CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

‘A Special Desk in This Chamber’ for the War Historian:

Period of ‘Elliott’s exuberance’

JULY 1920–1921

ELLIOTT, LIKE ALL new senators elected in 1919, did not become entitled to sit in the Senate until July 1920. He had been absent and uninvolved, therefore, when legislation authorising a controversial increase in MPs’ salaries was whipped through both houses in May, a raise that boosted his parliamentary income from £600 to £1000. His inaugural contribution to parliamentary debate occurred on 28 July. It was not a traditional maiden speech in the sense of a wide-ranging formal declaration of his political philosophy and priorities, but some brief observations concerning a bill dealing with organisational changes to the public service.

Right from the outset Elliott lived up to his pre-election assertions about his political independence. In only his second Senate speech he called on the government to ‘revise drastically’ some of its proposals to overhaul public service administration. He also supported amendments initiated by other senators, and showed ingenuity and tenacity in moving some of his own (one was eventually accepted by the government). His legal expertise and drafting flair were also soon illustrated when his amendment extending the provisions of the war service homes legislation, to the benefit of returned soldiers, was accepted by the minister for Repatriation, Senator E.D. Millen, in August.

Pompey’s independent approach became even more evident in October when the topic of expenditure on Canberra was debated in the Senate. With federal parliament continuing to sit in Melbourne until the national capital was established, it was hardly surprising that Victorian senators in 1920 were less enthusiastic than their New South Wales counterparts about pushing on with the development of Canberra. On 1 October Elliott’s Victorian colleague Frank Guthrie objected to £150,000 being spent on temporary buildings for ‘a bush capital’, denouncing this budget item as ‘reeking of extravagance’ when Australia’s war expenditure had resulted in an ‘enormous’ foreign debt (£656 million) and the government was supposedly being frugal. Amid testy exchanges Elliott vehemently supported Guthrie. ‘When we were invited to support the Ministry at the recent elections’, Pompey declared, ‘one of the main planks in their platform was that the strictest economy would be observed’. When New South Wales Nationalists (particularly H.E. Pratten, a prominent Sydney manufacturer who entered parliament in 1917) asserted that development of Canberra had also been party policy at election time, Elliott and Guthrie disagreed. ‘So far as I am aware that matter was never mentioned’, Elliott contended.

Senator Pratten: Did not the honourable senator say that he agreed with the Prime Minister and with the policy of the National Party?

Senator Elliott: I do not know what Senator Pratten signed, but I certainly signed no platform whatever … I gave a general support to the policy of the Ministry, but I did not support any expenditure upon Canberra. In fact, I feel so strongly upon this matter that I have no desire to sit behind the Ministry if they are going to incur this expenditure. I would rather form a party of my own.

Senator Guthrie: We shall join the Country Party.

Senator Elliott: I again express my profound dissatisfaction with the general policy of the Government in this regard.

Elliott did not proceed to form a party of his own, but he did rapidly establish a reputation for outspokenness in parliament. The composition of the Senate fostered an independent approach. Likeable ALP veteran ‘Jupp’ Gardiner, a 53-year-old former rugby champion who tipped the scales at eighteen stone, was Labor’s solitary senator, and Elliott was not the only Nationalist senator to conclude that this circumstance imposed a greater responsibility on them to scrutinise government measures carefully. Pompey’s individualistic instincts were soon evident. He was particularly critical of the government when he considered it was not doing enough to reduce spending. During his first few months in the Senate he aired his disapproval of excessive expenditure in a number of spheres besides Canberra’s development. While he remained devoted to returned soldiers and continued to be a dedicated advocate for their cause, he felt instinctively protective of those he described as ‘the middle classes, the people who get it in the neck every time’. And, though sometimes flummoxed by procedural intricacies in the Senate, he was soon using parliament effectively as a forum for raising issues in order to expedite desirable outcomes.

Meanwhile he continued to be busy outside parliament with a host of AIF-related activities. With structures to commemorate the AIF being erected all round Australia, Pompey was in high demand as an unveiler. Dignitaries doing the honours on such occasions tended to concentrate on abstract concepts — honour and glory, gallantry and valour, duty and sacrifice. Elliott spoke that language too, but his unveiling speeches were more effective than most because of his anecdotal style; rather than laboriously pontificating in general terms about those concepts, Pompey told vivid stories to exemplify them. When he unveiled an honour roll at crowded St. John’s church in Camberwell, for example, he admitted that he was unfamiliar with most of the individuals named on it; but he said he knew the kind of things they had done, and proceeded to describe particular Australian deeds at Gallipoli and the Western Front.

While this approach was well received whenever Elliott officiated at such ceremonies, it was especially appreciated when he was able to go into detail about the individuals being commemorated. When he laid the foundation stone of a war memorial church in Essendon, he talked about what the Essendon boys did at the landing. When he journeyed to the Euroa district to unveil a striking monument at Strathbogie, he described how those famous local identities Fred Tubb and Alex Burton had won the VC at Lone Pine. His audiences were enthralled. People flocked from miles around to attend the Strathbogie ceremony in October 1920; there had been no larger gathering in the town’s entire history.

Elliott’s connection with these commemorative structures was not confined to unveilings. He involved himself in fund-raising activities to help pay for them, such as his well-attended lecture on modern battle which substantially assisted the construction of a memorial hall at Camberwell. This lecture was illustrated with official AIF slides and film footage. The friendship of mutual regard and trust forged during the war between Elliott and J.L. Treloar continued into peacetime. Treloar, now the dedicated and diligent director of the Australian War Museum (later to become the Australian War Memorial), readily acquiesced when Pompey asked if he could borrow slides and film for his lecture; Elliott, in turn, was responsive when Treloar asked him to donate to the museum. Among the items he relinquished were the boots he was wearing when wounded at the Gallipoli landing, the hole made by the bullet that hit his ankle still clearly visible. Pompey was also involved when a proposal gathered momentum in Melbourne to cement Australia’s connection with Villers-Bretonneux through a financial contribution to the French town’s post-war restoration. In October 1920 he told a public meeting convened to discuss this proposal that the French regarded the AIF’s recapture of Villers-Bretonneux as the turning point of the war; a committee was formed to pursue this initiative, with Elliott as a vice-president.

There was one commemorative involvement he did distance himself from, however. It concerned his old school. Nowhere was Pompey a more celebrated hero than at Ballarat College. He was given a rapturous reception when he presented the prizes at speech night, and again when he attended the annual collegians’ reunion. On both occasions he was greeted with a standing ovation, cheers, and ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. A student present at that speech night recalled long afterwards Elliott’s imposing stature — immense chest and shoulders in particular — and the impression he conveyed of dynamic physical strength. At the ex-collegians’ gathering Pompey was acclaimed as ‘the greatest son the college ever had’, ‘a man whose name had rung through the whole British Empire’. He was elected president of their association, and it was proposed that a memorial hall should be constructed and named after him. Elliott told the meeting that he supported the concept of a memorial hall, but was not keen on having his name associated with it: ‘I’m not dead yet’, he explained.

