Townsville Bulletin - Townsville Weekend
Officer and a gentleman
While Anzac Day is fresh in our minds, it warrants a mention of one Brigadier General Harold Edward ‘Pompey’ Elliott of Victoria.
I’d never heard of Pompey Elliott until in Albany in Western Australia last year, I visited the National Anzac Centre. He was a well-known WWI figure, someone loved by the men he led, but disliked by his superiors for his bluntness when questioning orders that he deemed placed unnecessary threats on the soldiers under his command.
Pompey took care of his men and he set an example, leading from the front on the battlefield.
He had been a solicitor before the war and from what you read about him he must surely qualify for the romantic title of ‘warrior poet’.
But Pompey, a mother hen when it came to the lives of his men, was quite often, it seems, reckless with his own.
Such was the responsibility he felt for those serving under him that he tolerated no recklessness from superiors when it came to risking their lives unnecessarily. He could use words that sideswiped like an axe if he thought his men were being treated as mere cannon fodder. This directness put him at odds with those who wanted him to carry out orders without question. He wasn’t exactly the darling of the top brass.
Little wonder, then, that those shiny bum officials, safely sipping brandy in offices far, far away from the front lines, despised him.
Little wonder, too, that his men, seeing him in battle and doing his own reconnaissance out in no man’s land, loved him.
In one letter to his wife, Kate, he wrote: “It is always a terrible decision, this launching of magnificent men towards death … each one priceless.”
When 5500 men died during the first action at Fromelles at the Western Front, he wept as the survivors came back from the line.
The Department of Veterans’ Affairs’ Road to Remembrance series tells us that Elliott wrote frequently to his wife and children Violet and Neil as well as his sister-in-law Belle.
He was crushed when his brother George died at Polygon Wood and told Kate: “I saw him dead, so white and rigid and still … we have buried him so far from home among strangers.”
Historian Ross McMullin, in his book Pompey Elliott at War: In His Own Words, said Elliott could transform the war into a bedtime story, so kind was his turn of phrase for his children.
Describing tank warfare, Elliott told his “little laddie” Neil: “We got a lot of big wagons like traction engines and put guns in them and ran them ‘bumpety bump’ up against the old Kaiser’s wall and knocked a great big hole in it.”
But while he could use words to paint a picture book story about war to his children, he could as easily threaten men with death by hanging. Pompey Elliott was a strict disciplinarian and said he would publicly hang any of his officers caught looting. He later wrote: “None seemed inclined to make of themselves a test case.”
The division between himself and those in high command eventually came to a head. His success in battle was widely known and recognised, but in May 1918 he was denied promotion. It was a direct rebuff from those with the power to put him in his place. He said they told him he “suffered from lack of control and lack of judgment … that I break out like a volcano if things don’t go just as I want them”.
Returning home, Elliott served two terms as a senator for Victoria from 1919. Life should have been good, but he was a tormented soul. He was reportedly “profoundly unsettled” by the plight of returned soldiers during the Great Depression and he never really got over the treatment meted out to him by his superiors.
Suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, this great Australian both on and off the battlefield, took his life in Melbourne on March 23, 1931, aged 52.
If you’re over in the southern part of Western Australia, put the National Anzac Centre on your must-see list. As well as being a heart-on-the-sleeve tribute to those who went to war, it also provides glimpses into the personal lives of those who were in the trenches during WWI. And you do this while looking over King George Sound where the ships carrying men to war took on provisions before heading for Gallipoli. For many, the rocky bluffs and wild scrub beyond were the last things they ever saw of Australia.