Phillip Schuler Read online

  First published in 2016

  Copyright © Mark Baker 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 9781760111656

  eISBN 9781952534317

  Internal design by Midland Typesetters

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Index by Puddingburn

  Cover design: Deborah Parry Graphics

  Cover photographs: Photograph of Phillip Schuler by Mina Moore

  c. 1913 (May & Mina Moore Studios, Melbourne); Infantry on the

  march, AWM PS0900; Shutterstock

  WEEP no more, nor sigh, nor groan,

  Sorrow calls no time that’s gone:

  Violets pluck’d, the sweetest rain

  Makes not fresh nor grow again.

  Trim thy locks, look cheerfully;

  Fate’s hid ends eyes cannot see.

  Joys as winged dreams fly fast,

  Why should sadness longer last?

  Grief is but a wound to woe;

  Gentlest fair, mourn, mourn no moe.

  John Fletcher (1579–1625)

  For Emre and Serin

  Contents

  Prelude

  1 Frederick

  2 Phillip

  3 Coming of Age

  4 To Egypt

  5 Rehearsals

  6 Nell

  7 The Landing

  8 Schuler’s Landing

  9 Scoop

  10 The Postman

  11 The Letter

  12 The Retreat

  13 Dear Mrs Howard

  14 Larkhill

  15 The Blame Game

  16 Flanders

  17 The Wreckage of Hopes

  18 Love’s Lost

  19 Fortune’s Wheel

  20 After Phillip

  Picture Section

  Postscript

  Appendix: The Battle of the Nek

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Prelude

  Until the day break and the shadows fall away

  turn, my beloved, and be like a gazelle

  or like a young stag on the ragged hills

  Song of Solomon 2:17

  It is late. At the villa in Helwan, south of Cairo, the children are in bed but not asleep. The front door bell sounds, breaking the stillness of the night. Netta, the lady’s maid, hurries to answer the call and is greeted by two officers in the drab khaki uniforms of the Australian Imperial Force. She returns from the entrance hall excitedly telling the mistress of the house that one of the men looks like her fiancé, suddenly back from the war in France. But the dim light has deceived her, masking for a moment the terrible truth.

  After speaking briefly with the two strangers, Nelly Rabinovitch turns away, tears streaming down her cheeks. She embraces her two young daughters who have come downstairs after being aroused by the voices. ‘They came to say that Phillip is mortally wounded and now you must go to sleep,’ Nelly says. Nine-year-old Chickie, the eldest of the girls, knows what this means: ‘Mortal wounds were wounds you died of—but then he was not dead. But he was.’

  The next morning Nelly shows the girls what the Australian officers had brought her. It is the silver cigarette case she had presented to Phillip Schuler when he left Cairo in late 1915. He had vowed to return to marry the beautiful young widow once the war was over. Now the case is bent and twisted by the shrapnel that wounded the 27-year-old lieutenant on a battlefield in Belgium. There is also a photograph of his grave in the small cemetery behind the field hospital where he died within hours of being hit by stray shellfire.

  Sacha, the younger of Nelly’s daughters, had a gift of second sight; she often spoke of seeing ghosts and fairies. Nelly asks if she can see where Phillip is now. But this time there is nothing Sacha can offer to soften her mother’s grief. ‘When Phillip Schuler died it wasn’t death, our death, we felt but Death’s hollow mould, the stamp it leaves on those it has bereaved,’ her sister, Chickie, would say later in her life. She remembered fondly the dashing young Australian who had swept into their lives during the war before he was taken by it. ‘He loved our mother and she loved him.’

  Nelly and her daughters were far from alone in their sorrow. Back in Melbourne Polly Howard would carry a precious secret into old age: a son that Phillip Schuler never held; a boy who would live his entire life not knowing of the gallant father who perished in Flanders Fields just months after he was born.

  Trois Arbres. Three trees. A plot of land not much bigger than the large suburban block on Lisson Grove, Hawthorn, where Phillip Schuler spent his childhood. It lies between a newly ploughed field and a small copse of trees that wear the fresh green livery of spring. A row of crabapple trees runs along one boundary. There is a special calm here, the stillness punctuated only by the chatter of birds and the dull hum of a freeway in the distance. It is late afternoon on Anzac Day but still no names have been recorded in the visitors’ book of this Commonwealth war cemetery. Lest We Forget.

  He is here. Number 1 at the end of row S. Grave number 43. You could miss it if you didn’t know where to look and you need to look closely to be sure. A simple headstone identical to the rest that crowd close together along the row is engraved by hand chisel: ‘Lieutenant P.F.E. Schuler. Aust.Army Service Corps. 23rd June 1917. Aged 27’. There’s a line from the Bible’s Song of Solomon beneath a cross—Until the Day Break and the Shadows Fall Away. The words were chosen by his family back in Melbourne. They might equally have been picked by his beloved Nelly Rabinovitch in Cairo. Pansies and forget-me-nots sprout from the rough clay soil beside the freshly mowed lawn. A miniature rose is budding.

