Same war, different name
Signaller Ted Matthews, who had once been a carpenter, heard about the armistice in the Indian Ocean. He was on his way home on leave as one of the original Anzacs. Armistice Day was his twenty-second birthday. He had enlisted in Sydney as a seventeen-year-old. When he arrived in Egypt an officer said: ‘Ah, they’re sending babies.’ Matthews was hit in the chest by shrapnel at the Anzac landing. A heavy notebook in his top pocket softened the blow. In 1918 he fought at Villers-Bretonneux. He had been away from home for four years. He had been to some of the Great War’s worst hellholes and survived.
Sergeant Charles Johnson, from the Victorian town of Nagambie, was discharged in Melbourne on July 20, 1919, having enlisted as a fifteen-year-old. Unlike Matthews, Johnson had looked older than his years. He told the recruiting officer he was eighteen. He was only nineteen at the time of his discharge. His discharge papers said he had spent 1388 days abroad. What they do not say is that his sixteenth birthday came on Gallipoli, that he was wounded in France and went to hospital several times with pleurisy, and that one of his brothers, Harry, died from shrapnel wounds during the Passchendaele campaign.
Matthews and Johnson had been on extraordinary journeys, but so had tens of thousands of others, and now they all had to start life again. Matthews was married with two daughters when the Depression came. Twice a week he would walk from his home to Circular Quay to register for work, then on to Railway Square to pick up food parcels, a round trip of about twelve miles. He died in 1997, aged 101, the last of the ‘original’ Anzacs. Charlie Johnson managed hotels in Darwin and Melbourne, played football, married and brought up four children after his wife died prematurely. He died in 1971, aged seventy-one.
Some 180,000 Australians had come home – from France, Britain and the Middle East – by the end of 1919. These men who returned were not mostly heroes, a word now used carelessly. Nor were they necessarily moral exemplars. But it was surely true – on the basis of what they had done, where they had been and the time they had been away – that they were, as Bean put it, great-hearted men.
What was the nation going to do for great-hearted men? The answer turned out to be: not much. After four years those at home longed for normalcy, for the old orders and routines. Neither in Britain nor Australia did people much want to celebrate the string of victories in 1918 that were the counterpoints to the slaughters on the Somme and at Passchendaele. Only after three or four generations did a perspective start to form on the war. Only then did people begin to realise what their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had endured. By then most of the great-hearted men were dead.
Some 61,700 Australians didn’t come home. They were in the ground on Gallipoli and in Palestine and – mostly, about two-thirds of them – along the line that stretched from Villers-Bretonneux to Passchendaele. The wounded ran to 155,000, or about half the 324,000 men who had served overseas, and this figure excludes a large number who were gassed but did not seek treatment and spent the rest of their lives coughing and scratching. The Australian casualty rate was the highest among the British empire forces. Perhaps one-quarter of the original force of about 30,000 that left Australia in 1914 had survived.
The casualties were still being counted during the 1930s. By then another 60,000 had died from wounds or illnesses caused by the war. At least one generation of women and children, and maybe a second, suffered terribly from all this, and it is impossible to count casualty figures here. Many men returned broken and bitter; others turned drunk and violent. This legacy has been little explored. It may explain why many Australians in the thirty years after 1918 did not see the war, and Gallipoli in particular, in the romantic lights that have flickered around it in the new century.
Many men didn’t want to talk about where they had been or what they had done. There seemed no point talking about the barrage at Pozières to someone who had not been there. These men also knew that the war had been misrepresented in the Australian press and thus many ‘home patriots’ didn’t know what they were talking about. Australia is still full of families that say of their grandfather: ‘He never talked about the war.’ There wasn’t even much point talking about what to many was the best part, the comradeship. Again, how would someone who had not been present understand the acts of kindness and self-sacrifice that occurred alongside killing and cruelty? In their own conclaves the soldiers talked most about the mateship, the pranks and the jokes, and wrote about them in Reveille. These were the sweet memories. Ted Rule dedicated Jacka’s Mob, his narrative of the war, to ‘that grand companionship of great-hearted men, which for most of us, is the one splendid memory of the war’. The men who came back joined returned servicemen’s clubs. There at least they could talk to like minds; they didn’t have to try to explain the unexplainable.
The soldiers’ private memories were mostly bad and sad: friends lost, acts regretted, sights that were unspeakable, sounds that were indescribable, smells that belonged to an abattoir and all the terrible ‘what-ifs’ of war. (One soldier, Sergeant Andrew Muir, on visiting Belgium years later refused to drink the water: he explained that he had seen too many men dead in puddles there.) Their silences and brooding at least ensured that Australia would never again trip off to war as thoughtlessly as it had in 1914. It wasn’t a case of the men, or the nation, doubting the rightness of the cause; rather it was the realisation of how cruel war truly was.
Some men just wanted to be alone with their nightmares. The nightmares became their lives. An officer who had fought with distinction at Fromelles, and who was afterwards promoted to colonel, in the early 1930s threatened to kill his children, then left to live in a cave for a year. This is another aspect of the war that has been little scratched. Bronzed Anzacs are more attractive than bewildered men in caves.
