THE life of a battalion on active service approximates very closely to the domestic life of the family. Its 900 odd are dependent on the central authority of their unit. That central authority fathers and mothers them looking after every detail of their lives, however personal. It praises them and rewards them with small favours if they are good; and plays the heavy father with a stern lecture and sometimes with punishment, when its big hulking children have been behaving badly. When the unit goes into the line the same authority guides their footsteps on the way up, encourages and directs them whilst they are there. If any of them are wounded, if any of them are killed, the immediate relief of the wounded, the last duties towards the dead, are the zealous care of that authority which tries so hard to fill the place of parents.
The parallel between the life of the family and the family life of the unit could scarcely be exaggerated. Just as the education and chance in life of the civil family depends very much on the head of that family, so is it with this military family represented by the battalion and whose head is the battalion-commander. What manner of man he is determines to a great extent the character of the officers he has under him. On the officers of the battalion depend the efficiency of the unit at work, and its happiness and contentment at rest.
Such being the grave importance of a battalion-commander's position, it is a matter of interest to members of the 48th or to any interested in their story to recall what stamp of man was their commander. This sketch of the battalion would fall very short of its aim and object, if it omitted a particular account of him whose personality gave to the unit which he formed and led, its distinctive character.
Raymond Lionel Leane was too truly an Australian to have any inclination for discovering a line of ancestry, or much respect for the man who had no better claim to respect than the possession of one. He used facetiously to recount a hazy tradition of a forefather who lived in Ireland in strenuous days, and was there hanged for being a patriot or shot for not being a patriot. His descendant having a generous partiality for weak causes piously hoped it was a hanging matter. Ray Leane's father, however, walked in the ways of peace, being a nonconformist clergyman in South Australia. The end of the war found his mother still alive; of her it is sufficient to say that five of her sons served from the outbreak of war, attained high rank, and two of them fell in action.
The self-made man, especially when he knows himself as the admirable product of his own manufacture, is often an unarguable being. That Ray Leane should have escaped being the latter was very much to his credit, for in a great measure he was self-made and was aware of the fact. To the orthodox educational institutions which train and adapt men for careers he owed nothing, for they dealt not with him. To wealth he owed nothing, for he began modestly enough his pursuit of it in his early teens. What must indeed have been the strongest influence of his early years, was the atmosphere of puritan ethics and nonconformist theology in which those years were spent.
So strong was this influence that he was not satisfied with bending his own early life to it, but even set himself the task of persuading the world to the desirability and necessity of his creed and conduct. Indeed, Australia went near to losing a good soldier in order to gain a very indifferent parson, that is if Leane could have been an indifferent man in any capacity. Then that phase passed. Young Leane began to devote himself more exclusively to business, and soon his passion for wholesale conversion found an outlet for its energies in the competition of the market. The crude ideals of other days still survived to form a rather unrelenting character, even after the system with which he identified them had ceased to have more than nominal adherence. But contact with the world and its influence on a disposition naturally simple and warm-hearted, had thawed the frost of an early puritanism.
Leane, the rather successful businessman, threw himself with great zeal into the soldiering of the Commonwealth Military Forces, and in due time received a commission. When the South African war broke out he endeavoured to enlist in one of the contingents, but was rejected on medical grounds. Yet the present war found Leane, a man of 35, fit to take upon himself its fatigues and duties immediately it broke out, and still unwearied by its trials and labours when after four and a half years it came to an end.
Captain Leane left Australia with the first contingent. As a company-commander in the 11th Battalion, he came through all the hard training which the First Division experienced on the desert in Egypt. He landed with his battalion on Gallipoli on the morning the Australians began their great adventure. During the months spent there, he took part in one strenuous incident after another. He conducted a second landing that went near to ending his career, when one morning he scrambled ashore with a small party of men and lay for several hours beneath the steep bank of Gaba Tepe. The exploit was doomed to failure, the landing was accomplished under a hurricane of fire from the Turks, and it was soon apparent that withdrawal was inevitable. With the help of Tom Brennan, a regimental medical officer who was Leane's trusty lieutenant in many stirring episodes, he succeeded in getting all his wounded to the boats. It was but one of several forlorn adventures he was destined to lead, and his skilful escape from its consequences got Leane a Military Cross and a name among the diggers of being a good leader in a tight corner.
He was wounded on Gallipoli, but his wound was slight and kept him only a short time from his military duties. He received his majority and was temporarily in command of his battalion before it left the Peninsula, which it did a few weeks previous to the evacuation. Afterwards he was awarded the D.S.O. for his work on the same front.
