The Gallipoli Letter Read Online Free PDF

late July Walker was back in charge. Little Hooky loved his men, Bean reported, and the men ‘like [him] too. He’s a man we owe something to.’
    When briefed by General Birdwood, who was commanding the Anzacs, about the battle plans for the August breakout Walker had tried hard to have the attack on Lone Pine cancelled. He would lose too many of his men, he argued, for too little gain. But the general was overruled, although he managed to have the worst of the planning changed.
    On 4 September, as Bean lay sick in bed, Walker talked at length to Murdoch and showed him around Lone Pine. The general had also opposed the idea of the landing in the first place—he was a man who did not blindly accept the orders issued to him. Whether Hooky Walker gave Murdoch a view of his own doubts and reservations about the men above him—William Birdwood in command of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps and Ian Hamilton, overall commander of the Dardanelles expeditionary force—we cannot know. Murdoch was, after all, a journalist. He may well have picked up Walker’s doubts and reservations. Or the men among whom Murdoch moved might well have let something slip: ‘It was just murder up here, mate, when the fighting was on; sheer, bloody murder.’ But we cannot know precisely what was said.
    The next day Bean was sick in bed again and Murdoch headed out by himself. He roamed about, no doubt asking and listening as good journalists do. No big-noting; no mention of his commission from the Australian prime minister. At some stage Murdoch had also visited the British at Suvla Bay, a place easily seen from the heights at Anzac and he had been shocked by what he had found there: confusion, morale at its lowest possible ebb, failure.
    On his last day on Anzac, 6 September, Bean took Murdoch to Quinn’s Post, the real hot spot where the opposing trenches, Turkish and Anzac, were only metres apart. It was a place where bombs were tossed casually across the short stretch of no-man’s-land, where the soldiers of both sides were ever alert for the possibility of attack. It was testing to be at Quinn’s for the days or weeks that a soldier might spend there, but even for an hour or so for a keen journalist. Only brave men were ever at Quinn’s.
    And then he was gone. ‘M left at midday’, Bean reported. But his job was far from over. Murdoch went to the island of Imbros, within sight of the battlefield he had just left, to await a ship that would take him back to Cairo and then on to London. There were other journalists on Imbros taking a bit of a spell from the front line now that the campaign had settled once again into stalemate mode. Among them was the most flamboyant of all the correspondents, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. It was Ashmead-Bartlett who had written the first account of the 25 April landing by the Anzacs, which had been published in the Australian papers on 8 May. He had written of ‘this race of athletes’, and that there had ‘never [been] a finer feat in this war’ than the April assault; it was all thrilling stuff. But by September Ashmead-Bartlett was a disillusioned man, firmly convinced that the army must be evacuated if a mighty loss of life was to be avoided. As a first step he had decided that Ian Hamilton must be sacked: for the failure of the campaign and because he would never agree to an evacuation.
    After just four days at Gallipoli Murdoch had reached much the same conclusion: that the campaign was doomed to failure. And he agreed with Ashmead-Bartlett, too, that an evacuation was the only sensible plan. Prompted by Bean, Murdoch’s thoughts had turned to the coming winter and the horrors it must produce. With the failure of the August offensive fresh in men’s minds, Murdoch concluded that a breakout now was unlikely and certainly impossible to attempt before the next spring, say April 1916. And Murdoch had also absorbed from Bean a real