved and respected. For him, the cause was right; the ends, just.
He was there during the journey out (where he witnessed the sinking of the Emden), at the Gallipoli landings, the battles of the Nek, Quinn’s Post and Lone Pine, the charge of the Australian Light Horse and other fabled moments in the doomed invasion. And at the end of it all this young man was still able to see the battle not only as a worthwhile expression of duty done, but also as the forging of the nation: Australia, he writes,
attained Nationhood by the heroism of her noble sons. ‘Anzac’ will ever form the front page in her history, and a unique and vivid chapter in the annals of the Empire. The very vigour of their manhood, the impetuosity of their courage, carried slopes that afterwards in cold blood, seemed impregnable.
Schuler is unflinching in his belief in the rightness of the Mother Country and in the sincerity with which he seeks to wrap the young Australian nation in the image of ‘Anzac’. It never occurs to him to question that duty, to ask why Australia should have followed Churchill’s crackpot plan, to invade the Turkish nation on the orders of Britain in an attempt to open a third front against Germany. Churchill rates just one mention in the book.
But we should not ask for such things in a work like this. It is not an analysis. It is reportage, written with sensitivity, awe and respect, by a man of his time. It is a historically accurate reflection of the ideals and feelings of most men and women of 1915, told in a voice that is at once sincere and ingenuous.
We are in Schuler’s debt for that voice. It is authentic. His words cement the point that many Australians were conscious that they were building a new country in the crucible of war. That was not some pseudo-nationalist sentiment superimposed on Gallipoli with hindsight. In 1915 it was real; it was felt. And this authenticity deserves respect, whatever else you might feel about the project of trying to embed national identity in a military catastrophe.
Schuler was a journalist, not a historian, and yet his action-packed account of Gallipoli may indeed be read as the first draft of history. It is laden with vivid anecdote and well-chosen detail. Take his description of a crowd of enlisted men about to march off to war. He conjures the social gradations of an entire army through a snapshot of how they were shod and dressed:
There were men in good boots and bad boots, in brown and tan boots, in hardly any boots at all; in sack suits and old clothes, and smart-cut suits just from the well-lined drawers of a fashionable home; there were workers and loafers, students and idlers, men of professions and men just workers, who formed that force. But—they were all fighters, stickers, men with some grit (they got more as they went on), and men with a love of adventure. So they marched out to their camp at Broadmeadows—a good ten-mile tramp.
Schuler is unsparingly admiring of the Australian soldier, who was ‘generous’ to a fault and ‘spoiled’ the local Egyptians. Even on leave, when many Aussies were busy establishing their reputations as ‘larrikins’—the timeless euphemism for drunken whore-mongering louts—the diggers were merely indulging in good old-fashioned masculine fun, the locker-room talk of 1915, ‘innocent for the most part’. Hence Cairo was
an orgy of pleasure, which only a free and, at the time, unrestrained city…could provide. Those men with £10 to £20 in their pockets, after being kept on board ship for two months, suddenly to be turned loose on an Eastern town—healthy, keen, spirited, and adventurous men—it would have been a strong hand that could have checked them in their pleasures.
His descriptive powers are well attuned to the tension of the moment. As the troopships approach the hilly shoreline of Gallipoli, he writes:
The men were quietly singing the sentimental ditties of ‘Home and Mother’, or chatting in a final talk, yarning of the past—the future, so imminent now, left to take care of itself—until they were borne within a distance when silence was essential to success. Then they clenched their teeth…Over the whole of that army, 30,000 men, there hung a lifetime of suspense. Would the moon never go down!
As for the infamous error, of landing the troops at the wrong beach, Schuler cheerfully inquires,
But was it so awful an error? Chance had carried in her womb a deeply significant advantage, for at the original point the beach had been carefully prepared with barbed wire, that ran down into the very water. Trenches lined the shore…So Chance guided the boats into a natural cove, certainly not very large—just a segment of a circle some 400 yards long. Never anticipating an attack at the foot of such a ridge, the Turks had dug but few trenches to protect this spot.
In other words, the mistake probably saved many lives during the landing, and yet the opening battles were as bloody as any during the seven-month campaign, thanks to the steep hills that met the wrong beach.
Schuler writes with a paintbrush, capturing a vivid scene wherever he goes: ‘white hospital ships loomed like aluminium-painted craft in the fierce sun, and their yellow funnels seemed fairer still by the side of the darkened smokestacks of the panting destroyers.’ The Turks’ rifles sounded like ‘thousands of typewriters’—perhaps an expression of a desire to exchange his for a rifle? And he sprinkles his prose with fascinating vignettes, such as the clandestine activities of the German commander: ‘Under guise of a sergeant of the Red Crescent walked General Liman von Sanders, the German leader against Anzac, and he mixed with the burial parties.’
Some omissions are telling. There is no mention of John Simpson and his donkey, fabled heroes of Anzac popular history, suggesting that Simpson was no more or less feted than other stretcher bearers at the time. In this light, the donkey probably served the purposes of government propaganda more effectively than did Simpson.
To a man the commanders, Australian and British, in Schuler’s telling, were brave and smart, and mucked in with the lads. In this case, Schuler’s patriotism verges on the credulous: many of the officers were below average and some were disastrous. He diplomatically leaves out the names of the worst.
Yet he is spot on about the much-loved British General William Birdwood, leader of the Anzacs, and the only corps commander to oppose the evacuation. Birdwood rarely missed his evening dip, often within range of Turkish snipers: ‘He bathed amongst his men, shedding off rank with his uniform…A quiet, very firm, but very friendly man was this leader of the Australians, who understood their character admirably.’
Of all the battles, the charge of the Australian Light Horse on 7 August most sharply spurred Schuler’s pride in his countrymen:
The whole line went. Each man knew that to leave those trenches was to face certain, almost immediate death. They knew it no less than the glorious Light Brigade at Balaclava…They charged. Lieut.Colonel White had not gone ten paces when he fell dead, riddled with bullets. The first line of 150 men melted away ere they had gone half the distance to the trenches, and yet the second line, waiting and watching, followed them…What did the brigade do but its duty?—duty in the face of overwhelming odds, in the face of certain death; and the men went because their leaders led them, and they were men. What more can be said? No one may ask if the price was not too great. The main object had been achieved. The Turks were held there.
And then, after Birdwood’s August offensives failed, and reinforcements were denied, came the secret evacuation of the beaches. At dusk on 19 November, as the last phase of the withdrawal began, a mere six thousand men were left holding back fifty thousand Turkish troops, a fact of which the Turks were, for the Anzacs’ sake, blissfully unaware.
Schuler offers this unforgettable portrait of the diggers retreating down the hills, to the safety of the departing boats:
Their moving forms were clearly distinguishable in the glimmer from the crescent moon. The hills looked sullen and black. No beacon lights from dugouts burned. That first column began to leave Anzac shore at eight o’clock on the transports that were swiftly gliding from the shore…As the news broke on an astonished world, it was reported—and will be recorded—as one of the most extraordinary feats of naval and military history, that only three men at Anzac and two at Suvla Bay had been wounded in this astonishing masterpiece of strategy.
In another telling, the Anzacs abandoned the beaches in the dead of night, having been soundly defeated in a pointless campaign that had cost their force more than twenty-eight thousand dead and wounded.
And yet, it seems churlish to deny them the accolades of that astonishingly bloodless retreat, to puncture the youthful buoyancy of Schuler’s vision of a proud nation at arms: ‘Openhearted, ever generous, true as gold, and hard as steel, Australia’s first great volunteer army, and its valorous deeds will live in history while the world lasts.’