  In a war cemetery, all men created equal are equal at their end. Five rows back from Phillip Schuler is Major General William Holmes, commander of the Australian 4th Division. He was wounded close to where Schuler was wounded in late June 1917, soon after the Battle of Messines Ridge. They died and were buried here, nine days apart. The one concession for a general is a plot that’s set slightly apart from the next: New Zealand gunner Private S.H. Parsons. Aged 21.

  A century ago Major General John Monash established the headquarters of his newly formed Australian 3rd Division at Steenwerck, a French farming hamlet a few kilometres west of the Belgian border. And here, on the outskirts of the village, the 2nd Australian Casualty Clearing Station was located. It was a maze of prefabricated huts and tents with duckboards criss-crossing the encampment to cope with the eternal mud of winter. Trains carrying the wounded would stop at a siding. The men were moved to the wards on small trolleys that ran on a network of tracks. The adjoining cemetery was used for hospital burials until April 1918 when the area passed into German hands for five months. After the Armistice that November, it was used for battlefield reburials. Schuler shares his resting place with another 469 Australians, 99
7 Britons, 213 New Zealanders, 22 Canadians, a South African and an Indian. So many carry the epithet of the unidentified: ‘Known to God Alone’.

  A grand row of old poplars lines the narrow road leading into the neat village square and the church with a towering steeple that commands the district in every direction. Lieutenant Schuler passed scenery little changed from this on his way through here to the field hospital. Had he been conscious he would have observed the same red-brick farmhouses and barns, the same neat fields, and the same herds of plump dairy cows. His was a one-way journey. Like hundreds of other soldiers who could not be saved from severe injuries, he was buried in the field behind the hospital. Three trees; 1704 graves.

  It should not have ended like this. Not for Phillip Schuler; not for so many of these too young men who are buried here. He was handsome, gifted and full of life. Already he had achieved so much and proved he had so much more to achieve. But ‘fate’s hid end’ was a random shelling on a quiet day long after the battle in which he fought with distinction had ended.

  A century on, Australians would stare at Schuler’s photographs from the Gallipoli campaign and wonder if the ghost of Goya was lurking somewhere. Some would read his Australia in Arms and wonder how a young man could write with such poise, for Schuler, the youngest of the correspondents, delivered the finest prose to come out of Gallipoli. Others would reflect on what might have been had his voice on the doomed campaign been heard as loudly as that of his once friend and later nemesis, Keith Murdoch. In 1917, Nelly Rabinovitch lost her love and Australia lost a shining youth. But death was everywhere in 1917. Phillip Schuler was merely another name on a roll that seemed to have no end. Perspectives on the man who began his war as correspondent and was driven by that experience to end it as a soldier would come later, recognition later still.

  1

  Frederick

  The brief circle of Phillip Schuler’s life began and ended with Germany. It was the country of his ancestry and the nation against whose aggression he would fight and die.

  In 1860, Jacob and Catharine Schuler left their home in the farming community of Heimerdingen, near Stuttgart in southern Germany, to sail to Australia. The goldrushes in the colony of Victoria promised if not instant wealth then at least a wealth of opportunity in a new land. The Schulers brought just one of their four surviving children on the voyage, a six-year-old boy christened Gottlieb Heinrich. Several elder children were left in the care of their grandparents. The chosen son would grow to become one of the most significant Australian journalists and newspaper editors of his generation. But much of his often reclusive life would remain a mystery to his colleagues, his friends and even his family. He would change his name, indulge conflicting stories about his coming to Australia and airbrush key details of his German heritage, particularly when the tide of anti-German sentiment that washed over Australia during World War I lapped at the door of the Schuler household.

  In his youth or early adulthood Gottlieb Heinrich became Gottlieb Frederick Heinrich—and thereafter was known as Frederick, an Anglicised version of his father’s middle name. After trying their hand at various diggings, the family settled at Myerstown, a goldmining settlement on the outskirts of Bendigo. Jacob Schuler, a butcher in Germany, became landlord of the London and Dublin Hotel. It was a trade that would hasten his early death. In November 1867, Jacob, who the district coroner determined ‘drank very much latterly’, dropped dead ‘from disease of the heart accelerated by intemperate habits’.1 Within a year, Catharine had remarried, to William Curtis, another publican—an event that appears to have triggered the gradual and ultimately complete estrangement of Frederick, then fourteen, from his mother and younger sisters Pauline and Olga.

  From an early age, Frederick wanted to become a journalist. His eldest daughter would later claim that he never went to school. He compensated for his lack of formal education by becoming a voracious reader—in several languages.2

  Everywhere he went he carried a book and it was while reading on horseback that he fell and broke his nose. He had ambitions. He was determined to qualify himself for a position on the literary staff of a newspaper. So he studied French and German until he became an accomplished linguist, and later on, a recognised authority on the literature of both languages.3

  In the early 1870s, Frederick scored a position on the staff of the Bendigo Independent. By 1873 he had moved on to the bigger and more prestigious Bendigo Advertiser where he quickly established a reputation as an expert on the mining industry. Six years later he jumped to the big league with a move to Melbourne and a position on the parliamentary staff of The Age. He would remain at that newspaper for almost half a century.

