Hamilton’s informant had been wrong in one respect. The letter had not been addressed to Lawson as he thought, but to Asquith, the Prime Minister. Hamilton was not dismayed when he heard this news from London: ‘I do not for one moment believe Mr. Asquith would employ such agencies and for sure he will turn Murdoch and his wares into the wastepaper basket… Tittletattle will effect no lodgement in the Asquith brain.’
But here again he was wrong, for Murdoch had by no means given up the hunt. He had lost Ashmead-Bartlett’s letter, but he had his own pen. On his arrival in England he wrote an 8,000-word report on Gallipoli, and addressed it to the Australian Prime Minister, Andrew Fisher. Ashmead-Bartlett’s letter, which was now safely pouched in the War Office, had said that Hamilton and his staff were openly referred to by the troops at Gallipoli with derision, and that morale in the Army had collapsed; but this was the mildest pin-pricking compared with the views that Murdoch now disclosed. Part of his report was a eulogy of the Australian soldiers: his criticism was reserved for the English. Braithwaite, he informed the Australian Prime Minister, was ‘more cordially detested in our forces than Enver Pasha’. Birdwood ‘had not the fighting qualities or the big brain of a great general’. Kitchener ‘has a terrible task in getting pure work from the General Staff of the British Army, whose motives can never be pure, for they are unchangeably selfish’. Murdoch had seen one of Hamilton’s staff officers ‘wallowing’ in ice while wounded men were dying of heat a few hundred yards away. As for the British soldiers of the New Army, they were ‘merely a lot of childish youths without strength to endure or brains to improve their conditions’. One would refuse to believe that these could be British soldiers at all, their physique was so much below that of the Turks. ‘From what I saw of the Turk,’ the report went on, ‘I am convinced he is… a better man than those opposed to him.’
On the question of the morale of the soldiers Murdoch was equally trenchant. ‘Sedition,’ he wrote, ‘is talked around every tin of bully beef on the peninsula.’ And again, ‘I shall always remember the stricken face of a young English lieutenant when I told him he must make up his mind for a winter campaign.’ And finally, ‘I do not like to dictate this sentence, even for your eyes, but the fact is that after the first day at Suvla an order had to be issued to officers to shoot without mercy any soldier who lagged behind or loitered in an advance.’
There was perhaps some excuse for this amazing document, despite the fact that Murdoch had been only for a few hours at the front and could hardly have seen very much of the Turks. Overstatement is not such a rare thing in time of war, and any journalist would recognize here the desire to tell a good story, to present the facts in the most brisk and colourful way.
To the inexperienced and confident eye of a young man who had been brought up in a remote dominion, who knew very little about other kinds of people and their ways, and still less about war, this first sight of the battlefield had been a terrible thing; and no doubt Murdoch was genuinely indignant. He felt that it was his duty to break ‘the conspiracy of silence’ on Imbros.
And there was some substance in the report; not in the frantic and reckless details about sedition and the shooting of lagging soldiers, but in the general theme. G.H.Q. was being criticized, things had been mismanaged, and Murdoch was telling the plain truth when he said so. At all events, it was the truth as he saw it, and in wartime there is a definite place for the reports of fresh eyewitnesses of this kind. They serve to remind politicians and headquarters planners that they are dealing with human beings who in the end are much more important than machines and elaborate plans. Such documents can hardly be used as state papers, as evidence upon which policy can be decided, and Murdoch’s letter should have remained what it was — a private letter to his Government which required checking from other sources.
But Lloyd George saw it. It is only fair to assume that Lloyd George was sincerely moved by its terms, but he was also an opponent of Lord Kitchener, and he had always preferred Salonika to Gallipoli. He urged Murdoch to send a copy to Mr. Asquith.
If up to this point an explanation can be made of Murdoch’s motives, it is more difficult to find an excuse for the action which the Prime Minister now took. He did not send the report to Hamilton for his comments. He did not wait until Kitchener had studied it. He had it printed as a state paper on the duck-egg blue stationery of the Committee of Imperial Defence, and circulated it to the members of the Dardanelles Committee. This was the paper they had before them, when on October 11 they decided to send either Haig or Kitchener to Gallipoli to find out what Hamilton and his headquarters were up to. This was the origin of the ‘flow of unofficial reports’ about which Kitchener had warned Hamilton earlier in the week.
On this same day, too, October 11, Ashmead-Bartlett arrived in London fresh from his dismissal from G.H.Q. at Imbros. He lost no time in seeing Lord Northcliffe, the proprietor of The Times and the Daily Mail, and in making arrangements for a full, uncensored exposure of the Gallipoli question in the columns of the Sunday Times. Both Murdoch and Ashmead-Bartlett were very busy in Whitehall and Fleet Street during the next few days, and it soon became known that they had Northcliffe’s backing. Northcliffe by now was convinced that Gallipoli must be evacuated.
On October 14 the Dardanelles Committee assembled again, and Hamilton’s reply to Kitchener’s evacuation cable was put before them. It was, as they feared, an unhelpful and depressing message — merely this despondent reference to losses of fifty per cent. Churchill was still for supporting Gallipoli, but with the failure of the August battles his reputation had taken a further downward plunge — after all, was he not the author of the whole disastrous adventure? — and the Salonika group was very active. They insisted that Hamilton should go. It was left to Kitchener to break the news to him.
At Gallipoli the weather had turned bitterly cold, and October 15 on Imbros was a depressing day. Headquarters was on the point of moving across to winter quarters on the other side of the island. A new stone shack, something like a Greek shepherd’s hut, had been built for Hamilton, and he was sleeping in his tent for the last time. He was already in bed when an officer came to him with a message from Kitchener marked ‘Secret and Personal’, telling him that when the next message arrived he should decipher it himself. Hamilton had a fair idea of what this next message was going to be, but he allowed himself one final gesture. No, he said, he did not want to be woken when the message came in: it was to be brought to him at the usual hour in the morning.
Next day the message was put before him, and he got to work with the cipher book and the device like a bowstring which was used for decoding cables. Word by word he spelled out:
‘The War Council held last night decided that though the Government fully appreciate your work and the gallant manner in which you personally have struggled to make the enterprise a success in face of the terrible difficulties you have had to contend against, they, all the same, wish to make a change in the command which will give them an opportunity of seeing you.’
General Sir Charles Monro, one of the Army commanders on the Western front, was to supersede him, and Monro was to bring out a new chief-of-staff in place of Braithwaite. Birdwood was to be in temporary command until Monro arrived. Perhaps, the message added, Hamilton might like to visit Salonika and Egypt on his way home so that he could make a report on those places.