Category Archives: The role of the Press

43. August 1915

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Eight men from the Shire of Alberton died on active service at Gallipoli in August 1915, most in the period 6-8 August: Frederick Bird 559, 4 LHR, died of wounds 6 August; James Moysey 138, 8 LHR, killed in action 7 August; James Pickett 232, 8 LHR, killed in action 7 August; Patrick Sweeney 451, 8 LHR, killed in action 7 August; John Adams 31, 15 B, missing from 7 August then killed in action same date; George Tyler 2194, 7 B, missing then killed in action 8 or 9 August; Alexander John McLeod 1709, 7 B, killed in action 16 August and William Dewell 1153, 14 B, missing then killed in action 21 August. Only two of the men – Frederick Bird and Alexander McLeod – have known graves, the rest feature on the Lone Pine Memorial. Another soldier from the Shire of Alberton – David Geoffrey Willis – died of meningitis in camp in Melbourne on 26 August 1915.

The men will be covered in separate posts. This particular post looks at the 2 distinctive actions of the time – Lone Pine and the Nek – in an attempt to give some sort of context to the deaths. At the time, one hundred years ago, people in Australia needed to be reassured that the increasing sacrifice associated with the campaign in the Dardanelles was warranted. Newspaper reports continued to conceal and misrepresent the real military situation. The primary focus for the stories was the heroism and the fighting qualities of the Anzacs. The Gallipoli campaign was reported as a military adventure.

‘The Taking of Lone Pine’. Fred Leist 1921. Used with permission of the Australian War Memorial

Lone(some) Pine

Despite the high level of Australian casualties – over 2,000 Australians in 4 days of hand-to-hand fighting in covered trenches – the action at Lone Pine (Lonesome Pine) was intended as yet another feint. It was designed to hold Turkish troops in place immediately prior to the major assault in the north on Chunuk Bair and Hill 971. The overall strategy in the north was to secure the high ground of Sari Bair and achieve the breakthrough that had eluded the allied troops from the very first day of the Dardanelles campaign. The action in the north was to be supported by a series of feints in the south and there was also to be a major, concurrent, British action based on Suvla Bay. The actions in the north – Suvla and Chunuk Bair – failed. In fact, the action at Suvla Bay is generally regarded as one the low points in British military history.

In Australia, the misreporting of the Gallipoli campaign continued. Heroism remained the dominant theme.The news about Lone Pine reached Australia by early September. On 4 September 1915, The Age (p. 11) published an extensive account, again by Ashmead-Bartlett – special representative of the British press at Gallipoli – which led with the heroic headlines: Gallipoli Battle.   Fight For Main Crest.   Position Taken And Lost.   Australia’s Glorious Part   Amazing Dash Shown    “Attack With Fury Of Fanatics.”

In the article Ashmead-Bartlett expressed some frustration with the failure of the main attack on Sari Bair. According to him, victory had been so close. He was setting down what was to become the conventional wisdom of how the attack had so nearly succeeded. The failure of the British action at Suvla was even written into the record, albeit discretely:

“There was bitter disappointment in relinquishing the crest [of Sari Bair] when it was almost in our grasp after so many months, but there was no alternative. The Anzac Army Corps fought like lions, and accomplished a feat of arms almost without parallel in climbing those heights, although handicapped by the failure of another army corps to make good its position on the Anfarta hills further north for the purpose of checking the enemy’s shell fire.

The article also presented the background to the specific action at Lone Pine and gave a vivid account of the savagery of the fighting:

“In order to enable the forces detailed for the main movement, which had for its ultimate object the occupation of Sari Bair, from Chanak Bair to Kojachemen [Hill 971], it was necessary to attract the enemy’s attention towards the south and force him to keep his troops in front of our lines while our main forces debouched from Anzac. This was the reason for the Australian advance on 6th August, and the desperate attack on the Lonesome Pine plateau…

“The Turks have fortified the place carefully, and it was a veritable fortress. The trenches were roofed with huge pine logs, railway sleepers and immense teak planks, and were covered with earth, making the trenches impervious to shells except from heavy howitzers.

EXTRAORDINARY STRUGGLE UNDERGROUND.

…The Australians rushed forward to the assault with the fury of fanatics, little heeding the tremendous shrapnel and the enfilading rifle fire. Great difficulty was experienced in forcing a way into the trenches. Mighty physical effort was required to remove the obstructions. …The Turks were caught in a trap. Some surrendered, but the majority chose to die fighting. There was a desperate hand to hand fight in every trench and dugout. Four lines of trenches were captured in succession, additional infantry pouring in as the advancing lines thinned. …

“The Turks massed their forces, and counter-attacked desperately for three days and nights. They frequently retook sections of the trenches, only to be again driven out. The extraordinary struggle was almost entirely underground. Both sides showed an utter disregard of life. The wounded and dead chocked the trenches almost to the top, and the survivors carried on the fight over heaps of corpses. Despite the most determined courage shown by the reinforced Turks, the Australians held their ground finally, and the Turks wearied of the struggle. The trenches are now merely battered shambles. The removal of the dead and wounded occupied days. The bodies of 1000 Turks and colonials were removed from the trenches, and hundreds more corpses lay outside.

Clearly, the fighting was brutal and both sides fought with incredible bravery. But the high losses for the Australians had to seen against the military objective of the action. Lone Pine was a feint. As Ashmead-Bartlett told his readers:

“Although the capture of the Lonesome Pine plateau was the most desperate hand to hand fight yet on the peninsula, it was merely a diversion and preliminary to the main movement northwards, which commenced the same evening under darkness.

However, as indicated, the main movement was itself a failure. Moreover, 100 years on, Prior (2009, p.171) only rates the military success of Lone Pine as ‘ambiguous’. By any standard, Lone Pine was an incredible loss of men for such qualified military outcomes. As for Gallipoli in general, Lone Pine demonstrated that the relationship between heroism and sacrifice on one hand and military success on the other was very tenuous.

‘The Charge of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at the Nek, 7 August 1915’. George Lambert 1924. Used with permission of the Australian War Memorial

The Nek

The futility of the action at the the Nek very early in the morning on 7 August was even more striking. Perhaps it was more the orchestration or performance of the famous charge that was its most distinctive feature. This is the action that was immortalised in the Peter Weir film, Gallipoli. It was essentially another diversionary action timed to support similar operations at Quinn’s Post and Pope’s Post. Critically, it depended on the success of other actions, particularly the New Zealanders’ push to Chunuk Bair. But the New Zealanders were well behind and, in fact, Prior (p. 176) argues that Birdwood ordered the doomed attack at the Nek to proceed because he wanted it as a diversion to support the New Zealanders. The military plan was in effect turned on its head at the last minute. In the event, 4 waves – 150 men in each – of the 8 and 10 Light Horse Regiments rushed to their deaths. Of the 600 men involved more than 300 were killed or wounded and the bodies lay on the battlefield for weeks after. The 8 Light Horse Regiment, the first to attack, suffered most, with 234 from its 300 strength either killed or wounded.

The war diary for the 8 Light Horse Regiment is a very concise and sobering read:

At 4.40 we led the attack on the TURKISH trenches on the NEK. The C.O. led the first line which consisted of about 9 officers and 150 other ranks and the second line of equal strength by 2nd in command. Moving into a deadly machine gun fire, the attack failed to get home.

The Commanding Officer was 33yo Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Henry White and he was killed in the first few seconds. Bean (1941, p. 614) claimed he made 10 paces.

At least at Lone Pine some military objective had been achieved – whether it was worth the casualty level is another issue altogether – but the Nek achieved no military outcome. Against this background, the reporting of the episode in Australia posed a significant challenge. Not surprisingly, the tactic was to talk up the heroism and sacrifice.

The story was reported some 6 weeks after it occurred, appearing in The Age (p. 6) on 30 September 1915, although the date for the copy was earlier – Gaba Tepe, 16th August.  The headlines proclaimed: A Victorian Charge.   Light Horse Storm Trenches   Terrific Hail of Bullets Faced.   Imperishable Glory Won.  It was sourced:  [From the Special representative of “The Age”]

The article featured a description of the Nek itself and gave a picture of the task facing the men:

The nek [sic] is 150 yards wide, and the space between our and the enemy’s trenches is 80 yards. In some places it is less. On the right hand is a sheer drop over the cliffs into the valleys, now captured by us. Out towards the left flank, on the left of the position, is the head of Monash Gully. The plateau is crossed and re-crossed by enemy works. The nek is on the left, and on the right is the famous Pope’s Post. Between Pope’s and our next trenches is a ravine, and then comes Quinn’s Post. Opposite these points the Turkish trenches are sometimes only a few yards distant – they are scarcely ever more than 80 yards apart.

The work before the Light Horse was to charge over the enemy parapets, up a slight incline, against row after row of gradually rising trenches.

The heroic style of writing is intended to put the reader there at the Nek, to make them part of the action. The obstacles are insurmountable. This is a glorious but doomed attack.  Then came the charge:

The Victorians [8 LHR] on the sound of a whistle scrambled over the parapets into the face of a fearful fire. I cannot describe the volume and intensity of the waves of lead that swept across the tops of the parapets. The Turks had never before disclosed the positions of many of their machine guns, but now ten or more were sending a rain of bullets thudding against the parapets or skimming over the top.

Against this “hell fire” the Light Horse leaped out, led by their officers. Lieutenant-Colonel White, a more gallant leader than whom never faced fire, insisted on leading his squadron, and he had gone but a few yards when he was riddled with bullets. Still our men went on, only to be shot down, crippled or killed outright. The second and third lines had come out at intervals of a few minutes…

… The parapets were covered with the wounded and dying. Stretcher bearers rescued men where they could, dragging them down into the trenches, while over the parapets went other men, doomed like their brave comrades. Many only reached the parapet.

Bean (1941, p. 622) summed up the challenge facing the Light Horse at the Nek: On no other occasion during the war did Australians have to face fire approaching in volume that which concentrated on The Nek.

In case the reader questioned why the pointless killing was allowed to continue for so long, the article already had an answer. It was the claim that some men had made it to the Turkish trenches and therefore they had to be supported. In his Official History, Bean (p. 615) also featured the report of the pre-arranged small red and yellow flag that people claimed to have seen in the enemy trenches. Bean stated that reports had it there for 10 minutes before it was torn down. He surmised that it was almost certain that a few men from the first wave managed to get into the first Turkish trench on the extreme right. Flags or not, it was clear to those directly involved at the Nek that morning, that the military objective was not attainable. Several attempts were made to call the action off. Presumably, after the carnage, people sought to rationalise what had happened.

The Age described the flag incident and employed it to exonerate the military commanders:

A handful of men from the second line reached the first line of the Turkish trenches… They flung themselves into those trenches somehow but there is scarcely a soul alive to tell the tale. According to a prearranged signal, the Turks having been driven back along the communication trenches, our men raised a red and yellow flag about a foot square. Ten minutes had scarcely gone by when this, as wonderful a feat as any in the campaign, was accomplished. Each minute had rendered the position more desperate; each minute ten, twenty or thirty men had gone down, yet the general had no option, when those heroic men of the Eighth reached and captured the first trench, but to send support. And so the third line went forth to death and glory.

The article does not acknowledge it but, In the confusion, a large number of the fourth wave also charged. The second 2 waves of the attack were made up of men from 10 Light Horse regiment.

More than anything else, the article focussed on the heroism of the men involved. And, of course, there was strong provenance for doomed but heroic attacks like this. The image of the resolute British soldier, following his officers’ orders to certain death was a staple in British and Imperial culture at the time, and the The Age exploited it forcefully:

There is a parallel between this charge and the famous charge at Balaclava. The Light Horse knew that to leave their trenches was to charge into valley after valley of death. They never questioned those orders, but went at the word of command, and their deed stands on that same glorious pedestal. “Was there a man dismayed?” I venture to think that after one engagement, with the knowledge of all that trench warfare meant, the troops never presented a braver front. “Theirs not to reason why; theirs but to do – and die.” Words never conveyed a fuller meaning than did these for the men who left the trenches at 4.30 a.m. on 7th August.

We might want to dismiss this style of newspaper reporting as mawkish claptrap and an unconscionable cover-up for gross incompetence on the part of military commanders, both British and Australian, but the historical reality is that such sentiments would have comforted many families at the time. This was a picture of the Empire at its greatest. Moreover, stripping out all the jingoism, there is no doubting the bravery shown by the men who did literally run to their deaths.

This particular report on the charge at the Nek is arguably one of the lowest pieces of military propaganda ever published in WW1. The last paragraph reads more like a sermon than a piece of reporting. It exploits the heroism shown by the men to insist that no one should ask any hard questions about what had happened; and its claims about the overall success of the charge at the Nek and the wider great flanking movement are grossly inaccurate:

The Glory of the Dead
In this way in a brief few minutes did a regiment perish, but it left behind an imperishable name. Yet the regiment did no more than its duty, but the men did it against fearful odds, in the face of certain death, because their leaders led them. No one may ask if the price was not too great. The main object had been achieved. The Turks were held not only here, but right along the line – tied to their trenches, crowded together, waiting to be bayoneted where they stood, as they had been at Lone Pine. Above all, the way had been kept clear for the great flanking movement, which the New Zealand and Australian infantry, British, Indian and Maories [sic] carried out, ending with the linking of hands with the new army flung ashore at Suvla bay. Victorians, and indeed all Australians, will “honor the charge they made – honor the Light Brigade.”

Even before Lone Pine and the Nek there was an established pattern of newspaper reporting that minimised military failure and extolled the fighting quality and bravery of the AIF. Lone Pine and the Nek took the practice to new levels. However, the extent of the military failure, and the shocking level of casualties meant that the seemingly unchecked pursuit of sacrifice and heroism would eventually be questioned. For those in Australia reading the mainstream press the doubts began to appear not very long after the disasters of early August. Ashmead-Bartlett was one the most important Imperial war correspondent at the time – certainly he was the most popular one in Australia, where he was famous for his depiction of the heroic AIF – yet in the Argus (p. 9) on 18 October 1915 he questioned the worth of the entire Gallipoli campaign. Under headlines including, Blunders At Gallipoli.   Ashmead Bartlett’s Warning  and  Some Plain Speaking, he was quoted as questioning whether the appalling slaughter at Gallipoli had been worth it. It was a nuanced report but the gist was that while Australian soldiers had made a name for themselves for their fighting qualities, the overall campaign had been a litany of military blunders. The enormous sacrifice had achieved no significant military outcomes.

References

The Age

Argus

Prior, R  2009, Gallipoli: The End of the Myth, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney

Bean, CEW 1941, Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918, Volume II – The Story of ANZAC from 4 May, 1915, to the evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula, Chapter XXI – The Feints of August 7th., 11th Edition 1941

War Diary of 8 Light Horse Regiment, August 1915

 

41. Pressed to enlist in the first half of 1915

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This is the second post that looks at divisions apparent in the local community from the very beginning of the War. Once again it involves a series of letters-to-the-editor in the local paper, the Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative. The common thread to the letters was the claim that young men from the township of Woodside were refusing to do their patriotic duty and enlist.

The first letter was signed anonymously, “Mary Jane” and it appeared in the paper on 21 April 1915.

It appears strange to me that so many able bodied young men are content to remain at home while the best and bravest of our boys have either gone or are going to fight for King and country in the battle fields of Europe. During a recent visit to Woodside I saw a tall, strong, active young man wearing in his button hole a badge displaying the historic words, “England expects every man to do his duty.” That young man is still in Woodside, and so far as he is concerned England stands a big chance of being disappointed. He is only one of many we meet every day. Their duty it appears lies at home; though late, very late at night, they may be heard riding home from the nearest hotel singing “Tipperary.”

The essential charge was that the patriotism of too many young men in the district was hollow.  They hid behind the pretence of patriotism, more interested in heavy drinking sessions at the local pub than fighting overseas.  And, as far as the writer was concerned, there was at least one such young man in Woodside. In fact, from the entire Shire of Alberton, Woodside was the only specific location named.

Two weeks later the same argument was revisited, and once again Woodside was identified. This time the writer signed him or herself as “Patriot”. One interpretation would be that “Mary Jane” and “Patriot” were the same person and that the first letter was intended to establish some sense of credibility – or  serve as a ‘teaser’ – for the more serious charges to come.  If it was not the same person then there was definitely a congruence of views.

“Patriot’s” first letter appeared on 1 May 1915. It was signed “Patriot” of Woodside. The detail in the letter covering the specifics of life and individuals in the local community of Woodside certainly gives the impression that the writer was a local.  The basis of the argument was that, unlike other local communities, Woodside had seen very few young men volunteer. Moreover, not content with such indifference to their patriotic duty, the same group spent or wasted their lives drinking, fighting and being a general nuisance in the community. The significance of the letter is that of all the small towns and settlements across the Shire of Alberton, attention was turned on the particular township of Woodside. Where “Mary Jane’s” letter had merely hinted that there could be a problem at Woodside, this letter proclaimed boldly that Woodside was some sort of epicentre of patriotic indifference.

I believe out of [the] large crowd of young men in Woodside only about two or three have gone, but I think a couple more started and came back again for some reason or other which I don’t know. Where in other places I know one or two have gone out of every family and more would go if they only could. These boys are different to the boys in Woodside, for I believe at the present time there are about a dozen young men in Woodside that could go and won’t go. They would sooner spend their time fighting one another, and will be seen going about for days or a week after with their eyes and hands neatly tied up after having had them attended to by a doctor. Then of course they have to have a holiday, for they are not able to do anything, but every night they will be seen rolling up to the hotel again, and will be heard going home quite happy at a late hour at night. Perhaps in some future time they may be sorry they never joined the colours, instead of fighting one another about there. I believe one certain young man said he would go only he had to stay to buy his mother’s bread. This, I think, is a poor excuse, for I know his mother has a husband and one or two more sons, and I think if the husband can’t provide her with bread he ought to go to the war and try to his duty there if he can’t do it at home. And many more of these strong young men ought to do the same.

Not surprisingly, the letter prompted a response. Two letters appeared in the edition of 19 May 1915, nearly a fortnight later. One was dated 12 May, Woodside and the other 13 May, also Woodside. The first, by Jas. O’Neill, claimed that in fact ten or a dozen of the Woodside boys had already enlisted and more were going to enlist. Jas. O’Neill appears to have been, according to the Electoral Roll, James Joseph O’Neill, labourer of Woodside. O’Neill made the point that at least those going would be able to fight a enemy they met face to face whereas they were powerless to take on “Patriot” who was nothing more than a backbitter [sic] hiding behind her anonymity. He assumed “Patriot” was a woman or perhaps he wanted to make the point that a real man would not conceal his identity.   He also suggested that more of the … Woodside boys would join the colours if it was only to get away from the likes of “Patriot”.

The second letter was signed by another O’Neill – S J. O’Neill – and this writer explicitly identified himself as the target of “Patriot’s” attack and presented his defence. The writer was 25 yo Simon John O’Neill:

I was commented on as being in a hotel brawl, instead of being at the war. Allow me to say that in trying to avoid a dispute I was drawn into one, but have not, as the writer says, been repeatedly at the hotel at night since the occurrence, and can prove that I have been working and not loafing round the hotel. As for not going to the war, unfortunately I am unfit, or I should have volunteered long ago.

S J O’Neill also challenged “Patriot” to reveal his or her identity:

It would also be interesting to know why “Patriot” does not disclose his or her name, as anyone who speaks the truth has no need for secrecy. On condition that “Patriot” will answer this letter through the press, with his or her name signed in full, I will lodge £5 at the “Standard” [Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative] office in aid of the Belgian Relief, and I think “Patriot” to prove true patriotism should contribute the same amount.

Another 2 weeks passed before “Patriot” replied on 26 May. The reply revealed just how personal the initial attack had been. To begin, “Patriot” dismissed the respondent James O’Neill by stating that the first letter … had nothing whatever to do with him. There was a sense of outrage that this O’Neill has bought into an argument that did not concern him. Presumably he was too old to enlist. But in the next sentence “Patriot” continued the attack on the younger S J O’Neill, claiming that her sources suggested that  … he has not been in Woodside much since then [the brawl at the hotel]. Clearly, J S O’Neill was one of “Patriot’s” initial targets.  He was one of 3 O’Neill brothers, all from Woodside and aged in their early twenties. People in Woodside who read the first letter would have known those being written about.  “Patriot” had no intention of backing down. The claim was made again that only a handful from Woodside had enlisted, and as for revealing his or her identity and the £5 challenge:

As for signing my name, I will not, as it may only cause trouble and perhaps make many people bad friends, but I am sure my statements are just as correct as his, and he can give his £5 if he likes. … I would be quite willing to give mine also, if I could only afford it, but I cannot as I am only receiving a small salary, and having more than myself to keep I find I am not able to do it.

On 4 June, “Mary Jane”, the initial person to call into question the patriotic loyalty of the young men of Woodside, submitted another letter-to-the-editor. It seemed that both “Patriot” and “Mary Jane” had to respond to the O’Neills; and there was the suspicion, again, that the two identities were the same. In fact, “Mary Jane” referred explicitly to this belief in the letter – Some people, I am informed, are quite sure that “Mary Jane” and “Patriot” are one and the same person – and then denied it, but in a most unconvincing manner. She also claimed, again unconvincingly, that she had never intended to target specifically the O’Neill Brothers and that, in effect, they had self-identified:

Only the O’Neill Brothers to whom I had not given a thought when writing, fitted the cap on their own head.

She also expressed regret that … her former letter caused so much bitterness in certain quarters. But it was a sham contrition – It was not intended to arouse such feelings and certainly would not have done so amongst sensible people. – and she drove home again the basic message:

… when married men are leaving wives and children and giving their lives to the service of their country, surely the single man who has youth, health and strength, and has no nearer duty to perform might also consider his country’s claim upon his manhood.

And, finally, there was another parting shot at S J O’Neill:

If he would rather stay home and keep a whole skin, the least he could do would be to refrain from wearing patriotic badges and singing war ditties, especially very late at night when respectable residents wish to sleep.

In turn, this letter elicited responses from 2 of the O’Neill brothers. The first from S J O’Neill appeared on 11 June. He pointed out, correctly, that “Mary Jane’s” first letter – back on 21 April – had, in fact, elicited no response in the paper. It was only the letter of “Patriot” that had prompted response. He queried why she had felt the need to reply when no-one had ever engaged with her in the first place. His clear implication was that “Mary Jane” and “Patriot” were the same person.  He focused on her attack on the young man wearing the patriotic badge – presumably himself –  the character she had originally set up in her first letter in April:

… her deceased [sic] brain has once carried her beyond the sublime when she objects to people wearing patriotic badges and singing war ditties simply because they have not gone to the war. Did “Mary Jane” ever take into consideration the help which every person is giving by procuring one such badge to which she objects, but “where ignorance is bliss it is folly to be wise.”

And he offered as his farewell:

I would advise “Mary Jane” to sink herself into oblivion and stay there for the rest of her life, or until such time as her foul mind has discarded its bitterness, and that she may be fit to come and live with pure-minded people.

The letter from Maurice E O’Neill – the second respondent – appeared on 16 June. He and his 2 brothers had commenced enlistment by this point – they had all passed the medical at Yarram in May 1915 – and he indicated that he was leaving for the camp at Seymour and he wanted … to have a pick at “Mary Jane” for the first and perhaps the last time. He claimed that, despite her denials, she had definitely targeted the O’Neill boys. Given that he was killed in France in 1916, his parting wish was cruelly ironic:

So I will wish “Mary Jane” and “Patriot” farewell. Hoping that they will have recovered from their strange delusions by the time I get home again.

The last word went to “Mary Jane”. Her letter published 23 June admitted some grudging respect for the O’Neill brothers who had enlisted; but at the same time she took on the persona of a poor, defenceless woman, threatened by young louts, and claimed credit for goading the brothers to enlisting:

The O’Neill brothers seem to be suffering from furore scribendi [rage for writing]. I have heard that they are going to the war. On this I congratulate them most heartily. They are setting an example that others, in the same position, might well follow. If it is any satisfaction to them to knock out a poor old woman before they leave Woodside, they are welcome to that. Only let them deal as bravely with the enemy when they met him. So far as this correspondent is concerned they have kept it up very well indeed. Had they not done so it had long since been forgotten. It is no use tickling a frog that won’t jump. Alas! there are many frogs that are too indolent to croak, much less jump.

Trying to interpret these events from so long ago is obviously not easy. However there are several points that can be made. First, the local paper chose to publish the letters of “Mary Jane” and “Patriot”, even though the letters were anonymous, the claims generalised and the reputations of known people attacked.  Again, as with the ‘flag flapping’ of Post 38, the paper gave people a platform to make virtually any claim they liked in relation to real or perceived lapses in patriotic sentiment and duty. The local paper was flexing its political muscle and brandishing its patriotic credentials.

The second point concerns the accuracy of the basic claim that not many young men from Woodside volunteered. At the time, this claim would have been difficult, if not impossible, to determine, with major problems over who was keeping records and how an individual was to be identified with a particular location. There was no objective, independent tally of enlistments from every location within the Shire kept at that specific time. Nor was one ever kept at any point over the duration of the War.  In such an environment, people’s perceptions were very powerful. While there had been manifestations of patriotic duty all over the Shire at the outbreak of the War, there would also have been inevitable variations in the rate of enlistment between locations. If someone like “Patriot” wanted to claim that such a variation amounted to proof that young men in a particular location were unpatriotic, and that assertion was given credibility by being published in the local press, then no doubt perceptions could readily become commonly accepted beliefs. Doubtless in mid-1915, after the correspondence in the local paper, people throughout the Shire of Alberton would have discussed the possibility/probability/certainty that not enough young men had volunteered from Woodside. And in discussing the situation at Woodside, they would also have looked at their own location and wondered if the same claim could be made about their own young men’s sense of patriotic duty. Presumably, this was exactly what the local paper was setting out to achieve.

The third point covers the possibility, 100 years later, of being able to uncover the identity of the anonymous writer(s).

There is little doubt that whoever wrote the letters to the editor knew about the O’Neill brothers. The O’Neill’s were right in responding to the letters in the belief that they, specifically, were being targeted. Details in the letters of “Mary Jane” and “ Patriot” certainly did identify them. Presumably, the letters were written by one or more persons in the local community of Woodside who knew the O’Neill family and, more particularly, had identified the O’Neill boys as typical of those single, young men who were causing problems – drinking, fighting, out late at night – when they should have already done the right thing and enlisted. One or two people wanted to draw attention to the O’Neill boys and the local paper was prepared to assist, presumably on the basis that the O’Neills represented a problem that was common across the Shire as a whole.

Then there is the issue of the name, “Mary Jane”. The boys’ mother was typically referred to as Mrs W(illiam) Kerr. Her first husband, and the boys’ father, was James O’Neill but he had died and she had remarried, to William John Kerr who also lived in Woodside. Mrs William Kerr was in fact Mrs Mary Jane Kerr (O’Neill). It seems that the pseudonym of “Mary Jane” was a deliberate choice, with the intention, clearly, to identify the O’Neill boys. This again pointed to someone in the local community who knew the O’Neill family history.  Moreover, given that the local paper was prepared to publish both sets of anonymous letters – from both “Mary Jane” and “Patriot” – it seems reasonable at least to suggest that perhaps the editor of the paper – A J Rossiter – played a role in the affair. Perhaps, even, he had heard of the O’Neill boys and decided himself to craft a series of letters that appeared to come from concerned locals. It was his chance to raise an issue that people were talking about. As will become evident in future posts, Rossiter was certainly prepared to take an active role in promoting patriotic duty in the local community. Perhaps this whole episode was a underhand way of doing just that. There would have been little chance that his ruse could ever have been uncovered. But there is no proof of any such strategem. Besides, there is even the possibility that the writer might have been a relative: an aunt or uncle keen for the brothers to do what they saw as the ‘right thing’, rather than bring dishonour on the extended family.

Leaving conjecture to one side, the actual fate of the O’Neill boys is known. There were 3 O’Neill brothers. They were all single and they enlisted together in June 1915. The oldest was Simon John O’Neill (1958) who was nearly 25yo when he enlisted on 16 June 1915. The middle brother – Maurice Edward O’Neill (1960) – was 23yo when he enlisted on 18 June 1915. The youngest brother was Joseph Geoffrey O’Neill (2062) who was nearly 21yo when he enlisted on 22 June 1915. All 3 brothers had their initial medical at Yarram and were issued with railway warrants (105-107) on 31 May 1915 to travel to Melbourne. All 3 had been born at Sale and all gave their religion as Roman Catholic. All had as their next-of-kin their mother Mrs W(illiam) [Mary Jane] Kerr of Woodside.  Presumably the father was dead by the time they enlisted. All 3 gave their occupation as labourer but the 2 older brothers featured in the 1915 Rate Book with each holding a few acres of land at Woodside. The 2 older brothers had been involved in the Woodside Rifle Club and the oldest (Simon John O’Neill) had spent 18 months in the Light Horse unit based in Sale. All 3 brothers enlisted in 24 Battalion and all served overseas. Simon John O’Neill returned to Australia in March 1919 and Joseph Geoffrey O’Neill in April 1919. The middle brother, Maurice Edward O’Neill, was killed in action in France on 29 June 1916.

What influence the writings of “Mary Jane” and “Patriot” had on the decision of the O’Neill boys to enlist is not possible to determine. Certainly there was a surge in enlistments once the casualty levels associated with Gallipoli became commonly known. Moreover, the background of at least 2 of the 3 brothers, in the Woodside Rifle Club and other military training, suggests that they were always potential volunteers. At the same time, being identified in the local press as unpatriotic would have been hard to withstand. Even when they did enlist, their critics could only offer half-hearted praise, and rebuke them for taking so long.  Overall, their reputations were seriously damaged and enlistment at least removed them from the local area. As James O’Neill suggested right at the start, they might well have enlisted to escape the likes of “Patriot”.

In 1920, on the anniversary of her son’s death (29/6/16), Mrs Mary Jane Kerr inserted the following In Memoriam in the local paper:

O’Neill – In loving remembrance of my dear son, Private Maurice Edward O’Neill, killed in action on 29th June, 1916. R. I. P.

We all miss him, for we loved him,
And shall always feel the loss
Of our fair-haired darling, sleeping
‘Neath a little wooden cross.

Inserted by his mother.

References

Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative

National Archives file for O’Neill Simon John

National Archives file for O’Neill Maurice Edward

National Archives file for O’Neill Joseph Geoffrey

 

38. ‘Flag flapping’ patriotism

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This is the first of 3 short posts that look at divisions within the local community that began to form from the very beginning of the War. From 1916, with the push for conscription, the division would reach levels unparalleled to that point, however from the very beginning of the War the signs of tension were there. This first post looks a ‘flag flapping’. The second looks at early ‘shirkers’; and the third at Germans in the local community.

In the early stage of the War, division arose over the proper display of patriotism. In the heightened anxiety and bravado of the times, the standards of patriotism demanded – of both individuals and institutions – encouraged true ‘patriots’ to go looking for and expose those whose loyalty could be called into question. Local newspapers were keen to assist, and had the power to legitimise and also intensify the debate. This was the opportunity for them to present themselves as the voice of the community.

On 2 December 1914, the Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative published a letter to the editor from an anonymous correspondent going by the name of  “Patriot”. The letter called into question the patriotic loyalty of the head teacher of Port Albert State School. The basic issue was the claimed reluctance of the head teacher to fly the flag, literally, and show an appropriate level of patriotism.  His indifference was compared with the enthusiasm apparent in all other schools across Australia. The possible counter claim that the school’s flag was old and tattered was already being discounted. It was a full-on attack on the head teacher’s sense of patriotism and the local paper chose to print it. “Patriot” wrote:

What has struck me forcibly for a considerable time, is the attitude of the head teacher of the State School, compared with that of other teachers all through the States. In every school in the State the teacher thinks it an honor for the national flag to be flying, and for the scholars to salute it. At Port Albert it is never seen now (when it should be proudly displayed more than ever) the excuse being the flag is tattered. In the days of Nelson and Wellington a torn flag signified honourable service. The teacher may probably be forgetful in such matters, but I would like to see patriotism installed in my children whatever happens.

The head teacher – Gerald Russell – had little choice but to reply in the next issue (4/12/14). He criticised the parent for writing under a pseudonym and then pointed out that the local school committee had …  already arranged for the purchase of a new flag. However, he was not prepared to leave the matter there and, given the very public attack on his sense of patriotism, he fired back at his detractor’s own patriotism, arguing it was more show than substance. It was clear that he knew who “Patriot” was because he went on to accuse him of not contributing to the school’s patriotic fund. He also questioned if “Patriot” had expected him, as head teacher, to purchase a flag with his own money, and then suggested that perhaps “Patriot’, if he was so keen on the idea, could himself have paid for the replacement flag:

Did “patriot” expect me to provide, from my own pocket, funds for that object? Had I known that gentleman was so keen on getting patriotism instilled into the minds of his children I might have deliberately suggested such an opening for himself. The wonder is that the children of such a parent should feel such a need. Let me suggest a practical way of achieving the same laudable result. There is a patriotic fund at the school for the purpose of receiving  children’s small offerings. “Patriot’s” children have not paid in a red cent. Is “patriot’s” patriotism of the blatant variety?

Thanks to the local paper, this was now a very public dispute across the district and the potential for arguments over the display of patriotic fervour to poison relations between a head teacher and his parents – with the students in the middle – was very obvious.

“Patriot” returned fire in the next edition (9/12/1914). This time he revealed his identity – “Patriot.” Otherwise known as Jack Robertson. Robertson was a fisherman from Port Albert. In his reply, Robertson takes on the persona of a parent forced, reluctantly, to call out the head teacher for lack of patriotic loyalty.  The attack on the head teacher, as one of the leading members of the local community, is severe; and the threat in the last couple of sentences is clear:

It has been common talk for weeks about our school teacher never displaying the Union Jack. I stood it as long as possible, but last Monday week was the limit. Three young men left on that day for Broadmeadows. They were born and educated here. There was no demonstration whatever at the school. Surely the time was opportune. A few of the bigger boys, who asked permission, were allowed to go to the station a few minutes before train time. The rest of the school were disappointed at not seeing their chums off. Another illustration: Last Empire Day every school in the shire had a celebration: Port Albert – nil. Mr. G. Russell says “Patriot’s” children never paid a cent into the Patriotic Fund at the school. They never did and never will. I prefer to send mine otherwise. I have contributed in a dozen different ways, besides making shirts, handkerchiefs, etc. If he has given as much (which I doubt) as I have he has not done too badly. He “delicately suggests”  I should install patriotism in my children myself. I have, from the time they were able to understand. I would not like that task left to him. He might only “delicately suggest” patriotism. I maintain a good teacher has a great influence over a child, and very often the making or marring of a child is started at school. We can look back with pride on a lot of our past teachers, men who were first and foremost in everything. Mr. G Russell wants to know if my patriotism is of the “blatant variety”? My patriotism is through every fibre of my body, and will stand the wear and tear. Will his? Mr. G. Russell never mentioned in his letter whether he is loyal or not. Probably he will when the new flag comes, if he doesn’t ——.

The 3 young men, former students of the school, referred to were Harry Lewis (1639), James Lindsay (1566) and Jack Robinson (1602). They enlisted together at Yarram on 24 November and they were given consecutive railway warrants (numbers 61- 63) for travel to Melbourne on 30 November 1914. The whole issue about farewells for young men who had enlisted was certainly topical at the time and no clear protocol had yet emerged. In fact, over the entire course of the War there was significant variation between local communities across the Shire in the way such farewells – and later on, welcome homes – were handled. As will become apparent in future posts, in some instances the local school did become the centre for such farewells, but this arrangement was not universal. Basically, the claim that the school did not give a decent farewell to the 3 young men was, in terms of practice at the time, somewhat opportunistic and even unwarranted; but the claim did reflect genuine concern that not enough was being done to farewell the young men. Certainly, people at the time would have read the letter and agreed that the school should have done something.

One week later on 16 December,  Russell replied. Inadvisedly, he determined to give the readers a lesson on the various forms of patriotism. Almost certainly, the locals were never going to welcome instruction by the local school master on the nature and varieties of patriotism. He drew the distinction between the true patriotism of the “young hero” who faced death on the battlefield, and the contrived patriotism of the likes of his opponent, “Patriot”. Labouring metaphors, the head teacher dismissed the “Patriot” as …  entrenched behind an ink pot and a sheet of paper … who could only … wield a bad pen, venomed by spite, and hurl mud bombs on all and sundry.

Russell also laid on the sarcasm, another ill-advised tactic:

We have it on the highest authority- his [Patriot’s] own: “Patriotism [is] through every fibre of my body.” Is it any wonder there is little left for me when he has such a superfluity of it? How fortunate we are in the possession of such a one. Slumber sweetly, ye babes of Port Albert. No danger of “Louvains” while “Patriot” … is with us.

The letter ends with a palpable sense of outrage that one of his own school committee has turned on him:

The most regrettable thing about the whole affair is that a member of the school committee should treacherously attack one whom, by virtue of his office, he was honourably bound to assist.

In the next edition (18/12/1914) Robertson replied, with what was to be his last missive. It was short but sharply pertinent. He obviously felt that he had won the contest. He claimed that the head teacher, with his talk of varieties of patriotism, was merely trying to dissemble and that for all his clever words he had repeatedly refused to address the basic charge, namely that under his leadership the school was not putting on the sort of patriotic display common in other schools, and which the community expected and wanted. As far as Robertson was concerned, the head teacher could be as smart as he wanted with his arguments and repartee, but he could not conceal this major failing.

Head-Teacher Russell replied in the next edition. He felt the need to emphasise his practical loyalty and pointed out that he had been … contributing five per cent of my salary to the State School Patriotic Fund since its inception. He welcomed the closest scrutiny of this claim and wrote that he doubted that Robertson was making the same sort of financial sacrifice.

Perhaps Russell sensed by this point that he had lost the argument; but he was still keen to point out the hollowness that could so easily characterise displays of patriotism:

Flag flapping is very well in its place, and it is the most blatant patriot that shouts “God save the King” the loudest.

However, the problem the head teacher faced was that flag flapping was precisely the type of patriotic display that the community expected from the local state school. The issue was not whether it was Russell or Robertson who had the finest sense of what true patriotism represented, or even who of the pair was making the greatest financial contribution to patriotic fund-raisers, but, rather, the key issue turned on what sort of visible patriotic display the local community could expect to see at the school. And the short answer was that they definitely wanted to see something; and they did not feel the need to argue this with the head teacher. Russell might have been the finest and most generous patriot in his private life, but the local community wanted the public manifestation of patriotism.

The last letter published on the matter appeared on 23 December 1914. It was another anonymous effort, this time signed Foreman of Jury. There is no way of ever knowing its provenance, but it looks like the sort of final word or verdict that an editor – in this case, A J Rossiter – could impose on a dispute that had seized the attention of the local community, a dispute that the local paper had enabled and promoted. Irrespective of whoever wrote the short letter, it is very clear that the head teacher had been found guilty as charged:

On the main points at issue, neglect to fly the flag, and failure to have any patriotic demonstrations on Empire Day and other suitable occasions throughout the year, the plaintiff, Patriot, gets the verdict. Penalty £5: to be paid into Empire Patriotic Fund, half by defendant, Russell, and and half by members of the school committee.

To some extent this last letter makes light of the whole episode and dismisses it with some gentle mockery. However, it is apparent that the background issue was not seen as trivial. The local head teacher had been publicly attacked over his perceived lack of patriotism and his reputation had been severely damaged. Doubts about his patriotism would have coloured the community’s dealings with him from then on. At another level a clear warning had been issued to all other local schools and head teachers that the local community did expect a highly visible form of patriotism to be on display.

The last point to make is that there was in fact a formal farewell for the 3 men referred to earlier. It came in the following January. It was written up in the local paper on 6 January 1915. This time the school children were involved. It is interesting to speculate whether (a) this formal farewell would have occurred and (b) the Port Albert State School would have been involved, had it not been for the earlier agitation of the “Patriot”.

The Port Albert railway station presented an animated scene on Monday last, when a large crowd assembled to bid farewell to three local soldier boys, James Lindsay, Harry Lewis and Jack Robinson. The school children sang, and the whole crowd joined in “Tipperary” and “God Save the King.” Detonators were placed on the line in honor of the volunteers.

References

Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative

37. “They Rose To The Occasion” : the AIF’s image emerges victorious

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This post looks at the narrative of the AIF at Gallipoli as it was presented in 2 newspapers of the time: The Argus as a Melbourne metropolitan daily and the Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative, published twice weekly, as the local paper for the Shire of Alberton.

At the time, newspapers were the only media source of information. From the very start of the War they were subject to strict censorship, and the release of information covering ‘war news’ was highly controlled. In Australia, there was intense interest in the AIF’s fortunes, matched with the understanding that its first engagement in the War would represent a defining moment in the young nation’s history. Before Gallipoli there were 2 overriding preoccupations: would the AIF prove itself as equal to the British army on the field of battle; and how would the AIF mark itself as a distinctive Australian fighting force? Further, the first major campaign involving the AIF represented the chance to counter the negative publicity it had drawn to itself in Egypt. Overall, even before the first shot was fired, the legendary status of Gallipoli was assured.

The first reports of the landings at Gallipoli came very early. On Monday 26 April 1915 The Argus reported on the ‘allies’ landing in the Dardanelles. The troops were described as British and French and the Australians were not specifically listed. There were significant inaccuracies in relation to the landing sites given. Two days later – Wednesday 28 April – there were more accounts of the landings: they had taken place at several points on the Gallipoli Peninsula, covered by a naval force. The reader was reassured, falsely, that:

In spite of serious opposition from the enemy behind strong entrenchments and entanglements, the Allied forces were completely successful.

On 30 April there was a map of the Dardanelles with landing sites, but there were still major inaccuracies.

On 4 May came the first indication of casualties – the Roll of Honour – giving the AIF dead as 10 officers and 42 other ranks, plus another 96 wounded. In the same edition came the first of the congratulatory telegrams. The Governor General was reported to have congratulated Birdwood on the Australian troops’ … successful entry upon active field service. Birdwood’s cable responded that the … troops have all done splendidly. Importantly, there was also reassuring praise from the British. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, speaking on behalf of the Admiralty, cabled praise for the Australian troops. The First Lord of the Admiralty (Churchill) was reported as extending congratulations to both Australia and New Zealand … on the brilliant and memorable achievements of their troops in the Dardanelles. Churchill was also reported as claiming that Admiral de Roebeck in charge of the British Fleet had expressed the fleet’s … intense admiration of the feat of arms of the Australian land forces.

On 6 May there was an article with the headline Heavy Losses of Officers. The death toll had doubled to 108, the majority of whom were officers. The Argus noted that if so many officers had been killed the number of deaths from the other ranks must have been far greater. It stated that despite the level of casualties, people appeared determined to see the campaign through; and it claimed that the true extent of casualties needed to be revealed as soon as possible. The tone of grim determination was being established.

On May 7 The Argus gave the first account of the actual Australian landings on 25 April. It was sourced from the Reuter’s correspondent in Cairo and it claimed to be the … first report of the actual fighting during the landing of the Australasian troops at Gaba Tepe. There was an accompanying map, showing the point of landing near Suvla Bay. The key headline was “Nothing Stopped Us”. The account highlighted the fighting qualities of the Australians:

When approaching the shore the Australians and the New Zealanders jumped from the boats into water that was often neck deep, and waded to land. They found the Turks occupying the ridges, and took three of these in succession in a running fight, extending over a length of three miles.

The picture of the Turkish defenders was far less complimentary. Prior to the campaign it been widely and popularly believed that the Turks, an inferior race, would be no match for the superior forces of the white British Empire. Now this seemed to be exactly what had happened:

One Australian said afterwards: – “Nothing stopped us. Our big lads lifted some of the Turks on the end of their bayonets and the other Turks ran screaming and howling in fear.”

The inferior Turks were also uncivilised:

The ambulance men were under fire, the Turks making a dead set against them, and shooting them down mercilessly. … It has been established that the Turks used dum-dum bullets.

The Turkish losses were great:

The Turks’ losses were enormous, the bayonet rushes of the Australians and New Zealanders causing great slaughter.

The same article made the incorrect claim that Krithia was practically captured.

May 7 also saw the first article in the local paper – Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative – to do with the Gallipoli campaign. There was a brief reference noting that the list of dead was increasing and that as only officers’ names had been released to that point, the true casualty rate must have been far greater and worse news was to come. There was a local connection because one of the dead officers, whose name had been published, was a Major Hamilton from Malvern who had married a local girl – Una Bland, daughter of Mr & Mrs W Bland of – Yarram. He was described as … a brave man who had died for his country.

The local paper was always keen to promote the link to the local community and one of its preferred options was to include the letters sent back to Australia from local men serving in the AIF.

The same edition of the local paper reprinted an article from the The Age about men flocking to recruiting stations as the list of casualties grew. Rates of volunteering seemed tied directly to casualty levels. This was said to be the British way and another example of true British determination in the faced of tragedy:

Last week the recruiting figures were growing smaller and smaller, and fears were raised that there were few men left to come forward voluntarily. On Monday [3 May], simultaneously with the publication of the lists of Australia’s killed and wounded, the men came forward again in the old way, eager to do their part in the fighting.

Then on 8 May – some 2 weeks after the event – The Argus published the extensive account by Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett of the initial landing on 25 April. This piece turned out to be one of the most significant newspaper reports in Australia’s history.

Ashmead-Bartlett was a war correspondent for the British. He had seen service as a lieutenant in a British unit in the Boer War in and had worked as a war correspondent in the Russo-Japanese War (1904). In its introduction to the article, The Argus emphasised his credentials, noting that he was … chosen to represent the British press at the Dardanelles … and claiming that he was at … the very forefront of war correspondents. This claimed status as the British expert was employed to give credibility to his account. Ashmead-Bartlett went ashore at Gallipoli on the night of 25 April.

Any reader of the account by Ashmead-Bartlett would have been left in no doubt that the Australians had proved themselves on the field of battle to be the equal of the British troops. Apart from anything else, the claims were highlighted in the headlines of the article: They Rose To The Occasion and No Finer Feat in the War. Equal to Mons and Neuve Chapelle.

The article described in detail the fighting qualities of the Australians who had morphed into a race of athletes:

The Australians rose to the occasion. Not waiting for orders, or for the boats to reach the beach, they sprang into the sea, and, forming a sort of rough line, rushed the enemy’s trenches.
Their magazines were not charged, so they went in with cold steel.
It was over in a minute. The Turks in the first trench were either bayoneted or they ran away, and their Maxim was captured.
Then the Australians found themselves facing an almost perpendicular cliff of loose sandstone covered with thick shrubbery. Somewhere, half-way up, the enemy had a second trench, strongly held, from which they poured a terrible fire on the troops below and the boats pulling back to the destroyers for the second landing party.
Here was a tough proposition to tackle in the darkness, but those colonials, practical above all else, went about it in a practical way.
They stopped for a few minutes to pull themselves together, got rid of their packs, and charged their magazines.
Then this race of athletes proceeded to scale the cliffs without responding to the enemy’s fire. They lost some men but did not worry.
In less than a quarter of an hour the Turks were out of their second position, either bayoneted or fleeing.

He was impressed by the reckless and ruthless pursuit of the enemy – But then the Australians whose blood was up, instead of entrenching, rushed northwards and eastwards, searching for fresh enemies to bayonet. – and the courage of the wounded. He claimed he had never seen the like of it before:

The courage displayed by these wounded Australians will never be forgotten. Hastily placed in trawlers, lighters and boats, they were towed to the ships, and, in spite of their sufferings, cheered on reaching the ship from which they had set out in the morning.
In fact, I have never seen anything like these wounded Australians in war before.
Though many were shot to bits, without the hope of recovery, their cheers resounded throughout the night. You could see in the midst of the mass of suffering humanity arms waving in greeting to the crews of the warships.
They were happy because they knew that they had been tried for the first time and had not been found wanting.

While the Turks were referred to as a brave enemy, there were other less flattering descriptions of them:

Amidst the flash of bayonet and the sudden charge of the Colonials, before which they broke and fled, and amidst a perfect tornado of shells from the ships, the Turks fell back, sullen and checked.

and

Early in the morning of April 26 the Turks repeatedly tried to drive the colonials from their position. The colonials made local counter-attacks, and drove off the enemy at the point of the bayonet, which the Turks would never face.

Interspersed with the account of the fighting there was more commendation from the British. The British PM (Asquith) was quoted as declaring in the House of Commons:

The landing of the Australians and New Zealanders was opposed by a heavy fire at point-blank range, but they carried their positions with a rush, and their attack was pushed forward with the greatest dash.

Lastly, there was the greatest of claims, under the headline, No Finer Feat in the War. Equal to Mons and Neuve Chapelle.

There has been no finer feat in this war than this sudden landing in the dark and storming the heights, above all holding on whilst the reinforcements were landing.
These raw colonial troops in these desperate hours proved worthy to fight side by side with the heroes of Mons, the Aisne, Ypres, and Neuve Chapelle.

Both the tone and intention of Ashmead-Bartlett’s account were that of the Imperial Boys-Own – At 3 o’clock, when it was quite dark, a start was made for the shore. There was suppressed excitement. Would the enemy be surprised or on the alert? – but the more relevant point is that the report suited the time perfectly. Here was what was accepted as definite, independent and expert proof from a British war correspondent that the AIF had come though its ‘baptism of fire’ and could count itself as a genuine part of the British Army. Moreover, here also was the beginning of something special: a fighting force that had its own, unique qualities. And now that the ‘truth’ had been presented in the paper it could never be undone. Ashmead-Bartlett’s account became the incontestable foundation for everything that was to follow.

There was more of Ashmead-Bartlett in The Argus on 10 May. Again he portrayed the Turks as not having the nerve to stand up to the Anzacs. And under the heading “These Colonials are Exceptions” he wrote:

Most troops, when under fire, especially volunteers with only a few months’ training, keenly feel losses at the beginning, more especially if these occur before they have had time to settle down, but these colonials are the exception to the rule.
Despite their heavy losses, the survivors were as keen as ever.

There was more praise for the AIF from Birdwood:

General Birdwood told Mr. Ashmead-Bartlett that he could not sufficiently praise the courage, endurance, and soldierly qualities of the colonials. The manner in which they hung on to the position day and night was magnificent, considering the heavy losses, the shortage of water, and the incessant fire of shrapnel to which they were exposed in a position where they were without cover. They also had to face incessant infantry attacks of the enemy, after they retired to a contracted line. They set their teeth, and refused to budge a foot.

Ashmead-Bartlett found the Australians reckless, careless and dismissive of danger. He wrote, under the headline, Bathing Under Shrapnel Fire:

These colonials are extraordinarily good under fire, often exposing themselves rather than take the trouble to keep under shelter of the cliff. One of the strangest sights was to see the numbers bathing in the sea with the shrapnel bursting all around them.

On 11 May, in The Argus under the headline – The Dardanelles Australians’ Bravery. Disdain Of Cover. – an unnamed correspondent continued the same theme of reckless indifference:

An account has been received at Athens from an eyewitness of the recent fighting in the Dardanelles. He states: “The heaviest losses were borne by the Australians and New Zealanders, whose one fault was a complete disdain of cover. Their bravery and dash were amazing. In some cases the men, after rushing the first Turkish trenches in ten minutes, charged ahead despite the appeals of the officers, penetrating several miles inland and suffering heavily when Turkish reinforcements compelled them to retreat.

Back in Gippsland, the account by Ashmead-Bartlett was published, in full, in the local paper – Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative – on 12 May, 4 days after it appeared in The Argus. The same edition ran a short report on local casualties. It gave total losses to that time as 172 dead and 936 wounded and specifically referred to several locals who had been wounded:

Private A .W. C. Avery, son of Mr. and Mrs. Geo Avery, Port Albert and Private F. W. Butler, Jack River and Private H. George, Murrumbeena, who some years ago was a resident of Port Albert, and later was employed in a store at Yarram.

Both Butler and George were subsequently killed. Avery was discharged as ‘medically unfit’ in 1917.

The local paper also began to publish its own accolades for the AIF. On 14 May, it reported a Reuter’s cable:

The “Times” states: – ‘The essence of the Dardanelles enterprise is the resource and vigour of the Australians and New Zealanders, who have been asked to carry out a task which would test the mettle of the most seasoned soldiers. They have already done well, and are now facing more deadly obstacles with the passion of enthusiasm.

In The Argus, Bean’s account of the Gallipoli landing did not appear until 15 May and by that point Asheamd-Barlett’s account had already effectively written the history of the event. Bean’s report – dated Alexandria, May 13 – was introduced as an account of the later stages of the landing of the Australian troops at Gaba Tepe. It was described as supplementing the earlier account by Ashmead-Bartlett. Bean’s account was more precise and while it lacked the jingoism of Ashmead-Bartlett’s style it did reinforce the heroic efforts of the AIF:

“Early on the second morning the 8th Battalion (Victoria) repelled four Turkish charges, and the 4th Infantry Battalion (New South Wales) made a most gallant attack with the bayonet. They drove the Turks back through the scrub till they came on the Turkish camp. Nine-tenths of our men went straight through that, until they were faced by three machine-guns in position farther back, and came under the fire of a battery. This battalion (the 4th) was afterwards ordered to retire somewhat, as its position was difficult to support.

On 19 May in The Argus there was more from Ashmead-Bartlett. This time he was keen to present failure as success. The British had been well and truly been checked in the south (Cape Helles) but he managed to represent this defeat as follows:

”The British,” he reported, “are not yet in possession of Achi Baba, at the southern end of the Gallipoli Peninsula, but have forced the Turks to disclose the strength and character of the defences, and we are in a position to estimate the difficulty of the task.

For Ashmead-Bartlett the failure had been a stunning success:

Our successful landing administered a staggering blow to the Turco-Germans, who, not without reason, regarded the peninsula as impregnable.

Also, on this occasion, Ashmead-Bartlett acknowledged that the Turks had fought with extreme bravery.

On 19 May, the local paper featured more international congratulations for the AIF. Under the heading of War News an unsourced report noted:

General Sir Ian Hamilton says the Australian troops are fit to meet any troops in the world. Outside the Guards they are the largest and heaviest army in the world.

Another also unsourced report claimed:

The heroism of the Australians at the Dardanelles is stated to be unique in the history of modern war.

The paper reported casualty levels as 255 dead and 1841 wounded. Intentionally or otherwise, the casualty level was increasing in proportion to the praise bestowed on the AIF.

The first poem to feature in The Argus on the action in the Dardanelles did so on 20 May. Predictably it touched on death in the cause of the Empire, with gallant souls set free by death in battle.

On 2 June, Bean’s account of the death of General Bridges featured prominently in the local paper. The tone was heroic: Bridges had scorned danger and had been dodging snipers for months. When he was hit, he did not want his men endangered taking him down to the beach:

General Bridges had proved himself a capable and strong commander, absolutely imperturbable amidst the turmoil of operations and wholly without fear.

There was a reference to the Turks not firing on the stretcher as Bridges was evacuated:

The enemy, probably because he saw it was a party carrying a wounded man, did no fire any shots in this direction till the stretcher had passed.
We have noticed that the Turk, whilst not always a scrupulous or humane fight[er], has sometimes acted very fairly and humanely. It probably depends on the individual.

In the same article Bean wrote about the Turkish attack on the morning of 19 May and the huge losses:

Our men were in magnificent spirits, never shooting without a good target, even sitting on the parapet or traverse, laughing and firing as fast as they could load. The next morning the Turks lying in front of our position were far thicker than I have ever seen. There cannot be less than 1500 dead. Our loss was trifling – certainly not more than one to ten of the enemy, and probably only one to twenty.
I have never seen men in better fighting form. They are earnestly hoping the Turks will attack again, which probably they will in spite of the severe lesson, as they are ready to stake a great deal on driving the Australians into the sea.

In The Argus on 7 June there was a report that set out to explain why earlier optimistic forecasts about the British and allied fleet’s ability to destroy the forts and force the Dardanelles had been wrong. The forts were proving too hard to hit and destroy and the mines and guns of the Turks were too great an obstacle and had caused major ship losses. Therefore the current land invasion, supported by artillery, was required. But the Turkish force by itself was only ever portrayed as a second-rate opponent. Without the leadership of the Germans it would have failed:

The Turkish soldier fights very well behind entrenchments, but he is a very bad gunner, and possesses absolutely no knowledge of the science of war. Had the defence of the Straits been left in his hands alone the Allied fleet would most probably have taken Constantinople by now. But the Turkish army, directed by highly trained German officers, and having advantage of their science and technical skill, is a very different enemy.

On 16 June, the Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative published a lengthy soldier’s letter home from the young – 18 yo – Syd Collis who was serving in the Medical Corps. He had written it in early May to his father, Mr Geo. Collis of Alberton. At the time, he was based at Heliopolis. He described his work tending to those who had been wounded at Gallipoli:

Soldiers will be returning to Australia now disabled, some with arms and lefts shot off. I saw a chap get his leg amputated. Some have their toes and hands shot off. It was awful that some of them got shot before they landed. Shrapnel is doing the damage. They are standing the pain like Britons, and wishing to get back to the front – quite as anxious as we are. Light Horse is no good, and all of them have volunteered to go to the front as infantry, our crowd included.

Collis focused on the claimed perfidy of the Turks. He told his father that the general consensus was that if you were wounded you needed to keep a bullet to shoot yourself:

They all say keep one bullet for yourself, because if you see the Turks coming and are wounded shoot yourself, because they have gouged our boys eyes out, and cut their heads off with the bayonet.

He also claimed the Turks also shot stretcher bearers, and they were scared of the Australians and ran from them:

The Turks run when the Australians make the bayonet charge. The Australians slaughtered thousands of them, and took lots of prisoners. They have great name and intend to keep it up.

Another report from Bean – dated 13 May, Gallipoli – appeared in The Argus as late as 18 June 1915. It gave a detailed account of the landing and fighting on the first day. The detail covered the specific action of each battalion on the day and the circumstances surrounding the deaths of individual officers. The language was more restrained than Ashmead-Bartlett’s. Bean described how the men pushed inland, with the Turks reluctant to face their bayonets:

With a shout the first boat-loads fixed bayonets, on the inner edge of the beach, and rushed straight up at it, and the Turks did not wait. Later he wrote: The enemy could be seen quite thick upon the third ridge, but they did not attack. … They did not advance; on the contrary, when parties of our men overshot the general line on the second ridge and went up to the third, they retreated before them and waited for reinforcements.

Bean also made the point about the battalions being mixed up and how the men formed small parties and then headed inland under the command of any available officer. It was an example of the men themselves exercising judgement and initiative in the heat of battle. These were troops who could think for themselves.

On 11 August the local paper featured more reports from Ashmead-Bartlett. He was keen to emphasise not just the physical prowess of the Australians:

The colonials are of amazing physique. No European nation possesses anything to compare with them. The Prussian Guard consists of picked men, but they are fat and ungainly. The colonials are great big-limbed athletes, with not a pound of superfluous flesh among the lot.

but also the collective and independent way they discharged their military responsibilities:

It is not so much an army as a community which has come together for the job, and framed its own laws to carry it out. They work in little groups, which are united either by home ties or mutual regard. These groups discipline themselves.

The preceding analysis shows how, in the weeks following 25 April 1915, Australians reading their newspapers were left in no doubt that the AIF’s first major engagement of the War had been an outstanding success. The men of the AIF had proved themselves to be true ‘Britons of the South’. They were at least the match of the British soldiers. They had proved their worth to the Empire. They had also began to craft a distinctive identity: ruthless in battle; contemptuous of danger; physically bigger and stronger than other soldiers; self-disciplined and enterprising; and with a natural cynicism that brought out the larrikin. It was a very tough, reassuring picture of the AIF, infinitely preferable to that of out-of-control, poorly disciplined rabble destroying Cairo, trashing the reputation of Australia and even being sent home in disgrace with VD. It was also a picture that both helped offset the grief generated by rapidly increasing casualty levels and promoted a surge in enlistments.

The preceding analysis also suggests that what was lacking over this period was any independent, objective analysis of the campaign. The reports were filtered through tight censorship, the tone was celebratory and jingoistic and no criticism of the campaign was even entertained. There was no place in the press for doubt, disbelief or question, at least at this early point. The simple motif throughout was the heroic struggle of the Australian soldier, in difficult circumstances, against an enemy who was in every way inferior and who could be treacherous.

Future posts will show how doubts over the worth of the Gallipoli campaign inevitably arose and a complex play of blame and counter-claim developed to cover what came to be seen as an unqualified military disaster. Indeed the historical debate over Gallipoli – certainly in Australia – continues to the present. See, for example, Robin Prior’s defining work, Gallipoli: The End of the Myth.

At the same time, there has never been any chance that the qualities of the AIF, identified and pushed so hard in the popular press in the first few weeks of the campaign, would ever be seriously questioned or significantly qualified.  True, the Turks could be humanised, over the years, to become a more worthy and noble foe; but, realistically, there was little, if any, chance that the hyperbole of Ashmead-Bartlett and others, once published, could ever be scaled back.

For the press of the time, Gallipoli established Australia’s complete loyalty to the Empire, and proved to all back home that its soldiers were at least the equal of the British. For Australia, Gallipoli was – and has continued to be –  more a proof of national character than a military campaign.

References

The Argus

Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative

Prior, R  2009, Gallipoli: The End of the Myth, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney

35. Image problems for the AIF before Gallipoli

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Typical souvenir sent home from Egypt, 1916.

Typical souvenir sent home from Egypt, 1916.

Prior to 25 April 1915, the AIF was an army in search of an image. The basics of the image were there from the start and the AIF was created to be a national (Australian) army within the greater (British) Imperial army. The name – Australian Imperial Force – succinctly defined the basic building blocks for the image.

All the volunteers for the AIF enlisted as British subjects. Many of its early officers were British. Organisation, training, equipment, weaponry  – all matched the British standard. All essential components were designed so that the AIF could function effectively as a module of the British Army.  In its infancy, the AIF was not capable of acting as an independent military force and relied, for example, on British intelligence and artillery.

At the same time, the AIF was a national army. It was the first, genuinely national military force that the new Commonwealth of Australia had created. While it was created to demonstrate Australia’s total commitment to Britain and the Empire, it still had to reflect a distinctively Australian character. The 20,000 men who landed in Egypt from late 1914 represented the first, large-scale collection of Australian soldiery on the world stage, and it was inevitable that those back home, the soldiers in Egypt, and the rest of the world would try to define this new army in ways that made it unique. The quest was on to define its distinctive national character and explain how it differed from the British Army, and also other Dominion forces, particularly the Canadians and New Zealanders.

The struggle to define the essential character of the AIF began as soon as it was formed and continued throughout the War and in the years after the War. Indeed, it is still a concern today, principally because it has always been argued that the character of the AIF goes to the core of what defines Australia as a nation.

One of the most important commentators on the early AIF was the official war correspondent Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean.  Bean’s own life matched in many way the pursuit of the distinctly Australian (male) character. Born in Australia, Bean was an avowed Imperialist and spent many years at school and university (Oxford) in England; but, once back home in Australia, he became committed to identifying the distinctly Australian national type, and like so many others he was drawn to the itinerant, rural worker.

Bean started his war reporting with a distinctive Australian type in mind. You can see this in some of his earliest reports from Egypt. The following passage is taken from copy he wrote on 22 December 1914. It was published in the local paper – Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative – on 3 February 1915. Immediately prior to this section of the article, Bean had explained how the Australians, because of their higher pay, were being feted all over Cairo, even in the most exclusive hotels. However, it was not just the pay, because Bean also intimated that the Australian, even at the rank of private, had a natural presence and authority to him that promoted respect:

It is a study to see the Australian from beyond the wheat belt with his weather beaten brown wrinkled old face and his rather ill fitting khaki suit sitting at a table in a big grill room amidst over-gorgeous columns and salmon coloured upholstery, surrounded by wealthy Turkish merchants, Italian students, French and Syrian clerks and smartly dressed women, and drinking his coffee or whisky with his mate and waited on by a tall Berber blackfellow in enormous red Turkish pantaloons and wreathed with twice as much gold lace as a field marshall.

Bean captures what he sees as the essential image: the tough, hardened, no-pretence Australian soldier and his mate might appear out-of-place but, in fact, the whole scene revolves round them. However it is all rather simplistic, and for all his efforts to make the connection between the rural working class and the newly formed AIF, Bean must have appreciated that the lifestyle of the rural, working-class male was not ideally matched to the world of military discipline.

In fact, all was not well in Egypt at that time with the AIF.  The Australians were forging a reputation for drunkenness, debauchery and hooliganism and their lack of regard for military discipline was an ongoing concern for their commanders.  For a more detailed account of Australian ‘high jinks’ at the time see Stanley (2010) and in particular his account of the ‘Battle of Wazza’ on Good Friday , 2 April 1915 when Australian and New Zealand troops attacked the brothel district of Cairo.

Australian behaviour in Egypt did not reflect well on either the AIF or Australia. Bean was even asked to write a sort of ‘how to behave in Egypt’ for the newly arrived AIF troops – What To Know In Egypt. It masqueraded as part tourist brochure, part good-health guide and part handbook on understanding-the-local-culture, but it was intended principally to curb the sort of behaviour that was creating a negative image for the AIF. The section on VD was clearly intended to keep the men out of the brothels:

Lastly, Cairo has itself a name in the world as a hotbed of both gonorrhea and syphilis. There is a reason for this. Egypt is not a country under the full control of its government. The Egyptian officials even though they had able British administrators to help them have possessed little control over the foreigners who live here. Egypt has been one of those countries which European nations have only admitted to their circle as probationers, as it were.  …The consequence is that although Cairo has long been a resort of foreign women riddled with diseases it has been almost impossible to check this disease. Egypt has been an ancient home of syphilis – it was certainly here in Roman times; and there is found in the skull bones of mummies a disease which is almost certainly syphilis. Modern Cairo with its mixture of women from all nations, East and West has long been noted for particularly virulent forms of disease. Almost every village contains syphilis. And if a man will not steer altogether clear of the risk by exercising a little restraint, his only sane course is to provide himself with certain prophylactics beforehand to lessen the chance of disastrous results.

However, stronger action was required and Bean was then pressured to write a newspaper piece that left the reader back home in no doubt that there was a problem with the AIF’s image in Egypt. It was written at the very end of December 1914 and it appeared in Australian newspapers about 3 weeks later. Locally, it appeared in the Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative on 22 January 1915. Bean emphasised that he was only describing the actions of relatively few men, and he was keen to talk up the great potential of the AIF, but it was a most uncomplimentary picture. It appeared under the headline: Our Soldiers in Egypt.  High Jinks At Cairo.   “Do All Australians Drink So Much.”

There is only a small percentage – possibly one or two per cent – in the force which is really responsible for the occurrences about which Cairo is beginning to talk; the great majority of the men are keen, intelligent, well restrained young Australians, whom you will meet enjoying their hours of leave in front of the cafes or in the museum or the zoological gardens or the post card shops, dressed as neatly as any of the other soldiers in the town, and behaving themselves in the way in which any rational Australian on a holiday would behave. They have the material in them not merely for as good a force as the New Zealanders or the Territorials, but, to one’s own thinking, of a better force, because the Australians here, besides having the best physique, are, man for man, more highly strung, and, if anything, quicker witted.

But there is in the Australian ranks a proportion of men who are uncontrolled, slovenly, and in some cases – what few Australians can be accused of being – dirty. In a certain number of cases it is noticeable that these men are wearing the South African ribbon. Possibly they are the men who since returning from that war, have never had any skilled occupation, and who therefore were the first to enlist when recruiting for the present force was begun; or it may be that the discipline in the South African campaign was very much slacker than that required of troops before they will be permitted to go to the front in the present class of warfare. Or it may be merely that a certain class of old soldier is given to the very childish habit of showing off before the young soldier, and giving him examples of the sort of thing that he thinks may with impunity be done by anyone who knows the ropes. Whatever the reason it has been noticed by too many people to admit of doubt that whilst many of the most capable and splendid members of the force are men with South African experience, there is a class of old soldier who, so far from being the most suitable member of the force, is the least suitable of any. Many young soldiers take these men at their true worth. “It’s the likes of them that are going to spoil the game for the rest of us and lose us our leave,” I heard one youngster say a few days since. “The fellows are getting a bit fed up with them down amongst our lot.” But they are really doing a very much more serious thing than losing other soldiers their leave – they are losing Australia her good name in the outside world, and those Australians who happen to be living in Cairo or are in touch with the world outside the camps have the mortification of looking on whilst day by day the reputation of Australia slowly vanishes before the actions of a handful of rowdies who do not really represent the country. The Territorials have not our physique, and some of the Lancashire regiments seem to be composed largely of mere children; but by dint of hard work they have become thoroughly smart soldiers; and although both amongst them and the New Zealanders there has been a certain amount of the hard living which will always be found where great numbers of men are collected, none who is not deaf can hide from himself the fact that the talk at present current in Cairo attaches to the Australian force rather than to the Territorials, or as far as I can judge to the New Zealanders.

