Labor’s Titan, Gilbert Giles Roper
Source: Warrnambool Institute Press, 1983, edited by Allan and Wendy Scarfe. Copyright Allan and Wendy Scarfe. This digital edition for Marxists
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Transcription, mark-up: Steve Painter
“They are all inspired by the lust of blood, only it is somebody else’s blood and not their own that is to be shed.”
In the decade after the Boer War there was a strong growth of militarism in Australia. The British War Office was impressed by the performances of Australian troops in the Sudan and South Africa, and determined to recruit a large force of Australian servicemen for the decisive military and naval conflicts, which they knew were not far ahead.
After federation, Australia was drawn into a defence agreement that was designed to produce uniform action by Great Britain and her Empire in the event of hostilities developing. Compulsory military service was adopted by Australia in 1909. In 1910 Lord Kitchener visited Australia. He drafted proposals for nationwide military and naval training that were subsequently adopted by the commonwealth government.
The Kitchener Plan began with boys of twelve years of age, who were drafted into the “junior cadets” for physical training and elementary drill. At fourteen all males were sent into the “senior cadets” for musketry and more advanced military drill. From eighteen to twenty-six they became part-time soldiers or sailors, learning advanced weaponry and so on.
This scheme for universal military training in Australia went through the federal parliament as a bipartisan measure, but when implemented it became known as “boy conscription” and intense public opposition arose in many parts of Australia, particularly in Broken Hill. Discipline was often at a low ebb on the parade grounds and in camps, and numerous youths were sentenced to detention in military establishments for refusing to attend for the prescribed period of training. Conscripts who were promoted as NCOs or officers were sometimes thrown in horse-troughs or rolled down sandhills, and some conscripts enjoyed playing cricket with the butts of rifles. Harry Holland summarised the popular dislike of this training scheme in a pamphlet entitled The Crime of Conscription, which excoriated Andrew Fisher, William Morris Hughes and other Labor parliamentarians who had supported the introduction of such militarist measures.
The cause of these war preparations was the knowledge available only to an inner circle of British defence chiefs that a war was pending between the British Empire and the dominant nation in Europe — the German Empire. Publicly, Britain was supposed to be on the best of terms with Germany. The Kaiser, Wilhelm II, had visited Britain, and the reigning monarch in Britain, Edward VII, was hailed as the “peacemaker”.
It was well said that in the Great War of 1914-18 truth was the first casualty. The secret preparations for the terrible conflict with Germany were hidden from the Australian people and could only be guessed at by those who opposed the war. The degree of deception practiced on the public was only made clear many years later. Ironically it was Lord Mountbatten who pointed out in his televised memoirs that preparations for war with Germany, directed by Prince Louis Battenberg and Winston Churchill, were well under way soon after the Boer War.
Even C.E.W. Bean, the official historian of Australia’s part in the Great War, incorrectly wrote:
“In August, 1914, the test carne with extreme suddenness. War fell upon the British people out of a clear sky … Until the last days of the crisis no part of the British people realised that it was itself involved in this impending struggle of nations. The British Empire looked amiably on while the last precious moments of peace expired, and Sir Edward Grey employed an incomparable patience and a transparent sincerity in endeavouring to find for Austria, Germany and Russia one road after another to a pacific solution.”[1]
In all these involved negotiations, Germany remained hopeful that Britain would be on her side when the last cards were played. Britain delayed entry into the war until August 4, when, in Napoleonic language, the wine had been drawn and had to be drunk.
On July 30, according to Dr Bean, Sir Joseph Cook, who was prime minister of Australia, heading a Liberal Party administration, was away from the temporary national capital, Melbourne, on an election campaign, when he received a cablegram in secret cipher from the British government informing the Australian government that there was an imminent danger of war. Cook could not understand the cipher, and had to have it decoded in Melbourne. Soon another cablegram arrived that requested Australia to implement the first part of the plan to cope with a war situation in accordance with the terms of the Defence Agreement.
Andrew Fisher, who was the leader of the ALP opposition in the federal parliament, was also electioneering, and was obviously privy grim news new from London. Addressing an election rally in the Victorian town of Colac, on July 31, he uttered this pledge: “Should the worst happen, after everything has been done that honour will permit, Australians will stand beside the mother country to keep and defend her to our last man and our last shilling.” On the following night, at another election meeting, Cook echoed Fisher’s pledge.
The mechanism by which Australia was drawn into the Great War — the Defence Agreement — revealed that the Australian constitution contained no provision necessitating a decision of parliament or a national referendum before Australia entered a war. There was no escape clause from the Defence Agreement. A German freighter tried to steam out of Port Phillip Bay, a shell was fired from a coastal fort across the ship’s bows and we were embroiled in one of the most terrible wars in all history, in which 60,000 Australians were to die. Our political leaders assumed that the war would have the unstinted approval of Australians. In this belief they were to be rudely disillusioned.
