The Gallipoli Letter Read Online Free Page B

campaign was to succeed. It had failed almost completely, causing a very high rate of casualties. The injured men that Keith Murdoch was meeting in the Cairo hospital wards had fought in the offensive, fresh from bloody fighting at Lone Pine and the Nek.
    Charles Bean, who by now had been at Anzac for more than four months, had come to an early decision once he had experienced war at close range: he would pay little heed to accounts of the fighting coming from wounded men. This was not because these men would deliberately falsify stories of what had happened but because, under the stress of wounds and from fear for their own futures, their understanding of the situation might easily be confused. Murdoch was unaware that these wounded men might not be his best informants.
    But Murdoch also spoke to Australian officers stationed in Egypt in administrative and training positions. Before he even reached Gallipoli alarm bells started to ring. Among the Australian officers there was widespread condemnation of British military inefficiency and the want of preparedness, as well as a concern about British arrogance which showed in a broad contempt for ‘colonial’ ways and methods of work. We Australians are definitely second class in British eyes, officers reported. There was a suggestion that British commanders were reckless in their use of the troops at their disposal, causing unnecessary casualties.
    The hospitals at Cairo had shaped Murdoch’s thinking before he set foot at Anzac Cove. As he toured the enormous wards holding thousands of wounded soldiers Murdoch’s emotions would have reinforced the comments made by Australian officers. Could these wounds, many of them severe, permanent and life-threatening, be justified in terms of territory gained or the possibility of the overall success of the campaign? Here were the wounded men, Murdoch noted. What of the many thousands more who had died at the front and were now in their graves, never to be rescued by the stretcher-bearers or to find a place on a hospital ship?
    â€˜Keith Murdoch arrived today,’ Charles Bean wrote in his diary on 3 September 1915. Were the two men at ease with each other when they first met on the battlefield in Bean’s dugout, sheltering from the shells and bullets which were a constant at Anzac? Did Murdoch look around the dugout with some wistful, lingering disappointment that it was not his home but rather Charles Bean’s? The dugout was primitive enough: a desk and chair both made out of packing cases, a sand-bagged wall for protection, a spirit-lamp, a few items of clothing hanging from nails belted into the clay back wall, a primitive camp bed and a little bit of rubbish. And men passing day and night, going about their business, maybe up to Quinn’s Post or Courtney’s where Bert Jacka had fought so tenaciously in May to be awarded the first Australian Victoria Cross of the war. Men talking and laughing, smoking and complaining, carrying supplies or ammunition, or stretcher-bearers on their way to another job. It took most men a couple of days on the peninsula before they could stop ducking when they heard the whizz of a shell overhead, or not flinch when a bullet thudded into one of the sand-bagged parapet walls protecting them all. It took these couple of days for men to accept the random danger of life at Anzac and the domestic nature of life there, too. Keith Murdoch had only four days on Anzac and there was much to see.
    After they had yarned for a while in Bean’s dug-out the official correspondent took his guest ‘up to the top of this hill to see the view’. The photograph on page 23 shows Murdoch at Anzac in an open long-sleeved shirt rolled up to the elbows, labourer’s pants with braces to hold them up, and shoes, not boots. He is holding a pith helmet made of canvas and stiff cardboard. Murdoch is tall, vigorous in attitude, hair closely cropped, earnest-looking. He was certainly not