There was no logic to the way the war came to be seen in popular memory. Gallipoli, the foundation story, had an aura and Fromelles did not. Gallipoli was a defeat and Mont St Quentin an unlikely victory, but Mont St Quentin never lodged in the nation’s consciousness. Simpson, the man with the donkey, was lionised and Percy Black, crucified on the wire at Bullecourt, was not. Folklore took over the war. The soldiers knew much of the folklore was wrong.
As one historian has noted, the Australians had fighting instincts but not soldierly instincts: to the end they had found the dictatorship of the army hard to accept. Yet it was also hard to be a civilian again. Safer, but anti-climactic. Having tramped around France for two years, scrounging and skylarking, having felt thrillingly alive when the barrage stopped, it was hard to adjust to taking the 7.51 train to the warehouse for a day’s paper-shuffling. Those who had left Australia in their late teens had not known any adult life except fighting. Joe Maxwell, the boilermaker’s apprentice who won the Victoria Cross, returned and worked as a gardener. He wrote in 1932 that even after more than a decade, city life palled at odd moments – ‘the dull struggling routine of tram, train, office, and rule of thumb’. He felt he had lost a sense of freedom – ‘the freedom of being unfettered to office or desk’. He missed the faces of the fellows he knew ‘in the days of storm’ and the faces of those who had gone.
In 1914 Henry Gordon Bennett had been an actuarial clerk with the AMP Society. He finished the war as a brigadier-general, a rank he had reached at twenty-nine, making him then the youngest brigade commander in the British empire armies. He was a man of some achievement. He called on the Melbourne manager of the AMP on his return. Yes, he could have his 1914 job back, nothing grander. He felt let down. ‘I would rather resign,’ he told the manager. ‘In that case,’ the manager said, ‘you will have to refund the salary paid to you throughout the war.’
THE GREAT WAR was the worst trauma of the twentieth century for Australia. People back home could explain the loss of a son or a husband with one word. They simply said ‘Pozières’ or ‘Passchendaele’. Many wives of dead soldiers never remarried; women who had lost their fiancés remained spinsters and as sixty-year-olds still opened a drawer and stared at a photo of a young man with bright eyes and wearing a rough woollen tunic. The Australian historian Bill Gammage in 1994 spoke of ‘dreams abandoned, lives without purpose, women without husbands, families without family life, one long national funeral for a generation and more after 1918’.
A generation had lost many of its most generous male spirits. Geoffrey Blainey wrote that the worst effect of the war on Australia could never be enumerated. It was the loss of ‘all those talented people who would have become prime ministers and premiers, judges, divines, engineers, teachers, doctors, poets, inventors and farmers, the mayors of towns and leaders of trade unions, and the fathers of another generation of Australians’.
The war started off bringing Australians together and ended up dividing them. Almost half the eligible male population had enlisted. Here was the first divide: between those who had gone and those who had not. Another wound had opened up over conscription and it would not heal for generations. Sectarianism was now part of the landscape and both Catholic and Protestant clergymen kept it going long after the war ended. The Labor Party in the decade after Federation had helped make Australia a unique democracy that was perhaps kinder to the working man than any other in the world. Conscription had split Labor so badly that it would not regain government until 1929, and then only briefly.
The war should have modified Australia’s view of ‘the mother country’. Australians had grown up with an idealised view of Britain and the wisdom of her politicians and military leaders. The soldiers discovered the reality. British soldiers were no better than them. British generals made terrible mistakes and they were called Fromelles and First Bullecourt. British politicians made mistakes and one of the worst was called Gallipoli. British democracy was not the same as Australian democracy; it came with hangovers from feudalism. And there was the country itself: so much of Britain seemed crowded and polluted and grimy. The war had revealed these things to the soldiers. They talked about them among themselves and in their letters home, but not publicly. Billy Hughes should have noticed the same things. If he did, he didn’t mention them, but then he was trying to be too many things to too many people. And so, after 1918, a chance was lost for Australia to rethink its relationship with Britain and, without rupturing the bond, without abandoning ties that were sound as well as sentimental, accept that the British empire was not quite what they thought it was in 1914, and that many homespun Australian values were as worthy as those that had been imported. Australia mostly lapsed back into the ways of a self-governing colony.
The country was weary from war overseas and political nastiness at home. Spanish influenza arrived in Australia and killed some 12,000 in 1919. (Around the world it killed more people than the Great War.) The world began the slide towards depression in 1929 and by 1932 unemployment in Australia had reached thirty per cent of the workforce. The historian Michael McKernan found just the right adjective when he called the interlude between the two big wars ‘the grey years’. The new identity would be a while coming. It would take the fall of Singapore, another world war, the break-up of the old British empire, the fears of the Cold War and mass migration from Europe to change the ‘British’ society in the south seas into something nearer to an Australian society.
BILLY HUGHES WAS angry when the armistice was signed. He had not been consulted. He thought President Wilson’s Fourteen Points threatened the things Australia had fought for, and high among these was the right to annex German New Guinea and keep Japan as far as possible from the Australian coast. He wanted compensation for war losses and to punish Germany severely. He thought Wilson a dreamer, a liberal who didn’t know how deals were done in the grubby conclaves outside universities and definitely not the bloke you would pick to run a waterfront strike. Hughes now reverted to the Australian nationalist and trade-union scrapper. No high-minded Virginian was going to rob him of the spoils he had set out to win. Hughes demanded that Australia be represented in its own right at the peace conference in Paris in 1919 rather than as part of the British empire. He went along and did what he did best: theatrics. But clever theatrics, designed to unsettle his opponents and produce the end he wanted. Impish, cranky, fiddling with his hearing aid and pretending to be deaf when it suited, ‘this strange man’ (as an English delegate called him) managed to offend and befuddle Wilson. Hughes’ cameos – he was, after all, only a bit player – produced a string of anecdotes, some hard to verify.
