‘A Wonderful Setting for the tragedy’: an artist captures an Anzac horror
When he accompanied Australia’s official First World War historian Charles Bean on a historical mission to the Gallipoli peninsula in 1919, George Lambert rose from his bivouac before daybreak each day so as to ensure that the colours of his work would match the early morning light. He was there to sketch the topography of the Dardanelles and build a visual record of Gallipoli that would provide material for grand narrative paintings.
I know, because I have stood on the heights there at daybreak, that there is something both familiar and alien about the harsh landscape of the Dardanelles. The early sun comes flat and strong across the Aegean, giving the patchy vegetation an eerie resemblance to the scrub of the Australian bush.
This illusion was not lost on Lambert when he toured the peninsula. In fact, he had already formed strong associations between the battlefields of the Near East and his Australian homeland. His time as a war artist with Australian light horsemen in Palestine in 1918 had encouraged him to envisage the front lines as an extension of the Australian bush frontier. He saw, in the ‘sweating, sun-bronzed men and beautiful horses’ of the light horse, the pioneer bushmen he had observed working the wool trade from his uncle’s property at Warren.
The morning light was of particular importance for Lambert’s recording of the Nek – a narrow ridge high up on the peninsula where at 4.37am on the morning of 7 August 1915 men of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade were ordered over the parapets to their deaths. The story of the 3rd Light Horse has been immortalised in Australian legend, not least as the denouement of Peter Weir’s Gallipoli, in which the steel-springed Archy Hamilton hurls himself into no man’s land. In August 1915 men of the light horse were tasked with capturing the high ground of the peninsula in a coordinated series of attacks aimed at breaking the deadlock. The failures of the plan are famous: bombardments were incorrectly timed, communications failed, a crucial pincer attack by New Zealander troops did not eventuate. As a result, of the 600 Australians who attacked at the Nek there were 372 casualties.
The view from the Nek commands the peninsula, but when Lambert surveyed the site with Bean it was not picturesque. The party was forced to bury more than 300 Australian bodies in a strip of land the size of three tennis courts, which prompted Lambert to write to his wife that the ‘gruesome is… scattered all over the battlefield’. Lambert was stoic; ‘evidence grins coldly at us noncombatants’, he wrote, ‘and I feel thankful that I have been trained… to stop my emotions at the border line’. However this may have been mere bravado; Bean recorded in his diary that ‘Lambert was, I think, more sensitive than the rest of us to the tragedy – or at any rate the horror – of Anzac’.
Lambert captured this horror in his iconic The charge of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at the Nek, 7 August 1915, 1924 which is held at the Australian War Memorial. The Art Gallery of NSW is fortunate to hold the preparatory cartoon, executed in his London studio in 1920. The subject of the work is the charge of the 10th Light Horse Regiment, the third of four waves to go over and perhaps the most tragic as the regiment’s commander unsuccessfully attempted to have the attack called off.
Lambert was conscious of the fact that to evoke the full force of the tragedy would require a dramatic construction that animated figures in landscape rather than an attempt at objective reportage. ‘The worst feature of this after battle work’, he wrote, ‘is that the silent hills and valleys sit stern, unmoved callous of the human and busy only in growing bush, and sliding earth to hide the scars left by the war disease’. To this end he carefully orchestrated the scene at the Nek and froze the action at its most dramatic moment, compressing the image of Gallipoli to what he saw as the essential characteristics of the Australian type: courage and sacrifice.
For the most part, the figures were composed from uniformed models in his London studio, but while he was at Gallipoli he recreated death scenes using his assistant William Spruce as a model and at times he used is own body as a prop. Bean recorded how Lambert, in order to get a better sense of the effect of battle on men’s bodies, would often ask him ‘how I thought a man would fall if hit on one side and spun round; Lambert used to jerk himself forward as he imagined this charging man would, and as you see one figure falling in the centre of the picture today’.
Many of Lambert’s earlier studies are utilised in some way in The Nek, giving the dead an appearance of compositional harmony. The soldiers’ bodies are strongly ordered – twisted and contorted not only by enemy bullets, but by the artist’s brush. They are structured in the space by a strong diagonal push through the canvas from the bottom left to the top right that follows the rise of the soldiers from the trenches. It was this dramatic manufacturing that inspired one critic to describe the bodies as being thrown ‘into the air like marionettes jerked into eternity’.
A close look at the Gallery’s preparatory sketch reveals the subtlety of Lambert’s experimentation with figuration. The removal of secondary lines of Turkish soldiers in the painting demonstrates a desire to compress the space so as to heighten the impact on the viewer. In other areas the composition is lightened; Lambert removed a Turkish soldier from the right of the painting so as to emphasise the second Australian soldier from the right, a hatless blonde boy bearing a stigmata wound on his downturned hand. He also turned the boy’s head, which originally stared directly at the viewer, to the right, releasing our eyes from this focus. The interlocution is too strong in the sketch; the subtly of the pose is more poignant in the painting and this gives the viewer encouragement to consider him as allegory.
In 1924, the same year in which The Nek was completed, Julian Ashton compared Lambert’s handling of the brush and ‘his technical dexterity to the beautiful bowing of an accomplished violinist’. The image of Lambert as orchestrator is a particularly apt one given the choreography of figures in The Nek. Musician, artist or dramatist, the Dardanelles landscape was certainly a stage on which Lambert could locate the birth of Australian nationalism. A place of horrifying beauty, as Lambert later wrote to his wife, ‘from the point of view of the Artist Historian the Nek is a wonderful setting for the tragedy’.
Publication: Look, April, 2013, 10-11.