When the Fourth and Fifth Divisions were formed at the beginning of 1916, Major Leane was appointed to the command of the 48th Battalion. He came to France with the unit in June of the same year, and was henceforth with it in all its varied fortunes. At Passchendaele he was very seriously wounded and this involved an absence of four months from his command. It was his only lengthy absence from the unit, for a marvellously strong constitution saved him from any illness; and his holidays, were brief and always taken when the battalion was at rest. Even this absence occurred during a time when the battalion was enjoying its only spell from hard fighting, and he was again back at the head of his unit before the heavy work of 1918 had commenced.
For his part in the fighting at Passchendaele he received a bar to the D.S.O. Later on he received the C.M.G. whilst still in command of the 48th.
Colonel Leane continued to lead the battalion until the end of May, 1918, when he was promoted to the command of the brigade with the rank of Brigadier-General. The 48th was a constituent unit of his brigade. His connection with his old battalion therefore was still a very close one, and continued so until the early months of 1919 when the unit was gradually disbanded.
Leane the man was a study, and such a one as to make adequate description of him difficult. For he seemed to have no sole and dominant characteristic, except the characteristic of displaying many characteristics dominantly. See him in his happy moods, no man was more happy. His men really loved him, and with good reason. He ever identified himself completely with their lives. When they enjoyed themselves he enjoyed himself with them. At their sports, their concerts, their rough-and-tumble "buck" dances, he was not only with them but of them; gay and boyish as themselves, in fact, a big boisterous digger.
See him in anger, and see anger ennobled by the bigness of it. A stern, hard man in the conception and performance of his personal duty, he had little sympathy with those who culpably fell short of his standard. In a critical moment at Pozieres, when the battle was fast and furious, he could be seen going about cool and alert as if he were immune and himself controlled all the agencies attempting his destruction and that of his unit, directing here, encouraging there. One forgot his own fears in admiration of the man. Then meeting an officer ill suited to standing the awful strain on mind and nerve, and too plainly showing his collapse, the colonel was immediately roused to homeric wrath; like a gigantic stormgod tossing about in that sea of destruction, he threw his head towards the smoke-hidden sky and appealed to the high heavens to know "what he had done that God should inflict such a windy b----d on him for an officer." And one forgot his own fears in irrepressible laughter.
In his sympathy, when sympathy was called for, there was the tender feeling of a woman. He had suffered hard strokes at the hands of war. His brother, Colonel Allan Leane, was killed. Major Ben Leane and a nephew, Captain Allan Leane, fell at Bullecourt whilst serving with the battalion. It is remembered how on that occasion he searched among the dead bodies for that of his brother; how he carried in his arms the remains of poor Ben and set up a rude cross over the grave which he himself dug; how he then continued to give himself entirely to the care of his unit in that trying engagement. Those tragic bereavements never hardened him, and he who truly and literally scorned death ever showed something approaching a parent's emotion at the death of his men.
And what of Leane the soldier, the officer, "the old man of the 48th," Leane "the big fellow" as his admiring diggers used to call him? Leane the soldier was just Leane the man, and therein perhaps lay the secret of his success. He was pre-eminently a judge of men. In his choice of those who served him and his allotment to them of different duties, the good judgment [sic] of Leane the commander suggested Leane the acute business man, placing salesmen in the different departments of his commercial business with a view to getting the best out of them. Pozieres had taught him that this war was a young man's war. In his subsequent selection of officers he rode the lesson to death. The kindergarten henceforth gathered around him was known as Leane's pups. The pups were well worthy of the big mastiff that led them.
He was master of his battalion when it was in the rest area, and that statement contains more than a truism. No petty crisis that might be provoked in his big mischief-loving family, ever bluffed Leane. His officers and men gave him a loyalty almost religious in its intensity. It was founded on respect, however, and all under him knew he would not depart one hair's breadth from principle to gain it.
He could, take care of his battalion when it was in the line. Never did his unit occupy any front of which he did not know beforehand every hole and corner. He had a genius for the details of a situation, a prodigious and never-failing memory that made trouble for any officer under him who was not master of the minutest particulars of his own task.
His courage in the line was too much an accepted fact to impress those who knew him and served with him. He was not the kind of man to whom one ascribes heroics, reckless bravery or daredevil-Dick methods. His judgment was too clear, his will too strong. His bravery seemed the most natural thing in the world, just as it should have seemed. A clear judgment told him that loss of his life was nothing to neglect of his duty towards those under him. A strong will enabled him to act according to that judgment. Doing his duty was natural to the man and he did it naturally. If risking his life was incidental to doing his duty, he did that naturally also and without any of the fuss of heroics.
But the officers and men saw therein true bravery. They saw the bravery of the strong and well-balanced mind, even when they understood not the qualities of character that were its foundation, they saw the unerring judgment exercised in the field, and the efficient leadership on which their success and their lives so much depended. What they saw inspired in them a loyalty and an affection that probably made Colonel Leane's hard years with the battalion the happiest period of his life.
Such was the Colonel, a man who "lived with men and they despised him not."