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British general, Sir Frederick Stopford. Put simply, Stopford was too old and yet also too inexperienced for the command. Born in 1854 Stopford was 61 years of age at the time of his appointment to the Dardanelles. He had never commanded troops in battle. He had retired from the army in 1909 and was not in good health. He was selected for command at Suvla because he was the next most senior officer on the list and to pass him over would have caused unpleasantness in an army that was still based more on social class

    PLATE 5 The 21st Battalion marches up Monash Gully after arriving at Gallipoli on 8 September 1915. AWM Neg. No. A00742
    and good form than on professionalism. It was ‘Buggin’s turn’ for Stopford. Even Ian Hamilton had urged greater vigour from Stopford in the first hours of the Suvla campaign but he was ignored. Hamilton sacked Stopford within days of the start of the fighting at Suvla but by then it was too late. Bean undoubtedly told Murdoch the sorry saga of Frederick Stopford but the letter reflects more the Australians’ anger over the ‘tea party’ rather than an unfortunate British appointment. Murdoch describes the troops sent to Suvla as ‘fresh, raw, untried troops under amateur officers’. Sending such men to battle was ‘to court disaster’. Murdoch was more interested in the decisions made in London than with one elderly, failed leader.
    It is no surprise, then, that the early part of Murdoch’s letter to Fisher contains a blistering condemnation of Suvla. But Murdoch is exaggerating when he writes that at Suvla ‘one division went ashore without any orders whatsoever’ and he misunderstands when he says that another division down there had initially set off in the wrong direction. Murdoch’s summary conclusion is correct, however, when he writes that, all things considered, the work of the general staff ‘has been deplorable’.
    Bean’s influence on the letter is apparent as Murdoch moves to his next major point: that the attempt at a break out could not be resumed until spring next year and that in the meantime the troops would have to endure an appalling winter, which many would not survive. That was the anxiety in all quarters at Anzac by the time Murdoch arrived. The August offensive had failed. It could not be resumed without as many as 150,000 additional troops. And in the meantime those who were already there would simply have to sit out the awful conditions of winter: rain, wild seas, heavy snow.
    This was a prospect to which Fisher needed to give the closest attention. The men were already sick, Murdoch reported, as many as 600 soldiers a day were reporting ill. What if the force were to lose 30,000 to sickness over the winter? Murdoch asked. The 60,000 remaining ‘will not be an army. They will be a broken force, spent.’
    This was powerful writing, and awful reading for a prime minister responsible for the health and well-being of his nation’s soldiers. Fisher would need to ask himself how the Australian people would cope with the news of mass evacuations from Anzac due to sickness.
    It is worth noting, too, some of the images that Murdoch used to impress his points on his prime minister. Men were already sick, he wrote, from dysentery caused by the flies. But what of the consequences, he asked, of the autumn rains which will ‘unbury our dead’ and add vastly to the dangers of airborne disease.
    In similarly powerful prose, Murdoch had informed Fisher that ‘sedition is talked around every tin of bully beef on the peninsula’. Murdoch realised that almost every soldier or officer he met had buried a good mate on the peninsula already. Australian soldiers saw themselves as quite competent to form their own opinions, to think for themselves. They had freely offered their service as soldiers to their country but they had not surrendered their capacity for independent thinking and judgement.