  When Frederick arrived at the office at 31 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, in March 1879—six months before the paper moved to grander premises around the corner in Collins Street—The Age was approaching the heights of its power, prestige and profitability. Under the stern, crusading leadership of David Syme, it backed the miners at Eureka Stockade, fought the exploitation of factory workers and championed the cause of small landholders against the squatters. The paper was a ferocious campaigner in support of tariff protection for local industries and one of the most influential voices in shaping the Australian Federation. It also provoked what remains one of the biggest—and financially ruinous—defamation cases in Australian history. In all of that, Syme, as historian Geoffrey Blainey would observe a century later, was first and foremost a zealous advocate for the interests of Melbourne and Victoria:

  David Syme regarded his newspaper as a political pulpit from which he preached long, closely-argued sermons on economic and political issues. One strenuous campaign called on Victoria to impose import duties on goods from England, the United States, News South Wales and everywhere. Victoria should make its own furniture, locomotives, and wines rather than import them. The Age was thus a vigorous nationalist 20 years before the Sydney Bulletin arose with a wider, more aggressive definition of nationalism. Syme’s nationalism, however, was not amphibious: it did not cross the Murray or Bass Strait. He was the apostle of Victoria.4

  In the chapel of David Syme, Frederick Schuler became a trusted acolyte. The young journalist soon proved his worth in the press gallery at Parliament House, as both a reporter and a key agent in Syme’s relentess political intrigues. A profile in Melbourne Punch would eulogise him as a ‘master scoop-maker’, a great compliment in the world of driven newsmen:

  David Syme had marked his [Schuler’s] powers and was using him. He became one of the big, stern man’s confidants. His best work, from a literary point of view, was done in the parliamentary gallery. He was put in charge of The Age parliamentary staff. It was at a time when State politics was full of fire and fight. Schuler scored as a writer in his gallery notes. He scored as a newsgetter and a manager of men in the lobbies, where he carried out many a plan mapped out by David Syme for the handling of the parliamentary machine.5

  In the decade after Schuler joined the paper, The Age boomed. Its circulation almost tripled to 100,000 copies a day between 1880 and 1890. In the era of small newspapers, the Saturday edition grew to sixteen broadsheet pages, enabling Syme to boast that his was the bulkiest penny newspaper in the British Empire. At that time, the slightly thicker Times of London was selling for threepence. The Age’s influence was also growing rapidly. A campaign over exploitative conditions in shops and factories triggered a commission of inquiry. New legislation enacted in 1885 banned the employment of boys under twelve and girls under thirteen. It also required shops to close at 10 p.m. on Saturdays and 7 p.m. on all other days, and provided for compulsory inspections of lift safety and sanitation standards in workplaces.

  While pushing the boundaries of politics and journalism at home, The Age also had an eye on new frontiers across the continent and beyond. In 1869 the New York Herald had financed Henry Morton Stanley’s famous African expedition in search of Scottish missionary David Livingstone. In 1874 the New York Herald teamed up with London’s Daily
Telegraph to bankroll a further voyage by Stanley to trace the course of the Congo River—which he did while losing 240 of his party along the way. In 1883 The Age sent its man, George Morrison, into the heart of darkest New Guinea where he narrowly survived a spearing by unwelcoming natives. Later, as a special correspondent for The Times, Morrison joined and reported the 55-day siege of the diplomatic quarter of Peking during the Boxer Rebellion. He was just one of a clutch of larger-than-life personalities who would grace the pages of The Age in the late 1800s. Marcus Clarke, author of the classic For the Term of His Natural Life, was a regular contributor. Alfred Deakin, a lifelong confidant of Syme, joined the paper in 1878 and would continue to dabble in journalism long after he began his first term as prime minister of Australia in 1903.

  In 1890, Frederick Schuler was promoted from chief political reporter into the powerful position of chief of staff of The Age. He would flourish in the role, with Melbourne Punch describing him as ‘one of the best news corps commanders’ that Melbourne had: ‘Scrupulously just, mathematically exact, and wonderfully methodical, he kept his staff going as though it were a well-oiled piece of machinery.’ But Punch would concede that these qualities, while admirable, also reflected a personality driven by caution and convention rather than ‘remarkable originality and resource’.6 A very short man—he stood less than five feet tall—Frederick was also seen as a shy, reclusive and enigmatic figure by many of his staff and associates:

  A little man, tight lipped, keen-eyed, self-contained and Jewish in appearance, although he is not Jewish at all, he looks what he is—a man who is wrapped up in the paper on which he has worked . . . and willing to work night and day to further its interests and increase its power.7

  Junior staff would marvel at his mystery and remoteness. Syme biographer C.E. Sayers, a reporter at The Age during Frederick’s later years on the paper, would describe the scene as he and his young colleagues watched senior members of the staff arrive at the office in Collins Street each morning: