Gallipoli (84 page)

Finally finishing, he hands the letter to Keith Murdoch, together with several letters of introduction he has written for him – including to Harry Lawson, the proprietor of his paper,
The Daily Telegraph
, and Chairman of the Newspaper Publishers' Association, which will hopefully allow Murdoch to meet the people he must in London, to tell the truth about what is happening to the army in the Dardanelles. The two journalists take their leave of each other with some emotion, fully aware of the gravity of what they are doing, and unaware that some of their conversation has been overheard by one of the other correspondents. For if walls have ears, so too, sometimes, do the canvas flaps of tents …

Shortly afterwards, on the morning of 8 September, Keith Murdoch walks up the gangplank of the destroyer that is to take him from Imbros back to Egypt, before he is due to take SS
Mooltan
on to London. Every now and then, like a best man fretting over the wedding ring before the marriage ceremony, he pats the inside pocket of his jacket to ensure that the precious letter is still safely there.

Only a short time later, General Hamilton receives a note from one of the other correspondents, who has got wind of some letter that Ashmead-Bartlett has apparently written to the proprietor of
The Daily Telegraph
, critical of the whole Gallipoli campaign and the way it is being run, and it seems Keith Murdoch is carrying it back to London. For ‘the honour of my profession',
¹⁷
this correspondent feels he must bring it to General Hamilton's attention.

Hamilton is bemused. ‘I had begun to wonder what had come over Mr Murdoch and now it seems he has come over me!'
¹⁸

Nevertheless, the matter must be dealt with …

EVENING, 8 SEPTEMBER 1915, NO CRUELLER STROKE THAN THIS

Hugo Throssell's heart is breaking. On the hospital ship
Davannah
steaming west in the Mediterranean, they are just off the coast of Spain when one of his fellow troopers, Sid Ferrier – who had had his arm amputated straight after the battle of Hill 60 – starts ailing. Badly. It had seemed that with close medical attention, rest, a proper diet and no bombs incessantly landing all around, he had been getting better, just as they all had been. Hugo has been visiting him for a couple of hours a day, the two talking quietly of what they would do in London, and how it would be when they got back home … home to Australia. And after Hugo had told the doctor of Sid's extraordinary courage, the medico had taken a special interest in him thereafter. But, just a few days earlier, things had taken a severe turn for the worse, when the stump of Sid's arm became infected and turned a grisly, putrescent black. It's tetanus.

The doctors have been working on him since, and Sid's wonderful pluck has never deserted him – despite his sweating body being contorted into grotesque arching forms and going through severe spasms as the tetanus takes hold – but now, as the soft dusk of eventide creeps up on the ship, so too is it obvious that the darkness is coming for Sid, as Hugo stands over his dribbling and mostly unconscious form. Quietly, the doctor tells Hugo that at least he doesn't think Sid is suffering.

Now, though, Sid's breaths are coming in raspy form, with ever long pauses between. The end is nigh. Hugo leans in close as Sid gets out his last word on this earth …

‘
Mother
…'

Shortly afterwards, Throssell writes to that good woman in Western Australia:

The next morning, Hugo stands to attention beside Colonel Noel Brazier and the half a dozen soldiers of the 10th Light Horse as the chaplain conducts the funeral service on the deck. Brave Sid's body, wrapped in the Union Jack, lies on a slanting board before them. Out of respect, the ship's engines have been stopped, and the only sound apart from the chaplain's voice is the light whistle of the sea breeze through the superstructure.

As they commit Sid's eternal soul to the Lord and his body to the deep, all of them salute – some with the left hand, if the right has been amputated. Sid's body hits the water with a splash and then slips beneath the waves.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, Sid to the aquatic depths …

Back at Gallipoli, the battle goes on, both with the Turks and with the men of the 2nd Division, who remain eager, and sometimes too eager, to see action.

One Dinkum Captain is getting endless queries from his men.

‘What the hell is the good of sitting here?' asks one, champing at the bit to get into action.