One does not want to give the impression that things have reached the stage of a scandal or anything approaching it. Steps will doubtless be taken to correct it, as they have been taken before, and the Australian force will be doing itself credit before it has finished its training, and be worthy of the majority of men comprised in it. The New Zealanders have just taken steps to get rid of a certain number of men who were doing little good in their force, and the same, or some similar steps, will no doubt be taken with the Australians. But it is just as well that the Australian public should be aware of the reason for the return of the majority of the men who are returning, or have returned, since the expedition sailed. It is easy for a man to return to his native village and reap a certain amount of hero worship on the ground that he was invalided, or to pitch a story before an admiring crowd at the local hotel of how he was going to show them that he was not going to stand any nonsense, and finally “pitched in” his resignation. The facts are that a certain number of men have been invalided through serious sickness or accident, neither of which was their own fault. A certain number also were sent back some time ago from Albany and Colombo, because some of them – no doubt on conscientious grounds or for reason best known to themselves – refused to be vaccinated. A few others have been, and will be, sent back because they contracted certain diseases, by which, after all the trouble of months of training and of the sea voyage, they have unfitted themselves to do the work for which they enlisted. And a percentage will probably find their way back from here, the reason for whose return has been that they have damaged their country’s reputation, and a few of them have been got rid of as the best means of preserving it.

The tone of the piece is cautious and hesitant and the language is qualified, indirect and oblique, if not obtuse. You had to read into it, for example, that men were being sent back to Australia because they had contracted VD (certain diseases).  In the context of Egypt and the the triumphalism of the White Australia Policy, references to Australians being ‘dirty’ would have had all sorts of offensive associations. The attempt to pin responsibility on the veterans of the Boer War was bound to win enemies but, presumably, it was preferable to target this specific group of older men than suggest there was a problem right across the force. You can sense Bean’s wariness in writing the piece; and the article was, potentially, a career-ending move for him. In fact, his reputation with the troops was severely damaged and it was only his bravery in the subsequent action at Gallipoli – he was recommended for the Military Cross and mentioned in despatches for his work with wounded men – that restored his standing.

Some idea of the fury that the article sparked amongst the troops in Egypt at the time, comes from another piece published in the Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative  on 30 April 1915. By this point the local paper was regularly publishing extracts of letters sent home by soldiers serving overseas. This particular letter came from Athol Woods who was the son of (former) Major Woods of Woodside. Alexander Thomas Woods was a grazier of Darriman and his son – Harry Athol Woods – had enlisted as a 34yo in Brisbane on 27 August 1914. It appears he was farming on the Darling Downs prior to enlistment.  Overall, Athol Woods was critical of the way newspapers were reporting events from Egypt, and he specifically targeted Bean. He described Bean’s articles as unjustifiable and unpardonable and he wanted Bean severely dealt with. He was prepared to admit that there were some Australians who were a problem, but he did not want their actions to be publicised, in any way:

Of course, in a body of men like we have here, there are sure to be a few who go over the odds, but it is a very poor percentage, and even these few have not done anything very dreadful. It seems hard that all we Australians should be termed a disgrace to the Empire and Australia by an animal wearing the stars of a captain who has not got the nous of a mule. But enough of this. I think the people of Australia will treat these articles with the contempt they deserve.

The barely concealed rage evident in the letter home from Athol Woods points to just how sensitive the whole issue of the AIF’s image was. Everyone – the troops in Egypt, their officers and all those back home in Australia – knew how critically important the image of the AIF was to the image of the nation as a whole.  Prior to Gallipoli, the fear that the AIF was creating the wrong image weighed heavily on people’s minds. And Bean had come to understand that using the Australian press to hammer home lessons to the troops on how they should behave was not going to work.

References

Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative

Stanley, P 2010, Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny, Murder and the Australian Imperial Force, Pier 9, NSW

C E W Bean: entry in Australian Dictionay of Biography

Bean, C E W 1915, What to Know in Egypt: A Guide for Australian Soldiers, Cairo

The ‘Souvenir of Egypt’ is held by the Cashen family. It was sent to Marie Ziesing from Alfred Carr – both of Mile End, SA – in 1916.

27. ‘The lions of the evening – the men in khaki’: farewells to mid 1915

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An earlier post (11) covered the farewell in September 1914 of the first large group of recruits, approximately 50, from the Shire of Alberton. Other posts have pointed out that many more volunteers left the Shire individually and without any sort of formal farewell. Judging by newspaper reports, it appears that after the September 1914 farewell from the Alberton Railway Station there were only 2 additional formal farewells through to May 1915. Both of these farewells came at the end of 1914 and they are the subject of this post.

The 2 farewells came about when recruits were given final leave to return home and bid farewell to their families before being sent overseas. Given this, it was inevitable that the men involved were ‘locals’ in the sense that they had strong, long-standing and on-going association with the district. They were coming ‘home’ before being sent overseas. Other men who had enlisted from the Shire but who had had only passing or limited association with it, as well as those whose association with the Shire had been in the past, would hardly return for such farewells.

One of the farewells was held in the small community of Stacey’s Bridge and the other in Yarram, the most populous and chief town of the Shire. The one at Stacey’s Bridge was more a relaxed, community celebration whereas the one at Yarram was a more stylised and formal farewell. This difference between more community-focused farewells in the smaller townships and settlements of the Shire, as opposed to the more formal farewells conducted at Yarram, was to continue throughout the War.

The farewell at Stacey’s Bridge on Wednesday 4 November 1914 was written up in both local papers – the Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative and the South Gippsland Chronicle – on 6 November 1914. Both accounts mentioned that word of 4 men coming home for a final farewell was received with only a few days warning and that preparations, not just for the farewell but also for an appropriate ‘souvenir’, had to be organised very quickly. On the night there was a ‘three-fold programme’. First there was a (roller) skating carnival, with prizes for ‘best dressed’ and ‘best skater’. This was followed by the actual farewell presentation ceremony for the 3 local lads who were home on final leave from Broadmeadows before leaving for overseas. Finally, there was a dance social for everyone.

It was a very hot night but nonetheless the skaters, bathed in perspiration, managed to keep up a lively performance, many of them in fancy dress. The four local lads acknowledged that night were: Jack Cantwell (21yo), Aloysius Cotter (19yo), Patrick Sexton (19yo) and Jack Babington (20yo). The last of these – Jack Babington – had not managed to get leave but his presentation gift was accepted by his father and he was certainly acknowledged in the speeches. For their ‘souvenir’ gifts, the men had been given the choice of a ‘gold locket’ or field glasses. After the presentation ceremony the assembled crowd sang a verse each from Rule Britannia and the National Anthem. The dancing that followed ran well into the small hours.

The speech making that night emphasised pride in the fact that ‘boys’ from Stacey’s Bridge had joined the AIF. According to the Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative : It was a credit to the Stacey’s Bridge district that four young fellows had volunteered, and they might well feel proud of them. The same paper noted the young age of the volunteers – only 18 or 19 years of age – and remarked that people remembered them as local school boys. There was also praise for their parents .. who did not raise the slightest obstacle to their sons’ desire to go to fight. All of them had been members of the Stacey’s Bridge Rifle Club. Overall, those there noted the young locals were … – straight, honorable young fellows, who were determined to fight for their homes, their relatives and their friends.

At the same time, there was a level of naiveté evident in comments made that night. People were not even convinced the boys would have to fight. Mr Robert Lee was quoted as hoping … they would not have to fight, but if they had to, he felt sure they would give a very good account of themselves. He wished them a pleasant trip and no fighting. The reality, as already indicated (Post 23), was that the death rate in this first group of volunteers from the Shire would be 1 in 3. Of this group, it would be Patrick Sexton. He managed to make it right through to April 1918 before he was killed. On that night of farewell from Stacey’s Bridge, the last night he spent with his family, his sister (Margaret Sexton)  took out the prize for the best dressed skater.

Those who spoke that night at Stacey’s Bridge were all local farmers. There were patriotic sentiments expressed and notions of duty stressed, but the overwhelming sense was that of pride in, and best wishes for, the local boys who had grown up known to everyone and were now off to war, not that people at that point had had any first-hand experience of what the War meant.

The only other major farewell to locals, up to May 1915, took place one month later at Yarram on the night of 9 December. According to the detailed article in the Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative of 11December 1914, the 7 men farewelled were: Sergeant Newlands (sic), and Privates Harry Bett, W. Sweeney, P. Sweeney, W. O. Sutton, H. Coulthard, and J. Babington. Obviously, this time Jack Babington was able to get his leave. In the detailed account of the same event published in the South Gippsland Chronicle – also on 11 December 1914 – the names of the men themselves were not included. The only reference made was to Sergeant Newlands (sic) who responded to the toast. One consequence of not including the names – and it must have upset the families at the time that the names were not recorded – is that it is not possible to identify precisely who the men were. The definites were (Sgt) William Andrew Newland (34yo), who had spent 4 years in the light horse in South Africa, Henry Drysdale Bett (19yo), Patrick Joseph Sweeney (28yo), William Owen Sutton (19yo) and John Sutherland Babington (20yo). The W. Sweeney was either William Henry Sweeney (28yo) or William Patrick Sweeney (21yo). It was probably William Henry Sweeney, the brother of Patrick Joseph Sweeney, but it is not definite because the other William (Patrick) was also a local who could well have returned for a farewell. He was most likely a cousin of the Sweeney brothers. The problem with the name H. Coulthard is that there was no H Coulthard who had enlisted. It must have been either Eric Osborne Coulthard (20yo) or Samuel Francis Coulthard (31yo) who were most likely cousins.

In terms of the war service of this group of 9 men (5 definites and 4 possibles) only one – Patrick Sweeney – was killed in action (August 1915); but only 2 of the other 8 managed to serve the entire period of the War. The most common experience was that they were discharged early after being wounded. For example, Sgt Newland, wounded at Gallipoli, was back in the Shire by August 1915. Subsequently, he became the local recruiting sergeant.

The farewell at Yarram was a very formal affair and once again it was put together with little notice. The organisers even managed to place an ad for the event in the Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative on the day it was held. The ad noted that it was to be a Farewell to Our Soldiers, that there would be Speeches by Prominent Residents, and that admission would be by a small donation at the door to defray expense of refreshments.

Both local papers reported the event in detail on 11 November 1914.

The Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative set the scene under its heading: Our Soldier Boys. FAREWELL. PRESENTATION OF SOUVENIRS. MONSTER GATHERING IN THE MECHANICS ‘ HALL.

Short as was the notice – about 24 hours – the Mechanics’ Hall on Wednesday evening was crowded to its utmost capacity by a gathering of local and district residents, met to honor the young men who were, perhaps, giving their lives for their country. It was an enthusiastic assemblage, an air of patriotism being imparted by the flags representing England, Australia, Belgium and Russia. While on the stage sat the lions of the evening – the men in khaki.

Occasions such as this in the early days of the War served the dual purpose of recognising the sacrifice of the individuals who had volunteered and providing a platform for declarations of patriotic loyalty. The latter function was very evident that night in Yarram. There were 6 designated speakers. As has been noted earlier, the speech making at such functions in Yarram was dominated by the class of proprietors, managers and professionals.  It was this group that, effectively, had taken responsibility for articulating the narrative of the War on behalf of the Shire. The local papers disseminated – and also augmented – the narrative. Admittedly, there were 2 local graziers who spoke that night but one of them was Neils John Christensen who spoke as the then Shire President and the other, Arthur Hugh Mooore, had very little to say beyond wishing the men a safe return. The key speakers were Rev. George Cox, Fr. Patrick Francis Sterling, George Frederick Sauer, draper from Yarram and also the President of the local Australian Natives’ Association branch and Ben Percival Johnson, solicitor of Yarram.

Rev. Cox was keen to emphasise religious justification for the War, arguing that Germany was, effectively, no longer a Christian nation. The account from the Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative noted:

The Rev. Cox was called upon first. He did not know if this form of gathering was unique in Yarram, or had been held in connection with the South African war. To many it was an unusual experience to have a number of citizens going from amongst them in the name of God and the Empire, to fight in the greatest battle in history. It was fitting, he thought, that the church should be first to speak, because he believed the war was a religious one fundamentally. He realised that it was a war of Christianity against a philosophy born of hell. … These young men were going to fight in the name of God. May He give them His sheltering care, and may they be instruments for His glory.

The fact that Fr. Sterling was called upon to offer a speech reflected the common support, at that time, across all Christian denominations for the Nation’s and the Empire’s commitment to the War. Sterling had been born in Nenagh, Tipperary. He would have left his audience in no doubt about his patriotism. The paper wrote:

He had a letter from his old Irish mother the other day, whom he had never heard swear, but she was hot when she wrote that letter. She said, speaking of the sinking of the Emden, “I notice your country has sent the poor devils to hell.” (laughter). He echoed those sentiments, and hoped the young men from this district would send many a German to heaven. (Loud Applause)

On the face of it, Sterling’s reported hope that the locals would be despatching Germans to heaven does not appear to match his mother’s sentiments and, not surprisingly, the version in the South Gippsland Chronicle is a better fit:

He had lately had a letter from his mother in Ireland and she had said, commenting on the Emden, “I see some of your people have blown some of the devils to hell.” (Laughter) He had never known his mother to swear before. (Laughter). He hoped the Yarram soldiers would send many of the Germans to hell. (Loud laughter and cheers)

Whether the German dead were heading for heaven nor hell there was clearly popular support for killing them. Given the comments of both Cox and Stirling it is worth reflecting on just how difficult it would have been at the time for any clergyman to question either the justification or conduct of the War.

Sauer, as President of the local ANA, laboured the idea that Australians could always be relied on now, just as they had been in the Boer War – they were there when wanted every time – and that they were natural fighters: The fighting blood in our veins came from the old stock, and they would find that Australian boys at the front would keep their end up with the best troops in the world. (Applause).

Johnson, the local solicitor, had the task of presenting the souvenir to each soldier – a wristlet watch . He was keen to stress their youth:

He preferred to call them boys; he had known some of them as toddlers. Some had attended the local state school, and other schools in the district and now they were about to depart to fight in the greatest war the world had ever known.

Johnson pressed the common themes of the Empire – they were going to fight alongside their kinsmen, the British of Canada – the sacrifices being made by the men, and their families – particularly their mothers and wives and sweethearts – and the confidence that everyone had in their fighting abilities. Johnson also touched on another of his favourite themes: the belief that very few people, even including the people in the UK, really understood the seriousness of the situation unfolding in Europe. People needed to wake up to the enormity of the danger they faced.

The musical items presented that night – and there were very many – were as patriotic as the speeches. The following list is compiled from the account in the Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative : The Veteran’s Song, Sons of the South, Harlequenade, The Soldier’s Pardon (recital), (It’s a Long Way to)Tipperary, Flight of Ages, John Bull (repeated), Bianca, (It’s)The Navy, The Englishman, The Sergeant of the Line, Jonathon Jones, Home sweet Home. The South Gippsland Chronicle added to the list: Trooper Johnnie Ludlow. All told, and with lively audience participation, the items must have stretched for at least one hour.

The morning after the farewell there was another short send-off immediately before a scheduled meeting of the Shire Council. It was attended by about forty people. There was a toast to ‘The King’ and those there sang one verse of the National Anthem. Speeches were short but there was mention of how the men from the ‘back blocks of Gippsland’ were going to hold their own and show the British soldiers how good they were. Everyone wished them a safe return home and, again, some even hoped they would not have to face battle. Events were concluded with one last toast. In the words of the Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative:

Glasses were charged, and the health of the soldier boys drunk, musically honoured with “Jolly Good Fellows” and “Tipperary.” Good-byes, bugle calls, and they were soon off to Alberton, to catch the train.

There were no further organised farewells in the district until May 1915 when one of the local doctors, John H Rutter joined the army medical corps. Then, after Gallipoli, the rate of farewells increased dramatically and the whole process of farewelling the locals who had enlisted became more organised and, over time, more directed to the process of recruiting.

References

Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative

South Gippsland Chronicle

18. Was it possible, by the end of 1914, to comprehend the reality and scale of industrial war in Europe?

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An earlier blog – The Belgian Narrative. Part 1 – gave some idea of military casualties in Europe by the end of 1914. The level, after just a few months of fighting, was on a scale never before experienced. Beaumont (2013 p. 28) gives the Austro-Hungarian casualties (dead, wounded, missing) in Galicia as 420,000. Strachan’s figure (2001 p. 278) for total French casualties through to just 10 September is 385,000. Hochschild (2011 p.117) gives total Russian casualties to the end of September as 310,000. Strachan (p. 278) gives combined German casualties for the first battle of Ypres as 80,000 and his equivalent figure for British losses in the same battle is 54,105. Hochschild (p.126) notes that by the end of 1914 the BEF had suffered 90,000 casualties. Strachan (p. 278) generally agrees with this level and notes that casualties to 30 November of 89,964 actually exceeded the size of the original establishment of the British Expeditionary Force. This is only a snap shot of just the first few months: it does not cover either all theatres of conflict or all battles.

At the time, it did not follow that the true level of casualties was either known or, if known, revealed. There was comprehensive censorship in place both in Britain and in Australia. Further, in the case of Australia there was the vast distance from the reality of Europe. In Britain, on the other hand, the constant flow of wounded men arriving back from France made it difficult to conceal the whole truth. Moreover, as British soldiers became casualties in France the letters back home began to dry up, and with this happening on such a scale it was increasingly clear that an unprecedented catastrophe was unfolding across the English Channel. Australia would not experience the equivalent situation until after the end of April 1915.

Casualty levels were quoted in Australian papers at the time, but the picture given was impressionistic, confused and understated. Reports in The Argus after the Battle of Mons (23/8/14) illustrate the point. On 3 September (p.7) under the headline How We Fought At Mons   Stories From The Front   Told By Returned Men  the British casualty figures appeared at the end of the article. In summary, an official list of British casualties showed that some 165 had been killed, 680 wounded and approx. 4,200 were missing. But, 5 days later, in The Argus on 8 September (p.7) another report gave total British casualties to 1 September as 42 killed, 147 wounded and approx 5,000 missing. Allowing for the discrepancy here in the casualty figures given just 5 days apart in the same publication, the more pertinent point is that a few days after Mons, at the Battle of Le Cateau on 26 August – a date well within the time frame of the 2 sets of casualty figures published in The Argus – British losses in a single day came to 8,500.

