Share
Clip description
A shell explodes in No-Man’s-Land after a title suggesting that this is part of an Australian follow-up to an American attack on the Hindenburg Line in late September 1918. The title says the Australians broke through at Gillemont Farm after the Americans were checked. The next title says that Captain Wilkins, MC, and his assistant Sergeant Joyce were both slightly wounded in this action, accompanying the Australian troops. After this battle, US and Australian troops cross in the back areas. The Australians entrain, as the Americans go forward. Nearing the war’s end, Australian editors, accompanied by the official correspondent CEW (Charles) Bean, tour a prison camp housing some of the 29,144 German prisoners captured by the Australians in 1918.
Curator’s notes
The first shot of a shell bursting is thought to be a fake. It’s certainly not from 1918, as it was first seen in 1916 in the British film, The Battle of the Somme, which created a sensation in Britain and Australia when it was shown in late 1916. But even in the original film, it is not thought to be genuine. Historians at the UK’s Imperial War Museum have reconstructed The Battle of the Somme (1916) and they suspect that these shots of an artillery bombardment were staged for the British cameramen at a trench mortar training school behind the lines, along with that film’s most famous sequence, in which English ‘Tommies’ are photographed leaping out of their trench and getting shot, at the start of the 1916 battle. The Australian film is likely to have been edited and titled after the conclusion of hostilities, probably in 1919 or early 1920. It was shown as part of a touring program in several capital cities in Australia in the early 1920s. These screenings, usually a full week of films with a different program each night, accompanied by different generals and historians giving talks, were mounted from July 1920 (in Sydney), then annually in one or more capitals in the next two years.
Charles Bean mentions in his wartime diaries from January 1917 that he spent some time during a London visit selecting shots from the official British war films of 1916 for use in the Australian films – a possible explanation of how footage from The Battle of the Somme (1916) turned up in this film. Another shot from the British film turns up in the Australian film Bapaume to Bullecourt (1917), purporting to show the British pursuit of German troops in the early spring of 1917. Several other sequences in the Australian films are likely to be shots made by Geoffrey Malins and John McDowell, the two British cameramen who shot The Battle of the Somme (1916). Bean mentions in a footnote to the diaries, added in 1928, that he had been involved in titling some Australian films after the war (AWM38, 3DRL606/69/1, page 8), which makes the inaccuracies and duplications in these films the more curious. During the war, Bean had been fanatical about accuracy, especially in relation to photographs.
After the war, the same standards do not apply to the films put together for the series of public screenings from 1920–22. Shots with incorrect location titles were used in some films and, on a couple of occasions, the same footage is labelled differently and reused, making it extremely difficult to know what we are looking at. It may be that these films were titled and edited quickly and for a purpose that was not strictly historical. It may also be that the titles were not written by Bean. In the early 1920s, the Australian War Memorial, though promised and in planning, did not yet exist – except as a small and devoted staff overseen by John Treloar, founding director of the Australian War Records Section, established in London during the war. The public talks from 1919 onwards were, at least in part, an effort to raise funds and public support for the memorial, while the government made up its mind about when, where and how much to spend on building it. Accuracy in the titling of the films may have taken a temporary step to the rear, in favour of the needs of fund-raising. Many of the suspect shots appear to be chosen to add excitement, or at least action, to the films. There is clearly something missing after the first title in this clip – as there is no tank to be seen.
The end of this clip shows a collection of Australian newspaper editors visiting the Western Front in September 1918, just after the Australian victory at Péronne. The visit provides a fitting coda to the ongoing animosity between Bean and the new Australian Corps commander, General Sir John Monash (recently knighted in the field). The Australian editors included JO Fairfax, one of the proprietors of The Sydney Morning Herald, with its editor, TW Heney, who had known Bean for more than a decade; Geoffrey Syme, Melbourne Age co-owner; SH Prior, editor of the Sydney Bulletin; and Frank Anstey, a socialist member of parliament. In his biography of Bean, Dudley McCarthy notes that Monash did not tell Bean of this visit in advance, nor invite him to the luncheon he (Monash) gave them (see From Gallipoli to the Somme – the Story of CEW Bean, 1983, p 348).
Despite Monash’s obvious displeasure, he attached himself to the visitors after the luncheon was over. He and Murdoch were both anxious that their tour should be of wider scope than that provided for in the official programme; which, they felt, was designed more as a personal publicity exercise by Monash than to reveal what they believed to be the magnificence of the ordinary Australian soldier.
This is the afternoon we see here, 3 September 1918, and it provides a rare glimpse of Charles Bean during the war years. He oversaw most of what the Australian photographers pointed a camera at – but apart from a few still photographs, he usually stayed out of the frame. He can be seen here on the right in the last second of the clip, the man at the back in slouch hat and spectacles, walking with a cane. The party is led by General Sir John Monash.