He was as fond of Ballarat as it was of him. In 1920 Bean contacted him to ask which town, suburb, or district he would like to be associated with in the AIF official history. The answer was Ballarat. Although he had not lived there for decades, ‘I … have regarded myself always as belonging to the Ballarat district’ and ‘have a great liking’ for it.

In mid-1920 Elliott’s prestige and reputation as an authority on the AIF landed him in a bitter sectarian controversy. On 3 July a theatrical play about the war, ‘Advance Australia’, was performed at Bendigo to raise funds for a Catholic convent carnival. Its anti-British sentiments, particularly evident in its depiction of the battle of Fromelles, offended ‘loyalists’, and a furore erupted. There were angry demonstrations and protest meetings. Discrediting the play was not a straightforward matter, as its author and producer, Father J.J. Kennedy, had not only been at Fromelles himself — as the (Catholic) chaplain of the 53rd AIF Battalion — but had been awarded the DSO for conspicuous gallantry in caring for the wounded there. Strident objectors to the play invited their local MP, Prime Minister Hughes, to address a protest meeting on 9 July, but he was too busy; when General Elliott signified his willingness to speak, the Argus reported that ‘satisfaction was expressed’ in Bendigo.

The meeting was crowded and rowdy. Pompey provided a long and detailed account of the battle, and insisted that a theme in the play which loyalists found particularly offensive — that the British had let the Australians down as usual — was factually misconceived. Whenever Elliott sensed that pro-Irish Catholics were taking on pro-British Protestants he instinctively aligned himself with the latter; also, throughout the 1920s he vigilantly scrutinised the way AIF history was being documented. Even so, considering Pompey’s real views about British generalship and staff work at Fromelles, this was a peculiar intervention. Its timing, just before the Ballarat by-election contested by the Labor identity he abhorred more than any other, D.C. McGrath, was surely no coincidence. Kennedy and his supporters had no doubt that the agitation surrounding the play was a deliberate attempt by Nationalist manipulators to fuel sectarianism in the last week of the campaign in Ballarat. If so, the tactic failed — McGrath won the by-election.

Elliott’s AIF-related activities were not confined to commemorative monuments and attempts to influence how the history of the war was being written. Providing practical assistance to the men who had returned from the war was also a big priority. Striving to improve their lot was a constant preoccupation. Besides doing his utmost in parliament for them collectively and — where particular grievances were brought to his notice — individually, he wrote numerous references. One to survive from this period concerned Corporal Frank South of the 60th Battalion. Armed with Elliott’s recommendation praising his ‘excellent service’ during three years in the 15th Brigade, South succeeded in getting the position he was after. But Pompey’s references did not always do the trick. Despite his ‘very strong’ letter of support, the quest of his old friend McNicoll to become administrator of the mandated territory of New Guinea was unsuccessful.

In February 1921 Elliott’s supersession grievance was reignited when divisional commands in Australia’s post-war defence scheme were announced. With seven appointments to be made (there were five infantry and two Light Horse divisions in the reorganised peacetime force), and his supersession wound of 1918 still raw, it was a stinging personal rebuff for Pompey to find himself overlooked when Gellibrand, Glasgow, Rosenthal, and Tivey were all among the selected seven. The other three chosen were Hobbs, ‘Digger’ Brand, and a well-known New South Wales Light Horse commander who was also assistant minister for Defence, Sir Granville Ryrie. Elliott’s chagrin at missing out resulted not only from his conviction that he was entitled to one of these commands on merit; he had also received what he interpreted as an inside tip that he could expect to get one.

His ‘informant’ was Digger Brand. After the mid-1918 appointments that had so affronted Pompey, Brand had been earmarked as next in line for an AIF divisional command (unbeknown to Elliott, who had far superior claims). No such vacancy had arisen and, after the Armistice, Brand became state commandant in Victoria. In that capacity Brand had been at the pier to meet Elliott when the Orontes arrived in June 1919, and had been one of Pompey’s fellow speakers at the influential returned soldiers meeting in the Domain the following month. He had later approached Pompey for advice in connection with peacetime command appointments: if Elliott were given a division in the post-war force, who would he recommend as prospective brigade commanders in Victoria? While providing the assessment Brand requested, Elliott remarked that Brand’s letter was the first intimation he had received of the potential offer of a divisional command; Brand replied that Pompey’s claims could hardly be overlooked.

Since that exchange Elliott had been awaiting developments with wary expectancy. In August 1920 when Gellibrand, having returned to Tasmania, accepted an invitation to become Victoria’s Chief Commissioner of Police, he was quoted as admitting that his decision to accept this interstate position had been influenced by a foreshadowed appointment in the new defence force. Elliott even made this reported remark the subject of a question without notice in the Senate: ‘I have no knowledge of any employment of a military character being offered to Sir John Gellibrand’, Pearce replied. (In fact, Brudenell White, with adroit behind-the-scenes manoeuvring, had engineered the offer of the police commissionership because he wanted Gellibrand to be available to command a Victorian-based division.) On 8 February 1921 it was announced that Gellibrand (and Brand) had each been given a division, and Elliott discovered that his most heartfelt ambition had eluded him once again.

He was, of course, furious. He immediately fired off a protest letter, declaring himself unavailable for a brigade command in the peacetime force (as a Victorian brigadier, his immediate superior would have been either Glasgow or Gellibrand). He also contended that this repetition of his 1918 supersession warranted a personal investigation by Senator Pearce into ‘why I have been deemed unfit for promotion’. This letter was referred to the highest military tribunal in Australia, the Military Board; Pearce, as Defence minister, was its president. Accepting Elliott’s withdrawal of his services with regret, the Military Board ruled that his latest claim to have been superseded was misconceived. Moreover, the board ‘reluctantly’ concluded (in a formal minute endorsed by Pearce) that ‘the substance and tone of General Elliott’s statement of his grievance show him to be lacking in the restraint and judgment necessary for high command’. Elliott was informed that the board (including the minister) found his representations unsustainable. Pompey persisted:

As I have been thus superseded by the Military Board without any crime or fault imputed to me, or any opportunity to answer any accusation made against me … I must respectfully request that the matter be made the subject of an enquiry by a Supreme Court Judge or other independent Commissioner on the lines mentioned in my former letter so that I may be informed wherein I have failed to win the favour of the Military Board or other authority.

