The Gallipoli Letter (4 page)

The hospitals at Cairo had shaped Murdoch's thinking before he set foot at Anzac Cove. As he toured the enormous wards holding thousands of wounded soldiers Murdoch's emotions would have reinforced the comments made by Australian officers. Could these wounds, many of them severe, permanent and life-threatening, be justified in terms of territory gained or the possibility of the overall success of the campaign? Here were the
wounded
men, Murdoch noted. What of the many thousands more who had died at the front and were now in their graves, never to be rescued by the stretcher-bearers or to find a place on a hospital ship?

‘Keith Murdoch arrived today,' Charles Bean wrote in his diary on 3 September 1915. Were the two men at ease with each other when they first met on the battlefield in Bean's dugout, sheltering from the shells and bullets which were a constant at Anzac? Did Murdoch look around the dugout with some wistful, lingering disappointment that it was not his home but rather Charles Bean's? The dugout was primitive enough: a desk and chair both made out of packing cases, a sand-bagged wall for protection, a spirit-lamp, a few items of clothing hanging from nails belted into the clay back wall, a primitive camp bed and a little bit of rubbish. And men passing day and night, going about their business, maybe up to Quinn's Post or Courtney's where Bert Jacka had fought so tenaciously in May to be awarded the first Australian Victoria Cross of the war. Men talking and laughing, smoking and complaining, carrying supplies or ammunition, or stretcher-bearers on their way to another job. It took most men a couple of days on the peninsula before they could stop ducking when they heard the whizz of a shell overhead, or not flinch when a bullet thudded into one of the sand-bagged parapet walls protecting them all. It took these couple of days for men to accept the random danger of life at Anzac and the domestic nature of life there, too. Keith Murdoch had only four days on Anzac and there was much to see.

After they had yarned for a while in Bean's dug-out the official correspondent took his guest ‘up to the top of this hill to see the view'. The photograph on page 23 shows Murdoch at Anzac in an open long-sleeved shirt rolled up to the elbows, labourer's pants with braces to hold them up, and shoes, not boots. He is holding a pith helmet made of canvas and stiff cardboard. Murdoch is tall, vigorous in attitude, hair closely cropped, earnest-looking. He was certainly not out of place among the soldiers.

The view from the top of Bean's hill must have enthralled Keith Murdoch. Men were burrowed in their thousands into the side of the cliff opposite, their home when they were not in the front-line trenches. An Anglican chaplain, Walter (‘Bill') Dexter likened the scene to his days in the ministry in Gippsland in Victoria, where forest workers camped and at the end of the day would make their camp fires to cook the evening meal and boil the billy. It was just like that on Anzac, Dexter wrote. The smoke from hundreds of fires drifting lazily upwards as men began to settle in for the night. Men yarned; checked their shirts and pants for lice; repaired their clothes or read their mail. Perhaps they read an Australian newspaper or magazine, weeks out of date, but a link with home nonetheless—apparently as occupied by the footy at home as with the Turks above and in front of them.

Charles Bean was quite ill when Murdoch was on Anzac and would shortly be evacuated. Many of the men were sick, Bean told Murdoch, some of the best men too—illness had become a grave issue. There was an awful shortage of water and much of what was there was of doubtful quality and possibly harmful. There was little fresh food, Bean continued and no variety at all in the diet. As Bean was forced to lie-in for the rest of the time Murdoch was on the peninsula the question of the health of the troops was very much to the fore in their discussions. More needed to be done for the troops, Bean thought, and he feared the prospect of winter, the cold weather just a couple of months, or even a matter of weeks, away.

In the few days he had Murdoch made his way around the Australian positions at Anzac. At Lone Pine he met up with General Harold Bridgwood (‘Hooky') Walker, who was commanding the First Australian Division. The Australians had just won possession of the Pine—now a bulge in the Turkish line—after ferocious fighting there from 6 to 9 August.

