The Australian Corps
Billy Hughes was trying to be a man for his times too. But what were the times saying in Australia? It had all seemed so simple during the federal election of 1914. Support for Australia’s part in the war had been bi-partisan. Few had envisioned the age of the howitzer and casualty lists that every day filled columns in the newspapers. The political conversation had turned nasty during Hughes’ conscription referendum in 1916. Fissures had opened up in a society that had mostly been united about the big issues since Federation. The arrival of the Nationalist Government – a coalition of former Labor men, such as Hughes and Pearce, and the conservatives – had ensured that the fissures widened.
Not that Australians had lost faith in the crusade against the Kaiser: the election of the Hughes Nationalist Government in May, 1917, had rather proved that. But there were now tensions between Catholics and Protestants, between those who believed in conscription and those who thought Australia had contributed enough, and between those who thought Billy Hughes a patriot and those who thought him Judas, the man who betrayed his class. It may also have been true that the rhetoric of the conscription campaign and the issues that had been dragged into the public arena were now working against voluntary recruiting, which had fallen away badly after the referendum. A wounded officer who had served at Gallipoli and in France urged university students to enlist. As Stanley Bruce he would become Prime Minister of Australia. An engine-driver from Bathurst, a good trade unionist, was shocked at the way strikes were being suppressed in the interests of the war effort. As Ben Chifley he too would become Prime Minister. The crusade had become muddled. The clarity of 1914 had gone.
There was another problem, though many people in 1917 were unaware of the extent of it. People trying to make judgements about the war didn’t know with any accuracy what had been happening at the front. Newspapers were their main source of information and the papers were omitting so much that their reports were often misleading. The allies had won so many ‘victories’ yet the frontline had advanced only a mile here and a mile there. Censorship is inevitable in war and no-one should be surprised by it, but in the Great War some journalists and editors seemed too comfortable with it.
So here was Hughes, on November 12 at Bendigo, trying again to introduce conscription by referendum. In theory he didn’t need a referendum: he had a majority in both Houses of Parliament. In practice he had no choice: he had pledged that conscription would not be introduced without another referendum. And a new poll would only be called if ‘the tide of battle turned against the Allies’. Hughes was even more devious this time. This is the question people were to be asked on December 20: ‘Are you in favour of the proposal of the Commonwealth Government for reinforcing the Australian Imperial Forces oversea?’ No mention of conscription, and an assumption that the voters knew what the proposal was. But both sides played at deviousness. Daniel Mannix, now Archbishop of Melbourne, was Hughes’ most obvious opponent in the coming debate. Mannix, who inevitably appeared in his clerical robes, was to claim during the campaign that when he spoke about conscription he ‘did not speak as a priest or as an archbishop, but simply as an honest, straight and loyal citizen of Australia’.
HUGHES WASN’T GOING to the people again simply because he believed the ‘tide of battle’ had turned against the allies, although he was clearly worried about the defeat at Caporetto and anarchy in Russia. He was most likely unaware of how badly Third Ypres had run down British and dominion troop numbers and how little it had achieved. Hughes was first of all going to the people because he needed an army large enough to give him a loud voice at any peace conference. He had been worrying about troop numbers long before Caporetto or Lenin’s coup. He may also have thought that Australia would now be more receptive to conscription.
Hughes had tried to stimulate voluntary enlistments after the first referendum failed. Recruiting committees were set up in all States. Public meetings were held, so many that handbooks were written for speakers. One handbook, The Speaker’s Companion, included ‘Sister Susie’s Creed’. Sister Susie said: ‘I refuse to establish propinquity or to flirt with any male who cannot produce statutory evidence of ineligibility for active service. If there are not enough soldiers to go round I will cheerfully die an old maid …’ Here was something new: no uniform, no propinquity. Speakers, sometimes wounded soldiers, occasionally women, turned up at theatres, cinemas, town halls, sporting events and even beaches. Women tried to shame perceived shirkers. The big daily newspapers still supported conscription. The Bulletin ran savage cartoons against ‘cold footers’. Church of England clergymen preached in favour of compulsion. And none of this produced the numbers required.
Enlistments had peaked during the Gallipoli campaign of 1915. July of that year produced 36,575 recruits and August 25,714. These figures were never approached again. In June, 1917, when the Australians took 7000 casualties at Messines, enlistments were only 3679. In September and October, when the Australians ran up tens of thousands of casualties between Menin Road and the edge of Passchendaele, enlistments were 2460 and 2761 respectively.
