Bearing Witness Read online

  Peter Rees has been a journalist for more than forty years, working as federal political correspondent for The Sun News-Pictorial, The West Australian and The Sunday Telegraph. He is the author of The Boy from Boree Creek: The Tim Fischer story (2001), Tim Fischer’s Outback Heroes (2002), Killing Juanita: A true story of murder and corruption (2004), The Other Anzacs: The extraordinary story of our World War I nurses (2008 and 2009), republished as Anzac Girls (2014), Desert Boys: Australians at war from Beersheba to Tobruk and El Alamein (2011 and 2012) and Lancaster Men: The Aussie heroes of Bomber Command.

  Every effort has been made to trace the holders of copyright material. If you have any information concerning copyright material in this book please contact the publishers at the address below.

  First published in 2015

  Copyright © Peter Rees 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74237 954 8

  eISBN 978 1 74269 786 4

  Front cover photo: Phillip Frederick Edward Schuler

  Index by Puddingburn

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Prologue

  Part One

  THE EARLY YEARS

  1 Here, My Son

  2 Waterloo

  3 Tempering steel

  4 Moral stance

  5 The lure of the pen

  6 Seeds of the myth

  7 The cub

  8 The Sydney passenger

  9 Moral certainty

  10 Agent of change

  Part Two

  THE WAR YEARS

  11 The booted heel

  12 A hell of a time

  13 Play the game

  14 Digging in

  15 Sideshow

  16 Boosting a reputation

  17 The non-combatant

  18 Brothers in arms

  19 General failure

  20 The workhorse and the gadfly

  21 A question of discipline

  22 Counting the bullets

  23 A new prism

  24 A monumental folly

  25 The giant mincing machine

  26 The war gets personal

  27 No way out

  28 Good will not come of it

  29 Self doubt

  30 British impetuosity

  31 Bean does a Murdoch

  32 A change of focus

  33 Cultural stereotyping

  34 The juggler

  35 War on a different front

  36 An assessment of character

  37 An ill-judged intervention

  38 And so it is peace

  Part Three

  AFTER THE NIGHTMARE

  39 The bush backwater

  40 The Nipper

  41 Bluff and double bluff

  42 Censorship, tragedy and farce

  43 In his own hands

  44 The ghastly spectre

  45 The straight line

  46 About turn

  47 Back among old Diggers

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  For Sue,

  and in memory of my grandfather, Private James White, 7th Battalion AIF, who with his brother Fred knew the horrors of Gallipoli and the Western Front.

  We have followed your work, Captain Bean; you seem to have been closer to this war than most people.

  Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, Commander, British Grand Fleet, 17 October 1916

  He is red-hot in every attack we make, always ready to help the wounded or do anything else in that line.

  General William Birdwood to Australian Governor-General

  Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson, 17 April 1917

  I wish I could find a word about half-way between ‘prim’ and ‘prig’ and without either the unkindness or harshness that those two words connote. He did seem to me to be rather self-consciously upright and with more tolerance than understanding of the wickedness of lesser mortals such as politicians, public servants and persons who saw their responsibilities in a way different from his way.

  Sir Paul Hasluck, former Australian Governor-General, 29 July 1983

  I am too self-conscious to mix well with the great mass of men.

  Charles Bean, 8 May 1918

  PREFACE

  On a sunny early spring afternoon, 2 September 1968, a nineteen-year-old cadet journalist walked past St Andrew’s Cathedral, in the centre of Sydney, as mourners gathered for the funeral of Charles Bean.

  I remember pausing and wondering about this man—war correspondent, official war historian, and a founder of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

  As long as there were Diggers at the front line he was there, in a way that is unimaginable today. The troops knew him by sight. He was not just a correspondent to them but someone prepared to share their discomfort in the trenches and risks on the battlefield. He did not fire a bullet but left a priceless legacy in his twelve-volume series, the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918.

  Few writers can claim to have had the impact on Australia that Bean has had. For him, the views and experiences of privates were as valuable as those of the generals.

  A century has passed since the outbreak of the Great War, yet so little is known about the man himself—a boy from Bathurst, educated in Britain, who arguably created the Anzac legend.

  PROLOGUE

  ‘In our blood’. The phrase stared back at Charles Bean from the sheet of paper in his old typewriter. Carrying notions of moral and racial superiority, those words had long troubled him. Now, as he struggled to find some clarity of thought from the fog that was beginning to envelop him, he wanted to tackle concepts he had come to reject—base concepts that nonetheless shaped peoples’ and nations’ histories. He tapped away, determined to explain just why these beliefs were wrong. He typed back over lines to edit them out as his mind whirred, rejecting and replacing words, trying to express his thoughts. This speech was important; he knew it would also likely be among his last.