Wilson wondered if he understood Hughes’ attitude on German New Guinea. ‘If I do,’ Wilson said, ‘it is this, that the opinion of the whole civilised world is to be set at nought. This conference, fraught with such infinite consequence to mankind for good or evil, is to break up with results which may well be disastrous to the future happiness or unhappiness of eighteen hundred millions of the human race, in order to satisfy the whim of five million people in the remote southern continent whom you claim to represent.’
Hughes fiddled with his hearing aid and replied: ‘Very well put, Mr President, you have guessed it. That’s just so.’ Everyone laughed, except Wilson.
Hughes agreed with Wilson that in mandated territories (as German New Guinea was to become) natives should be allowed access to missionaries of any denomination. ‘By all means, Mr President,’ said Hughes, ‘I understand that those poor people sometimes go for months together without half enough to eat.’
The allies all had different motives and ends. Clemenceau wanted revenge, to punish Germany so severely that she could never start another war. Hughes’ position happened to be close to Clemenceau’s. Lloyd George’s was subtle and complex. Like Clemenceau, he objected to Wilson, whose country had not suffered as France and Britain had, trying to dictate the terms of the peace and delivering lectures on morality. Lloyd George’s coalition had been returned at the general election of December, 1918. It became clear during the campaign that the public (as one politician put it) wanted the German lemon squeezed until the pips squeaked. Lloyd George didn’t want to impose a harsh peace on Germany, partly because he thought it might tip the country towards Bolshevism. But he was a politician seeking re-election, so publicly he said the Germans ‘must pay to the uttermost farthing, and we shall search their pockets for it’.
Wilson wanted a soft peace. He believed that no country should profit from the war, that spoils should not be divided up, that there should be no punitive damages, that subject people had the right to self-determination and that the League of Nations (the last of his Fourteen Points and the forerunner of the United Nations) should moderate world affairs. Vittorio Orlando, the Italian Prime Minister, came to Paris to collect on the pledges of territory that had been made to draw Italy into the war. A young Vietnamese kitchen hand working in Europe wanted Wilson to consider a proposal for Vietnamese self-determination. Nguyen Ai Quoc was turned away. Much later, and now called Ho Chi Minh, he humiliated another American president.
Here was the trouble: there was no unity of purpose. Deals had already been done. Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Orlando, the Japanese delegation and Billy Hughes didn’t much believe in self-determination. Germany had lost her overseas empire as soon as the war began. Turkey had lost the Ottoman empire upon signing the armistice. So by the time Wilson came to Paris the British had taken Palestine and created Iraq out of Mesopotamia, and they didn’t care too much if Wilson wanted to call these possessions ‘mandates’. Arthur Balfour had promised that Britain would consider setting up a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The French took Syria and Alexandretta. The Greeks took Bulgaria’s Aegean coastline and eyed the Turkish heartland. Japan took Germany’s island colonies in the Pacific north of the equator. Britain, France and South Africa claimed pieces of the Kaiser’s African empire. Poland was reborn and grabbed territory from Germany. And Billy Hughes insisted that Australia should control what had been German New Guinea. He had to settle for a mandate rather than annexation, but that gave Hughes all the power he needed.
Hughes wanted Germany bled white by reparations. The armistice signed at Compiègne simply mentioned ‘Reparation for damage done’. The delegates at the peace conference had to decide what this meant and reduce it to a money sum. Was it physical damage to France and Belgium: houses and factories destroyed, livestock stolen, farmland devastated? Did it cover the millions of tons of merchant shipping sunk? Or the allies’ costs in waging war? Hughes knew what he wanted: the £354 million that Australia had spent on the war, and another £100 million to cover repatriation and pension costs. Clemenceau pushed for crippling reparations; Lloyd George urged moderation. The demand against Germany came out at £24 billion. If it caused bitterness in Germany and gave pleasure to Clemenceau, it was also academic. The sum was reduced at a string of later conferences. In 1932 the idea of reparations was dropped.
But in 1919 Hughes appeared to have won on this as well as German New Guinea. No Australian Prime Minister since has played the free spirit with such zest among the world’s great powers. And if Hughes lacked Wilson’s gravitas, he had a better sense of his constituency. Wilson returned home and was unable to sell the treaty or the League of Nations to the Senate. He suffered a stroke late in 1919, possibly caused by overwork, and died five years later.
The Germans had been given no say in the draft of the treaty. They received a document that reduced their territory and population by about ten per cent. They would lose all their colonies and both banks of the Rhine would become a demilitarised zone. Their army would be limited to 100,000 men; they could not manufacture tanks, aircraft and submarines. The ‘war guilt’ clause made them responsible for the war. They had to pay a fantastic sum in reparations. It was a punitive peace, just like the one the Germans had imposed on Russia. But it might have been worse. Germany had not been invaded or dismembered: it still had its sovereignty.
