#2511 Private Owen Stanley Tolman
26TH BATTALION, AUSTRALIAN INFANTRY FORCE
DESPITE THE FACT THAT AUGUST would not contain a major offensive on the Somme, high casualties continued to mount. As well as the sick being evacuated from the line, casualty clearing stations were inundated with a constant stream of wounded men; those hit by stray bullets, maimed by the never-ending shellfire and taken ill in the dreadful squalor of the trenches.
Private Owen Tolman. (Australian National War Memorial)
Born in Hobart, 24-year-old Owen Tolman, a dockside worker, had enlisted at Claremont, Tasmania, in July 1915. With the 26th Infantry Battalion, he was one of those who had relieved the exhausted 1st Australian Division at the end of July after its capture of Pozières. When they arrived, Owen and his counterparts found their predecessors lying in the bottom of the trenches, the parapets littered with dead men. All looked exhausted and were at the end of the limits of their endurance.
On 27th July four waves of Owen’s battalion lined up shortly after 11pm, the objective at that time still being the OG Lines. As midnight passed, Owen was moving steadily forward to the 26th Battalion’s designated start position. Suddenly the enemy opened fire on them with machine-gun and rifle fire, although a large percentage of it was too high to hit anything effectively. They began their attack. As Owen and his battalion advanced, the men encountered first advanced posts, connected underground to the German lines, and then a shallow trench lightly manned and only partly protected by wire entanglements. In the darkness the men became somewhat confused. Troops veered to the left, and the men on their right became mixed up with Owen and his companions. The formation of waves set up to advance melted away into small groups as they climbed over uneven ground and attempted to avoid enemy shellfire.
Despite their troubles, Owen and his fellow Australians in their isolated groups managed to get as far as the undamaged and cumbersome wire entanglements in front of the enemy’s second line and a few men even managed to enter their defences. There was no way of contacting headquarters, and no co-operation with their own artillery. In the face of the wire and a fiercely defended position, the 26th Battalion began to retire again, confused as to whether orders to do so had been issued or not. Having established that any gains in the enemy line were meagre and not sustainable, and that other troops had been ordered to withdraw, the same order was officially given to Owen’s battalion. For the most part the men ended up right back where they started.
Casualty clearing stations behind the line were swamped with the wounded. That day No. 3 CCS, situated at Puchevillers, admitted 370 officers and men and on the next 178 more. Owen arrived with 233 more troops on the 29th, another busy day, as men continued to be treated, succumbed to their wounds or were transferred on to ambulance trains to be sent on to base hospitals and beyond that, Blighty. Numbers continued to be high, spiking even more in the first week of August as admittances reached nearly 600 men per day, including nearly 100 Germans. All the while, Owen remained under their care, too badly hurt to be transferred. When the 26th Australian Infantry Battalion was withdrawn from the lines on the 7th it had suffered more than 650 casualties, including Owen Tolman. He succumbed to his wounds on 10th August and was laid to rest at Puchevillers British Cemetery plot I.F.61.