Predictably, the Military Board confirmed its previous ruling. Elliott was notified that neither the regulations nor ‘the custom of the service entitles an officer to demand an enquiry’. Furthermore, the investigation of ‘a purely military matter’ by a senior judge or equivalent would set a most undesirable precedent. It ‘would have far reaching effects and militate against the very foundations of military discipline’. Besides, Elliott had ‘no reasonable grounds for considering himself aggrieved’.

Pearce signed his formal endorsement of this Military Board verdict on 5 April. The following day, when federal parliament resumed after its lengthy summer break, Senator Millen announced that the session then beginning would be primarily devoted to overhauling the tariff; other government initiatives would be meagre. It seemed that a staid, torpid parliamentary term lay ahead, but Pompey Elliott was in such an aggrieved frame of mind that he single-handedly torpedoed these expectations.

Warming up with some critical remarks about the Air Defence Bill, Elliott declared that there was ‘absolutely no necessity’ for an expansive and expensive peacetime air force, which had evidently been advocated by ‘certain highly-placed officers’ in order to secure remunerative positions for themselves. If, however, such a measure was going to be introduced, tighter provisions were needed to prevent inappropriately rapid promotion for certain officers who possessed social influence. By way of illustration, he contrasted the treatment of Street and Scanlan (without naming them) during the war, describing his frustration when his repeated attempts to have Street replaced as his brigade major were thwarted until this wealthy ‘social butterfly’ who ‘could not sleep in anything rougher than silk pyjamas at ten guineas a suit’ made a grave mistake at a critical time in April 1918. Whereas Street had been sent to Staff College at Cambridge, the officer Pompey wanted as his brigade major and recommended for an advanced training course, Scanlan, who was more talented but without influence, was sidelined at Salisbury Plain until Pompey rescued him. Another shortcoming of the Air Defence Bill, according to Pompey, was its failure to ensure that officers with grievances were able to seek redress: ‘I know from bitter experience during the recent war … that threats and duress were applied to prevent an officer exercising his statutory right of appeal to the Minister’. Accordingly, he would be introducing an amendment to enable an aggrieved individual to sue for damages in the civil courts in such circumstances.

The following week Elliott moved into top gear. His vehicle was an amending Defence Bill; while merely ‘a machinery measure’ to Millen, it was teeming with dangerous flaws in Pompey’s estimation. Uppermost in his ‘very grave and serious objections’ to the bill was its incorporation of the British Army Act into Australia’s peacetime defence administration. He also became animated about the issue of ‘redress of grievances’. After a terse exchange with Pearce, who denied Elliott’s claim that the right of appeal to the Defence minister no longer existed, Pompey proceeded to dissect the Military Board. This time he named names. Brudenell White had ‘washed his hands of the Australian forces’ when he accompanied Birdwood to the Fifth Army in 1918; of the other board members, only Elliott’s old friend General Forsyth had distinguished himself in the field during the war, and because his health broke down soon after the AIF’s arrival at the Western Front he was unaware of developments after 1916. No member of the Military Board except White, therefore, was competent to judge the comparative suitability of Australia’s generals for higher command, a state of affairs that was demonstrably unsatisfactory and also unnecessary:

Senator Elliott: We have here General Monash, who commanded the Australian forces in France with the utmost success, and [who excited] the admiration of the whole world. He has not been admitted to the Board —

Senator Pearce: But he was consulted about the divisional appointments.

Senator Elliott: Since the Minister has raised that question, I have the best authority for saying that, although General Monash has been consulted upon numerous occasions, upon no occasion has his recommendation been followed.

Senator Pearce: The honourable senator is wrong there. I have the signature of General Monash to his recommendations, and I can produce it.

This was unsettling. Elliott had nurtured all along the conviction that Monash held him in high regard and would have treated him differently. But it was, in fact, Pearce who was mistaken, not Elliott. Monash had been privately consulted about these appointments, but was annoyed that his views (especially his strong objections to giving Gellibrand a division) evidently ‘carried no weight’; the ‘reference of the matter to me was more or less a farce’, he concluded. Pompey foreshadowed the same type of amendment he had proposed in his response to the Air Defence Bill, a provision enabling an aggrieved member of the force who had been improperly dissuaded from appealing to the Defence minister to sue in the civil courts for damages. In this speech he decided to draw on his personal experience to underline the need for such an amendment. Headlines resulted.

‘I am reluctant to bring in anything of a personal nature’, he said, ‘but I want to show the Senate that I have had bitter experience of this sort of thing’. What followed was a graphic account of the desperate defence of March 1918, when his brigade was flung into a series of alarming situations, on more than one occasion having to march all night. He described how the tremendous exertions of his men were hampered at a critical stage by the unauthorised occupation of Hedauville by a detachment of British ‘fugitives’, who were obviously prepared to stay where they were and leave the fighting to others until Pompey took vigorous action to evict them. Quoting freely from his report to Hobbs about this incident, Elliott told the Senate that the staff officer in charge of these British renegades had protested to his superiors about Elliott’s forceful intervention:

Three weeks later General Hobbs called to see me. He said, ‘I want to speak to you privately’, and took me out into the garden. He then said to me, ‘General, I have instructions to tell you that while you are in the Australian Imperial Force you will receive no further promotion by reason of your conduct to the [British] officers’. When he said that, I turned away rather dumbfounded, and he struck me on the back and said, ‘I have got to tell you that, but by God you were right’. It turned out that this staff officer was the son of a Duke, and put the acid on General Birdwood for my conduct, and you see the result.

Shortly afterwards, Elliott continued, he discovered that he had been superseded by Gellibrand. He had protested to Brudenell White, raising the prospect of an appeal to the Defence minister; Pompey then read out White’s reply threatening to send him straight back to Australia if he resorted to ‘political influence’. The conclusion was clear. ‘There was absolutely nothing against me on the score of capacity to command or lead’, he contended. Yet if he had opted to exercise his undoubted right of appeal he would have been sent home in disgrace. The impact of these stunning disclosures was intensified because awareness of such contentious developments was minimal (censorship during the war was rigorous).

Pompey then analysed the recent appointments in the post-war force. He claimed that he had again been superseded by Gellibrand, he had again tried to exercise his right of appeal, and White had again stood in his way. Since White was the only member of the Military Board really in a position to evaluate the comparative abilities of the generals concerned, it was as if ‘I have appealed from him to himself’, and the result was predictable. Elliott concluded this sensational speech by announcing that the defects he had highlighted would no longer affect him personally: ‘I am so sick of the whole business that … I shall no longer serve in the Citizen Forces of the Commonwealth under the present heads’.