Whenever casualty figures were given they were always presented in a narrative intended to lionise the British or Allied troops and denigrate or demonise the opposing side. Copy was written so that casualty figures were filtered through the ideals of Imperial loyalty and national greatness. Heroic sacrifices and casualties could and had to be accepted by the grateful nation. For example, readers of the The Argus on 8 September (p.7) would have read in the same article that gave British casualty levels:

The British have established a personal ascendancy over the Germans, who are conscious that the result is never doubtful if the numbers are even. The British rifle fire has devastated every column in attack, while their superior training and intelligence enable the British to cope with vast numbers.

They would also have been buoyed by the following:

The British Press Bureau reports that 800 sick and wounded British troops are at Netley, in the Isle of Wight. Shrapnel had been responsible for the majority of the wounds. Cases of bullet wounds were few, which gave confirmation to the statement that the German infantry shoot badly. Cases of injury involving the loss of a limb are very uncommon, and the vast majority of the wounded were making good recoveries and would soon be able to rejoin their regiments.

Beyond the highly censored accounts of the fighting, understated casualty levels and the constant stories of bravery, duty and martial skill, newspapers of the time turned to other genres of reporting the War. For example in the Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative on 30 September (p.3) under the heading War Information. there appeared an unsourced and apparently random collection of war ‘trivia’. For those interested in the technical wonders of modern armaments there were items such as:

A 12-inch gun will send a projectile through three feet of wrought iron at 5000 yards.
12-inch guns fire a projectile weighing 850lb. whilst a 16.25-inch gun can throw a missile a ton weight 15 miles.
The guns of the H.M.A.S. Australia can pierce the heaviest armor used on any modern warship at a distance of 4 1/2 miles.
Machine guns fire over 1000 shots per minute. The best makers are the Maxim, Gatling, Gardner, Hotchkiss, Nordenfeldt and Krupp.

There were also items touching on military and naval strategy: The British dreadnoughts are of too great a draught to enter the Baltic, the sea being too shallow. This is therefore a safe hiding place for the German fleet.

Other trivia attempted to present some sort of comparison with earlier European wars: After the surrender of Paris in 1871 there were 534,000 French soldiers under arms and 835,000 Germans. The French lost during war 156,000 dead, and 143,000 were wounded or disabled. The Germans lost 28,000 dead, and 101,000 were wounded and disabled. French and German casualties had already exceeded these figures by the time the article appeared, just 2 months into a conflict that would run for another 4 years.

There was also the genre of ‘expert’ comment. Arguably, the most bizarre example of this genre appeared in the Sunday Times (Sydney) on 23 August (p.7). Again, it was unsourced but it was probably taken from a British paper. Under the headline – Modern Battles   Not So Sanguinary As Of Old   Improvement In Weapons, Followed By Decreased Proportion of Losses – the article set to establish that:

With the increase in death-dealing arms – machine guns of frightful rapidity, and so on – one would expect to find modern warfare more deadly than when men fought with swords and battle-axes or with flintlock muskets and pikes.
That, however, is not the case. Modern battles have distinctly shown that while numbers engaged on either side are ever growing larger, the proportion of losses has grown less.

There was even a table showing that over time – beginning with the Battle of Borodino (1812) and running through to the Battle of Shaho (1904) in the Russo-Japanese War – the proportion of those killed, wounded, missing and prisoners to total force engaged was declining. Accordingly, no matter how many were engaged in the conflict then underway in Europe, the rate of casualties could be expected to continue to fall.

Whether the article was written as propaganda or it was just superficial commentary from some ‘military expert’, the claims made in its opening paragraph – claims it was seeking to refute – did describe, accurately and graphically, the scale of the blood-letting to follow:

With millions of combatants facing each other in the present struggle in Europe evidently intending to fight to a finish, the carnage that must ensue cannot fail to be appalling. If, indeed, the same proportion of men were to fall as they used to do in battles of bygone times, half Europe would be absolutely drenched in blood.

However, as naive as such expert analysis could be, historians argue that even military commanders had been conditioned to underestimate the dreadful carnage to come. Hochschild makes the point that prior to the outbreak of conflict in Europe, modern weaponry had been reserved for colonial conflicts. He describes the Battle of Omdurman (Sudan) in 1898, noting the deadly efficiency of the new machine guns. Present at the battle were Winston Churchill – then a 23 year-old correspondent – and Major Douglas Haig who would go on to become commander of the BEF from 1915. According to Hochschild (pp. 18-19), on the day of the battle, some 50,000 Sudanese, twice the number of the British troops opposed to them, attacked on a broad front and were cut down by the latest version of the Maxim machine gun. There were 6 of the new weapons deployed and the particular model fired 500 rounds per minute.

… thanks to the Maxims, in a few hours the British were able to fire an extraordinary 500,000 bullets at the hapless Sudanese.
It was a historic slaughter. When the Battle of Omdurman was over later in the day, some 10,800 Sudanese lay dead on the desert sand beneath a brilliantly clear sky. At least 16,000 more had been wounded, and were either bleeding to death or trying to drag themselves away. The British lost only 48 dead.

Hochschild notes that while the new weapons demonstrated their killing power against poorly armed ‘natives’, military authorities were not inclined to consider what would happen if the same weapon was used by both sides in a European conflict. Indeed, Hochschild notes that the European powers appeared to have reserved the new weapons for exclusive use in Asia and Africa. Both British and German forces had used the new weapon in colonial wars. According to Hochschild (p.19),

This, to Europeans, seemed the machine gun’s logical use: “It is a weapon,” declared the Army and Navy Journal, “which is specially adapted to terrify a barbarous or semi-civilised foe.” No one imagined that either British or German soldiers would ever find themselves in the role of Sudanese Arabs, experiencing their very own Omdurmans in the very heart of Europe.

Elsewhere, Hochschild (p.110) also notes that for the military commanders of WW1 – including Haig, referred to above – their formative experiences in colonial wars had failed to prepare them for the true horror to come:

No one on either side was prepared for the fighting’s deadliness. Like the British, recent German and French experience of war had been of minor colonial conflicts with badly armed Africans and Asians: Erich von Falkenhayn, soon to be chief of the German general staff, had helped to suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China, and Joseph Joffre, the French commander in chief, had led an expedition across the Sahara to conquer Timbuktu. Neither side had spent much time on the receiving end of fire by machine guns or other modern weaponry.

Given the censorship and the news reporting of the time it was hardly surprising that people generally did not see the beginnings of industrial war, where new technology – the machine gun, modern artillery and barbed wire in particular – was to enable mechanised killing on a scale never seen before. Moreover, the people of the Empire carried with them into WW1 the tradition of lightning campaigns, the power and glory of the cavalry charge, the élan of the corps, the experience of limited casualties and the certainty of victory from countless Imperial campaigns.

Remarkably, there was one newspaper article at the time that did accurately foretell what was to come. Even more remarkably, it appeared in the Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative (28 August, p.6). The article was headlined: The Million Unit.  Vastness Of Modern War.  Question Of Endurance.  Can Any Nation Stand It? The article also appeared in a range of regional papers round the same time, for example: The Bathurst Times (20 August p. 4); Gippsland Mercury, Sale (28 August, p.7); Preston Leader (29 August, p.4). Oddly, it does not appear that it ran in the large metro dailies at the time.

The article was written by Adam McCay who worked for the Sydney daily, the Sun. Adam Cairns McCay and his brother, Delamore William McCay, according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, were well-known and successful journalists at the time. Both worked at the Sun after its establishment in 1910, and both in fact later served as editor of the paper. Adam McCay would become famous as the literary editor of Smith’s Weekly. However, what was most interesting in relation to the article written by Adam McCay in August 1914 was the fact that the oldest brother in the family was Sir James Whiteside McCay, who, amongst other positions, had been federal politician (1901-5), Minister for Defence (1905) and military censor at the outbreak of the War, and who had just been appointed as Commanding Officer of the 2nd Infantry Brigade of the AIF. At the time, the oldest McCay brother was regarded as one of the best military minds in Australia; although his actual military career through WW1 was dogged by controversy. It is reasonable to argue that the thesis expressed in the article reflected the thinking of, or was at least directly influenced by, the writer’s oldest brother.

The basic thesis presented in the article was that the current war in Europe was on a scale never seen before and the sheer scale of the conflict meant that it was unsustainable. The title – The Million Unit – emphasised that modern armies, where the basic unit of size was 1 million men, had never been seen before in history. Nor was it just the number of men in uniform because there were also the millions required to run the war industries to sustain the conflict; and all those either in uniform or in the war industries represented lost productive labour and lost economic wealth. Economically, war on this scale was unsustainable on anything but a very short-term basis and McCay gave a time frame of only two months, at a cost of £600,000,000 for Europe as a whole.

McCay argued that the notion of victory coming from overpowering the enemy in set piece battles was no longer tenable. Armies of this size could no longer be simply beaten in decisive battles. Supplying and managing the million-strong army was extraordinarily difficult: to then employ it strategically and dynamically within a complex and changing battle plan was almost impossible.

Great battles to-day cannot be won by swift tactics. Skilful moves in attack, clever out-flanking devices, brave charges and assaults will not suffice to drive out of position of advantage a vast force of a million men.

There was a natural tendency, in a conflict of this scale, for both sides to be forced to pull back and adopt defensive positions and strategies. McCay believed that, once this occurred, it would become obvious that there could be no military resolution. His was a prescient version of the 1950s doctrine of ‘mutually assured destruction’. It is interesting in the following how there is no reference to British strategy, interests or troops. Perhaps this was to avoid the censor’s attention. The conflict is being presented as essentially a European one:

The best hope for the world, if it is to be a world-condemning war, is that France and Germany may during the next few days or weeks fight a great battle which will be indecisive of the fate of the two nations in the war. If on the Russo-German frontier a similar deadlock should occur, there will be an obvious moral for the Continent which has for a generation devoted its vital energy to the task of preparing for this Titanic combat. It will then be shown that war is utterly futile. With two nations armed for mutual slaughter, the best result in the interests of future peace would be that they should realise that after all their huge preparations, they are both so well-prepared, and prepared on so vast a scale, that the exhaustion of their capacity for fighting must come before either can gain the decisive victory.

But McCay also hypothesised that even if the warring nations were forced into defensive warfare, exhaustion overtook them and each recognised that a military victory was not achievable, it was still possible that the war could be protracted. What he wrote in late August 1914 in a newspaper article, whose circulation appeared to be limited to regional centres, was stunningly accurate:

It is at the present moment hard to see how Germany and Austria can be defeated save by exhaustion. Placed by political boundaries in the dominant middle position between their two strong military opponents (France and Russia), and with other strategic advantages in their favor in the geography of the German frontiers, they present almost insuperable difficulties to conquest by invasion.

In the next paragraph he surmised that, equally, Germany could not overcome France and it would therefore eventually have to fail by ‘exhaustion’.

But there was no definite time frame for the ‘exhaustion’ to take effect. McCay argued it would be inevitable; but he conceded that his belief that it must be soon – principally because of the economic cost of war on such a scale – could be wrong:

When the first grandiose assault of arms has worn out the strength of the nations, supposing neither the Alliance nor the entente to have decisively won, what is to follow? A frightful possibility is that war may continue on a scale less in its devastation, with the impoverished nations struggling on for years in the midst of their misery. But surely human wisdom and mercy could not tolerate this iniquity; nor would the nations which bear the awful cost persist in the futile horror.

As the European conflict moved to its entrenched, defensive phase, McCay underestimated the power of industrial-scale war first to maintain and then surpass the level of casualties of the first phase. He also overplayed the powers of wisdom and mercy, and underestimated the resolution of nations to persist in the futile horror. Nor did economic drivers force the cessation of hostilities. However, for those who at least read it – and no doubt some in the Shire of Alberton, thousands of miles from Europe, did read it – McCay’s article demonstrated that amidst all the censorship and confused and uncritical reporting of the opening phase of the European war there was at least the beginning of an understanding of just how different the current war was to be. But Australia in late 1914, both in terms of distance and time, was still a very long way from the new reality of industrial war.

References

Beaumont, J 2013, Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest NSW.

Strachan, H 2001, The First World War. Vol 1. To Arms, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Hochschild, A 2011, To End All Wars: A Story Of Protest And Patriotism In The First World War, Pan Books, London.

Australian Dictionary of Biography

McCay, Adam Cairns (1874-1947)
McCay, Sir James Whiteside (1864-1930)

16. Righteous war and religious renewal, September-October 1914

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The last post examined how the narrative covering the invasion and occupation of Belgium dominated newspapers from August 1914 and was used to prove to readers that the Empire’s declaration of war with Germany had been justified. This post pursues the theme of the righteousness of the Empire’s position by looking at the unqualified support offered by the Church. While there was broad support from all faiths, including (Roman) Catholicism, it was the Protestant Churches that took on, and were expected to take on, the formal role of justifying the Empire’s involvement. It was Protestantism that presented itself as the religion of the Empire.This arrangement was reflected at the local level in Alberton Shire where the Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative, during August and September 1914, devoted considerable copy to pronouncements made by clergy from both the Church of England and the Presbyterian Church.

On 4 September (p.2) the local paper published the pastoral letter from the Church of England Bishops of Victoria that outlined the Christian response to the War. This was followed immediately by the sermon delivered by Rev. George Cox of Yarram on the same theme. Neither the pastoral letter nor the sermon expressed any doubt about the righteousness of the Empire’s position. There were numerous references to ‘imperial duty’ and the ‘justice of the Empire’s cause’. The basic line was that the Empire, because of what it was, had to be supported: The Empire, which is the home of freeborn citizens and fosters throughout the world the spirit of righteousness, calls for our help. The enemy, by contrast, was driven by …the spirit of aggressive military despotism.

While there was absolute conviction in the righteousness of the cause and total determination to support the Empire there was also a sombre tone. In the pastoral letter, the bishops called for a Christian response to the fighting:

The time of war is a challenge to the Christian Church to use her faith and influence to the uttermost extent, so as to minimise the evils of war and render assistance to its victims. … We trust that the clergy will, in their sermons, never forget how unfitting is all boastfulness of power or pride. … we cannot forget the untold misery which, from the very first, must accompany this great conflict of nations.

For his part, the prescient Rev. Cox was clearly challenged by the apparent incomprehensibility of the situation:

When we consider that the nations now engaged in this awful strife are the foremost in civilisation, enlightenment and religion; when we realise that both sides claim that their forces are engaged as the instruments of God for the overthrow of the other; when we think of all the fiendish inventions of mankind that are being used in the slaughter of his fellow-man in the cause of righteousness; when we ponder upon the untold and unthinkable suffering and misery and wretchedness and waste which the whole civilised world will be called upon to face for many a year, we may well stand appalled.

For Cox, the fundamental dilemma of two Christian nations going to war against each other was resolved by the conviction that one of them – Germany – while still claiming to be Christian, had in fact betrayed the very principles of Christianity:

Christianity stands for three things, amongst others – righteousness, justice and truth. But a great and powerful nation, professedly Christian, has substituted in place of righteousness military despotism, for justice arrogance, and for truth hypocrisy and blasphemy.

Importantly, both the pastoral letter and Cox’s sermon called for religious renewal. The view was that at such a time of crisis people had to turn again to God in prayer, and renew their religious life. For the Empire to prevail everyone had to take their religious obligations more seriously. As the bishops put it, penitence was the moral order of the day:

To all, in every Parish of the Province, we make our solemn appeal for repentance from past sins and for a whole-hearted surrender of our lives to the care and providence of the Eternal Father, through our Saviour Jesus Christ.

Cox gave a practical illustration of just how skewed people’s current priorities had become, and how far they had strayed from God’s true path and were testing His goodness. Cox noted:

How little we, as a nation, recognise this duty [our duty to God] so far may be judged by a comparison of the attendances at our football matches and the interests taken in them, and the attendance to our churches, and the recognition of our duty of praying for our troops.

Football was being set up to become the whipping boy of WW1.

This call for religious renewal was to take two very important directions over the course of WW1. One was the conviction that the War called for a moral as much as a military response, and that long-term social causes such as temperance had to be pursued with renewed vigour. Australian society had to become more religious, more morally pure and less vulgar. Hopefully, the defence of the Empire and the attendant turning to God could be employed to force people to confront the spiritual poverty of their lives. The other direction, even more extreme, was the attempt to portray those who answered the call of the Empire as, literally, soldiers of Christ. This latter direction was always going to be a big ask with the AIF but, as we will see in future posts, clergymen like Cox certainly did pursue it. Cox certainly saw his own enlistment as an extension of his Christian life.

Like the Rev. Cox, the Rev. F Tamagno of the local Presbyterian church was another Protestant preacher who had sermons published in the local paper at this time. His first sermon was reproduced on 4 September 1914 (p.2). As was common at the time, he employed the text, Render unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s.The conventional treatment of this text highlighted the difference between duty owed to the divine as opposed to any temporal power. However, in Tamagno’s sermon there could be no conflict and therefore patriotism and religion were fused in the interests of the Empire. For Tamagno, it was inconceivable that the British King could ever be an unbelieving, despotic Caesar. Nor could the glorious history  and achievements of the Empire ever be challenged. There was therefore no conflict of duty and the Empire was in the right:

Patriotism is upon our lips. Once more in the history of our Empire, and its King, we are being called upon to manifest that spirit of patriotism, so characteristic of our race. We all realise how momentous shall be issues of this war of the nations. It will not do for us to lean upon our forces only, but upon God. I believe that at heart our Empire and King are depending upon God for an honorable and triumphant victory. The nation that tries to conquer Britain, has before it a Herculean task – so great and so bloody, that one would think that Germany, even now would pause, and honorably decide to go no further. Tennyson has well said – “This England never did, and never shall, lie at the proud foot of a conqueror.” The stirring memories of our past are sufficient to awaken throughout our Empire that spirit of indomitable courage so characteristics of Britishers. The path by which we have come has been stained with the blood of heroes and heroines. We hoped that the nations had learnt to settle international disputes no longer by trained brute force, but by the calm and light of reason. Our Empire’s duty is plain; our conscience is clear; out hands are clear of the blood of thousands.

