On Sunday, 2 August 1914, Phillip Frederick Edward Schuler, a 25-year-old reporter with The Age newspaper, was a guest at a suburban tennis party in Melbourne. He was affectionately known to his many friends as ‘Peter’ and he never forgot the impact of that day. Within a year he would be the newspaper’s correspondent on Gallipoli.
As the gathering storm began to break, Schuler wrote of an army friend hastily being summoned to leave that winter tennis party:
When I went to see him at Victoria Barracks the same night, I found the whole place a glare of lights from end to end of the grim, grey stone building. It was the same the next and the next night and for weeks, and so on into the months.
But even when the Governor General, Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson, sent to the Prime Minister, Mr Joseph Cook, the telegram bearing the announcement that we all knew could no longer be withheld, the strain seemed unlifted.
‘England has declared war on Germany’ was the brief but terrible message quickly transferred to the broadsheets that the newspapers printed at lightning speed and circulated while the crowds in the street cheered and cheered again as the message was posted on the display boards.
Outside the office of The Age, there was now almost always a permanent crowd as the crisis unfolded. They sang Rule Britannia, Soldiers of the King and Sons of the Sea over and over again. People who waved Union Jacks were raised shoulder high. There were frequent choruses of God Save the King, men and women standing to attention. If any man forgot to remove his hat, he was soundly abused.
‘That night the streets were thronged,’ wrote Schuler, ‘as they were for weeks to follow and there was a series of riots, quickly subdued by the police, where raids had been made on German premises. Feeling was extraordinarily bitter considering the remoteness of the Dominion …’
The crisis had developed with extraordinary speed since 28 June, the day that a seemingly obscure event took place in far-off Europe: the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne by a Serbian nationalist. Most Australians, on their farms and their stations, or in their shops and their factories, would have been very hard put to find either nation on an atlas of the world.
European nations now jostled into alliances. On 30 July, Australians read that Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia, and Russia was mobilising to help its fellow Slavs in Serbia. Germany had then issued Russia with a warning; and if Germany declared war on Russia then France would be called in to help its ally, Russia. The dominoes were ready to fall.
If France was brought in, the expectation was that Britain would be pushed in also, as there existed an informal agreement between the two countries to support each other if attacked. And if Britain entered the war, Australia would be there.
On 30 July 1914, a coded cablegram sent the day before from the British Government arrived at Government House in Melbourne, the seat of the Commonwealth Government. The gracious white Victorian mansion, reached by a long carriageway and surrounded by sweeping lawns, with the Royal Botanic Gardens as its backyard, was a rich copy of Queen Victoria’s country house on the Isle of Wight, complete with a ballroom and a gilded throne. And here resided the newly arrived representative of the King, Governor-General Sir Ronald Craufurd Munro-Ferguson, heir to a Scottish estate.
The secret cable warned the government of the imminent danger of war and that it was time, if the government thought fit, to bring into force the ‘precautionary stage’ of a secret defence scheme – the mobilisation of Australian men for the armed forces. The cable was relayed to Sir Ronald, who was in Sydney on 30 July, as was the Minister for Defence, Senator Mullen. But the Prime Minister, Joseph Cook, was in Melbourne, albeit somewhat distracted by the federal election campaign then under way against Andrew Fisher, the Leader of the Opposition.
There was some scrambling and muddle initially, therefore. The only concrete action for the next couple of days was when Minister for Defence Mullen requested that the acting chief of the military staff travel up by train from Melbourne and meet him in Sydney, thus leaving Australia’s military headquarters at Victoria Barracks without a leader. Rather than call an immediate cabinet meeting, the Prime Minister was busy preparing for an important speech at Colac in Victoria, while the rest of his ministers were scattered throughout Australia. (One received an urgent telegram in the country but there was nobody with him who could decode it.)
On 31 July the Governor-General, still in Sydney, put the pressure on from London. He sent a telegram to Cook: ‘Would it not be well in view of the latest news from Europe, that ministers should meet in order that Imperial Government may know what support to expect from Australia?’
That night the Minister for Defence issued a statement: ‘If necessity arises, Australia will recognise she is not merely a fair-weather partner of the Empire, but a component part in all circumstances.’
The same night, Andrew Fisher, ‘a man of translucent honesty and high purpose’ who would go on to win the election and become Prime Minister on 5 September, stood in a hall in Colac and declared famously: ‘Should the worst happen, after everything has been done that honour will permit, Australia will stand by the mother country to our last man and our last shilling.’ The sentiment was echoed by Prime Minister Cook, speaking the night after Fisher, in the same hall: ‘If there is to be a war, you and I shall be in it. We must be in it. If the old country is at war, so are we.’
