Australia in Arms. Phillip F. E. Schuler
PART I
AUSTRALIA ANSWERS THE CALL
CHAPTER I
THE TOCSIN IN AUSTRALIA
It is impossible to look back and recall without a glow of intense pride the instantaneous response made by the young manhood of Australia to the first signal of danger which fluttered at the central masthead of the Empire. As time goes on that pride has increased as battalions and brigades have followed one another into the firing-line; it has become now a pride steeped in the knowledge that the baptism of fire has proven the young nation, has given it an indelible stamp of Nationhood, has provoked from the lips of a great English soldier the phrase, "These men from Australasia form the greatest army that an Empire has ever produced." To-day that pride is the courage with which the people face and mourn the loss of their thousands of braves.
Let me recall the first dark days of August 1914, when the minds of the people of the Australian Commonwealth were grappling with and striving to focus the position of the British Empire in the war into which they had been so precipitately hurled. On Sunday, 2nd August, I well remember in Melbourne an army friend of mine being hastily recalled from a tennis party; and when I went to see him at the Victoria Barracks that same night, I found the whole place a glare of lights from end to end of the grim, grey stone building. It was the same the next and the next night, and for weeks, and so into the months. But even when the Governor-General, Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson, sent to the Prime Minister (Mr. Joseph Cook), at noon on 3rd August the telegram bearing the announcement that we all knew could not long be withheld, the strain seemed unlifted. "England has declared war on Germany" was the brief but terrible message quickly transferred to the broadsheets that the newspapers printed at lightning speed and circulated, while the crowds in the streets cheered and cheered again as the message was posted on the display boards.
That night the streets were thronged (as they were for weeks to follow), and there was a series of riots, quickly subdued by the police, where raids had been made on German premises. Feeling was extraordinarily bitter, considering the remoteness of the Dominion. The Navy Office was barred to the casual visitor. Military motor-cars swept through the streets and whirled into the barracks square. Army and Fleet, the new Australian Naval unit, were ready. More than one person during those grey days felt a thrill of satisfaction and comfort in the knowledge that of that Fleet unit the battle-cruiser Australia was greater and more powerful than any enemy vessel in Pacific waters.
Now it is no secret that arrangements exist with the British Admiralty under which the Commonwealth naval authorities receive at the first signs of hostilities a telegram in the nature of a warning. The second message simply says "Strike." The fact that the Navy Office in Melbourne received its warning cablegram not from the Admiralty, but from a message sent from H.M.S. Minotaur, then flagship of the China Squadron, asking particulars concerning the Australian unit, and "presuming" that the naval authorities had received their warning, was only subsequently whispered. Where, then, was the Australian message? The original cable apparently was sent at the moment when Mr. Winston Churchill and Prince Louis of Battenberg between them took steps to keep mobilized the Grand Fleet in British waters, subsequent to the review, and sent them forthwith to their war stations. According to the pre-arranged understanding, the Australian unit was to pass automatically under the control of the Admiralty. Urgent wires were sent to the then Minister of Defence, Senator E. D. Millen, who was absent in Sydney, and the missing cablegram was brought to light in his possession. As soon as that final message came, the Australian ships, having coaled and prepared, moved to their war stations. It is not within the scope of this brief review to go further into this naval mobilization, though I shall make reference later on to the Fleet unit and its war history.
On everybody's lips there now (4th August) arose the question of the young nation's part in the war. Would there be need of contingents? For the first period, at least, the Australian military authorities were too keenly occupied with home defence to vouchsafe much attention to this question, though high officers told me that it was inevitable that Australia would play her part very soon—to what extent and when, they could not judge. The immediate need lay in the mobilization of part or all of the available forces at hand for coastal defence. The nervous tenseness of the situation was apparent on all hands; an underflow of intense uncertainty was plainly traceable in all the military movements. At the barracks day and night I found the military machine that Australia had so recently set running, rapidly speeding up.
All leave had been stopped on 1st August, and officers were hurrying back to their posts from various States of the Commonwealth. The defences of the ports along the coast were manned, and on the day when war was declared arrangements were completed for the extension of these defences to a mobile army, certainly of no great size as armies now are, to be used as shore patrols round the entrances of the great harbours of the capital cities. These men were the first draft of the Citizen Army that the Australian nation was training, and the rapidity with which they were mobilized, albeit it was only a small group, gave off the first spark from the machine, tested in a time of need. Yet the question that was ever to the fore during the first forty-eight hours after the declaration of war, and in fact until the following Wednesday, 10th August, was whether the whole of the Citizen Army was not to be mobilized. In other words, would there be a general mobilization, the plans for which were lying ready waiting to be opened all over the Commonwealth? The higher commands were told to hold themselves in readiness, and every one, from the youngest cadet to the Chief of the Staff, was expecting the word.
What would have been the need for such action? Remotely, of course, the position of the German High Sea Fleet and the integrity of the British Grand Fleet, but more closely the proximity of the German Pacific Squadron, consisting of two powerful cruisers, the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, a number of smaller warships, colliers, and perhaps transports. Fortunately, the battle-cruiser Australia had been kept in Australian waters, and while she remained afloat, the German ships would not venture in her vicinity. But the possibility to which the military authorities looked was that of the German squadron eluding our patrols that stretched across the north of Australia from Darwin to the Marshall Islands, and convoying a landing party, arriving off our eastern or southern coasts. They might or might not land; they might content themselves with shelling the towns. At one time it was believed that secretly Germany had been pouring troops into German New Guinea and collecting stores there. That she had intended New Guinea or Papua as a base in the Pacific was evident enough. However, the worst fears were far from being realized. The British Fleet in the Pacific (now containing the Australian warships), and soon the Japanese Fleet cooperating, after an unsuccessful attempt to trap the enemy, edged them from the Australian coasts across the Pacific to South America, where they were eventually destroyed in the Falkland Islands engagement.
By this time the need for a general mobilization in Australia was daily becoming less, as the enemy's ships were swept from the sea and the High Sea Fleet had been reduced to the category of floating forts. Accordingly the Government and military authorities