Hughes at Bendigo was careful to talk about ‘compulsory reinforcements’ rather than ‘conscription’. The system of voluntary enlistment would continue, he said, but Australia needed to supply 7000 men a month. If enlistments failed to reach this figure, compulsory reinforcements would be called up by ballot to make up the deficit. The ballot would be taken among single men only, between the ages of twenty and forty-four, including widowers and divorcees without dependent children. The list of exemptions included judges, magistrates and clergymen. ‘Those of you who have relatives in the trenches cannot heed their cry unmoved,’ Hughes said. ‘If they hungered, would you not send them food? If they were sick, would you not succour them? Their need is reinforcements. They need rest, they need help. The only way you can help the boys at the front is to send them more men …’
Then he soared on a rhetorical flight. It was the hour for Australians to prove their mettle. The heavens were dark with portents of evil. Russia was torn by anarchy. Italy was reeling. The spirit of disintegration threatened to divide the allies. It was an hour when men of weaker fibre would quail. Now was the time for Australians to draw themselves erect. ‘I tell you plainly that the Government must have this power. It cannot govern the country without it, and will not attempt to do so.’
Mannix’s style was lighter, simpler and more twentieth century. ‘The wealthy classes would be very glad to send the last man,’ he told a meeting a few weeks after Hughes had opened the campaign, ‘but they have no notion of giving the last shilling, nor even the first.’ The capitalists would not pay for the war. ‘You know that these people have a remarkable facility for passing these obligations on.’
KEITH MURDOCH KNEW about the new referendum before it was announced. Hughes had been cabling him. Murdoch had become the Prime Minister’s main agent in London. Matters that should have gone through the High Commissioner, Andrew Fisher, and the Colonial Office went instead to Murdoch, by coded cables from Hughes that were marked ‘secret’ or ‘most secret’. Murdoch in turn went to Lloyd George, Haig, Birdwood and others as Hughes’ representative. How Murdoch reconciled this double life – journalist one moment, emissary the next, observer today and player tomorrow – has never been explained. Most journalists sought out government secrets and contrived ways to publish them; Murdoch kept government secrets and fed his readers platitudes.
Murdoch had worked for Hughes during the Australian federal election earlier in the year. Hughes had wanted Murdoch to arrange for troops to be ‘canvassed’ about the election. Birdwood told Murdoch that Haig would not permit this, but then suggested other ways of sending political messages to the troops. Shortly after Murdoch cabled Hughes saying he need 1000 pounds immediately to cover expenses.
Six days before his Bendigo speech Hughes told Murdoch that another referendum was likely. ‘Anzac vote vital to success. Will you get committee together and explain position most confidentially: ask them take steps immediately make all preparations for very vigorous campaign. Everything is to be kept very quiet until public announcement … Feel confident can rely on committee which did such splendid work recent election to spare no effort secure same large majority of Anzac votes … Secrecy vital.’ (The ‘committee’ was a small group of Australian civilians in London, of which Murdoch was the luminary. All members were pro-Hughes and pro-conscription.)
Murdoch cabled back a few days later saying that Haig had promised to rest the Australian troops a month before the vote. The divisions had come away from Passchendaele badly under strength. There had been talk at the front of turning the 4th Division into a ‘depot’ division, providing reinforcements for the other four. Murdoch now made an astonishing suggestion to Hughes. Break up a division (presumably the 4th), he cabled. ‘This would have striking effect public opinion of Force and in Australia providing War Office permitted fact to become widely known.’
THE AUSTRALIAN WORKER called the scheme Hughes announced at Bendigo ‘a game of chance viler than any played in the hells of Monte Carlo’. It was a lottery. ‘Lives are to be drawn for on Tattersall principles; souls are to be made the subjects of a hideous sweep. The equivalents of eligible males are to be tossed into a hat or something; then someone – Death, who knows? – plunges in a hand, and all who are drawn are doomed to be the victims of bloody war.’
Nellie Melba, the soprano and socialite, sent a message to the women of Australia, encouraging them to vote for Hughes’ scheme. ‘I tried to make it strong,’ she wrote to Hughes, ‘because entre nous very few Australian women use their brains.’
Some called for Mannix to be deported. Mannix called Hughes ‘the little Tsar’ and said, with justification, that the Prime Minister was not putting a ‘straight question’ to the people. Hughes and Mannix were portrayed as the main players (which probably overstates Mannix’s part), and there was something fantastic about this that was lost in the flurries of argument. Hughes was a Welshman who had been born in London and had come to Australia in his early twenties. Though an Australian nationalist, he also had a fondness for his old world that now loaded him up with baubles and praise. Mannix was an Irishman who came to Australia in his late forties. He still had loyalties both to Ireland and ideas of Irish independence. Yet both these men purported to speak for Australia.