Moderate Germans felt that Wilson had failed them, that they should never have believed in him and his Fourteen Points. Wilson saw those points as one thing and his allies as another, although much of Wilson’s idealism survived in the final treaty. Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s biographer, summed up what had happened in two sentences: ‘The Treaty of Versailles was not as vindictive as France had hoped; nor was it as moderate as Lloyd George desired. It was certainly not as utopian as Woodrow Wilson envisaged.’
Less moderate Germans, many of them soldiers, corporals as well as generals, began to argue that they had not been beaten in the field and that they had been ‘stabbed in the back’, not by Wilson but by their own politicians and Jews. This was nonsense. The Germans had been allowed to carry their rifles home and demobilise themselves, but they had still been beaten. For much of the war two soldiers, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, had run Germany; they, rather than the politicians, had lost it. And Jewish casualties in the German army had been disproportionately high. None of these facts mattered. The stabbed-in-the-back explanation was easier to understand.
The treaty was signed in the Hall of Mirrors, seventy-odd yards long and dripping with chandeliers, in the Palace of Versailles on June 28, 1919.
THEY SAID IT was the war to end all wars. It wasn’t. They said it was the war to make the world safe for democracy. It didn’t. It led, almost in a straight line, to the Nazi Party and its chambers of horrors, to a sideshow run by the Italian impresario Benito Mussolini, who brought a dress code to fascism, and to the rise of Japanese militarism. They said the war would create lands fit for heroes. It didn’t. The men who had fought the Great War struggled to find jobs and security as the world headed towards what would be called the Great Depression. It might be said that the new war that broke out in 1939, bigger and much more cruel than the first, was not new at all but the Great War, Part Two.
Some still argue that World War II flowed from the harshness of the Versailles Treaty. By European standards the treaty was not that severe. The fact that many Germans did not believe they had lost the war was a problem. A bigger one was the matter of enforcement of the treaty. This fell mostly to Britain, France and the United States. In 1920 the United States abruptly repudiated Wilsonian idealism, including a guarantee that Wilson had given to defend France. Britain and France, both devastated by the war in a way the United States was not, were left to enforce the treaty. They lacked the will and the means. Germany began to rearm. The Great War would soon resume under a new name.
It is also fashionable to argue that the allies, particularly Britain and her dominions, fought the Great War for nothing of value. If they had not fought, France, an enlightened democracy and a well-spring of liberal ideals, would have fallen to the Kaiser. He and his Prussian militarists would have dominated Europe from the Ukraine to the English Channel and human progress would have been turned back to the absolutism of pre-Enlightenment times. The Kaiser was not Hitler; but like Hitler, he was about brute force.
Australia’s casualties were too high for such a small nation, but Australia had to fight, and it is important here to see events as they were seen in 1914. There was a sentimental attachment to Britain. Australia depended on Britain for naval protection. Australia had a vital interest in the Suez Canal, which was being threatened by the Turks. It had a vital interest in ensuring that Japan did not take over German New Guinea. And, as a liberal democracy, it had an interest in seeing France remain free.
THE GREAT WAR produced battle casualties of about thirty-seven million, of whom 8.5 million were dead. It is probable that at least half of these died from artillery fire and fewer than two per cent from bayonet thrusts. This was the first big war fought between industrialised societies. It started off looking back towards Napoleon, French soldiers walking to their death in red-and-blue uniforms, and ended up pointing towards Kursk, tanks lurching ahead of infantrymen in workaday colours and carrying automatic weapons.
The Great War was also the event that determined, perhaps more than any other, the shape of the twentieth century. It helped to bring on the Russian Revolution and the rise of Marxism around the world. It did away with three reactionary monarchies but led to fascism in Germany and Italy. It helped turn the United States into a great power and contributed to the economic decline of Britain. It made Japan stronger and tempted it towards expansionism. The Great War was the overture to World War II. This time the corpses were so many that no-one knows how many died, particularly in Russia and China. Estimates of the dead, including civilians, range from thirty-five million to sixty million, including some six million Jews. This time the Passchendaeles and Sommes took place in the east; this time the war would be won from the east.
As the year 2000 approached news organisations across the world tried to decide who had been the most influential man or woman of the century. No-one seemed to think of Gavrilo Princip, the nobody from Bosnia, and the shots he fired at Sarajevo.
NO SOONER HAD the Great War ended than the struggle for its history began. No figure has polarised the chroniclers so well as Douglas Haig. His admirers say he had great gifts as a commander; his detractors say he was a butcher and a muddler. His admirers say he was bright and his detractors insist he was dull. There is no middle ground. Each side claims too much. Haig remains a mystery.
The publication of his war diary and other private papers in 1952 probably did him more harm than anything. He comes across as cold, selfish and literal-minded, although much of the apparent coldness may simply be his natural taciturnity. Hardly ever does he pause to acknowledge the young men who are dying for him. It is as though it is their duty to do so and no more needs to be said. He is suspicious of Frenchmen and other ‘foreigners’, the Irish, Catholics, politicians, the working classes and Australians. He stood too far back from the war, more like a king than a general, and delegated too much. His judgement of men was often poor.