The ordinary soldier knew that the failure of the August offensive, except at Lone Pine, meant the continuation of the stalemate that had prevailed at Gallipoli since the second day of the fighting. Since then the Turks had settled behind their defensive line, as had the Australians and New Zealanders at Anzac and the British at Helles and now at Suvla. The August offensive—an attempt to push the Turks off the high ground and win the advantage by taking Chunuk Bair, a high point on the third ridge line, and Hill 971—was a sensible plan, indeed the only possible way that the Allies might have won at Gallipoli.

These were the crucial points in the August offensive. The fighting within the Anzac lines, lower down the battlefield at Lone Pine and later at the Nek, was merely a feint designed to draw off Turkish troops from the heights and, by weakening the defences there, to give the advantage at Chunuk Bair to the Allies. Though a feint, the fighting at Lone Pine was not any less intense. Indeed it was ferocious, conducted largely underground in the Turkish trenches across three days and nights—seven Australians fighting there would be awarded the Victoria Cross. (None of these awards dated to the first hours of the fighting because no officer survived to make a recommendation.)

PLATE 4 Keith Murdoch stands outside C.E.W. Bean's dug-out. Tall, vigorous in attitude, hair closely cropped, earnest-looking, Murdoch was certainly not out of place among the soldiers. The view from the top of Bean's hill must have enthralled Keith Murdoch: men were burrowed in their thousands into the side of the cliff.
AWM Neg. No. A05396

Hooky Walker was a British general who had replaced the Australian general William Bridges in charge of the First Australian Division when Bridges was killed by a sniper in early May. Walker had dropped back to command the First Brigade when James Legge, an Australian, took over the division but by late July Walker was back in charge. Little Hooky loved his men, Bean reported, and the men ‘like [him] too. He's a man we owe something to.'

When briefed by General Birdwood, who was commanding the Anzacs, about the battle plans for the August breakout Walker had tried hard to have the attack on Lone Pine cancelled. He would lose too many of his men, he argued, for too little gain. But the general was overruled, although he managed to have the worst of the planning changed.

On 4 September, as Bean lay sick in bed, Walker talked at length to Murdoch and showed him around Lone Pine. The general had also opposed the idea of the landing in the first place—he was a man who did not blindly accept the orders issued to him. Whether Hooky Walker gave Murdoch a view of his own doubts and reservations about the men above him—William Birdwood in command of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps and Ian Hamilton, overall commander of the Dardanelles expeditionary force—we cannot know. Murdoch was, after all, a journalist. He may well have picked up Walker's doubts and reservations. Or the men among whom Murdoch moved might well have let something slip: ‘It was just murder up here, mate, when the fighting was on; sheer, bloody murder.' But we cannot know precisely what was said.

The next day Bean was sick in bed again and Murdoch headed out by himself. He roamed about, no doubt asking and listening as good journalists do. No big-noting; no mention of his commission from the Australian prime minister. At some stage Murdoch had also visited the British at Suvla Bay, a place easily seen from the heights at Anzac and he had been shocked by what he had found there: confusion, morale at its lowest possible ebb, failure.

On his last day on Anzac, 6 September, Bean took Murdoch to Quinn's Post, the real hot spot where the opposing trenches, Turkish and Anzac, were only metres apart. It was a place where bombs were tossed casually across the short stretch of no-man's-land, where the soldiers of both sides were ever alert for the possibility of attack. It was testing to be at Quinn's for the days or weeks that a soldier might spend there, but even for an hour or so for a keen journalist. Only brave men were ever at Quinn's.

And then he was gone. ‘M left at midday', Bean reported. But his job was far from over. Murdoch went to the island of Imbros, within sight of the battlefield he had just left, to await a ship that would take him back to Cairo and then on to London. There were other journalists on Imbros taking a bit of a spell from the front line now that the campaign had settled once again into stalemate mode. Among them was the most flamboyant of all the correspondents, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. It was Ashmead-Bartlett who had written the first account of the 25 April landing by the Anzacs, which had been published in the Australian papers on 8 May. He had written of ‘this race of athletes', and that there had ‘never [been] a finer feat in this war' than the April assault; it was all thrilling stuff. But by September Ashmead-Bartlett was a disillusioned man, firmly convinced that the army must be evacuated if a mighty loss of life was to be avoided. As a first step he had decided that Ian Hamilton must be sacked: for the failure of the campaign and because he would never agree to an evacuation.