‘Why can't we charge and blow the bastards out?' asks another.

The Captain is beaten in making his reply by an old hand, whose penchant for bravado and death-wish tomfoolery is long gone: ‘Yer bastards put yer bloody head over parapet & get a little sudden death. You wouldn't get 5 bloody yards.'
²⁰

The younger Dinkums pipe down out of respect, but still their desire for the glory of battle rages.

17 SEPTEMBER 1915, A VERY STRANGE WELCOME – BIENVENUE EN FRANCE

Just after SS
Mooltan
docks by the quay in Marseilles – in a brief layover on his trip from Egypt to England – Keith Murdoch looks up to see two high-ranking British Army officers, with the two telltale red tabs on their collars, approaching him. They have just boarded the steamer and have been asking for him.

Keith Murdoch?

Yes.

‘You have a letter from Mr Ashmead-Bartlett …'

‘Yes …'

‘You must hand it over to us.'
²¹

‘It is for the Prime Minister.'
²²

Still the officer asks him to hand it over.

Murdoch realises he has no choice, and he very reluctantly does so, along with his report on the postal-service arrangements – sadly, even before he has time to add a
PS
as to what's wrong with the mail service at Marseilles.

With a nod, the British Army officers allow him to continue his journey.

(Prime Minister Andrew Fisher, when he finds out what has occurred, is appalled. ‘I have a strong and growing feeling,' he would later note publicly, ‘that it was not a friendly action on the part of the [British] Government … to send a military officer to seize Mr Murdoch's belongings and examine them while he carried the credentials of the [Australian] Prime Minister and the Minister of Defence on a mission on which he had been dispatched because we could not get any information.' It is nothing less than ‘an insult and an affront'.)
²³

The two British intelligence officers left in Murdoch's wake as he departs once more on SS
Mooltan
are stunned. They had been told the letter would be to Harry Lawson of
The Daily Telegraph
. And now they have intercepted a missive marked to the
Right Honourable H. H. Asquith, 10 Downing Street, London
.

And yet, while they are fearful as to just what it is they have done, General Hamilton is not, when he is informed of this fact by the War Office. Rather, he is bemused once more. And relieved. For Hamilton has complete confidence in Asquith. ‘I do not for one moment believe Mr. Asquith would employ such agencies,' he writes in his diary, ‘and for sure he will turn Murdoch and his wares into the wastepaper basket … Tittle-tattle will effect no lodgement in the Asquithian brain.'
²⁴

MID-SEPTEMBER 1915, AT
THE TIMES
IN LONDON, LORD NORTHCLIFFE PACES

Copy boy!

Newspaper offices of the world have a certain sameness about them: the smell of printer's ink, the endless clatter of typewriters, the sense that there is just too much news breaking in too little time to get it all down, and too little space to fit it all in.

And, ever and always, all of that is exacerbated when the proprietor of the paper is in the building – and never more so than when that proprietor is the irrepressible Lord Northcliffe, a man as quick to promote the worthy as he is to fire the lazy. He wants stories, he wants action, he wants circulation increases, he wants them NOW, and …

And, what?

Lord Northcliffe wants to see
you
, Herbert Campbell-Jones, Managing Editor of the United Cable Service, in his office upstairs, right now.

Campbell-Jones, an Australian who has been working and prospering on Fleet Street for the last three years – and whom Murdoch is coming to London to replace – does not tarry, and would write about the whole affair in Sydney's
Sun
newspaper some five years later.
²⁵

When he gets upstairs, Lord Northcliffe, a forthright man at the best of times, is ‘walking up and down the room … like a caged lion', and he really wants to know, ‘What can be done to save those poor fellows on Gallipoli? Can't you get the High Commissioner, Sir George Reid, to tell the Australian Government the truth?'
²⁶

From his own sources, Lord Northcliffe has heard just how grim the whole situation is and wishes to exert his influence to help alleviate it. ‘Can't you persuade Mr. Fisher to insist upon knowing the whole facts?'
²⁷

Well, Lord Northcliffe, as it happens, at this very moment there is a first-class Australian journalist by the name of Keith Murdoch ‘on his way to England, after visiting Gallipoli, [who] would be able to lay the whole situation directly before the Australian Government'.
²⁸

For the forces of Lord Northcliffe, of
sanity
, this is exactly what they have been looking for: a recent, credible witness affirming that the whole Gallipoli campaign is a debacle, with a fearless passion, untroubled by politics or his lowly position in the military hierarchy compared with those who are responsible for it all.