The die was cast. On the afternoon of 3 August, Cook convened a special cabinet meeting, after which a cable was sent immediately to London:
In the event of war the Government is prepared to place the vessels of the Australian Navy under the control of the British Admiralty when desired. It is further prepared to despatch an expeditionary force of 20,000 men of any suggested composition to any destination desired by the Home Government, the force to be at the complete disposal of the Home Government. The cost of despatch and maintenance will be borne by this [Australian] Government.
So Australia had committed itself to sending troops even before war had been declared. Cook announced the offer to the press after leaving cabinet and the news was published in the British press the next day. The Imperial Government responded that while there was no immediate need for the force, ‘it would be wise to take steps in case the necessity arose.’
War was declared on the night of 4 August in London (9 am on 5 August in eastern Australia) but already men had started to appear at military headquarters in both Sydney and Melbourne, begging to enlist. On 5 August a staff was set up at Victoria Barracks to register their names. That same day the Governor-General cabled London: ‘There is indescribable enthusiasm and entire unanimity throughout Australia in support of all that tends to provide for the security of empire at war.’ The day afterwards, the Secretary of State for the Colonies telegraphed that the British Government ‘gratefully accepted the offer … to send a force of 20,000 men and would be glad if it could be despatched as soon as possible’.
‘A tremendous wave of enthusiasm swept over the land,’ wrote Schuler, ‘and the acceptance by the Home Government of the offer was the occasion of great outbursts of cheering by the crowds that thronged the streets of the great cities and eagerly scanned the news sheets and official announcements posted outside the newspaper offices. Recruiting began without delay.’
In fact, recruiting for the Australian Expeditionary Force did not begin until 12 August, although many men had offered their names before war had even begun, of course. Initially the force was to comprise of a complete division (a full British division at the time comprised 18,000 men) and a brigade of the light horse. The initial offer was for 2,226 men and 2,315 horses.
The origins of the Australian light horse go back well before Federation. In the early 1800s the number of British forces stationed in the Australian colonies began to decline, and the colonies were told to raise volunteers to fill the gaps. The Crimean War of 1853-56 proved to be a catalyst and 1854 saw the formation of the Victorian Volunteer Yeomanry Corps, the Adelaide Mounted Rifles and the New South Wales Cavalry Troop. Five years later there were other volunteer mounted detachments in New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia and Victoria.
In Victoria by 1861 there were a number of independent mounted troops, who wore extravagant uniforms of their own devising and took their names from local towns – such as the Castlemaine Dragoons and the Kyneton Mounted Rifles. Eventually the Victorian independents were amalgamated under the title of ‘the Royal Victorian Cavalry Regiment’, with each troop being distinguished by the name of the town from which it was raised. They were also granted the prefix ‘Prince of Wales’ in honour of the marriage of the heir apparent to the British throne.
In 1876 General Sir William Jervois was appointed as governor of South Australia – and commissioner of defences for all colonies except for Western Australia. He recommended that the best way of ensuring a volunteer force was to introduce partial pay for militia units. As Australia was a country of vast distances where horses and horse-drawn vehicles were essential, it was natural that the numbers and importance of mounted troops would continue to grow. The Darling Downs Mounted Infantry in Queensland, the Victorian Mounted Rifles and the Tasmanian First Light Cavalry Corps, were all birthplaces of the Australian light horse and there were many more. By 1900 Australia could muster 18 mounted regiments and 29 infantry regiments.
Three months before the Boer War broke out in 1899, Queensland offered 250 mounted troops to the British Government, an offer that was soon followed by bushmen on horse from the other states.
The recruiting standards were advertised in the press and state gazettes: ‘Men to be good shots and proficient swordsmen, of superior physique, not under 5ft 6in or 34 in chest, good riders and bushmen accustomed to find their way about in strange country.’
The Australian horsemen who went into action in southern Africa were attached to British regiments, fighting in what was an empire army. They learned a great deal about the art of soldiering from the British and, conversely, the British soon became impressed by this colonial force, which easily adapted to fighting a guerrilla war with the Boers over countryside that was remarkably similar to parts of Australia.