With numerous high-ranking AIF personalities in the Senate, the reaction to Elliott’s speech promised to be as riveting as his remarkable revelations. Strong support from a non-AIF quarter came from Senator Pratten: he had ‘never been an admirer of General Birdwood’, who was ‘a lime lighter’. From ‘Fighting Charlie’ Cox, a Light Horse brigadier from New South Wales, on the other hand, came vacuous disapproval, not for the last time during a controversy involving Elliott. A more discerning contribution came from Brigadier-General E.A. Drake-Brockman, a Western Australian senator. Referring to Elliott as ‘my gallant and distinguished friend’, Drake-Brockman said he had shown ‘the same courage that he was so celebrated for in the field’ in raising ‘a matter which concerns himself very closely in order to illustrate what he considers a great defect in our present system’. While declining to discuss ‘the merits or otherwise’ of Pompey’s supersession complaint (‘I know nothing more about it than he has told us here’), and proclaiming himself an ardent admirer of both White and Birdwood, Drake-Brockman said that Elliott’s point about ‘appealing from Caesar to Caesar’ was compelling.

Pearce, the following speaker, admitted that he was ‘very much impressed’ by Drake-Brockman’s remarks on that aspect, but not at all by Pompey’s wartime recollections: ‘I deprecate discussion on the personal matters that Senator Elliott has brought forward’. The Defence minister said that he had no idea what had transpired in private discussions between Generals White, Hobbs, and Elliott in 1918; making an issue of it three years later was pointless as well as undesirable. With scores of soldiers feeling disgruntled about some wartime incident or another, an inquiry into Elliott’s grievance would set a precedent and open the floodgates. Moreover, any retrospective re-evaluation of command appointments was simply impracticable — some of the necessary witnesses were dead, and others were either overseas or scattered around Australia. As for himself, Pearce continued, he had not been in a position during the war to exercise an informed veto on appointments made overseas, and he had assured both Bridges and Birdwood beforehand that he would not be interfering. He had in fact benefited from a tip Bridges had given him years earlier, when he was inexperienced and unfamiliar with defence matters, that he should read a well-known book on the American Civil War, Henderson on Stonewall Jackson. This authoritative work, Pearce added, contained ‘a very good lesson for politicians’ about the disastrous consequences of meddling in such matters.

Six days later Elliott launched a counter-attack, instigating a special debate in the Senate on the ‘uncontrolled power’ Pearce had allowed Birdwood during the war. Pompey’s acute sense of grievance spawned intense resentment whenever he was embroiled in a dispute and other individuals involved did not see things his way. When overlooked in 1918 he had blamed Birdwood and White, vented his spleen on them, and looked to others (Monash, Pearce) to put things right. When he missed out on a division again in 1921 and his protest to the Military Board was dismissed, he impugned the credentials of board members and looked to Pearce to overrule them. When Pearce confirmed in the Senate that he had approved both the 1918 and 1921 appointments and was unmoved by Elliott’s indignant protests, Pompey went gunning for him.

On 27 April 1921 Pearce tried to have the Pompey-initiated debate about Birdwood’s power disallowed, but was unsuccessful. Elliott embarked on an analysis of the Civil War and Henderson on Stonewall Jackson, intending to demonstrate the inappropriateness of the conclusion Pearce said he had drawn from that book. He also sought to link the unfettered power ceded by Pearce to the denial of his right to appeal in 1918. Pearce parried this thrust easily enough: the admission that he felt unable to overturn AIF command appointments in no way signified that he had authorised Birdwood or White to suspend any AIF officer’s right of appeal. Moreover, while ‘General Elliott would have us believe that he had been superseded owing to a bias against him’, there were actually other generals more senior to Elliott (McNicoll and Tivey) who were also passed over — and did not protest — when Gellibrand and Glasgow were promoted. Besides, White’s letter of May 1918 was more ‘kindly advice’ than menacing threat. Pearce cited its praise of Elliott’s undoubted ‘courage’ and ‘ability’, quoted White’s qualifying stricture that ‘you mar it by not keeping your judgment under complete control’, and added a pointed observation of his own: ‘Senator Elliott is falling into the same error in Australia’.

Next day the Senate resumed debate on the Defence Bill, and Pompey was back on the warpath. Moving an amendment granting ‘additional rights’ to superseded officers, he embarked on another caustic exposé of Western Front controversies. Pearce tried to rein Elliott in, accusing him of ‘indulging in his reminiscences’ and claiming that his amendment was out of order, but the Senate Chairman overruled him. This Pompey diatribe was all the more dramatic because the central figure in it was Albert Jacka, Australia’s first VC winner in the Great War and a legendary soldier. Although he shunned publicity himself, Jacka’s awesome front-line prowess was so renowned that he was one of the three most famous AIF identities in post-war Australia (the other two being Monash and Elliott himself). Time after time Jacka had been superseded in the 14th Battalion, Pompey told the Senate, even though he ‘repeatedly distinguished himself’ as a brilliant tactician and ‘the bravest of the brave’:

He led dozens of desperate charges, he was worshipped by his men, and notwithstanding this, officers were repeatedly placed over him. The position became so critical that men in Jacka’s battalion refused to go into action unless under his command. Honourable senators may think that is an astonishing statement; but it is an absolute fact.

Why was Jacka subjected to ‘such a cruel embargo’? According to Pompey, it was because of his bitter reaction to the fiasco of First Bullecourt. Tanks proved a great success in 1918 when Monash ensured that they went into action ‘fully protected’ — he ‘even had aeroplanes buzzing up and down above to confuse the enemy’. But they had been a disastrous failure at Bullecourt in April 1917 because Birdwood and White had sent them forward without protection at a time ‘when the ground was white with snow, so that every tank stood out’ starkly. These tanks were supposed to be supporting the advancing AIF infantry, but nearly all of them failed:

One of them suddenly blundered into a sunken road in which the members of the 14th Victorian Battalion were waiting to attack. The man in charge [of the tank] was so utterly panic-stricken that he turned his guns on our own men, and at a range of 5 or 10 yards killed at least thirty. It was said at the time that if the men had had a tin-opener they would have murdered the man who was responsible; but he was inside the tank.

About 70 per cent of the Australians engaged at First Bullecourt became casualties there; more than 600 were in the 14th Battalion. After the battle Jacka, as battalion intelligence officer, compiled a frank and understandably scathing report about the tanks which, Pompey alleged, was suppressed by Birdwood and became a watershed for Jacka: from then on he did not get a fair go.

Elliott qualified these astounding revelations with a caveat. They were largely based on statements to him by various 14th Battalion members, notably Jacka himself and the widely esteemed commander of the battalion at Bullecourt, Colonel Peck (who came into closer contact with Elliott later in the war as Hobbs’s chief-of-staff). ‘I cannot, of course, vouch for their absolute accuracy’, Pompey pointed out, ‘as I had no means of investigating them’.