Aboard
Mooltan
, steaming through the impossibly blue and sparkling waters of the Mediterranean, Keith Murdoch remains entirely unintimidated by what has happened in Marseilles, and is in fact more galvanised by it than ever. It's proof of the venal nature of the authorities that he and the Diggers at Anzac Cove are up against. Sitting in his cramped, damp cabin, gently swaying left to right, he begins drafting his
own
letter to replace the one that has been confiscated. After all, he has been there, he has been tutored by Ashmead-Bartlett, he understands the basic situation and even some of the finer points. Into early adulthood, Murdoch had been a very bad stutterer, but with pen in hand he does not falter, as the words simply pour out of him.

Once arrived in London, on 20 September, he meets Herbert Campbell-Jones at
The Times
and shows the second incarnation of the letter to him.

‘I have never perused any document more packed with scorching phrases, more brutal in its utter frankness,' Jones would report.
²⁹
He encourages Murdoch to keep going on it, to refine, and keep refining, till he gets it absolutely right. Murdoch settles down to keep working on it, and the phrases continue to furiously flow for no fewer than 28 pages, some 8000 words in all.

It is addressed to the Australian Prime Minister Andrew Fisher, and he does not mince words, some of it echoing the lost letter of Ashmead-Bartlett: ‘I now write of the unfortunate Dardanelles expedition … It is undoubtedly one of the most terrible chapters in our history …'
³⁰
There is, he says, no respect whatsoever for General Hamilton and his senior staff, with their red lapel tabs and red bands around their caps, and no one even bothers to hide it. ‘Australians,' he reports firmly, ‘now loathe and detest any Englishman wearing red.'
³¹

Murdoch, clearly having overcome his concern that he is too inexperienced to make judgements on matters military, and allowing himself to be swept up in journalistic euphemism, now says of General Birdwood that he has ‘not the fighting quality nor the big brain of a great general'.
³²

In terms of damning allegations, Murdoch swears that not a few hundred yards from where 134 Australian soldiers with fever were dying of the heat for want of relief, he had seen English staff officers aboard the once transatlantic Royal Mail ship
Aragon
‘wallowing in ice'.
³³
The British troops at Suvla Bay, he notes, are ‘fresh, raw, untried troops under amateur officers …'
³⁴
Truly, they are ‘merely a lot of childlike youths without strength to endure or brains to improve their conditions'.
³⁵

And then there is the enemy. ‘From what I saw of the Turk, I am convinced he is … a better man than those opposed to him.'
³⁶

And yes, there are many demonstrable errors of fact in the account – the smallest of which is that there is no record of Keith Murdoch ever having
seen
any Turks, and certainly none up close – and much of the rhetoric is overblown. But the thrust is entirely consistent with the situation: the military leadership has completely lost the confidence of all those it would seek to lead. The situation is hopeless, and getting worse.

‘I do not like to dictate this sentence, even for your eyes, but the fact is that after the first day at Suvla an order had to be issued to officers to shoot without mercy any soldier who lagged behind or loitered in an advance.'
³⁷

He goes on …

‘I must leave this story, scrappy as it is, of the operations, to tell you of the situation and the problems that face us. I will do so with the frankness you have always encouraged. Winter is on us, and it brings grave dangers. We have about 105,000 men … on the Peninsula. About 25,000 of these are at Helles, 35,000 at Anzac, and the rest at Suvla … These are all that remain of fully 260,000 men. Nowhere are we protected from the Turkish shell …
³⁸