The Australian bushmen had grown up in the saddle and were used to living rough in tough conditions and extremes of climate. They could make do with little food and water, and knew how to use a gun to live off the land. Being on their own did not worry them. Joining together with others for big jobs like mustering on stations meant they could also come together and work as a team: they could rely on their mates. Translated into military life, this meant that the light horseman could operate effectively as a fighting unit on his own or mesh in with a section, troop, squadron or regiment, as needed.
By the end of the Boer War in June 1902, Australia had sent 16,175 mounted men and 16,314 horses. The reputation of the Australian light horse had been made and the experience of these men, many of whom would later join the light horse again and serve as veterans on Gallipoli, would be invaluable. As observed by one British general, who had once commanded a section of mounted Australians on the veldt: ‘The Australian Light Horseman combines with a splendid physique, a restless activity of mind … on every variety of ground – mountain, plain, desert, swamp or jungle – the Australian Light Horseman has proved himself equal to the best.’
Similarly impressed was Lord Kitchener, who visited Australia a few years later as a guest of the new Commonwealth Government. The British field marshal made an inspection and pronounced that the light horse were ‘the pick of the bunch’. They were less disciplined than British cavalry, he said, but capable of showing more initiative; in short, they were ‘real thrusters’.
By 1914 there were 23 light horse regiments throughout the country, made up of 456 officers and 6,508 men of other ranks. Most owned or bred the horses on which they did their few weeks of compulsory annual training.
Despite the fact that the Australian Military Forces (as the home service was called) had some 45,000 militia at their disposal by August 1914, Australia had decided to send an entirely new force to the service of the empire. The majority of this militia were aged between nineteen and 21, and Australia could not send away an army of boys, however willing. As large numbers were required for what was generally accepted as a short-term engagement, it was decided to raise a separate army, which would have its own commander, headquarters and staff.
As for a name for this new force, its recently appointed commander, General William Thorsby Bridges, had firm views: ‘I want a name that will sound well when they call us by our initials. That’s how they will speak of us.’ And so he decided on ‘the Australian Imperial Force’ and, sure enough, the initials ‘AIF’ would never be forgotten by history.
The scheme for the new army went ahead with breakneck speed. The proposed date for embarkation was 10 September. By 8 August, General Bridges had decided that the force would be drawn largely from men who had undergone some training. Half would be those then serving in the citizen army, mainly youngsters; the other half was to be made up of men not then in the forces but who had once been in the militia or had served in the Boer or other wars. The units would be connected with the different states and were to be definitely local and territorial. The infantry and light horse regiments would continue to be recruited from their own states throughout the war.
Pay was decided. A private would get 5 shillings a day active pay and 1 shilling a day deferred (to be paid on discharge). The ‘six bob a day’ soldiers were getting more than a private in any other army: the New Zealander got 5 shillings, the American 4 shillings and 7 pence, the British Tommy only 1 shilling a day at the beginning of the war. The Australian officers, though, were not to be particularly well paid. A lieutenant would get £1 1 shilling a day while abroad; a captain £1 6 shillings. Even a brigadier general only £2 12 shillings and 6 pence.
The majority of the men and officers were not in it for the money. Some who had been officers in the militia entered the AIF as privates, and some who could have had a commission enlisted in the ranks to be alongside a mate. Brothers often joined to be together in the same unit – one could be an officer, the other a private. ‘For the most part the wealthy, the educated, the rough and the case-hardened, poor Australians, rich Australians, went into the ranks together unconscious of any distinction,’ wrote Bean. ‘When they came into an atmosphere of class difference later in the war, they stoutly and rebelliously resented it.’
The recruiting tables were set up around the country on 11 August and the rush to enlist began the following morning. There were 1,000 waiting outside the gates of Victoria Barracks in Melbourne an hour before the first man signed up. Across Australia there were extraordinary stories of men riding 3,000 kilometres or more to a recruiting centre or walking hundreds of kilometres to answer the call.
Recruits like Harold Brentnall and George Fish did not have so far to travel. Harold had just turned nineteen and was training to be a dental mechanic. Leaving his Nicholson Street home in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, he would have taken the cable car that ran past his front door, past the Our Lady Help of Christians red-brick church on the hill, with its gold statue of the Madonna, on into the city. A short walk across Princes Bridge and then it was up to the bluestone barracks on St Kilda Road.
Harold didn’t know George Fish then. They were to meet at the Broadmeadows Army Camp to the north of Melbourne. George was just 23 years and five months old, a salesman with Felton, Grimwade and Company, the big manufacturing chemists. He left for the war from a neat Victorian cottage in Mackay Street, Essendon, which stands to this day, with its wrought-iron, cream picket fence and pale rose bushes in the front garden.
George’s sister, Jessie, went to visit her brother at Broadmeadows after he had been accepted. That’s where she met Harold Brentnall. A hundred letters later, she would marry Harold when he came back from the war.
A dental mechanic and a chemical salesman – sufficient qualifications for both to be accepted for the 2nd Field Ambulance, First AIF. One year later they would be on Gallipoli as stretcher-bearers, carrying the shattered remains of the light horse regiments down from the heights, down the crumbly brown banks of Walker’s Ridge, as the snipers’ bullets zipped and the shrapnel shredded, and they washed the blood off the canvas in Anzac Cove.
There had been enormous enthusiasm to join the light horse across Australia and soon the original plans were expanded to admit more volunteers. They became part of a well-organised mobile army.
The Australian Light Horse Training Manual of 1910 had set out plans for wartime establishment and elaborate training procedures. Specifically, the light horse mounted forces were to be organised into brigades and then broken down progressively into smaller, flexible groups, as follows:
The first light horse brigade to be raised was made up of the 1st Australian Light Horse Regiment (drawn from New South Wales), the 2nd (from Queensland) and the 3rd (jointly from South Australia and Tasmania). A further regiment, the 4th, was raised in Victoria, to go with the infantry initially as its ‘divisional cavalry’.
So many men from the bush, the towns and the cities were coming forward that a second light horse brigade was offered. It was made up of the 5th Regiment (from Queensland) and the 6th and 7th (both from New South Wales). But still the rush continued, and before the end of September it was found that many experienced horsemen were being forced to enlist in the infantry – because the mounted corps were full. Added to this there was added pressure from the Western Australian Government, which felt that the state’s own horsemen should be taking part in the call to arms.
So the decision was made to raise a third light horse brigade. This would comprise: the 8th Light Horse Regiment (from Victoria), the 9th (made up of two squadrons from South Australia and one squadron from Victoria) and the 10th (from Western Australia). Like the other two light horse brigades, it also had its own attached signal troops, light horse field ambulances and brigade trains, but no horse artillery or field engineers.
Before the 3rd Light Horse Brigade was formed, Harold Brentnall, George Fish and the other first army recruits in Victoria were heading towards Broadmeadows, the name bestowed, perhaps by some early property developer with a poetic imagination, on a sometimes dusty, sometimes muddy stretch of ground on the northern outskirts of Melbourne. The city had earned itself the sobriquet ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ after the gold rushes of the 1850s, and now Victoria’s capital was caught up in the new fever of the recruiting rush.
The Broadmeadows Army Camp (or ‘Concentration Camp’ as it was termed on maps of the day!) opened on 14 August 1914. The army had moved fast.
One of the first to start organising the training camp was Ernest Albert Smith, a 44-year-old clerk in the Education Department. He had served as a bombardier previously in the old Victorian Permanent Artillery, when General Bridges was an instructor – and the commanding officer of the First AIF knew his man. Ernest enlisted on the first day of recruiting and was immediately promoted to sergeant; on 17 August he was placed in charge of the advance party at Broadmeadows to prepare the camp for the volunteers. This advance party consisted of thirteen men in makeshift uniforms who, posing for a photograph at the camp, christened themselves ‘the Cheerful Idiots’. The camp would eventually stretch over 3 kilometres wide by nearly 2 kilometres deep.
The Argus newspaper gave a breathless preview of what was expected to happen when the rest of the first volunteers set off for Broadmeadows two days later:
The first of the main body will march through the city streets passing the Town Hall shortly after 11 am and the public will have the opportunity of forming an opinion of the splendid material from which the expeditionary force is to be moulded … The nucleus of the four battalions numbering 1,500 men will be paraded at Victoria Barracks and accompanied by three bands will pass through the city and up the Sydney Road to Broadmeadows. Colonel M’Cay [Colonel James Whiteside M’Cay had been appointed to command the first brigade raised in Victoria] intends taking no risks of his troops developing sore feet in the initial stages of their work but as a precautionary measure he is anxious to have on hand a stock of Vaseline or any soothing ointment equal to treating 1,000 cases a day … The need might recommend itself for the attention of those public spirited citizens who are anxious to do something for the young soldiers.
Men who had been medically examined, many of whom had signed up at other places, assembled at Victoria Barracks on 19 August 1914. At 9.30 am, 2,500 men set out to march to Broadmeadows. Some were in Citizen Military Force uniforms; the majority were in civilian clothes. After a number of rest stops en route, the men reached the camp at 5 pm and went under canvas.