It is also interesting to note Tamagno’s Empire-centric view of the War. World events were only seen through the filter of the British Empire and so for him the War was fundamentally a conflict between the British Empire and Germany. The reality, particularly at that point, in the first few months of the War, was that the conflict was decidedly a European one, and British involvement in this unprecedented European upheaval, at this stage at least, was only an expeditionary force.

Tamagno also saw the potential of the War to turn people back to God. In a sermon reported in the local paper on 7 October 1914 (p. 4) he made much of the recent reports of how the French – infamous for their hardline separation of Church and State, secularist tendencies and socially radical intellectual tradition – were turning back to God: They are becoming devout once again, filling the church, and valuing the ordinances of the religious life.

For all the sermons – set within the particular theological boundaries imposed by the British Empire – on the righteousness of the Allies’ cause in WW1, there was much additional evidence published in the press that pointed to German guilt and perfidy. As indicated in the last post, the brutal invasion of Belgium, and the subsequent repression and exploitation, certainly made it easier to promote the righteousness of the Empire’s stance and convince people that this was a conflict between forces of good and evil. This was a dominant narrative in the local press. At the same time, there was also a wealth of contemporary German political writing that could easily be employed to cast that nation as the aggressor. In the sermons of both Cox and Tamagno referred to above, references to the spirit of aggressive military despotism and trained brute force were code for what was seen as incontrovertible proof of German militarism. The commonly held view was that by the early twentieth century  Germany had created a new form of political state and civil society, committed to the ruthless and scientific application of military power to achieve political ends. It had become a military state. Proof for views such as these was there in abundance. For example, in the local paper on 28 August 1914 (p.6) under the headline, Modern German Ethics. Bernhardi’s Famous Chapter. A Cry For Bloodshed readers were treated to an extensive extract from General Friedrich von Bernhardi’s book Germany and the Next War (1911). The text had been published widely and well publicised. People reading the material published in the local paper would have learned that Germany, far from being reluctant to go to war actually saw war as a scientific necessity and moral duty:

War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with, since without it an unhealthy development will follow, which excludes every advancement of the race, and therefore all real civilisation. “War is the father of all things.” The sages of antiquity long before Darwin recognised this.

Without war, inferior or decaying races would easily choke the growth of healthy budding elements, and a universal decadence would follow.

They would also have read of Germany’s determination, and assumed right, to acquire new territories. Ironically, there was nothing here that British Imperialists could have faulted:

Strong, healthy and flourishing nations increase in numbers. From a given moment they require a continual expansion of their frontiers, they require new territory for the accommodation of their surplus population. Since almost every part of the globe is inhabited, new territory must, as a rule, be obtained at the cost of its possessors, which thus becomes a law of necessity.

War, they were also informed, served to replenish and renew:

All petty and personal interests force their way to the front during long periods of peace. Selfishness and intrigue run riot, and luxury obliterates idealism. … Wars are terrible, but necessary, for they save the State from social petrification and stagnation.

They would have also picked up that Germany had no commitment to international bodies set up to promote world peace, and was inherently suspicious of nations, such as the United States, that promoted this approach.

The German position even presented Christianity itself as a religion that promoted war: Christ himself said: “I am not come to send peace on earth but a sword.” His teaching can never be adduced as an argument against the universal law of struggle.

‘National character’ and ‘military tradition’ had to come together to create the optimum society, one geared for war.

Overall, readers would have been confronted with the inescapable reality that Germany was committed to war:

Reflection thus shows not only that war is an unqualified necessity, but that it is justifiable from every point of view.

Taken at face value, all such claims – made within the formal context of German military and strategic planning, and reflective of Germany’s determination to assert its rightful position in Europe and the World – could not but cast Germany as a ruthless, aggressive and almost super-human foe.

For those reading newspapers and going to church over the first few months of the War there would have been little doubt that the very existence of the British Empire was threatened. Fortunately, God was most definitely on the side of the Empire; even if He was calling for significant religious renewal.

References

Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative

15. The Belgian Narrative. Part 1: to the end of September 1914

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This is the first in a series of posts that looks at the development and dissemination of the narrative of events in Belgium through August and September 1914. Later posts will look closely at the impact of the narrative on the local community of Alberton Shire, in Gippsland.

When war commenced there was a desperate need for news. Some sense of the desperation is evident in this account taken from The Argus of 7 August 1914 (p.6). It describes the scene in Collins Street, Melbourne on the night of Thursday 6 August. The previous night – the day on which news of the British declaration of war had reached Australia – there had been ‘rowdyism’ and riots in the streets of Melbourne as people’s emotions had run out of control. As a consequence, on this night – 6 August – the police were out in force.

For a long time it looked as if they [the police] were going to have the street [Collins Street] to themselves. Suddenly a board appeared on the front of The Argus office bearing the news of the German repulse in Belgium. As if by magic a seething crowd sprang from nowhere, and in five minutes’ time Collins street was packed from kerb to kerb with a surging throng thirsting for news.

As desperate as people were for news of what was happening in Britain and Europe, the actual flow of news from that part of the world was drying up. Censorship had been introduced even before the formal declaration of war. Printed in The Argus on Wednesday 5 August (p.10), the official notice from E D Millen, Minister of State for Defence, declared that 2 days earlier, on 3 August … censorship of all cable and wireless telegraph communications throughout the Commonwealth had come into effect. In the same edition, the editor of The Argus (p.9) noted:

The strictest censorship of all cable messages, both press and private, received in and sent from the Commonwealth was exercised by the Military Authorities throughout yesterday.
This fact, taken in conjunction with others, indicates that Great Britain has become so seriously involved in the great European conflict that war with Germany, if it has not already broken out, certainly appears to be inevitable.
The establishment of censorship explains the comparative brevity of our cable messages in this edition. A considerable number of our telegrams from England have been detained by the Censor.

In addition to the limits imposed by censorship, the reality was that the military situation in Europe over the period August – September 1914, was hard to track and comprehend. Even if there had been no censorship it would have been difficult for news agencies to report accurately on what was happening. The period from early August to the aftermath of the Battle of the Marne saw massive troop movements as the armies of Germany and France, supported by the BEF and Belgian forces, attempted a rolling series of flanking and envelopment manoeuvres across vast areas. Even today, with all the history written on this period, there is still ongoing debate over interpretations of what happened. The sheer scale – and horror – of the military conflict that convulsed western Europe in the first 2-3 months of WW1, is evident in figures taken from Strachan (Chapt 3). He gives French casualties (dead, wounded, missing) to 10 September, after one month of war, as 385,00 and notes that by the end of 1914 France had lost 265,000 dead. The twenty-second of August 1914 saw the highest level of French casualties in a single day for the whole of WW1 – 27,000 dead. The equivalent figure for total German casualties to 9 September was 265,000. Casualties for the British Expeditionary Force to the end of November were 89,964 and by the same point the Belgian armed forces had been reduced by half. Casualties at these levels were unsustainable, for any army.

Strachan’s account demonstrates the size and complexity of the military operations in the first few months of the fighting. It highlights that even those directly involved – including the field and overall commanders – were often unsure of what was unfolding. Occasional news despatches, from one or other battlefield, were therefore always going to be of doubtful value, assuming in the first place that they were even passed by the censors. Impartial, accurate, meaningful and timely news was a seriously limited commodity.

It was against this background of confusion and censorship that the narrative of events that unfolded in Belgium became so powerful over the first few months of WW1. It dominated news services in the Empire and came to define the purpose and nature of the War. It was an unfolding news story with simple characterisation and plot, and it was set within the context of high principles and moral absolutes.

The narrative commenced with the declaration of war. Britain’s obligation to guarantee Belgian neutrality was presented as the pre-eminent reason for the declaration. In the edition of The Argus of 5 August (p.9) Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Minister, was reported thus:

It has been said that we might stand aside and husband our resources, and intervene in the end to put things right, but if we ran away from our obligations of honour and interest regarding the Belgian treaty, I doubt whether any material forces would be of much value, in face of the respect that we should have lost.

Against this principled position, Germany was the blatant aggressor, prepared to invade Belgium if its ultimatum for free movement of its troops through the country was not immediately met. The developing themes in the basic narrative were simple: Germany was the aggressor; Belgium was the victim facing overwhelming Germany forces; and Britain was the reluctant but principled major power that was forced to intervene.

Once the German assault on Belgium began, another key theme was added to the narrative: Belgian heroism. Belgium’s refusal to accede to German demands and its willingness to mount uncompromising and deadly resistance to the vastly superior invading forces cast it immediately as the heroic small nation. Headlines in The Argus on 6 August (p.7) declared: Germans in Belgium. Neutrality Violated and “We Will Not Submit.” Belgians’ Cry “To Arms.” The next day, 7 August (p.7) the paper was full of stories of how the heroic Belgians had stopped the German advance. The headlines proclaimed: German Reverse. Enormous Losses Sustained. Victory for Belgians and the report claimed: The Belgian War Office announces that the German invading army has been repulsed near Liege with enormous losses. … The heroism of the Belgians is described as “superb.”

There were other reports quoted in the same edition that claimed, “The general situation in Belgium is excellent.”

The reality was that the situation in Belgium was anything but excellent and by 11 August, readers in Australia should have picked up that the plight of Belgium was dire. The headlines in The Argus that day, Germans Outside Liege and Forts Held By Belgium, were supported by claims from Brussels that the Belgians continued to hold the forts. However, the same article also reported the German version: “We hold Liege fast in our hands. The losses of the enemy are considerable.” The German forces first broke the Belgian line at Liege on 7 August but it was not until 16 August that the siege of Liege was over. It had taken the German Army far longer than the scheduled 2 days; and the siege had highlighted the heroic – but doomed – struggle of the Belgian resistance.

The next theme in the Belgian Narrative – German atrocities – also seems to have first appeared in Australian papers at this point round 11 August. The same edition of The Argus featured accounts of the punishment handed out to the civilian population when it resisted the German forces. At this point, the German reprisals were set within some sort of context. It was not random violence. For example, under the headline Prisoners in Firing Line (p.7) there was an account of how

… the Germans were fired at from windows by numbers of the inhabitants of Liege. They were all caught instantly and shot. The Germans hold the Governor of the province of Liege (Lieut-General Heimburger) and the Bishop of Liege as a hostage, and threaten them with death if the forts continue to fire. A number of railway men and 25 others were accused of firing at Germans and driven at the point of the bayonet into the firing line before the forts. Three of them were killed, and the rest, pretending that they were dead, fell and lay on the ground.

There are other reports in the same edition of how the Germans threatened severe reprisals if their troops were fired on.

Reporting that continued to acknowledge the context for German reprisals in Belgium lasted for another couple of weeks. For example, in The Argus on 24 August (p.9), under the headline Germans Fire on Civilians, readers were informed:

The position of civilians in Liege is critical. The “Daily News” correspondent at Rotterdam states that shots were fired by the troops from a house. On Thursday the Germans bombarded 20 houses, killing many inhabitants. … The “Daily Chronicle’s” Amsterdam correspondent says that the situation of the citizens of Liege is very unfavourable. A shot was fired from a house on Friday. The Germans immediately opened fire with their machine guns, destroying 20 houses, and killing the inmates, and setting fire to 10 other houses.

However, just a few days later, on 27 August, the emphasis shifted dramatically to the reporting of German ‘atrocities’. The context was no longer that important. Rather, the focus was the appalling nature and ferocity of the reprisals. Under the headline Atrocities in Belgium (p.7) the following appeared:

The Belgian Minister has published a startling statement, giving a long list of outrages committed by German troops. These are vouched for by a committee of inquiry. While Belgian troops were resisting an attack by German cavalry they killed a German officer. No civilian took part, yet the village of Linsmeau was invaded by German artillery, cavalry and machine guns, notwithstanding assurances by the burgomaster that no recently fired guns had been found. Houses were burned, and the peasants were divided into groups. Afterwards were found in ditches skulls apparently fractured by rifle butts.

By 31 August (p.10), after the destruction of Louvain, the German forces in Belgium were being described as ‘barbarous’. The headlines that day proclaimed: Barbarous Germans. Beautiful City Burnt. “An Unpardonable Act”. In the commentary was the following statement, which had been released by the British Government Press Bureau. It ran under the headline, Residents Shot:

The destruction of Louvain was an unpardonable act of barbarity and vandalism. … Louvain is miles from the real fighting. International law recognises that the only legitimate aim of war is the weakening of the enemy’s army, and the rules forbid the destruction and seizure of property not imperatively called for by military necessities. By destroying Louvain, the Germans committed a crime for which there can be no atonement. Humanity has suffered a loss which can never be repaired.

Similarly, the edition of The Argus on 2 September (p.9) featured the headlines Ruthless Germans. The Tragedy of Louvain. Dead Litter Streets. It related the eye-witness account of an Oxford undergraduate who was present at the sacking of the beautiful Belgian town of Louvain by the Germans. The eye witness described how Gutted houses were tumbling into the streets, and German soldiers were looting the ruins. … Bodies of the murdered townspeople littered the streets.

Finally, the string of headlines in The Argus of 17 September (p.9) illustrate just how dominant the theme of German barbarity in the Belgian narrative had become by this point: Germany’s Shame. The Belgian Atrocities. Fiendish Outrages Related. An Orgy of Blood. German Abomination. Civilians Slaughtered. German Atrocities. Ten Priests Murdered. Drunken Men’s Orgy. Women Stabbed. Beyond the shocking headlines, the examples of brutality highlighted in the reports left little to the imagination:

The body of a man was found with arms and legs cut off, and that of another with the legs amputated. The hands of a child, 15 years of age, were tied behind its back and then the body was torn open.
A woman was stabbed with a bayonet, petroleum was next poured over her, and she was thrown alive into her burning home. The corpse of another woman was burnt in a similar manner.
An old man was suspended by his arms from a rafter and burnt alive.

The Belgian narrative – with its themes of British integrity, Belgian heroism, and German arrogance and barbarity – dominated the metropolitan press in the large cities by the end of September. The same narrative was presented in the local paper in the Shire of Alberton, albeit in a scaled down manner.

At the start of the German invasion of Belgium the local paper presented the same confusion and false hope. On 12 August (p.2) the Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative was reporting that German morale at Liege was low because of the withering Belgian fire … which mowed them down like corn. The German supply train was said to be in chaos, the troops starving and and men surrendering just to get food. In one report the Germans had been repulsed: A telegram from Brussels states that 40,000 Belgians have repulsed 43,000 Germans near Liege. But even in the same edition there were other more alarming reports: The Belgians displayed heroic courage in the defence of Liege, but they declared that they were too fatigued to repel the perpetual onsets of an overpowering number of Germans. Reporting by the end of August is far more sombre and it is clear that the German onslaught cannot be stopped. On 28 August the headline reports Heavy Belgian Losses, which a Belgian officer gives as 10,000 men.

By September the locals in the Shire of Alberton were also reading the claims about German atrocities. For example, the edition of 18 September (p.3) reported that various committees had been set up to investigate German outrages in Belgium. In terms of the atrocities themselves there were many accounts. In the same edition, locals read of how the German troops even set about the desecration of churches. The headline was Horrors in Aerschott Cathedral. Deeds by Drunken Soldiers:

The Antwerp correspondent of the “Evening News” describes horrors in the Aerschott Cathedral on the high altar, on which there were many empty wine and beer bottles. In the confessional were champagne and brandy bottles. The offertory box was stolen and replaced by beer bottles. Bottles were stuck in the pews, and everywhere were bottles and filth. The Madonnas Head and a large crucifix were burnt on the altar, brocades were slashed, pictures chopped from the frames, and a dead pig was found on one side of the chapel. This is the work of drunken German soldiery.

There was an even more sordid report in the same edition: Awful Outrage. Death of a Nurse:

On Wednesday, a daring German attack was made on Vilvorde. The Germans cut off the breast of Grace Hume, of Dumfries, a Red Cross nurse engaged in the Vilvorde hospital. The nurse died in great agony.

The reports of German brutality continued to multiply. On 23 September (p.2) there were more accounts of German perfidy and Belgian suffering under the headline, More Plundering By The Germans:

A large number of places situated at the triangle of Vilvorde, Malines and Louvain, are given over to plunder by the Germans, and partially destroyed.
The inhabitants were shot without trial, and women unable to escape were exposed to the brutal instincts of the Germans.
The Germans allege that the Belgian Government has distributed arms amongst the inhabitants; that the Catholic clergy has preached a sort of holy war; and that the women are as ferocious as the men. These are a tissue of lies.