But he had nerve, impressive nerve. He was always clear-eyed. Whatever the setback, he kept his poise. He had moral courage and a profound sense of duty. He fixed on his objectives and never wavered, never seemed to doubt himself. In 1918 Haig’s armies did more than the French or the Americans to secure victory. Unlike those of the French, Italians and Russians, his armies never came close to mutiny. Haig did what no British soldier had ever done before: commanded an army of one million men on a front of more than 100 miles in a new form of war for which no rule books had been written. The mistakes Haig made are easy to identify ninety years later, but Haig had no precedents to guide him. And, in the end, he did what generals are supposed to do: he won. He was proof of Noël Coward’s observation that the secret of success is the ability to survive failure. One cannot help but wonder whether some of the obloquy that has been heaped against Haig’s name comes down to the fact that, as an individual, he was hard to like and, ultimately, unknowable.
Churchill wrote that Haig was like ‘a great surgeon before the days of anaesthetics, versed in every detail of such science as was known to him, sure of himself, steady of poise, knife in hand, intent upon the operation, entirely removed in his professional capacity from the agony of his patient, the anguish of relations, or the doctrines of rival schools, the devices of quacks, or the first-fruits of new learning. He would operate without excitement, or he would depart without being affronted; and if the patient died, he would not reproach himself.’
Haig was offered no work after 1920. Lloyd George was not going to forgive him for being Haig. But the field-marshal did well from the war. He received an earldom and a grant of £100,000 (a ‘comfortable’ annual salary at this time was £200 a year). A public subscription was launched so that Haig might buy Bemersyde, the ancestral home of his family, on a hill above the Tweed.
Haig spent most of the rest of his life working for ex-servicemen and seemed to mellow. He died suddenly in 1928, aged sixty-six. A simple wagon drawn by farm horses carried his body to Dryburgh Abbey, Scotland, where he was buried under gloomy skies. His headstone is identical to those on the war graves in France. He had wanted it that way.
Hubert Gough was a pallbearer at Haig’s funeral. Lloyd George had refused to give Gough a chance to clear himself before a court of inquiry in 1918 and he left the army in 1922 and went into business. If it was true that Gough was the scapegoat for the British retreat during the German offensive of March, 1918, it was also true that, before that, he had been promoted far beyond his abilities. He lacked quiet judgement. Yet in 1937 Gough was awarded the Order of the Bath and one may only wonder why. Gough lived to be ninety-three.
William Birdwood lived to be eighty-five. He received a baronetcy and £10,000 for his war service. He toured Australia in 1920 to warm applause. His affection for the men he had led was obvious. He wanted to be Governor-General of Australia, and probably would have been, but the Labor Government decided an Australian should have the job, and it went to Sir Isaac Isaacs. Birdwood, typically, thought the decision correct. Birdwood was no tactician or organiser. His gift, and it was considerable, lay in building morale. The Australians knew him by sight. He had much physical courage. He was forever out just behind the frontline, shaking hands with privates from Bendigo and Dubbo, who, if slightly bewildered, decided he ‘wasn’t a bad sort of cove’. Birdwood was one of the most popular generals of the Great War.
David Lloyd George fell in 1922 when he recklessly confronted Mustafa Kemal, the new Turkish leader, over the Dardanelles neutral zone and almost dragged Britain into a needless war. Lloyd George resigned. By all the obvious measuring sticks he had been a good wartime leader. He could inspire with words and cut a dramatic figure with his wayward hair and mesmerising eyes. He understood the rhetoric of war and the temper of the people. He united the nation behind him in a way that Billy Hughes did not. He had energy: more than anyone he harnessed Britain’s industrial resources to win the war. What was not apparent to the public at the time was that since 1915 his war strategy had been muddle-headed. To the end he had believed that the war could be won in the east. Also unknown was his weakness in dealing with Haig. He would shun and humiliate him; he thought him a ‘butcher’. But he would not replace him, or even confront him. There was something feeble about this. Lloyd George devoted himself to writing from 1931. He married Frances Stevenson, his secretary, after the death of his wife. He died in 1945.
ERICH LUDENDORFF WROTE his memoirs in Sweden. He claimed the military had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by politicians and likened himself to Siegfried. He returned to Berlin, a hero of the Right, and marched with his one-time corporal, Adolf Hitler, in the Munich putsch, and soon after became a Nazi member of the Reichstag. He divorced his wife to marry a neurologist who was also an amateur philosopher, and the pair worshipped ancient gods and blamed Germany’s troubles on Jews and Freemasons. Ludendorff began to criticise Hitler’s methods in the 1930s, but by then many thought him a crank. He died in 1937.
Paul von Hindenburg endured. His position as a national hero and father figure seemed unassailable. He too fostered the stabbed-in-the-back explanation. Hindenburg became President of the German republic in 1925. He was still there when the Great Depression hit. Hindenburg knew little of economics. Crisis followed crisis and suddenly Hitler’s Nazi Party had a mass following. The Nazis, communists and democrats brawled for Germany’s soul. In 1932, though in his eighties and showing signs of senility, Hindenburg ran again for president against Hitler. The field-marshal beat the corporal, but the following year, as the crises continued, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor, and the Weimar Republic became the corporal’s first victim. Hindenburg at this time showed some warmth towards Hitler. That had always been his way: he accommodated. Hindenburg died in 1934.