His revelations were challenged straightaway in the Senate by Drake-Brockman, who was in charge of the 16th Battalion alongside Jacka’s unit at First Bullecourt before becoming commander of the 4th Brigade, which included both these battalions. Drake-Brockman conceded that the tanks were ‘rottenly officered’ in April 1917, and their ‘complete failure’ at Bullecourt justified the ‘very strong protest’ submitted by Jacka. However, he distanced himself from Elliott’s criticism of Birdwood and White, and insisted that Jacka was in no way penalised because of his Bullecourt report. This could not have happened, Drake-Brockman told the Senate, because Jacka’s report was never forwarded. Both it and the equivalent review by his 16th Battalion counterpart were so controversial that Peck and Drake-Brockman decided to adopt them as their own rather than hide behind the commendable frankness of their subordinates.

This sophistry did not vitiate the essential validity of Elliott’s allegations. The damning report written by Jacka had, in fact, been forwarded. Although countersigned by Peck and Drake-Brockman, its real author’s identity had been obvious. And it was true that Jacka did not receive the promotion and decorations his leadership and battle deeds deserved. His admirers claimed that he performed at least one VC-winning exploit at the Western Front on top of the VC he won at Gallipoli. Bean and others regarded what he did at Pozières as the most outstanding individual feat by any Australian in the whole war. It was also correct that Jacka’s Pompey-like tendency to criticise his superiors bluntly was the main reason for his under-recognition. Elliott may not have realised, however, that probably a bigger culprit than either Birdwood or White in this unfair treatment was Brand, whose inept handling of Jacka — a difficult subordinate, admittedly — demonstrated the inappropriateness of preferring him to Elliott as a divisional commander.

That same day Pompey aired more startling revelations in the Senate when he referred to a letter he had received from his old friend McNicoll, now the principal of a school at Goulburn. McNicoll, writing to congratulate Elliott for exposing dissatisfaction with the Birdwood–White regime, recalled his own aggrieved protests about Gellibrand in 1918, and claimed that the rejection of his application for the New Guinea post despite ‘the very strong letters of yourself and Monash’ indicated that he was still paying a price for them:

I have never recovered from having stood up for a decent thing … There are many other matters which we know of mutually and which one does not care to write about, and I’m sure I’m not alone in my feeling of satisfaction and gratitude to you for the action you have taken in raising a protest.

McNicoll might well have been taken aback to find such a letter quoted by its recipient in parliament (and cited accordingly in the press); but Pompey was all steamed up, and the letter was irresistible ammunition to refute Pearce’s assertion that other AIF generals did not object when they were bypassed in 1918. Not only had Tivey been furious, as ‘his batman told my batman’, Elliott declared, but McNicoll’s letter was incontrovertible proof that Pearce’s claim was ‘absolutely false’.

As Pompey quoted its contents and elaborated on them, he once again had his fellow senators on the edge of their seats. He vividly described how McNicoll, his ‘oldest friend in military and civil life’, had recovered from a near-fatal wound at Gallipoli to become a senior brigadier under Monash at the Western Front, before being leapfrogged in the promotion stakes by Gellibrand in mid-1918. Unlike Elliott, McNicoll then had Gellibrand as his immediate superior, and they were soon at loggerheads, as Elliott underlined with this excerpt from McNicoll’s letter:

I don’t know whether I told you that in June 1918, after he [Gellibrand] had been appointed to the 3rd Div[ision] he treated me so abominably that I asked to be relieved of my command and returned to Aust[ralia].

However, a detailed appraisal of this damaging rift by Gellibrand’s biographer decades later concluded that the root of the conflict was not Gellibrand’s manner (as Monash claimed, siding with McNicoll) but the conduct of McNicoll, who was ‘downright insubordinate and disloyal’, incompetent as well, and ‘an unwanted and unwarranted burden on Gellibrand’.

In response to Pompey’s revelations Pearce reiterated his distaste for Elliott’s preoccupation with personal grievances. The relevance to the Senate debate of what General Tivey’s batman had said to General Elliott’s batman was ‘beyond my comprehension’, he remarked. Furthermore, the changes Pompey was advocating would produce ‘hopeless confusion’ and ‘chaos’. Elliott disputed this angrily — ‘I do not ever remember hearing such a travesty of facts’ — and counter-attacked with more recriminations. He let fly with a highly jaundiced blast about preferential treatment for Gellibrand and an astonishing outburst about an unspecified AIF officer:

In France one of the biggest ‘duds’ I know of commanded a regiment of Light Horse, and he was stationed in a village behind the lines for the whole period of the war. During practically the whole of that time he was there he was intoxicated, and the villagers in pity and contempt named him ‘Le Toujours Zig-Zag’, by which they meant that he was always drunk … He returned to Australia and is now in command of the troops in Tasmania.

In view of these ‘extraordinary statements’, Senator Gardiner observed,

whoever is engaged in writing up the history of the war should be supplied with a special desk in this chamber and should be given a special invitation to be in regular attendance in the Senate, because matters of the greatest interest to them may crop up here at any time.

A week later Pearce told the Senate he had a statement to make in response to allegations by Senator Elliott. The officer Pompey had traduced as Toujours Zig-Zag was Colonel Dudley White, brother of Brudenell White; his ‘charge of drunkenness in France’ had been investigated, and was ‘entirely unfounded’. A pre-war accident, which partially paralysed Colonel White for some time, had bequeathed ‘lameness’ and a ‘slight speech impediment’ as permanent legacies, but ‘throughout his war service this officer was of temperate habits’. This statement was presented as a verdict of the Military Board. Perhaps it was (although Pearce received it from Brudenell White personally) but, whatever its origins, it demonstrated that Pompey, not for the first time, had jumped in without checking his information sufficiently. Although he maintained that Colonel White’s ‘incompetence in command’ was notorious ‘in the whole AIF’, the upshot was tantamount to an embarrassing own goal.

Elliott did not heed the lesson. A few hours later, during the resumed Senate debate on the Defence Bill, he returned to the supersession issue and Jacka’s treatment. He had not fully investigated Jacka’s case before raising it in the Senate previously, he admitted, but had now done so, and was even ‘prepared to lay before the Senate statutory declarations on the subject … to clear up the matter and to give the public an opportunity to learn the real facts of the case.’ Pearce unleashed an impatient rejoinder: ‘I should be busy for the next fifty years if I followed up all these tarradiddles.’ Maintaining that Jacka had been unfairly treated when inferior officers were imported into the 14th Battalion and placed over him, Pompey launched into a pungent analysis of their deficiencies. One of them had left Australia with the Third Division:

General Monash tried him in two places, as a brigade-major and as a battalion commander, and he had to be kicked out of both [yet] General Birdwood … after Bullecourt … insisted on this man taking command of the 14th Battalion over Captain Jacka’s head … At Polygon Wood [he] disappeared for two days, and during three days Captain Jacka ran the whole show. The colonel, in disappearing, took his telephone instruments with him, and Jacka had to beg, borrow or steal telephone instruments, make a new headquarters, and continue the action.

