under fire running from shell hole to shell hole for protection. He sent press despatches back to Australia, continuing to record military actions, conversations, interviews. and the evidence of "what actual experiences, at the point where men lay out behind hedges or on the fringe of woods, caused those on one side to creep, walk, or run forward, and the others to go back." The website of the Sir John Monash Centre notes that Bean’s editorial opinions often contradicted military authorities, yet he was highly respected. Bean observed the "fog of war" (communication breakdown between commanders in the rear and troops at the frontline) and he described the devastating effects of shellshock. Intense artillery fire, he said, ripped away the conventions of psychological shelter and left men "with no other protection than the naked framework of their character", an experience too much for many. The Centre’s website further notes that Bean's reputation and influence grew and, in 1916, he was granted access to British Army war diaries, a privilege not extended to some British historians. Having missed the poorly conceived and executed attack at Fromelles on 19 July 1916, the first big Australian action in France which had resulted in heavy losses, Bean was there the following morning moving among survivors getting their stories. It was the fallen at Fromelles to whom Bean dedicated his Letters from France, a selection of his first-hand observations from the Western Front published in 1917. The dedication reads; "To those other Australians who fell in the Sharpest Action their Force has known, on July 19, 1916, before Fromelles, these Memories of a Greater, but not a Braver, Battle are herewith Dedicated".Several days after the battle of Fromelles ended Bean witnessed the battle of Pozieres. Over several weeks he was on the ground and sometimes in the trenches as the fighting raged. The experience shook him as it revealed the horror and destruction of modern warfare. The heavy casualties incurred there almost broke the back of the all-volunteer A.I.F. Bean recorded in his diary: 'Pozieres is one vast Australian cemetery'. The carnage on the Somme caused Bean to conceive the idea of a memorial where Australia could commemorate its war dead and view the relics its troops collected. Bean had noticed as early as the Gallipoli campaign that Australian soldiers were avid collectors of battlefield souvenirs and imagined a museum where they would be displayed.