After just four days at Gallipoli Murdoch had reached much the same conclusion: that the campaign was doomed to failure. And he agreed with Ashmead-Bartlett, too, that an evacuation was the only sensible plan. Prompted by Bean, Murdoch's thoughts had turned to the coming winter and the horrors it must produce. With the failure of the August offensive fresh in men's minds, Murdoch concluded that a breakout now was unlikely and certainly impossible to attempt before the next spring, say April 1916. And Murdoch had also absorbed from Bean a real concern about the qualities of British military leadership at Gallipoli. Bean was at a low ebb, his diary shows, and in real despair about the prospects at Gallipoli. He wrote bitterly about British muddle, confusion and arrogance. Bean was also a sick man. His mood must have affected Murdoch.

So Murdoch and Ashmead-Bartlett talked and agreed with one another. ‘You must let people in London know these things,' Murdoch urged, just as he would be letting his own prime minister know the truth. Ashmead-Bartlett reminded Murdoch of the commitment both had signed that required them to submit everything they wrote to the censors. ‘If I wrote the truth,' Ashmead-Bartlett explained, ‘it would never be passed by the censor.' When Murdoch had sought Hamilton's approval for a visit to Anzac Murdoch had written that ‘any conditions you impose I should, of course, faithfully observe'. Yet briefing a prime minister, Murdoch believed, stood outside any undertaking either he or Ashmead-Bartlett had given. They could write to prime ministers without submitting to the censors, Murdoch argued. Murdoch must have resolved on this when he first applied to Ian Hamilton for permission to visit Anzac. He would report truthfully and fully to Andrew Fisher; he had a commission to do so. Murdoch now urged Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett to do the same to his prime minister, Herbert Asquith.

You are going to London, the British journalist countered, and you can tell the people in charge the truth. But it was highly unlikely that they would listen, argued Murdoch. After all he had only been on Anzac for four days, had seen nothing whatever of the operations at Helles and very little of Suvla. Nor had he met the most senior people like Hamilton and Birdwood, nor did he have an understanding gained by months in the field. Who in London would take him seriously? But they would listen to Ashmead-Bartlett if he were to write a letter. Murdoch was arguing a very strong case. Certainly Ashmead-Bartlett could believe that if Murdoch were to attempt to criticise the campaign in London he would make mistakes. He simply did not know enough. Supporters of Hamilton and the campaign would leap on those mistakes to discredit Murdoch and he might end up doing more harm than good. Ashmead-Bartlett agonised, eventually deciding that he would write to his prime minister—Murdoch would take the letter to London for personal delivery to 10 Downing Street.

Murdoch left Imbros on 8 September, unaware that he had already been betrayed to Hamilton, most likely by another war correspondent aghast that the two journalists were determined to circumvent the censorship to which each had freely submitted. Hamilton believed that the letter Murdoch was carrying was destined for publication in Ashmead-Bartlett's paper, the
Daily
Telegraph
and that, on publication, it would cause a sensation. So Hamilton arranged with British military intelligence in France to have Murdoch stopped and the letter seized when his ship, S.S.
Mooltan
, docked at Marseilles. Indeed Murdoch was told at Marseilles that he would be arrested unless he turned Ashmead-Bartlett's letter over. Which he did.

It was an awful shock, though, to everyone involved in the seizure of the letter to discover that it was addressed not to the editor of the
Daily Telegraph
but to the Rt Hon. H.H. Asquith, 10 Downing Street, London. The military nervously asked themselves if it was right that they intercept the prime minister's correspondence. The letter was quietly lost, most probably somewhere in Whitehall. Ashmead-Bartlett was in disgrace regardless, for the potential breach of censorship. In early October, Hamilton withdrew his accreditation and told him to leave Imbros immediately. This was a tactical error on Hamilton's part. The journalist could talk his head off in London without restraint, and he did.