The Great War had a tremendous effect upon the labouring people in all countries. In Australia, amazing scenes accompanied the early part of the war. It was generally believed that the war would be brief, because surely nothing could withstand the might of the empire on which the sun never set. The Kaiser was half-mad, anyway, and the German soldiers, though brutal, were exceptionally stupid, said the press. Germans were described as “Huns”, and given the collective designation “Fritz”. A type of large sausage popular in Australia had always been known as Fritz, but the name was quickly changed thereafter to Devon sausage, while German buns became Kitchener buns and so on. The soldiers, with bright swords and bayonets, marched away through streets lined with cheering crowds waving patriotic flags. Concert parties mounted on wagons roved through the streets singing rousing and poignant songs, and the surging crowds denoted the determination of the people to resist the Kaiser’s attack on “British freedom” and “the rights of small nations”.
Australian Labor Party parliamentarians, with very few exceptions, were swept along in the torrent of chauvinism. On October 14, 1914, Andrew Fisher, who had become prime minister after a sweeping victory at the polls, reiterated his Colac pledge in the federal parliament, declaring: “We shall pledge our last man and our last shilling to see this war brought to a successful issue.” Frank Anstey, the Victorian socialist, declared on the same occasion: “We have a personal interest in what is taking place and to that extent it becomes our duty to furnish all the aid we can, whether in arms or men.” He added that “a thing worth voting for is a thing worth dying for and fighting for — not merely talking about, but, if need be worth going to where the contest is, where the cannons are roaring, the rifles cracking, and the bayonets flashing.”
The Industrial Workers of the World, whose members were called “Wobblies” or “IWWs”, was the first organisation in Australia to openly oppose the war. Their meeting in the Sydney Domain on the first Sunday after Australia’s entry into the war in August 1914, took the form of an antiwar meeting, displaying an antiwar banner with the words: “War! What for?” the title of an antiwar book by George R. Kirkpatrick. The Industrial Workers of the World saw the war as a “bloodbath”. On August 10, 1914, the official organ of the Industrial Workers of the World, Direct Action, published an editorial by Tom Glynn, headed: "Workers of the world, unite against war!!” Three weeks later, in the same paper, Tom Barker advised the workers: “Don’t be fooled by jingoism”.
Opposition to the war brought together a heterogeneous array of organisations and individuals who apparently had little in common except their mutual loathing of the slaughter. Quakers and socialists, the Industrial Workers of the World and religious objectors, pacifists and many other varieties of anti-militarists welded themselves into an opposition, but they needed all their moral and physical courage, for those who opposed the war were treated harshly. The 1914 Trading With the Enemy Act, the Crimes Act, and the War Precautions Act together gave parliament and police wide powers of coercion. The inquisitorial recruiting campaigns and the regulations issued under the War Precautions Act imposed a constant petty bullying over the lives and thought of “disaffected” civilians. There were 3442 prosecutions under the regulations of the War Precautions Act. Brookfield being one of them, for such crimes as exhibiting the red flag or saying, “Do not enlist to fight for a man like Billy Hughes”. Most defendants, interestingly, had Irish or non-British surnames.
The Industrial Workers of the World were singled out for particular persecution and their sufferings deeply moved Brookfield. In 1915 Tom Barker, one of their leaders, was jailed for six months for prejudicing recruiting by publishing in Direct Action the best remembered poster of the war: “To arms! Capitalists, parsons, politicians, landlords, newspaper editors, and other stay at home patriots. Your country needs you in the trenches! Workers, follow your masters.”
Many people swung away from support for the war as a result of the exposure of the extent of profiteering. The term “profiteer” was a play on the word “volunteer”. As the Australian Imperial Forces were recruited entirely from volunteers, there was the implied suggestion that while patriots were volunteering to defend Australia, others (usually portrayed as top-hatted men wearing Union Jacks as waistcoats) were profiteering from the misfortunes of war. The Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Dr Mannix, observed: “Those who talk loudly about the last man adopt a much more subdued tone in promising the last shilling.” Dr Mannix was virtually a one-man propaganda factory against the war. He defined the war as a trade war, and asked embarrassing questions as to whether Ireland was included in the fight for the “rights of small nations”.
Dr Mannix spoke for the large contingent of Irish nationalist supporters in Australia. Another large community group that had no enthusiasm for the war were people of German origin. Most of these lived in South Australia, in and about towns with Germanic names such as Klemzig, Lobethal, Hahndorf, Kaiserstuhl and Hergott’s Springs. The largest concentrations of South Australian Germans were in the Barossa Valley, around Tanunda, where nearly all the shops were run by descendants of the original German migrants driven out of Germany by persecution. Adelaide had its German Club, German college, German band, and the Liedertafel, while German-style musicians playing in the streets had long been part of the Adelaide scene. Some South Australian Germans changed their names, but many maintained a sullen opposition to the war, speaking the German language, maintaining their national customs, and worshipping in the numerous beautiful Lutheran churches. Father Jerger, parish priest in the Catholic church at Marrickville for more than thirty years after he arrived from Germany, was persecuted and ultimately deported because he asked his congregation to pray not only for the Australian servicemen but also for the enemy.
