The Gallipoli Letter by Keith Murdoch Read Free Book Online

The Australian prime minister needed to know this about his soldiers.
    Sedition is a dangerous word to use about men in an army but it was an effective word to send to a prime minister. The British might have thought that Australian troops were there to be used in whatever way the British generals chose, but even the mild-mannered Charles Bean recognised the strength of independence among the Australians and railed at the arrogance and insensitivity of many of the senior British officers. Murdoch had picked it up among the Australians in a matter of days and it was another factor that Fisher had to bear in mind in his thinking about Gallipoli.
    Throughout the letter there ran a thread that Charles Bean observed in Murdoch: ‘an intense devotion to his country and countrymen’. In part his high regard for the Australian soldier lay in the contrast Murdoch perceived between soldiers of his own country and the British soldiers. At one point in the letter Murdoch referred to the British soldiers at Suvla as ‘toy soldiers’, a terrible insult.
    He was on firmer ground when he wrote directly about the Australians. He wrote of the ‘wonderful affection of these fine young soldiers for each other and their homeland’. ‘It is stirring,’ he continued, ‘to see them, magnificent manhood, swinging their fine limbs as they walk about Anzac. They have the noble faces of men who have endured.’ It was an implied demand that Fisher, Australian prime minister, care for these men and defend them, nourish and protect them. ‘Oh,’ Murdoch concluded this section of the letter, ‘if you could picture Anzac as I have seen it, you would find that to be Australian is the greatest privilege that the world has to offer.’
    In his book The First Casualty a history of war correspondents, Phillip Knightley briefly recounts the story of Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett and Keith Murdoch. Knightley concluded that, ‘If the war correspondents in France had only been as enterprising, the war might not have continued on its ghastly course.’ At first sight this claim seems exaggerated, possibly grandiose. But looking closely at the Murdoch letter you can see what Phillip Knightley was driving at. It was a question of telling the truth. Murdoch had a commission from the Australian prime minister to tell him truly what was happening at Gallipoli. Murdoch discharged that commission remarkably well. Yet the truths he told were terrible. That the campaign was misconceived from the start; that the leadership of the British generals was exercised overall at a level of considerable incompetence; that the campaign was unwinnable; and that the continuance of it would most likely cause significant loss of life, through disease and the possible increased availability of Turkish, and probably German, artillery. In Murdoch’s view most Anzac soldiers would be blasted into the sea or carried across it in the hospital ships.
    Murdoch ended his letter in the same personal way with which he had begun it. ‘This of course is a private letter,’ he wrote, ‘but you will show it to George Pearce and Hughes, so I shall say nothing more than goodbye.’ But it was not a private letter. It was an appeal to Australia’s three most senior war ministers for the rescue of Australian troops from the dire circumstances in which they had been placed. The crucial decisions about the conduct of the campaign were not Australia’s to make and these three men must have felt a degree of impotence when reading what Murdoch wrote. But the letter caused events to move as they would have wanted anyway.
    The letter’s real influence had been in London where the decisions were made. Hamilton had been brought home and never commanded troops in war again. The Anzacs were evacuated, the last men leaving on 20 December, just as the real force of winter set in. They were sad to go, if only because they left so many of