There was also the ‘Polish Jew’ who ‘was put in command of the battalion although he could not speak English’. While he was with the 14th this ‘unfortunate illiterate’ (who ‘could not write his own orders’)

never by any chance went near the front line. Whenever an action was imminent he developed synovitis … I do not know where he came from originally, but the position became so bad at last that headquarters could not stand him and fired him.

Pompey’s denunciation of the colonel who absented himself at Polygon Wood was factually based, but he was taken to task for his criticism of the other 14th Battalion commander. Drake-Brockman was soon on his feet to set the record straight about Eliezer Margolin:

He was my second in command in France … I have never served with a more gallant gentleman. Perhaps it was unfortunate that subsequently he was sent to the command of the 14th Battalion, because it is quite true that his method of speech was not quite orthodox. But this ‘illiterate’ Jew, as he has been termed, could not only speak English well though with a slight foreign accent, but he could also speak French, German, Russian, Hebrew and the Arabic languages fluently.

According to Drake-Brockman, Margolin was unable to go forward because he twisted his knee when he fell into a Messines shell hole:

Of course he could not get up to the front line. How could he with his knee swollen to about four or five times its normal size? I saw it myself … I know that Senator Elliott has not deliberately misinformed the Senate with regard to this matter. But he did not know all the facts. I do.

Senator George Henderson, another Western Australian who knew Margolin personally, hastened to corroborate Drake-Brockman. Henderson sang Margolin’s praises effusively — ‘there was never a more loyal or more courageous gentleman’ — and contended that

if Senator Elliott’s statements generally, in connexion with all other matters upon which he has spoken in this chamber, are as far removed from the facts as his comments concerning [Margolin], then his every word ought to be discounted and discountenanced by the Senate.

Elliott was clearly nettled by Henderson’s stinging reflection on his credibility. His strained attempts to defend himself only made matters worse. The protest he made about being subjected to a ‘personal attack’ by Henderson sounded hypocritical as well as hollow. His plea that he had been relying on information given to him in good faith, which he was unable to test by examining the informants on oath, invited the predictable rejoinder that he should be more careful about using such information to malign innocent individuals in their absence. While maintaining that transferring ‘a foreigner, a stranger, to take over the command of a battalion from a man of the type of Captain Jacka’ had been a grave mistake, he conceded that if the men who understandably resented this had inadvertently misled him about Margolin ‘I am sorry that I was led into error’.

The manner of Pompey’s attacks on both Margolin and Brudenell White’s brother exposed the fundamental flaw White himself had pinpointed in mid-1918 — Elliott’s tendency in controversy to shoot himself in the foot by using inadequately checked ammunition. The egg on Pompey’s face concerning Margolin detracted from the validity of his allegation about the other colonel who disappeared at Polygon Wood, and undermined his argument about Jacka’s unfair treatment in the 14th Battalion. Drake-Brockman, who had been closer to the 14th Battalion action than Elliott, had already challenged some of his assertions about Jacka; it was imprudent, if not peculiar, for Pompey not to check with Drake-Brockman before firing off his anti-Margolin broadside. The crowning humiliation for Elliott was the intervention of another influential authority who publicly aligned himself with Margolin’s defenders. In a letter to the Argus the soldier Elliott admired above all others, Sir John Monash (who was also Australia’s most prominent living Jew), wrote that the characterisation of Margolin as ‘an illiterate Polish Jew’ was ‘lamentable’ and ‘ridiculous’; Margolin was ‘a gallant, cultured gentleman, of fine physique and engaging personality, ardently loyal to Australian soldiers and ideals’.

After reading Monash’s published letter, Pompey sent one of his own to the Age. Some of ‘my friends … disapprove of my actions’, he acknowledged. But he had decided, with his eyes open, to raise his own case publicly as the best way of exposing the deficiencies of the system on behalf of numerous others who also had grievances:

I knew quite well that I should be outraging the military tradition and so-called custom of the service, that my motives would be misunderstood and my actions maligned, but I owe something to the boys who served under me, and they have ever said that I would never ask them to do something which I would not do myself.

As for Margolin, Elliott had not identified that officer by name in parliament until others did so, and he resented the assertion in Monash’s letter that he had acted ‘without knowledge or inquiry’. Having

never met the officer in my life … I investigated the complaint made to me in the presence of a representative of the “Sun” newspaper for several hours, and examined a number of witnesses.

Whatever Margolin’s defenders said about his character, and whether the criticisms of him by 14th Battalion men that Pompey had aired in the Senate were unduly harsh or not, the main point, Elliott insisted, was that Margolin had been a conspicuous failure as commander of that unit, and should never have been installed over Jacka in the first place. This was all very well, but if someone else had publicly denigrated Elliott as he had disparaged Margolin and Dudley White, his outrage would have been apoplectic.

On the next Senate sitting day, 11 May, there was more drama when debate resumed on the Defence Bill. After a number of senators, including Elliott, had discussed the Australian government’s refusal to yield to insistent British pressure and authorise the death penalty in the AIF (a contentious issue during the war), Pearce pulled a rabbit out of the hat. Evidently annoyed by Pompey’s recalcitrance — especially his success in spearheading resistance to the incorporation of the British Army Act into Australia’s post-war defence organisation — Pearce announced that a document retrieved from AIF records confirmed that an Australian commander had ordered ‘men to be shot in a certain eventuality’. The Defence minister then proceeded to read out Elliott’s Villers-Bretonneux order (countermanded by Hobbs) that retreating British soldiers were ‘to be rallied and re-formed’ as the 15th Brigade advanced through them, ‘and on any hesitation to be shot’. Pearce, capitalising on his ambush, declared that Elliott’s repeated call for a strengthened appeal mechanism for aggrieved commanders ‘certainly comes with a very bad grace’ from someone who issued such an order. ‘General Elliott was not then prepared to give even a trial’; it was ‘shoot first and give a trial afterwards’.

Pompey defended himself with a spirited account of that ‘extremely critical time’ when the British ‘started to stream back in utter rout’. He had to ‘take the most drastic steps to stop the panic’ because ‘there was every possibility of a general rout’. That situation was exceptional, he insisted, and there was ‘no analogy’ between it and his advocacy of an appeal mechanism. Other senators denounced Pearce’s retaliatory manoeuvre:

Senator Foster: You must have been pretty badly rattled last week to have had that raked up.

Senator Pearce: Senator Elliott is so fond of reminiscences that I thought I would give him a dose of his own medicine.

Senator Gardiner: I think it redounds to his credit … [B]ecause Senator Elliott has been criticising somewhat severely the Bill which the Minister is handling, he has taken this opportunity of getting a little of his own back, and in what I consider a very discreditable way … To say that there is an analogy between an officer faced, not only with disaster to his own troops, but disaster to the whole of the Allied Forces, is ridiculous in the extreme … My heart fills with pride to think that we had an Australian officer who, in the face of overwhelming disaster, had sufficient pluck, courage and determination to do what Senator Elliott did, and I am sure that sentiment will ring from one end of Australia to the other.

The continuing controversy over Elliott’s sensational revelations was not confined to the Senate. His speeches were, of course, prominently featured in the newspapers. ‘AMAZING AIF DISCLOSURES: Differences Between Generals’ blared the Age above its lengthy report of one of his parliamentary outbursts. Another tirade was reproduced in the Sydney Sun under arresting quadruple headlines — ‘DUKE’S SON AND AUSTRALIAN GENERAL: Secret of Great War Revealed: Aussies Halted in Sodden Fields: Social Influence Stops Promotion’.

Others entered the fray, notably Elliott’s old Labor foe D.C. McGrath. In the House of Representatives on 12 May McGrath accused Elliott of being ‘utterly inconsistent’. He contrasted Elliott’s reaction to Father Kennedy’s play ten months earlier, when the general had publicly denied that British soldiers ran away, with his assertion in the Senate on 11 May (after Pearce divulged his countermanded Villers-Bretonneux order) that they did. Pompey’s immediate response, a letter to the Argus published on 14 May, emphasised the difference between the battle of Fromelles (the subject of Kennedy’s play) and the defence on the Somme nearly two years later. At Fromelles, he insisted, the British ‘did not run away, but advanced gallantly and lost heavily’; their ‘failure was largely due to the faulty tactics of their commanders’. Maybe, but when he went on to contend that Kennedy’s play ‘was utterly false in its suggestion that the British ran away or in any manner let us down in a discreditable manner’ this was irreconcilable with his own scathing criticism of the British 184th Brigade’s ‘shameful betrayal’ of half the 58th AIF Battalion.

McGrath would have had Elliott on toast had he been aware of it. Politics, military history, and personal grievance were a murky mixture; Pompey’s counter-attacking instincts were luring him into deep water. In the Argus letter he distanced himself from aspersions on the British infantry generally (as distinct from certain staff officers and commanders), and even made the bald declaration that the British Fifth Army ‘was deliberately sacrificed by Sir Douglas Haig’ in 1918. Moreover, not even in March 1918 could it validly be said (as a character in Kennedy’s play had claimed) ‘that the Australians had been always let down’, an observation hardly consistent with Elliott’s wartime perception that his own brigade was let down substantially by a neighbouring British formation in each of its most important engagements at the Western Front.

For the rest of May Elliott and McGrath went round for round in the pages of the Argus. McGrath reiterated that Elliott had been ‘plainly inconsistent’: the anti-Kennedy protesters were fired up because the play alleged that the British had run away and let Australians down, not because Kennedy had wrongly attributed this state of affairs to July 1916 instead of March and April 1918. Pompey countered by denying McGrath’s allegation that he had accused any British soldier of cowardice at Fromelles, the Somme, or anywhere else. All he had said, he claimed, was that

under certain circumstances certain officers, so specifying them that no innocent person could be injured, were guilty of misconduct, and these in almost every instance were officers appointed through social or other interest to posts for which they were quite unfitted.

Why, he had not even accused McGrath of cowardice, he continued, a gratuitous shaft that McGrath predictably resented, even though the Argus refrained from publishing Pompey’s elaboration (presumably for legal reasons, since McGrath had sued earlier in similar circumstances).

That same month Elliott was also prominent, and in combative mode, in the columns of the Age. On 14 May the newspaper published an article by a British visitor who felt Australia had emerged from the war with a bad case of

excessive national self-esteem … detected in numerous speeches which seem to suggest that the Australians won the war. Even though such speeches are usually made by irresponsible persons, they create an unpleasant impression in Europe.

Pompey, identifying himself as one of the main offenders in this British critic’s eyes, was incensed by the thrust of the article and its condescending tone. Dissemination of such supercilious sentiments, after what he and other Australians had experienced during the war, was like ‘waving a red rag at a bull’, he admitted in his searing rejoinder in the Age a fortnight later.

This 4,500-word outburst was an extraordinary effusion. No more powerful assertion of Australian nationalism in the context of the Great War has ever been published. Elliott’s virulent analysis encompassed Fromelles, First Bullecourt, Polygon Wood, Villers-Bretonneux, and the offensive of 8 August 1918. He also covered such inveterate hobby-horses as unwarranted British slurs about AIF indiscipline; Birdwood’s 1918 circular urging the AIF not to belittle the British; the chasm between Monash and Birdwood in capacity, character, and performance; what happened when Pompey acted on the post-Fromelles tip he received from General Feilding about how to avoid complying with an ill-conceived order; and much, much more. It all culminated in a fervent peroration:

Australians have come to the conclusion, from bitter experience, that never more will they entrust the Australian soldiers’ lives to the control of irresponsible British officers, who, for the sake of their own personal ambition or selfish glorification, are willing to break every rule, regulation or act devised for the safety, comfort and well-being of the despised, but necessary, animal, the private soldier.

When Elliott’s Age tirade was criticised in a Bulletin article headed ‘Anti-British Propaganda’ on 9 June, the upshot was another spirited exchange in the press. While the Bulletin endorsed the sturdy nationalism reflected in Pompey’s criticism of the inadequate generalship which had ‘uselessly sacrificed’ Australian lives ‘in hopeless attacks on impregnable positions’, the famous weekly felt he should have left it at that:

Unfortunately, in his impetuosity, the Brigadier went on to make wounding comparisons and descended to personal attacks … His animus against Birdwood peeps out in every paragraph … The fact is that wherever his personal prejudices come into play his judgments are of small value. This is illustrated, not only by the obsession which causes him to see red when Birdwood’s name is mentioned, but by the unprovoked attack on Margolin, an indiscretion for which he was very properly rebuked by Monash and … Drake-Brockman … There is still a great deal that Australia can usefully learn about the war, but the effect of these ‘revelations’ is more harmful than helpful. An honest man in a temper who has somehow persuaded himself that in airing his private grudges he is doing his country a service is always a painful spectacle.

Touché, but Pompey was undeterred. His forthright reply, published in the Bulletin a fortnight later, slated Birdwood as ‘a mere painted lath of a soldier’ who ‘was utterly incapable of understanding the simplest tactical problems’. He again emphasised that the real issue with Margolin was not his character, but his failure as a battalion commander and the injustice of installing him over Jacka. And once more Pompey scorned the alleged black mark against him, the notion that

though my courage and capacity were undoubted, I had failed to keep my judgment under perfect control. In other words, I had failed to do the kow-tow act with sufficient humility.