  Anzac Day 1959 had just passed, and the lean, bespectacled Bean, not far short of eighty, with his once carrot-coloured hair turned white, sat in his study in a modest house in Collaroy, on Sydney’s northern beaches. Under his desk was an old Hecla cast-iron electric ‘Foot Warma’. In one corner stood a cricket bat that had been fashioned into a drink stand; and in another, a lectern where he often stood reading while adjusting the studs in his shirt collars. In glazed bookcases lining the walls, his library of 1000 books provided a timeless backdrop: the Australian poet Christopher Brennan, the historian Sir Keith Hancock, his English friend John Masefield, and Charles Dickens. In this, his sanctuary, these were among the books he drew upon. This is where he could be found in the last years of his life, doing what he had always done: writing.

&nbs
p; Bean had long reflected on just what the Great War meant to ordinary people, how it had changed lives, shattered families and left a generation in search of answers. And then Australians had had to do it all over again with World War II. For Bean, World War II had stimulated a further change in his thinking about those words that now focused his attention—‘in the blood’.

  He remembered a letter he had written to The Sydney Morning Herald six years earlier:

  In my youth it seemed to be almost universally believed that qualities such as courage or gentleness were ‘in the blood’ of some peoples, and ruthlessness and savagery ‘in the blood’ of others. The belief had become part of our language.

  When I went to the First World War we all accepted the general belief that something in the biological composition of the Prussians—perhaps a Russian or Tartar strain—impelled them to brutality. The atrocities of which we read in the first stage of the war were, one assumed, the consequence of it.

  . . . It was not till, as a war correspondent, I tried to obtain particulars of such atrocities . . . that I began to doubt the truth of this assumption . . . In World War II the case was obviously very different . . . But whatever the cause of the dreadful happenings which left such deep wounds, it was definitely not a tendency to brutality inborn in Germans and Japanese and not in, say, Englishmen or Dutchmen.

  As he acknowledged, in his youth Charles Bean had assumed that certain qualities characterised certain races. His early writings reflected this, from his first trip to the New South Wales outback in 1909, reporting on the wool industry for The Sydney Morning Herald and gathering material for his book On the Wool Track, to his appointment as Australia’s official war correspondent to the Great War five years later. He saw the outback as the great challenge but believed that such Anglo-Saxon traits as initiative, versatility, inventiveness and courage were taming the bush. At the same time, there had been his encounter with an Afghan camel driver on the banks of the Darling River. It was then, perhaps, that he had first paused to rethink views he had taken for granted; views about the order of nations and peoples in the world. And then there had been the falling out during the war with the great Jewish general Sir John Monash.

  For much of his life he had ascribed to the British race qualities that set it apart—‘the racial capacity to think calmly even in times of mental storm,’ as he put it in a speech in 1934. But what drove Charles Bean was the search for the truth as he saw it. His parents had instilled in him principles that placed the quest for moral and intellectual truth above striving for personal gain. In a diary she kept, his mother, Lucy, recorded her hopes for her eldest son when he was just six, concerned that he had a ‘besetting fault of selfishness’ that he needed to fight:

  Charlie dear, be truthful, and upright, and morally brave, I should like you to be brave in every way, but I care far more for moral bravery than for any other . . .

  I do not want to see you a rich man, or man holding a leading position, so much as to see you a good, charitable man. You may be all, and I shall be happy if I live to see you all, but the riches and position come after . . . you can be happy without them, but you cannot be happy unless you are good.

  Be kind and unselfish. You Charlie my eldest, know the little talks we have had together about this.

  Lucy’s hopes for her son had been a guiding light in the years that followed. Now he crystallised his thinking after two world wars. ‘It is almost universally assumed by our general public that military morale springs from innate qualities—qualities “in a people’s blood’’, as the phrase goes. Yet my own observation, and the course of history, seems to me to prove beyond doubt that blood has nothing to do with it, [but] that experience, leadership, tradition and religion very much indeed.’ He then turned to the most unpleasant subject with which he had had to deal—war crimes and atrocities:

  Wartime propaganda everywhere found very receptive soil in the practically universal belief that the moral qualities of any nation are innate—‘in our blood’ as we often say. I understand that biology has completely disproved this; at any rate history does.

  You do not have to go far into this grim field to find that ancestors whose bodies and brains were presumably no different from our own, meted out to the unfortunate Jews of York and elsewhere treatment extraordinarily reminiscent of that inflicted by Hitler and his Nazis.

