Chief Staff Officer. According to Chadwick, Bean was one of many who considered that White, not General Sir John Monash, should have the corps command. In his last book, Two Men I Knew: William Bridges and Brudenell White, Founders of the A.I.F. Bean told the story, related also in volume VI of the Official History, of his own "high-intentioned but ill-judged intervention" in this matter. Kelly viewed that intervention as having been, nonetheless, motivated by what Bean believed to be in the best interests of the A.I.F. In correspondence to Brudenell White (28 June 1918) Bean wrote about the importance to Australia of a planned repatriation of the troops: “To me repatriation means the future of Australia”. Later, in October 1918, Bean urged Prime Minister, William Hughes, "that it was all important to get some plan drawn up by the A.I.F. at the earliest possible moment – put Monash in charge – Birdwood is not the man for it at all. It was urgent, I said, if they did not want a catastrophe". Ten days after the armistice, on 21 November 1918, Monash was brought to London to be Director General of the A.I.F. Department of Demobilisation and Repatriation, taking command formally on 4 December. On 11 November 1918, Armistice Day, Bean's diary records that he returned to Fromelles with a photographer to revisit the battlefields where over two years earlier on the night of 19–20 July 1916, the Australians had endured their brutal introduction of warfare on the Western Front: "...we found the old no man’s land simply full of our dead”. The Online International Encyclopedia of the First World War notes that "Bean was the only Australian correspondent who was with the A.I.F. for the duration of Australia's involvement in the War, from Gallipoli to the last battles Australia fought on the Western Front, a feat which had few parallels elsewhere in the Empire". In an article subtitled "Tribute to Mr Bean" in the Sydney Morning Herald on 9 June 1919, Sir Brudenell White said: "That man faced death more times than any other man in the A.I.F., and had no glory to look for either. What he did – and he did wonders – was done from a pure sense of duty." Post-war Whilst still in France at the end of 1918 when the Germans were seeking an armistice, Bean resumed thinking of a post war Australia.