The Dutch Government refused demands by the allies for the extradition of Kaiser Wilhelm to face charges as a war criminal.
Wilhelm lived as a country gentleman. Photographs show him sawing firewood and feeding ducks. He liked to read; P. G. Wodehouse was his favourite author. Wilhelm died in 1941. He had been at his best when the going was good.
In 1921 Right-wing extremists in Berlin assassinated Matthias Erzberger, who had signed the armistice at Compiègne. Hermann Goering, who took over the flying circus from the dead Richthofen, headed the Luftwaffe for Hitler in World War II. He was condemned to death at the Nuremberg war crimes trials but committed suicide the night before he was due to be hanged. Rudolf Hess was wounded three times as an infantryman in the Great War before becoming a pilot. Hess was Hitler’s deputy until 1941, when he flew to Scotland with a bizarre peace proposal. He was given a life sentence at Nuremberg. Heinz Guderian began the Great War commanding a wireless section. He became ‘the father of the panzer divisions’ and an exponent of blitzkrieg. Guderian spearheaded the drive to the French coast in 1940 and the following year took his panzer group to the outskirts of Moscow. Erwin Rommel led the Afrika Korps in North Africa in World War II and acquired a reputation among allied troops there that perhaps exaggerated his talents.
DOUGLAS MACARTHUR WENT on his first trench raid with the American forces in March, 1918. Instead of a helmet, he wore an officer’s cap with the wire removed and set at a jaunty angle. Instead of a tunic, he wore a sweater with a black ‘A’ for Army emblazoned on the front. A long scarf knitted by his mother topped the outfit. He was armed with only a riding crop. Asked why he was not in regulation dress, he said: ‘It’s the orders you disobey that make you famous.’ He was sacked during the Korean War for, in effect, disobeying orders and became even more famous. The man who sacked him was Harry Truman, the plain-speaking artillery officer who had become President of the United States.
George Patton was as vain as MacArthur, and more flamboyant, less talented as a strategist but a quick thinker. He came into the Great War as a cavalryman and left it convinced that tanks were the future. Patton covered more ground than any other allied commander in the race across western Europe after D-Day; he also committed more indiscretions. He died in a traffic accident in Germany in 1945.
‘Black Jack’ Pershing returned home heavy with honours and was given the unusual rank of ‘General of the Armies’. His best achievement had been to keep most of his army under his control, rather than having it farmed out to Haig and Pétain. America’s contribution to the Great War is often misunderstood. It is not so much what American troops did in 1918, but what was promised: three million Americans on the ground in 1919. This changed the arithmetic of the war and led to Ludendorff’s wild throws of 1918.
FERDINAND FOCH, THE fiery little Frenchman, was one of the truly great figures thrown up by the war and his reputation, unlike Haig’s, has endured well. No man imposed his personality on the war more dramatically than Foch. To some the war was about firepower: whoever had most, and in the right places, would win. To Foch the war was also about faith. He was indomitable; he believed in himself and the power of will. Most of the power came not from his office but his personality. He inspired, prodded, nagged, cajoled and encouraged the French, British, Belgian and American armies. Rebuffed here, he would try there. His catch-cry roughly translated to ‘Everyone to battle’. Foch declined to enter politics after the war. He visited the United States and was taken to a baseball game at Yankee Stadium. He was introduced to Babe Ruth, the legendary player, who looked at his shoes as he tried to think of something friendly to say. Eventually he looked up at Foch and smiled. ‘You were in the war, weren’t you?’ Babe said amiably.
Foch died in Paris in 1929 and is buried close to Napoleon in the church of Saint-Louis-des-Invalides. Clemenceau died in the same year. He had asked to be buried without ceremony. He wanted an iron railing around his grave, but no inscription.
Like Foch, Henri-Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun and the French army commander at war’s end, was made a Marshal of France. At the age of eighty-four, and with the French armies defeated by Hitler, Pétain became head of the Vichy regime. The pessimist in him saw this as the best compromise – or at least this is the kindest interpretation of what he did. Pétain was sentenced to death for treason in 1945. Pétain had once described the young Charles de Gaulle as ‘an officer of real worth’. De Gaulle, another veteran of Verdun, commuted Pétain’s sentence to solitary confinement for life. Pétain died in 1951, aged ninety-five. His name was removed from the memorial to those who served at Verdun.
IN VOLUME IV of his memoirs Lloyd George wrote that, after the war, he discovered that the only man who might have replaced Haig ‘was a dominion general’. Did he mean Currie or Monash? In a later volume Lloyd George answered the question: it was Monash, the ‘most resourceful general in the whole of the British army’. Lloyd George was of course using Monash to diminish the reputation of Haig and others. When Haig needed replacing, Monash was only a divisional general and little known outside the Australian force. In 1918, when Monash was a corps commander and known for Hamel, Amiens and Mont St Quentin, the need to dump Haig had passed: the allies were winning the war.
Lloyd George could have been referring to Currie, an outstanding soldier who was at least the equal of Monash. Currie retired from the army and became a university vice-chancellor but could find no peace. A Canadian politician used parliamentary privilege to accuse Currie of being cavalier with the lives of his men while seeking glory for himself. Currie sued for defamation when an Ontario newspaper repeated the allegations years later. He won the case but it was said that the ordeal affected his health. He died in 1933, aged fifty-seven.