Hughes stumped up and down the country, bursting with nervous energy that exhausted his secretaries. The campaign was noisier and nastier than the one before. It was not so much about the realities of the western front as perceptions of patriotism. Both sides exaggerated.
At Warwick, on Queensland’s Darling Downs, someone threw two eggs at Hughes. One hit his hat. A scuffle began and accounts of this vary spectacularly. One has Hughes emerging with bleeding knuckles.
In Sydney, according to the Bulletin, an army medical officer was addressing a referendum meeting when an anti-conscriptionist shouted: ‘Did youse ever do any fightin?’
The officer lifted his head and said: ‘I didn’t even know the little man had even enlisted.’
The interjector couldn’t understand why the crowd burst into laughter.
LIEUTENANT CYRIL LAWRENCE was still behind the Passchendaele front a week before Hughes’ speech at Bendigo. In letters home the previous month he said he had been stuck in mud up to his thighs for an hour. Eight men, he said, took seven hours to carry a wounded officer about 2000 yards. In his letter of November 5 he worried about where the war was going. ‘We can’t go on forever like this and the old Hun, drat him, is nothing like finished yet.’ Both sides were losing their ‘very best manhood’ while the slackers remained behind. People were talking about the new world after the war. Lawrence felt the shirkers would inherit it.
Early next month he was preparing to vote. ‘Will I vote – will I what! … The whole area is posted up with great sheets just like an election at home. They promise us all sorts of things – “more rest” is the best we can see, but it is an empty promise and everyone knows it.’
Other soldiers were less worried about shirkers. Sapper Frank Heerey, a miner from Tasmania whose family had fled the Irish famine, wrote a typically laconic diary entry: ‘Another cold day. In aft voted NO on conscription question. Fluff & I had a spread for tea. On duty till 8.30 pm, wrote letters.’
HUGHES LOST THE referendum. He knew he had lost before midnight on polling night. It was worse than last time. The ‘No’ majority more than doubled to 166,588 and this time Victoria also voted ‘No’. The only States that voted ‘Yes’ were Western Australia (by a large majority) and Tasmania (narrowly). Sectarian issues had been present throughout the campaign, but there was more to the ‘No’ majority than the dissent of some, though certainly not all, Irish Catholics. People of all persuasions, from the Left and from the Right, were uncomfortable with Hughes’ scheme and perhaps also with his divisive style. The electorate had again shown its subtle colours. It was still for the war; it still didn’t believe in conscription. Hughes had said over and over during the campaign that he could not govern without conscription. Early in the New Year he tendered his resignation to Munro-Ferguson, the Governor-General. Who could Munro-Ferguson turn to? Frank Tudor, the Labor leader, lacked the numbers in Parliament. So did Sir John Forrest, the explorer and former West Australian Premier who wanted the prime ministership. Munro-Ferguson was thus justified in making a decision that doubtless pleased him. He reappointed Hughes.
THE SOLDIERS HAD again voted for conscription, this time by a majority of 9879. Bean felt that a majority of troops at the front voted ‘No’. Private Roy Brewer of the 2nd Division wrote to his parents a few months after the referendum. ‘Well father you asked me some time ago what I thought of the referendum. Well I was against it, and I think the majority of our Battalion were against it. I would not vote to pitch a man over here against his will.’ Private Brewer, a winner of the Military Medal, was killed later in the year.
The Bulletin ran a letter from a soldier in a ‘sloppy trench’. ‘We’ve just heard the result of the Referendum. Lord knows what’s going to happen now! I suppose we’ll just have to keep on splitting up until there’s not enough left to split, and then turn it in. Some wag said they’d only need two ships to take the Australians home – one for the staff and the other for the identification discs.’
Pompey Elliott had gone to England after Polygon Wood. Gas had blistered his face and the pain prevented him sleeping. He stopped shaving – the razor was spreading the infection – and his beard came out blotched with grey. He was just short of forty years old. Other things were wrong. He missed his wife and children, whom he had last seen in 1914. ‘Tell me all about the wee people,’ he wrote home, ‘tell me everything about their hair and cheeks and chins … I can never hear enough of them.’ He was only hardbitten on the outside.
On his return to France in December it was apparent that something else was wrong. ‘Yet sometimes I feel that I have reached the limit of my strength and that I cannot stand the strain much longer … I am always tired and sometimes my head aches … and my nerves seem all raw and aching.’ He was also worrying about the financial troubles of his law firm and what they might cost him.
Elliott had the symptoms of what these days would probably be called depression. And the rejection of conscription made all seem worse. Mannix’s pronouncements had infuriated him. It was as though Elliott’s own country had abandoned him, a sentiment he wrote to a friend and which ended up being published in the Argus.