The true extent and nature of German atrocities in Belgium from August 1914 have been the focus of historical debate for the past 100 years. There is no doubt that Belgium’s neutrality was violated, the German invasion was ruthless and the subsequent occupation of Belgium was harsh and exploitative. There were atrocities against the civilian population. Against this, many of the sensational, lurid and macabre stories – written in part to fashion public opinion in the then neutral United States – that filled newspapers at the time were fabrications. For example, the report above about the British Red Cross nurse murdered by the German soldiers was a complete fabrication. While nurse Hume was a real person, she was not in Belgium – she was living in Huddersfield – and the story had been concocted by her sister. The sister, Kate Hume, was subsequently prosecuted. The story itself had been disproved by late September 1914. Yet for the entire duration of the War similar stories about the mutilation of Belgian civilians remained common.

The Belgian narrative, in all its themes, was very powerfully presented and it was very effective in shaping people’s attitudes and beliefs. It reinforced for people the righteousness of the Imperial cause. The war had been forced on Britain and the Empire. They had been compelled to act to protect Belgian’s neutrality. Germany was the aggressor. The narrative also underscored the ideal of sacrifice: Belgium was doomed. It could never withstand the onslaught of the German forces; yet it resisted – stubbornly, forcefully and heroically. And, undeniably, Germany was a ruthless and determined enemy. Within just weeks Germany had shifted from being one of Australia’s major trading partners, and a nation recognised for its advanced technology, industrial output, training and education, arts and culture, as well as the original homeplace of so many highly successful and well-regarded immigrants – and whole communities – to a pariah state, given over to the most extreme form of militarism, that threatened the very basis of Western Civilisation.

The locals, like people all across Australia, were deeply affected by the Belgian narrative and enthusiastically supported major relief programs for Belgium. By the end of September advertisements were appearing for all kinds of activities. As an example, the local paper of 30 September (p.3) advertised a Handkerchief Afternoon Tea to be held at Aylesbury, Yarram on 7 October, with proceeds to the Belgium Fund. Everyone was cordially invited and admission was handkerchiefs for wounded soldiers. All such sympathy, support and fund raising became an extension to the Belgian narrative. A later post will show the practical effects in the local community of the outpouring of sympathy for the poor, oppressed people of Belgium.

References

Strachan, H 2001, The First World War. Vol1. To Arms, Oxford University Press

The Argus

Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative

For those interested in following up pictorial depictions employed at the time, the cartoons by Louis Raemaekers on the invasion and occupation of Belgium are available on Project Gutenberg. See:

Cammaerts, E 1917, Through the Iron Bars: Two years of German occupation in Belgium

Raemaekers’ Cartoon History of the War. Volume 1: The First Twelve Months of War

10. Rural workers and the federal election of 1914

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War was declared in Australia on the morning of 5 August 1914 in the course of a federal election. It was less than a week after both houses of federal parliament had been dissolved (30 July) and four weeks before the scheduled election date of 5 September. The brief background to this situation went back to May 1913 when the incoming Cook Government (Liberals) found itself with a majority of just one in the House of Representatives and in minority in the Senate. It then set about to engineer a double dissolution, under S 57 of the Constitution. It became the first national government to exercise this provision. The Cook Government hoped to convince the electorate that its decision to force the double dissolution was entirely justified as an attempt to break what it portrayed as the ALP’s stranglehold over its legislative agenda. After the declaration of war and pledges of Imperial loyalty, the Cook Government presumably believed that it would win further support from the electorate or, at least, reasoned that the electorate would be reluctant to change government at such a momentous time. But the results of the 1914 election proved it wrong: the ALP was returned with a comfortable majority in the House of Representatives (42:33), with a vote of 50.9%, which to this day still represents the highest level of support ever achieved by the party. In the Senate the ALP gained 31 of the 36 seats. This was before proportional representation in the Senate (1949).

The results of the September election clearly demonstrated the nation’s confidence in the ALP at the most critical time in the young Commonwealth’s existence. The political landscape looked back to the time of the first Fisher Government of 1910 -1913 when the ALP had a clear majority in both houses. This first Fisher Government had been the very first national government since Federation that had been able to govern in its own right. It was also recognised for the amount of progressive or radical legislation – depending on people’s political philosophy at the time – that it passed, including the critical legislation on national defence (the universal training scheme). At the start of WW1, the ALP had a record for strong, socially-progressive and nation-building government. It had emerged as the single, most powerful political party in the nation and its success had effectively forced the opposing political parties (Protectionists and Free Traders) to combine in a single political entity – the so-called ‘Fusion’ of 1909 – and even copy its strategies. However, the apparently monolithic power of the ALP as the driving force in Australian politics in the early years of Federation was to shatter in less than 2 years over the issue of conscription.

The ALP relied on the cities and major regional towns for its support, and both the rapid rise in manufacturing, particularly in Victoria, and urbanisation prior to WW1 had strengthened this demographic base. But rural Australia was a very different proposition, particularly where towns were small, the population dispersed and manufacturing and other secondary industry limited. Gippsland, and more particularly the Shire of Alberton, were definitely not in the ALP heartland. In fact, the ALP did not even put up a candidate for the relevant House of Representatives seat (Gippsland). However, it did at least work to build or, at least, retain its Senate support and in May 1914 – well before the double dissolution – ALP Senator Russell gave a public address to a large audience in the shire hall at Yarram. It was a long (two hours) and lively meeting and it was reported in detail in the Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative ( 20 May 1914). Senator Russell obviously knew he was in a Liberal stronghold and attempted to counter the claims most commonly made against the ALP: it didn’t understand or care about the farmers and rural industry; it struggled with financial management; it favoured preference for unionists in the workplace etc. There was a lot of (Applause) and (Laughter) noted in the paper’s report of proceedings and Russell obviously put in a good performance. He touched on many issues. He argued that the co-operative ventures of the farmers, particularly the dairy farmers, were a form of socialism. He attacked price fixing by monopolies like the Colonial Sugar Refining Company in Queensland. He accepted the need to fine tune the universal training scheme because it was interfering with the young lads’ football and other sporting commitments. He claimed that PM Cook was engineering the grounds for a double dissolution, and there were many passing shots at the Fusionists, including the then current member (J Bennett). However, the most significant comment came towards the end of his address when he claimed that the ALP had lost the 1913 election because of the ‘Rural Workers’ log’. Russell continued with a spirited defence of the industrial rights of the rural working class:

The Fisher Government lost [the] last election because of the Rural Workers log. A rural worker is a young man reared in the country district. One painful fact is that he clears out to the city to better himself, because he sees less opportunity in the country districts. The poor chap who looks round the factories and can’t get a job goes to the country. The men farmers want are those born and bred in the country. By all means help them in the country, and don’t sweat them. The farmer who gives decent conditions has nothing to fear. As to the Arbitration Court, the farmer has an equal right to state his case. Farmers be men! Don’t ask for the right of the three, four or five per cent who sweat their men. men, whether labourers or employers, had a right to be treated as men. No power could stop the Rural Workers going on. If they are checked, when strong enough they will strike – and at a time when the crops are ripe.

The Rural Workers’ Log was a set of claims drawn up by the Australian Wokers’ Union to cover pay and conditions for rural workers. The set of claims was an ambit one and the AWU could only put it up if there was an interstate dispute. Moreover, it would have proved very difficult to unionise the widely dispersed rural workforce in a district such as the Shire of Alberton. However, despite these qualifications, the very existence of such a log of claims was seen by farmers, and represented by anti-ALP forces, as an all-out attempt to unionise the rural work force. To the farmer, particularly the small farmer, and even more particularly the dairy farmer, the idea of a unionised workforce was anathema. Farming was based on family labour, supplemented by small-scale, casualised and itinerant labour. It was also looking to mechanisation to reduce its dependence on labour. Labour demands were driven by seasonal, climatic and a whole range of other variables. Unlike the factory, the farm did not see the absolute separation of home and work place. Nor was there any simple division of time and, for the individual worker, the range of work, and the skills involved, were more varied than in any factory setting. In short, Russell’s claim that the Rural Workers’ Log had cost the ALP the 1913 election would have rung true with his audience at Yarram.

Without even realising it, Russell was also being prescient because the Rural Workers Log was again put forward as the key issue in the 1914 election in the Shire of Alberton. As there was no ALP candidate even standing for the House of Representatives seat of Gippsland, the anti-ALP forces in the district needed both to limit the ALP vote in the Senate and ensure the victory of the ‘right’ anti-ALP candidate in the lower house. In this case, the right candidate was the then sitting member Bennett, a member of the Cook Fusion Government, as opposed to G H Wise who was standing as Independent Liberal. The basic strategy adopted was to talk up, again, the threat of the Rural Workers Log and thereby portray the ALP as anti-farmer and, at the same time, portray Wise as a tacit supporter of the Rural Workers Log. To see how this strategy played out it is necessary to look closely at the role played by the editor (A J Rossiter) of the local paper, the Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative.

As future posts will show, Rossiter became one of the key players in the district to provide the narrative both of and for the War. He used his paper to push a particular line which, in brief, was unequivocally both pro-Empire and pro-conscription. At this point, September 1914, he had no qualms about pushing a very direct pro-Liberal and anti-ALP line for the federal election. On Friday 4 September 1914, the day before the election, he featured in his paper a how-to-vote card under the heading Federal Elections. The Liberal Vote. It stated, All true Liberals should vote thus and directed readers to vote first for Bennett in the House of Representatives and then for the six named Liberals in the Senate. Similarly, in the editorial on Wednesday 2 September, in the week leading to the election, Rossiter backed the six Liberal candidates for the Senate and expressed his ‘utmost confidence’ in them. He also backed Bennett and claimed with confidence that he would be returned. At the same time, his endorsement of Bennett was not overwhelming, noting that:

Mr Bennett has done nothing to forfeit the confidence of the electors. As a speaker he has vastly improved, and during his brief term as Gippsland’s representative no man could have worked harder for the good of the province. He has passed through two most trying sessions, which might have been productive of good but for obstruction by the Labor Party.

However, the direct public endorsement of the Liberal candidates was only part of the political game plan that Rossiter pursued. He also actively promoted the fear about the Rural Workers’ Log. Just two weeks after Senator Russell had claimed, at the public meeting at Yarram, that the Rural Workers Log had cost the ALP victory at the 1913 election, Rossiter published a detailed overview of the log of claims, on 3 July 1914. The headline he provided stated that the log was to operate from 1 October 1914 which implied that its implementation was imminent. The same article appeared in the paper on a regular basis throughout July and, as reported in the paper, the log of claims would have raised serious concerns. For example, dairy farmers would have been most concerned about the rigid approach to hours of work and the related provision for overtime:

… 48 hours shall constitute a week’s work, such hours to be worked as follows: – Half-past 7 a.m. to 20 minutes to six on five days of the week, with one hour for dinner; and five minutes past 7 a.m. to 12 noon on Saturdays, with two “smoke-ohs” of 15 minutes each, one in the forenoon and one in the afternoon. Overtime is put down as time and a half.

The basic strategy Rossiter employed was to highlight the threat of the Rural Workers’ Log and its impending introduction – to reduce the ALP vote in the Senate – and at the same time emphasise Bennett’s strong opposition to it, as opposed to what he represented as Wise’s lack of concern or ambivalence. For example, in an editorial on 24 July 1914 Rossiter began by highlighting the ‘grim ogre’ of the Rural Workers’ Log with its ‘preposterous demands’ that was hanging over and threatening all farmers. He accepted that its introduction might not be as imminent as some – including himself! – claimed, but he did urge farmers to be prepared to combine together quickly and contribute funds to a shared pool to fight the claim in the Arbitration Court. Against this effective ‘call to arms’, in the same editorial Rossiter featured comments made by Wise to the effect that it would be very difficult for the AWU even to get its log of claims before arbitration and that, in any case, by its very nature the log was exorbitant and it would never succeed in its present form. Wise was being portrayed as unconcerned or sceptical. Then, on 19 August, there was a detailed account of a speech at Alberton on 15 August by Bennett. The headline was ‘Rural Workers’ Log’. In the article Bennett challenged Wise’s claim that he, Bennett, had deliberately inflated the threat of the log and was employing it as a ‘scare’. In the article Bennett railed against what he claimed was the dire threat posed:

The Rural Workers’ Log is no scare. It is a far reaching piece of realism and if persisted in it will absolutely destroy primary industries, and the day you destroy agricultural progress that day you will hand the development of Australia over to some foreign nation which has more sense than to force the Agricultural Industry into or under an award of an Arbitration Court. To fix the hours of employment and the rate of wage for the farmers is an impossibility until you can fix the rainfall and the sunshine.

He continued in the same vein to argue that the arbitration system itself was set against the farmers and reinforced the claim that Australia’s agricultural future was threatened by the Rural Workers’ Log.

Wise also gave an election speech in the district at the same time – 14 August, at Yarram – which was also reported in detail in the paper (19 August). The thrust of Wise’s argument was that Cook’s Fusion Government had been a failure: rather than attempt to pass legislation it had contrived to bring on a double dissolution for political purposes. He even claimed that the ‘Fusionists’ exercised stricter discipline than the ALP, implying that they were not genuinely ‘liberal’. He did talk about the Rural Workers’ Log but he minimised the threat it posed. He claimed that the Fusion Party had used the threat of the log very effectively in the last (1913) election: At [the] last election one successful lie was told – the most successful and effective lie that was ever told at an election – and it won every country seat in the Commonwealth for the Fusion, that was the lie about [the] Rural Workers’ Log.

There was also a series of letters published in the paper at this time with claim and counter claim as to the real danger posed by the log and the extent to which talk of it was being used to scare people and influence voting. Overall, Rossiter managed to keep the issue of the Rural Workers’ Log as the key local issue for the election and he definitely tried to discredit Wise by suggesting that he tried to downplay the threat because he was sympathetic to the ALP. Wise was also alleged to favour preference for unionists in the workplace. In the last editorial he wrote before the election – Friday 4 September – Rossiter left no one in any doubt about his views on Wise:

As, therefore, Mr Wise, be he described as Independent or what not, has in the past so assisted the Socialistic Labor party in directions inimical to the interests of farmers, whom he seeks to represent, they should rise as one united band tomorrow and say with the overwhelming voice of an undivided poll, “we will have none of him.”

Two of the Liberal candidates for the Senate gave election speeches in Yarram. Senator McColl addressed 150 electors on 5 August (reported 7 August) and Mr McLean addressed a large number of people on 1 September (reported 2 September). Rossiter’s two newspaper reports on their speeches were extensive and the speeches covered the full range of claimed ALP failings – the evils of the caucus system, the poor financial management of the ALP in government, union bids to restrict immigration to keep wages high, preference for unionists in the workplace, the ALP’s abolition of postal voting, the ALP’s use of the Senate to thwart the power of the House of Representatives, socialism Vs liberalism and so on. They further touched on topical issues such as the East-West railway, the funding for the new national capital, old age pensions and national insurance, and the White Australia Policy. There was even a question from the floor on Home Rule. Tellingly, as reported, there was not a single reference to the Rural Workers’ Log; and, presumably, if either speaker had raised it as an issue Rossiter would certainly have reported it.

Rossiter’s campaign against both the ALP in the Senate and Wise in the House of Representatives would have to be judged successful. As far as the Senate was concerned, roughly 60% of Gippsland votes went to the Liberals. The outcome in the House of Representatives was less clear cut. In fact, it was Wise who won the seat – by some 600 votes – but, more locally, in the Shire of Alberton, Bennett outpolled Wise by 200 votes. It is interesting to speculate why, outside the Shire of Alberton at least, Wise was successful. In part, Wise was obviously a strong local candidate. In fact, he had won the seat in 1910 with a majority of some 4,000 votes but then lost it to Bennett in 1913 by 2,400 votes. Once Wise regained the seat in 1914 he held it until 1922. As well, the fact that Wise had not joined the Fusionists probably helped him. Certainly he was able to portray himself as someone who had remained true to his principles: someone prepared to stand as an ‘Independent Liberal’ rather than compromise his beliefs. In a farming community that saw unionism a form of coercion, was naturally wary of government, in any form, and valued individual effort above everything else, it was not surprising that the independent candidate, as a professed liberal, would attract support.

It was hardly understood at the time (September 1914) but the intense opposition to the proposed log of claims for rural workers, with its implied unionisation of the rural work force, would have a parallel manifestation in 1916 when Hughes tried to introduce conscription. Just as unionism was opposed because it threatened traditional farming arrangements, with the focus on family labour, so too would the push for conscription be seen as an attempt to ride roughshod over the individual farming family’s right to balance the tension between retaining the farm and serving the Empire. Both instances threatened to undermine the independence of the farming family and the viability of the family farm.

Finally, it was somewhat ironic that the pay arrangements being then determined for the the newly formed AIF – 6/- per day, including 1/- deferred pay – posed at least the equivalent threat to the supply of itinerant and casualised labour in rural areas as the much-hyped and over-stated Rural Workers’ Log.

References

Gippsland Standard and Alberton Shire Representative

‘The Labor Party. Senator Russell At Yarram. A Stirring Address’ 20 May 1914, p.2
‘Federal Elections. The Liberal Vote.’ 4 September 1914, p.2
Editorial, 2 September 1914, p.2
‘Rural Workers’ Log. To Operate On Oct. 1st.’ 3 July 1914,  p.2 (Also 10, 15, 17 July 1914.)
‘Rural Workers’Log. Mr Bennett At Alberton’ 19 August 1914, p.4
‘Federal Elections. Mr G.H. Wise At Yarram’ 19 August 1914, p.4
‘Original Correspondence’ 2 September 1914, p.3 and 4 September 1914 p.2
Editorial 4 September 1914, p.2
‘Senator McColl at Yarram’ 7 August 1914, pp. 3-4
‘Federal Elections. Mr. McLean At Yarram’ 2 September 1914, p.2

Note: details on election results appeared in the edition of 9 September 1914, p.3