Phillip Bradley - Charles Beans Gallipoli: Illustrated

A man was watching some fellows being buried, with the parson by them. Poor buggers, he said.
Do you call them that? the padre saidI call them heroes.
Well we just calls em buggers, poor buggers!

Charles Bean, Diary 10, 8 July 1915

ABBREVIATIONS

The Gallipoli peninsula

The Anzac sector

INTRODUCTION

During the eight months the Anzacs were on the Gallipoli peninsula, many words were written by officers and men alike. One man, however, wrote more of the experience than any otherthe official Australian war correspondent, 35-year-old redhead Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean. As Australias official correspondent with the Australian Imperial Force he devoted all his time on Gallipoli to this task. He searched out the stories during the day and then, as he wrote from his cramped dugout on 2 June 1915, I sit up and write all night... and sleep in the morning. His search for the story of Anzac took him into the front lines and beyond, and his dedication to recording that story was remarkable. He was later chosen to write the official history of the campaign and produced two volumes of extraordinary detail, his work enhanced by a post-war visit to the peninsula and further correspondence with the participants. Charles Beans diaries and notes far and away provide the most comprehensive account of the Anzacs at Gallipoli.

Of greatest interest to me was how Charles Beans 21 diaries from Gallipoli reflected his own experience of the conflict. The diary extracts chosen for Charles Beans Gallipoli tell us as much about Charles Beans nature as they do about the nature of the fighting at Gallipoli. His early writing imparts a sense of excitement and wonder that gradually fades over the course of the campaign. In Beans later diaries covering the relentless killing on the battlefields of Belgium and France, as his spirit is blunted by continual exposure to the harsh realities of war, his prose soon drowns in a morass of detail.

In recent years it has become increasingly common for much of Australias military history to be classified as mythical. This is particularly true of the Australian Armys role in the Gallipoli campaign, and of Charles Beans viewpoint on it. Needless to say, but so important to consider, nobody else had the chance not only to live through the entire campaign, but then to immerse themselves in the Gallipoli story for so long. And no one could do so with such passion and with such a desire to honour the men who served as Charles Bean. He and other war correspondents such as Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, an Englishman, certainly spread the Anzac legend and helped create its heroes, but there was a very good reason for that. The endurance of the Anzacs at Gallipoli was extraordinary and that is why they take such a prominent place in the Australian story. Bean saw all sides of that legend and, unlike Ashmead-Bartlett and some of the other war correspondents, he did so with a circumspect reserve based on painstakingly gathered facts of unmatched detail. The history Bean relates is no myth. I cant write about bayonet charges like some of the correspondents do, he wrote on 25 September 1915; one has some satisfaction in sticking to the truth in spite of the prejudice against it.

The detailed accounts that Bean transferred from his diaries and notes to the official histories led to later criticism, mainly from senior officers who felt their own contributions were more important to history than those of their men. Even today some refer to Beans approach to operational history as history from below, but complete history would be a better description of his work. Bean was even more assiduous in studying the command viewpoint and gave it the correct emphasis in his histories. Other operational histories written from above are simply incomplete or sanitised history, where the consequences of the command decisions on the men involved are not explored, but simply treated as a chess game where the fallen pawns do not bleed. Naturally enough, many commanders preferred it that way. Many writers as wellnone could ever approach the detail of Beans work both during and after the war. On a number of occasions he risked his own life and was even wounded in gathering that detail. On 27 April 1915 he wrote: You put your head up at your own risk, but the situation was interesting and well worth it.