  What has changed in us is not our physical make up, but our tradition—the causes of that brutality were not innate, or racial, and unchangeable, but the almost universal belief that they are so, immensely complicates the making of peace and bedevils the relations of nations after any great war.

  My advice to our people and our poets would be . . . to attach supreme importance to the national tradition and all that goes to make it.

  National tradition. Bean saw it as the critical factor that sets nations apart from each other. In a young country like Australia, where tradition was necessarily nascent, he had seen it as his task to identify, highlight and shape public perception of national values and achievements. In doing so, he embraced a template that set his official history apart from previous national war histories. As Bean saw it, egalitarianism was fundamental to Australia’s national tradition.

  Reflecting years later on his first trip to the New South Wales outback, Bean noted of the men he met that they portrayed a general determination ‘to stand by one’s mate, and to see that he gets a fair deal whatever the cost to one’s self.’ This meant more to Australia than could yet be reckoned. He continued: ‘It was the basis of our economy in two world wars and is probably its main basis in peace time. Whatever the results (and they are sometimes uncomfortable), may it long be the country’s code!’

  This was the point Bean’s philosophy had reached as he worked on his speech for an approaching ceremony at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. He had been invited to accept the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa ‘in recognition of your distinguished eminence in public service, and in particular for your far-sighted initiative and dedicated work in the production of the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 and in the establishment of the War Archives Committee and the Commonwealth Archives Committee.’ Such was his stature that the university asked him to respond at the ceremony on behalf of all the honorary graduands.

  This was to be Bean’s second honorary doctorate: in 1931 he had accepted a Doctor of Literature degree from the University of Melbourne. Sir John Monash—despite their uneasy relationship during the war—had been party to Bean’s name being proposed. Five years after the war, Monash had acknowledged to Bean that the official history he was writing was a ‘great work’, and offered his papers. This was an outstretched hand.

  Less than a month before the ANU ceremony, Bean wrote to the university apologising for being slow to respond to its invitation to speak. ‘I had to give it thought because over six months ago I gave up public speaking owing to an increasingly defective memory. However, in view of your suggestion that I may be very short, I shall be glad to say something.’

  Even if the speech was to be simple, he nonetheless wanted to say something important about the concept of race, for he clearly recognised its continuing influence on people’s thinking—just as it had been influential on his own thinking for so many years. When he wanted to challenge something, Bean could be nothing but persistent. He thought he would begin by apologising to his audience for the decline of his speaking powers. ‘When one’s memory reaches the stage at which you not only fail to find the right word, but also, after an agonising interval searching for it, find that you have forgotten what you were speaking about, it is surely time to give up speaking in public,’ he wrote.

  Having broken the ice, he would return to an anecdote from the period he knew better than anyone else in Australia: the Great War. He would say that standing before such an august audience reminded him of the story of the Digger seen buried almost to the neck in one of the many slime-filled craters along the dread
ful tracks at Passchendaele in 1917. Only his head was showing above the muck. A party of rescuers set frantically about getting hold of some duckboards to help him out. The speech notes continued: ‘Don’t worry, mate,’ the party said, ‘we’ll get you out in half a minute.’ Came the reply from the tin hat: ‘Don’t bust yerselves, I’m orright, I’m standing on a mule.’ The draft speech went on: ‘I’m not standing on a mule, but among probably one of the most intelligent and, I feel, helpful audiences that you would find in Australia.’

  Bean had first heard the anecdote, apocryphal or not, in mid-August 1917. As he trudged around the battlefields, the story symbolised for him the droll humour of the Australians in the mud of Flanders. Bean became a familiar sight in the lines—a tall, spare, ginger-haired figure wearing pince-nez spectacles, with a telescope slung over a shoulder and a notebook either in hand or protruding from his coat pocket. He watched—sometimes from the front line, sometimes from the rear, but always within the range of field guns—practically every battle small or great in which the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) infantry fought. If he had not been at the front on the day of battle he made it a principle to get there soon afterwards so as to see the ground, often with a photographer to capture it for the country’s records. He may never have been one of the boys, but he revered their determination—and their ability to make light of adversity amid the trauma of war.

  But the speech would not be given. Atop the page he wrote: ‘Draft of intended address—not delivered, because of over-strain.’ As The Canberra Times reported the day after the ceremony, another eminent Australian, the physicist Sir Leslie Martin, a foundation fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and first chairman of the Australian Universities Commission, spoke. That night Charles Bean and his beloved wife, Effie, attended the dinner to mark the occasion. Bean noted in the little diary his mother had passed on to him that the dinner ‘was one of great strain for me.’ Within weeks his health had deteriorated. The years had taken their toll. For a modest man these years had not been an uneventful journey as he bore witness to extraordinary events that shaped Australia.