Monash lived to be sixty-six. Vic, his wife, and Bertha, his daughter, joined him in London in 1919. That year he wrote the 115,000 words of The Australian Victories in France in 1918 in one frantic month. It is sad that he wrote hurriedly and with the main purpose of correcting press reports that had undersold Australia’s – and his – part in Germany’s defeat. The tone of the book showed the less attractive side of Monash’s character: a sense of self-importance and a tendency to exaggerate. Nor did the prose reflect Monash’s unusual gifts as a writer.
He arrived back in Australia on Boxing Day, 1919. Vic died of cancer shortly after. Unlike Currie, Monash enjoyed the warmth of public affection without controversies, but his homecoming, particularly when viewed from this distance, was anti-climactic. The Australian Government did nothing to honour him, although he was eventually promoted to full general. He was offered no high posts. He was still the outsider, somehow not quite right for the Establishment. He eventually ran the State Electricity Commission of Victoria. This was important work; but it was not to be compared to breaking the Hindenburg Line. Lizzie Bentwitch returned to Australia and became his companion. Monash had always loved children; now he enjoyed playing with Bertha’s youngsters, teaching them to read and play draughts and giving them piggy-backs. He built a doll’s house for his grand-daughter, Elizabeth. It was a typical Monash production: nearly five-feet high, double-storeyed, every piece of furniture made to scale and complete with a toilet bowl and electric light.
He developed high blood pressure and began to tire easily. In 1931 he suffered a series of heart attacks over about a week. He died of pneumonia shortly afterwards. His state funeral brought out a crowd of 250,000, maybe 300,000, on a cold and cloudy day. Monash appealed across the spectrum. He was not of the Establishment, nor a ‘professional’ soldier; he was not ‘political’. Monash was not like other people, but he was a man of the people. Geoffey Serle, his biographer, wrote that soldiers needed a representative hero who was a volunteer; Monash was acceptable as ‘a seemingly unpretentious outsider … His commanding intellect was sensed as well as his basic honesty and decency. He was one tall poppy who was never cut down … No-one in Australian history, perhaps, crammed more effective work into a life …’ Few Australians have better claims to greatness than Monash.
Pompey Elliott committed suicide a few months before Monash died. Monash was saddened: the two had got on well. Elliott found no peace after the war. He had never recovered for being passed over for a divisional command. The ‘supercession’, he admitted in 1929, ‘has actually coloured all my post-war life’. He became a Nationalist senator and used the parliament and the press to attack Birdwood and White and the British high command. He was bothered by nightmares about the war and haunted by the deaths of those who had served under him. His blood pressure rose, he developed diabetes and received a head injury while horse riding. In 1930 he broke down and wept while opening a war memorial at Ararat. Earlier the following year he attempted suicide by turning on a gas oven. He was eventually admitted to a private hospital. During the night he opened up his left elbow with a razor blade and bled to death. Each year, on the anniversary of his death, the Friends of the 15th Brigade gather around his grave in Burwood Cemetery. A eulogy is delivered and at the end of the service the mourners walk to his grave one by one and place a poppy on it. The inscription on his headstone says: ‘This was a man.’
Bert Jacka was badly gassed in 1918 and underwent two operations in England. He returned home a hero late in 1919, by which time a cult had grown up around him. He went into business and became mayor of St Kilda. His business collapsed during the Depression. Jacka’s health broke down, partly because of his war wounds. He died of chronic nephritis early in 1932, aged thirty-nine.
No cult developed around Harry Murray: he was a modest man and it would have embarrassed him. He ended up the most decorated infantry soldier in the British empire armies of the Great War. He bought a grazing property near Roma in south-eastern Queensland and told Bean he was teaching his 10,000 sheep to march in fours. He married and six years later was divorced. He remarried and moved to an even more remote sheep property north of Winton. The marriage was happy and produced a son and a daughter. Murray loved the solitude: he enjoyed reading and listening to cricket broadcasts. And he began to write for Reveille. Few ex-servicemen wrote sweeter prose. Murray was without swagger.
He died in 1966, aged eighty-five. In 2006 a bronze statue of Murray by Peter Corlett (sculptor of the poignant ‘Cobbers’ statue at Fromelles) was unveiled at Evandale in northern Tasmania. Murray’s son and daughter were present.
Brudenell White was coaxed from retirement to become Australia’s Chief of the General Staff in World War II. He was killed, along with three federal ministers, in a plane crash near Canberra in 1940. White was courteous, modest and a fine staff officer. One may only wonder how successful Birdwood would have been without him. Tom Blamey, Monash’s former chief-of-staff, commanded the Australian army in World War II. His leadership was controversial, but he eventually became a field-marshal. Leslie Morshead, who had led the 33rd Battalion at Messines, Passchendaele and Villers-Bretonneux, commanded the 9th Australian Division at Tobruk and El Alamein. Talbot Hobbs, the architect who succeeded Monash as commander of the Australian Corps, helped design memorials to Australians in France and Belgium. William Glasgow, the pastoralist famous for his part in the counter-attack at Villers-Bretonneux and later commander of the 1st Division, became Minister for Defence in 1927. Charles Rosenthal, commander of the 3rd Division, returned to his architecture practice, served in the New South Wales parliament, and led the Sydney Anzac Day march for many years. John Gellibrand, leader of the 3rd Division, served three years in the federal parliament and helped found Legacy, which looks after the families of ex-servicemen.