The Bulletin was more measured in its response, praising Elliott’s ‘splendid’ role in preventing the incorporation of the British Army Act into Australia’s defence administration, while maintaining that

men in General Elliott’s position should not let their feelings run away with their judgment when discussing the war. Individual soldiers (Jacka, for instance) may be championed without the depreciation of others (such as Margolin), for that sort of thing leaves a bitter taste in the mouth … Hasty generalisations and injurious comparisons can only produce anger and bitterness of spirit.

The Bulletin published only a fraction of Pompey’s forceful epistle. He was evidently so stung by what the famous periodical said about him on 9 June that he sent a counter-attacking rant to other publications as well as the Bulletin. On 25 June a short-lived Melbourne weekly, the Midnight Sun, announced that in response to the Bulletin’s ‘Anti-British Propaganda’ critique of Elliott’s effusion in the Age (which had ‘created a considerable stir’), Elliott had ‘furnished us with a complete statement, which we regret being unable to publish in full’. What the Midnight Sun was able to find room for not only coincided with sentiments attributed to Elliott in the Bulletin on 23 June. It also comprised excerpts of the staggering diatribe — 28 typed pages — he sent on 17 June to the Sydney Sun (which apparently did not publish any of it). All three pieces were similar, if not practically identical: each contained, for example, Pompey’s distinctive refusal ‘to do the kow-tow act with sufficient humility’.

Through these trenchant newspaper contributions Elliott continued to maintain his rage publicly after the Senate commenced a mid-year recess in mid-May. He also used other means. His robust criticisms of Pearce’s administration in a lecture entitled ‘The Defence of Australia’ indirectly revived the supersession controversy. When Pearce retaliated by claiming that Elliott was embittered because he had been anticipating a divisional command, Elliott countered that he had good reason to expect one because he had been given an informed — and implicitly official — tip to that effect from Brand.

This startling allegation inspired another protracted run for Pompey’s supersession in the Senate and the press. The official file on the matter was called for and examined; it contained no such letter from Brand. Elliott said it was incomplete. Pearce sent urgent telegrams to Brand to elicit his version of events. All Brand had done, came the reply, was to ask (as state commandant) who Elliott would recommend — presuming he was given a division himself — as prospective brigade commanders. Elliott had written some comments on Brand’s letter and returned it, and Brand had then destroyed it because it was essentially personal. Pompey, on the other hand, alleged that Brand had, in effect, given him a provisional offer; he had replied that he wanted to see the government’s defence policy before he committed himself. When he then found himself overlooked upon the announcement of the appointments, the reason was obvious: it was ‘because I was not prepared to swallow anything before me without criticism’. The debate was predictably inconclusive. There was no evidence besides the conflicting recollections of the two individuals involved. But when Brand admitted to telling Elliott in a conversation or separate personal letter that his claims to a division could hardly be denied, some observers regarded this admission as tantamount to corroboration of Pompey’s version of events.

Reactions to Elliott’s agitation were mixed. For the individuals he was attacking, it was of course distinctly unpleasant to be the subject of unwelcome headlines. ‘Inwardly much distressed at Elliott’s attacks, mainly owing to their injustice and intemperance’, Brudenell White acknowledged in his diary. It was also in a terse diary note that Gellibrand alluded to his discomfort. ‘Period of Elliott’s exuberance’, he wrote. Birdwood, then in India, ‘felt sorely tempted to reply’ to Elliott’s ‘onslaughts’, but contented himself with sending Bean a self-serving version of the controversies animating Pompey. Bean replied with his own assessment:

I too have been very sorry that Elliott has taken the action of which we have read so much of late, but I always regarded it as certain that some grievance would be raised by him. I have a great admiration for the old chap … He was undoubtedly one of the great characters of the AIF, complex, and in many ways one of the most interesting.

A remarkable letter Elliott received from a senior minister in the Queensland Labor government, J.A. Fihelly, underlined the bizarre political ramifications of his ‘exuberance’ that were already evident in the Senate, where Pompey was supported by Gardiner in his frequent clashes with Pearce. Fihelly’s notorious pro-Irish outspokenness had made him the bête noire of Australia’s ultra loyalists. Acknowledging that he and Elliott were poles apart politically, Fihelly wanted nevertheless to commend Pompey’s penetrating portrait of Birdwood in the Bulletin, which was spot on from what he had observed as acting premier during Birdwood’s 1920 visit to Queensland:

Probably we (you and I) would disagree upon most matters but your summing-up of Birdwood is … excellent … He is just a drawing-room Johnny … a posturer addicted to society tittle-tattle and small talk.

At functions in Brisbane, Fihelly continued, Birdwood would prattle on

with unbelievable drivel. His comment on our Australian officers was also tactless and free, and, incidentally, very unfair. He is just one of those conceited grown up puppies who imagines that the Australian forces were made for his benefit … I think you summed him up well.

Elliott claimed that he had retained the support of most returned soldiers — both officers and rank and file — and ‘the great middle party of moderate Australian opinion is with me heart and soul’. It was certainly true that the misgivings of some observers about Elliott’s outbursts were countered by the undiminished admiration of many of those he commanded. One wrote to inform Pompey that he and others were ‘seething with … indignation on your behalf’ after ‘these revelations of yours (hitherto unknown)’ about the ‘deplorable’ supersession:

On behalf of others I wish to congratulate you Sir on the splendid fight you are now making, and maintaining your prestige through the press — also the able way in which you helped to eject the Army Act recently.

An officer who had served under him advised the Midnight Sun that

a more straightforward or conscientious man it would be impossible to find … He does not understand the truth-twisting methods of the present-day politician. And because his principles will not allow him to conform to the tactics of the crowd he finds himself being tripped up at every step … But if there was another war tomorrow and ‘Pompey’ Elliott called for volunteers to form a division, he would get enough for two, while many of the Brass hats would be lucky if they got a platoon.

‘Stick to it Pompey and you will win through yet’, encouraged ‘3 old Pals’ from the 58th Battalion. And from another 15th Brigade veteran Elliott received a letter commending his ‘noble stand’, which, he was assured, was a big talking point in returned soldier circles. This admiring correspondent concluded with reminders of two of the most stirring incidents the 15th Brigade had experienced — Pompey’s response to the disbandment mutiny, and the spontaneous tribute his men gave him in January 1919:

When I recall to mind the breaking up of the 60th Bn I see you addressing the boys who feel the “Breaking Up”. I try to picture you standing up and addressing the “House” in the same way. Some would say Bluff, but those who know you, know well that it is only the pleadings of a strong man for that which is Just and Right.

In conclusion, Dear General, I would just like to say that if at any time you feel that the odds are against you in the House, think of the day when … to a man the Battalions marched voluntar[il]y to your Billet and gave you a token of their respect, and I feel sure this memory will urge you on to Success.

Trusting you are in good health, I am honoured at being

One of your Diggers