One of the first disquieting developments of the war, on the home front, was the steady rise in the cost of living. Economics as a study was in its infancy in those days, but the public required no tutoring or books by experts to realise the trend towards inflation. The Fisher government had introduced paper currency in place of gold coins, a useful expedient in the manipulation of money. Many commodities doubled in price as the war continued. Typical was the price of men’s suits, which rose from the pre-war price of £2/10/- to £5 and more. War loans were floated and Australians began to notice that the war had caused them to acquire a national debt. Private banks used their credit resources to make fictional investments in the war loans. On these fictional deposits they collected high rates of interest in real cash. The widespread opportunities for greedy enrichment caused commercial morality to collapse, and thus the sinister word “profiteer” gained wider and more realistic usage.
From Switzerland came the antiwar manifesto of the central committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, written by V.I. Lenin, dated November 1, 1914:
The European war, prepared for decades by governments and bourgeois parties of all countries, has broken out. Growth of armaments, extreme sharpening of the struggle for markets … seizure of territories, subjugation of foreign nations, ruining of the competing nation, robbery of its wealth, diversion of the attention of the labouring masses from internal political crises in Russia, Germany, England and other countries, the separate and nationalist deception of workers and the destruction of their vanguard “ this is the sole real essence, significance and meaning of the present war.
News arrived that Karl Liebknecht had boldly defied the power of German militarism right in Berlin itself. Later came the dramatic story of the antiwar rising led by James Connolly in Dublin during Easter week, 1916.
In Europe the scene and the popular mood changed rapidly. Rosa Luxembourg’s Junius Pamphlet pointed to “the cannon fodder that was loaded upon the trains in August and September … rotting on the battlefields of Belgium and the Vosges, while profits are springing, like weeds, from the fields of the dead”. Hunger riots, pestilence, misery and desperation became rife. Huge armies disappeared in single battles, like the Russian armies at Tannenberg, and ancient empires, like Austria, began to crumble away. Socialists began to talk of uniting across the battle lines, and of turning the war into a civil war for the overthrow of the various warring governments.
So, too, in Australia, the heavy losses of the expeditionary forces, revealed in seemingly endless casualty lists, gradually aroused anguish and disillusionment. The Gallipoli campaign, planned under the direct supervision of Winston Churchill, had the aim of securing access to the Black Sea oilfields. Military academies had used assault and defence of the Dardanelles as copybook military and naval exercises, so the Turkish armies were well prepared for such a venture. Due to execrable intelligence work, Churchill timed the actual assault on Gallipoli at a time which coincided with the presence on the peninsula of an army of 300,000 Turks carrying out manoeuvres under the generalship of Mustapha Kemal, guided by the German instructional general Von Sanders. The resultant slaughter of Australian and other British troops caused a scandal that drove Churchill into the political wilderness for years. In France, the Diggers suffered from being allocated a disproportionately large and severe share of the fighting, and the casualties were enormous.
The war was being criticised by a greater number of newspapers, especially The Queensland Worker, the Barrier Daily Truth, Direct Action and the International Socialist. Big business continued to wallow in an orgy of profiteering. For a host of people the war was no longer a glorious crusade to “make the world safe for democracy” or to “make Australia a place fit for heroes to live in”. Instead, it had become a seemingly endless and horrible visitation threatening the lives of themselves and their fellow humans, and the pompous slogans of the warmongers now appeared as stupid shibboleths. Official propaganda that the Allies were “fighting to defend the rights of small nations” seemed hollow as the oppression of Ireland continued. Looked at from the vantage point of history, the propaganda of the Great War period was often crude and ludicrous. E.D. Morell, MP, threw £1000 on the table of the House of Commons, to be paid to anyone who could substantiate the newspaper story that German soldiers had pitchforked Belgian babies over their shoulders like sheaves of wheat. Nobody came forward to claim the money.
In this smouldering atmosphere the old political forms and personalities no longer sufficed. Ad hoc organisations were set up and political activity developed on an unprecedented scale. Among the new personages thrown up by the vortex of war was Brookfield, in whose massive figure the discontent, antiwar feeling, and social aims of the masses seemed to be embodied, and in whose words the true aspirations of the Australian working people were to find, for the first time, authentic and adequate expression.
1. C.E.W. Bean, Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-8. Vol 1. Angus & Robertson, 1941, 11-13.