Cyril Lawrence, one of the finest Australian chroniclers of the war, returned to work for the State Rivers and Water Supply Commission of Victoria. He became a brigadier during World War II, then held senior positions with the Commonwealth Department of Postwar Reconstruction and the Snowy Mountains Authority. Upon the death of his wife he left to live with his daughter, Margaret, in South Africa. He died in 1981, aged ninety-two.
William Donovan Joynt, the Victoria Cross winner, went farming after the war, then founded a printing and publishing business in Melbourne. He wrote Saving the Channel Ports and lived to be ninety-seven. Joe Maxwell worked as a gardener, wrote Hell’s Bells and Mademoiselles and enlisted for World War II under an alias. ‘Mick’ Moon became managing director of a large woolbroking and pastoral house. Ted Rule went back to being an orchardist. Private Martin O’Meara, a stretcher-bearer who won the Victoria Cross at Mouquet Farm and was wounded twice afterwards, returned to Western Australia and spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital. Corporal Arthur Thomas, the tailor who wrote so affectingly of Pozières, turned forty in the trenches during 1918. ‘I have had a damned long run and should be out of it by now, but men are wanted … so will stick it to the end,’ he wrote. He was killed three months later. Walter Howard and his son Lyall opened a petrol station at Dulwich Hill, Sydney. Lyall never recovered from his gassing: he suffered from chronic bronchitis and skin rashes. He died in 1955, aged fifty-nine. John, his son, became Prime Minister of Australia in 1996.
IN 1920 BILLY Hughes received a cheque for £25,000 – a ‘subscription’ – in recognition of his services to Australia and the British empire. The presumption was that ‘grateful citizens’ had raised the money, but the nation was never told who they were. This touched on something that was starting to bother people. Where did Hughes’ allegiances lie? With the workers’ party that had spawned him? Or with his new friends, some of them rich and powerful, on the conservative side of politics?
The conservative parties won the election of 1922 but the Country Party said it would not serve with Hughes. He resigned the prime ministership and spent the rest of his life waiting for calls: to be prime minister again, to be re-embraced by the Labor Party, to be seen as the natural leader of the nation. For the next thirty years he remained a force in Australian politics, a bundle of nervous energy forever plotting, manoeuvring and intriguing, offending one group as he charmed another, conducting vendettas, pretending to be deaf when it suited, sacking secretaries and eventually playing the grand old man, frail and indestructible.
Hughes almost single-handedly brought down the Nationalist Prime Minister Stanley Melbourne Bruce, a twice-decorated veteran of the Great War, in 1929. Expelled from the Nationalist Party, Hughes, aged sixty-eight, formed his own party. Then he joined the United Australia Party that had replaced the Nationalists and held a string of ministerial posts. Aged eighty-two, he was expelled from the United Australia Party in 1944. After World War II Hughes joined the Liberals. This was his sixth party. The story goes that when Sir Robert Menzies observed that Hughes had never joined the Country Party, Hughes replied: ‘You had to draw the line somewhere.’
Hughes died in 1952, aged ninety. Archbishop Mannix died eleven years later. There had been a reconciliation of sorts between the two. Like Haig, Hughes still polarises people. He is a patriot to some and a ‘Labor rat’ to others; there is no middle ground.
KEITH MURDOCH HAD been Hughes’ secret agent during the Great War. The relationship had begun to curdle in 1918 when Murdoch tried to undermine Monash and Hughes went along with the plot until he discovered that hardly anyone agreed with Murdoch, except Bean. Murdoch and Hughes finally fell out at the Paris peace conference. Murdoch in 1921 became editor of the Melbourne Herald. At this he was truly gifted: he had an uncanny sense of his audience. The paper prospered and Murdoch prospered even more. He still played the kingmaker but there were now better candidates than Hughes. Around the time that Hughes lost the prime minister-ship Murdoch put out a memorandum to staff. ‘We should be careful of W. M. Hughes,’ it said. ‘His motives are ugly – vindictive-ness, jealousy, self-interest. His dominant idea is not to help the country but to destroy [Stanley] Bruce.’ Like Hughes, Murdoch polarised opinions. Some said he was a fine newspaperman and a high-minded citizen; others said he was a seeker of power and wealth. Murdoch died in 1952.
Charles Bean didn’t polarise. He was admired for his industry, modesty and decency. He wrote six volumes of war history, two on Gallipoli and four on France and Belgium. He favoured infantrymen rather than artillerymen, White and Gellibrand and McCay rather than Monash, country boys rather than those from the cities. He sometimes joined one sentence to another to create jungles in which the reader had to trudge on, past tangle after tangle, until finally a shaft of sunlight broke through the canopy, and you understood why four men were running down a trench. But his volumes are also remarkable for their accuracy, their detail and democratic temper. Bean, a man of integrity and quiet courage, died in 1968. Long before that he had refused a knighthood. He told a friend that he could not imagine his wife (he married at forty-one) going to the butcher and asking for the meat for Sir Charles Bean.