Phillip Schuler of The Age witnessed the march and would write of it later:
[A] band of cheerful youths … headed by a band of Highland pipes and bugles that had volunteered to lead them, swinging with irregular broken step along the main streets. Their pride swelled in their veins as they waved brown felt hats, straw deckers, and bowlers to their mates watching from office windows and roofs.
It was the first sight of the reality of war that had come to really grip the hearts of the people, and they cheered these pioneers and the recklessness of their spirits.
There were men in good boots and bad boots, in brown and tan shoes, in hardly any boots at all; in sack suits and old clothes and smart-cut suits from the well lined drawers of a fashionable home; there were workers and loafers, students and idlers, men of professions and men just workers, who formed that force.
But they were all fighters, stickers, men with some grit (they got more as they went on), and men with a love of adventure. So they marched out to their camp at Broadmeadows – a good ten-mile tramp.
On 21 August, an Argus correspondent reported from the camp itself. ‘The rows and rows of tents looked most impressive in the sunlight,’ he wrote. ‘In the paddock nearest to the road as one walks from the railway station are camped the field artillery. Further west lie the long lines of the infantry battalions and still further to the east is the Light Horse.’
Meanwhile, on the night the men marched into Broadmeadows, a Patriotic Meeting had been held in Melbourne Town Hall, attended by Prime Minister Joseph Cook and the Victorian Premier, Sir Alexander Peacock. After God Save the King had been sung, there were splendid speeches, during which Cook told the gathering that one of his sons had joined up. The Prime Minister added: ‘I trust this war will teach the world a lesson and that is – war is a terrible thing and a thing to be avoided wherever possible. Australia will do her part.’
Sir Alexander echoed the frenzied patriotic fervour of the occasion. ‘Britain is proud of her colonies and the colonies are fiercely proud of Britain,’ he announced. ‘Let outsiders flout the Motherland and they will find her cubs from all parts of the world will come to her rescue.’
The following Sunday was the first visitors’ day at Broadmeadows Army Camp. At 10 am the men assembled in a three-sided square for a church parade, with a gun limber covered by a large Union Jack serving as a pulpit. The very first units of the light horse formed the left of the square as they all sang the Old Hundredth hymn and Onward, Christian Soldiers. There was a short sermon before the men again sang God Save the King and marched back to their tents.
At 3 pm the visitors came. Twenty thousand came that first Sunday, many more the following weekend. Broadmeadows Camp was soon the wonder of the time.
For the official inspection, in the second week of September, a vice-regal motorcade arrived from the city carrying both the Governor-General Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson and his wife, Lady Helen, and the Governor of Victoria, Sir Arthur Stanley, and his wife.
The party inspected the lines of tents, visited the kitchens and watched ‘the infantrymen drilling in their countless squads in the large paddocks which form the parade ground’. They also visited a vast ordnance store, where they saw the light horse saddles and harnesses ‘gleam in all the glory of their newly polished leather’.
Phillip Schuler reported on progress in the camp:
Every morning … they were doing exercises with rifle and bayonet and the drab black of their clothing changed to khaki uniforms; and as rapidly as this change came so the earth was worn more brown with the constant treading of thousands of feet and the grass disappeared altogether from the camp and the roads became rutted.
More men and still more men crowded in and filled the vacant tents till other lines had to be pitched. The horses began to arrive and motor-lorries with immense loads thundered across the paddocks to the stores where huge tarpaulins covered masses of equipment and marquees tons of meat and bread.
From four thousand the army grew to ten; for fresh contingents were offered, accepted and sent into training.
Tents peeped from between pine trees that enclosed a field and guns began to rumble in and were parked in neat rows. They waited for the horses, which the gunners were busily lashing into control …
All around the hills were green still. Each day they were covered with lines of moving troops. Infantry passed the guns on the road and the Light Horse passed the infantry and wheeled in through the same break in the panelled fence.
The Lord Mayor of Melbourne also made a run out to Broadmeadows and was impressed by the YMCA tent, which ‘with its piano, its papers and its pens and paper is such a boon and a blessing to the soldier at Broadmeadows’. He promised to do a costing to provide another amenities tent so that the troops could write more letters home.
Letters were arriving for the soldiers, too. A little girl wrote to headquarters: ‘Dear Soldiers. I am glad to know that you are so brave. And we know that you will come back to good old Australia again. And don’t forget that in the country you are going to there are little girls like me. And I know that you will treat them like little Australian children.’