#4378 Private Stanley Callaghan
18TH AUSTRALIAN INFANTRY FORCE
WHILE GOUGH’S MEN WERE ATTACKING, Rawlinson’s were playing a supporting role to the south. They did their best in terms of artillery, but it was becoming impossible to supply guns with ammunition to keep the overused and sodden weapons firing. The Australian contingent was still operating to the right of the Butte de Warlencourt and Le Sars, facing Bapaume, and with them was one man who had already lost his younger brother on the Somme. Horace Callaghan was finally confirmed dead in the middle of September after vanishing at Pozières on 23rd July, but his elder sibling Stanley had only joined the 18th Australian Infantry on the battlefield at the end of that month. Twenty-two years old and nicknamed ‘Bomber’, he was a miner before enlisting in October 1915 at a large training centre for Australian troops in Sydney. Having made his way to Europe, Stan left England for France on 10th August 1916.
On 15th November, as operations continued on Gough’s front, the Australians and the Royal Fusiliers tried to bomb the Germans out of a nearby trench, but the mud was so great a handicap that the troops soon became exhausted. Stanley’s battalion was out of the line. Thus far his countrymen’s return to the Somme had been horrific: ‘howling gales, pouring rain, endless mud, waist deep in places.’ The communication trenches were barely in use any more, they were so full of water. It was safer for the men to make their way along in the open. The situation became even worse when the mud started drying. It ‘tugged like glue at the boot soles, so that the mere journey to the line left men and even pack animals utterly exhausted’. Any journey bxy night was even more perilous. ‘In the dark, those who stepped away from the road fell and again and again into shell-holes; many animals became fast in the mud and had to be shot, and men were continually pulled out, often leaving their boots and sometimes their trousers.’ As Stanley became accustomed to life on the Western Front, three men of another battalion had to be dug out of their jumping off trench, and a company commander in a band of pioneers had to be dragged out of another by a mule. A few weeks later a rescue party broke the back of an officer of the 2nd Australian Division whom they were trying to haul from the mud. After each fight, the carriage of wounded across this area had to be performed almost entirely by stretcher-bearers. There was no respite from railways, and wagons or motor ambulances could not get anywhere close.
Private Stanley Callaghan (far right) poses with friends. (Private collection)
Stanley was doing forty-eight-hour stints in the lines, arriving already exhausted, sitting in the foul trenches and then being relieved again. ‘At first the men tried to shelter themselves from rain by cutting niches in the trench walls, but this practice was forbidden, several soldiers having been smothered through the slipping in of the … earthen roof, and the trenches broken down.’ Stanley and his companions could not stand still for too long either, because they started sinking in it:
No fires were allowed in the front line, and at this stage no food or drink could arrive there hot – except occasionally tea, which was carried in petrol tins and reeked so strongly of gasoline that men declared after drinking it they dared not light a cigarette.
By 15th November Stanley Callaghan’s brigade had been relieved from the lines, but his battalion was still furnishing working parties in the trenches. On that day, 170 men of the 18th Battalion were selected to go up and work. As the men moved backwards and forwards, fetching, carrying, cleaning and digging, Stanley was killed by a shell. He had survived just forty-two days with his battalion and became the second of James and Mary Callaghan’s boys to fall. Stan was laid to rest at Longueval Road Cemetery, plot G.17.
The eldest Callaghan brother who went to war, Les, was also killed on the Somme. As the war drew to a close in 1918, the Australians broke the German line at Mont St-Quentin in what Rawlinson apparently regarded as the finest move of the war. Les, married with children, received a gunshot wound to the head and died on 4th September. Thirty-one years old, he was laid to rest at St Sever Cemetery Extension, Rouen, plot Q.V.F.14.
In 1918, having lost three of her sons, Mary Callaghan was invited to unveil the war memorial in their hometown of Lithgow, New South Wales. An official present remarked that ‘it was appropriate that the … ceremony should be performed by Mrs Callaghan, who in losing her three sons … had made the greatest gift of all. It was the mothers of the gallant Australians who had fallen fighting [for those at home] who made the greatest sacrifice in this tragic war.’
To all intents and purposes the offensive battle on Rawlinson’s sector had come to an end. There would be no conquering of the Le Transloy Ridge in 1916. The Battle of the Somme had been a torrid introduction to offensives on the Western Front for the Australians, who were about to go into winter quarters. Since their arrival on the field in battle in July, the Australian forces had suffered some 23,000 casualties.
Mary Callaghan writes letters to her boys at the front, watched by their sister. (Private collection)