#729 Private Wesley George Wade
17TH BATTALION, AUSTRALIAN INFANTRY FORCE
WESLEY WADE HAD LIED ABOUT his age to join up, travelling 30 miles from his home in Sydney to do so and listing his occupation as a carpenter. Wesley’s father had run off and deserted the family in 1912, and Wesley’s mother didn’t know if he was dead or alive, so at the time of his enlistment she was raising her family alone. Her son reached Marseilles on 23rd March 1916 after a brief stop in Egypt after the Dardanelles had already been evacuated. When the Australians bedded in on the Western Front in more northerly areas of France, Wesley was wounded slightly in his left eye on 23rd April.
Without him, during the last week in July his outfit moved up to take over the front line to the east of Pozières from Horace Callaghan’s battalion. Unlike the units they were replacing, Wesley’s had no experience of a major offensive operation, the most complicated manoeuvre they had been involved in thus far being the evacuation of Gallipoli. Since arriving on the Somme front though, the 17th Battalion had already been engaged in localised fighting. Most notably, this included a fierce bomb-throwing contest that occurred as Reginald Minahan and Percy Williams were scrapping for Munster Alley on 25th and 26th July, where all modernity was cast out in favour of old-fashioned survival of the fittest, ‘each side being as dependant as the Homeric Greeks and Trojans on their sheer strength and endurance’.
Having been sent back to a hospital at Étaples to recover, Wesley spent a suspiciously long time at the base after his recovery, possibly because someone had an inkling that he was extremely young. He rejoined the 17th Battalion on 1st August to find that the position was ostensibly the same as when the initial Australian attackers had left it. The Germans sat on the crest of the ridge in the OG Lines, the Australians faced them and were preparing to attack again.
Wesley’s would not be an easy task; advancing out of a salient from cramped positions in the face of the German artillery. In fact, the brigade was already so exhausted by the constant shelling, bomb throwing, digging and carrying that a suggestion was put up to have at least part of it relieved. The commander simply explained that is was his ‘desire, and, I am sure, the wish of all, that the whole of the battalions of my Brigade should remain and play the part allotted to them’.
And so on his arrival Wesley found the rest of the men exhausted, not through having done battle, but in the main through having to lie in the range of the German artillery for days on end. ‘There they live and are slowly pounded to death,’ surmised one of his countrymen. The bombardment for the next charge had begun the day before Wesley’s return. The men were digging assembly trenches like mad and reinforcing their communications through Pozières, trying to rectify the dual issues of maintaining contact with their headquarters and evacuating the wounded that had occurred during the last attack. The 17th Battalion was still preparing to help assault the OG Lines again when Wesley was injured on the morning of 3rd August. Medical personnel rushed him to the nearest field ambulance, but he would never now go ‘over the top’ to have a go at the Germans despite travelling half the world to do so. Wesley Wade was dead before he arrived. The 17 year old had survived forty-eight hours on the Somme. He was laid to rest at Contalmaison Chateau Cemetery, plot II.D.1.
Private Wesley Wade (back row, centre). (Australian National War Memorial)