Major Consett Riddell felt abandoned too. He said he lay in bed thinking: ‘What am I fighting for?’ Not for France, Italy, Belgium or Russia, he decided. They had nothing to do with him.
I even wonder now if it is for my own country Australia which evidently does not want my help, and the only thing left is for some vague ideals about small nations and the fact that I could never have held my head again if I had not come. This is all a very small thing but takes the heart out of one terribly, I wanted to think I was fighting for Australia and now I can’t … The result is that first one division and then another must be broken up to provide men to fill the gaps in the others, and probably my division the 4th will be the first to go …
THE 4TH DIVISION wasn’t broken up, but it nearly was. The offer to disband it led, almost by chance, to the formation in November of the Australian Corps, all five divisions in one corps under Birdwood. No longer would the divisions be swapped between Birdwood’s I Anzac and Godley’s II Anzac. Godley was gone from the Australians’ lives, and this was no loss. And no longer would the Australians serve alongside the New Zealand Division, which had been part of II Anzac. This was a loss. There were no better troops on the western front than the New Zealanders.
Murdoch, as Hughes’ agent, did much to bring the Australian Corps into being. If Murdoch liked to play the kingmaker, he was also an Australian nationalist. On July 12, 1917, he cabled Hughes, first mentioning attempts to sell Australian flour in the United States – he was handling that too – then this:
Re troops, urgently ask your immediate consideration following important representations behalf whole AIF FRANCE. Officers men have very strong Australian feelings prize highly distinctive Australian identity find that Australian comradeship valuable moral support. Moreover several recent battles they lost heavily owing weakness failure support of British troops. Third Division never assimilated rest AIF, because separated and under Godley, who notoriously anti-Australian. Separation prevents enforcement Australian democratic policy by Monash. Very strong desire exists expressed insistently through all Divisions that they be brought together as soon as possible … Officers men strenuously dislike GHQ policy regarding all as merely British troops refusing recognise Australian nationality even omitting them from communiqués. Leading officers also consider Australia should have Liaison Officers War Office. At present important decisions affecting Australian Government public and national future taken without our recognisance by people responsible to quite another public.
Much of what Murdoch said was true. Haig and others at GHQ couldn’t see the Australians as allies fighting alongside them; they saw them as another arm of the British army, like the Irish and the Scots. GHQ wanted the Australians to conform, to adopt English forms and bring in the death penalty for desertion. Haig in his diary entries never seemed to accept that these volunteers had made an exceptional sacrifice. Haig was five hours from Charing Cross Station, from his wife, Doris, and their children. Some of the Australians had not been home for three years. They were months away from Australia, and they would only be sent home if they were seriously wounded or so ill as to be of no further use. Haig simply assumed it was their duty to be there – for him – and that they came from a colony, rather than a new nation with aspirations of its own. Communiqués often referred to Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders as ‘British’ troops. Haig didn’t much understand Australians. A few months into 1918 he told his wife the Australians had been put in convalescent camps of their own ‘because they were giving so much trouble when along with our men and put such revolutionary ideas into their heads’.
Hughes told the British authorities that all Australian troops should be grouped together under Birdwood. The staff officers should be Australians. Murdoch spoke to Haig. The field-marshal,
he said, thought a corps of five divisions would be unwieldy. Murdoch felt that Haig favoured Monash as the corps commander. Murdoch told Hughes that White would be more acceptable than Monash. He also belittled Monash in a letter to Hughes.
Birdwood and White now put up a proposal that was prompted by their need for reinforcements. The 4th Division should be used as a depot division. There would be only four fighting divisions in the new corps. Haig on November 1 accepted the idea. The Australian Corps was a reality. Haig also agreed that no British officers would in future be appointed to Australian staffs. British officers still serving with the Australians would be gradually taken back into the British army, including the divisional commanders Walker and Smyth. Monash said goodbye to Godley. ‘I served him loyally and faithfully for nearly three years and he has done nothing for me that he could not help doing.’
Birdwood didn’t really want to break up the 4th Division. It was regarded as the depot division for just a few weeks, then used as a fighting force again to plug holes in the British line. Hughes and Murdoch thus had what they had wanted all along: five divisions under Birdwood.
But Birdwood’s numbers were too low. The 3rd Division was down to about 8500 men, the 4th to roughly 9700. The Australians had been sent to the now quiet Messines sector. The troops played football, wearing guernseys in the colours of their brigades and battalions. One battalion started a newspaper and a debating society. And the wounded men came back, along with whatever reinforcements could be found in England, swelling most of the divisions by several thousand men. But what the corps needed was fresh men, not just those who had been wounded or whose nerves had been undone by years of fighting. As Bean put it, the Australian Corps was feeding upon itself.