Memories of the tragedy of war
AS DAWN broke over Cairns in North Queensland, July 10, 1917, word quickly passed about and flags were unfurled.
Not in celebration, but in solemn honour of Sergeant Ted McCafferty.
News of his death had reached town the previous evening … yet another well-known casualty of fighting on the Western Front.
Simultaneously in Toowoomba the news arrived at the home of his retired parents, James and Mary McCafferty, and was quickly passed to Ted’s four brothers and seven sisters, many of whom lived in and around the city.
Thomas Edward McCafferty was born in 1888 on the family’s Gowrie Little Plain farm near Toowoomba.
Some of his siblings called him Ted yet others knew him as Tom.
He was educated at local schools and Toowoomba Christian Brothers.
Before the war he swapped farm work to join his older brother Fred in the tropics.
Ted was tall – 186cm – strongly built, with dark complexion, black hair and brown eyes. All in all he was a pleasant, well respected young man.
Ted first worked at Hambleton Mill and later on the Cairns waterfront. He played football, but target shooting was his passion.
When war broke out in 1914 Ted answered the call to North Queensland rifle clubs to provide volunteers to urgently bolster the Kennedy Regiment.
In early August the men moved north in the steamer Konowna to secure Thursday Island.
Soon after arrival those on board Konowna were included in the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force to seize German possessions and wireless stations in the Pacific.
However, before reaching German New Guinea military authorities realised the Konowna volunteers were not seasoned men and had not passed medical tests, so they were sent home. This was a bitter disappointment.
Ted returned to work. He met Margaret O’Connell, known as Mag, the daughter of a local cab proprietor, and romance blossomed.
Late 1915 he decided to volunteer again, this time for service with the 41st Battalion.
He went into training at Enoggera outside Brisbane and by May 1916 he was appointed to D Company. And he and Mag married. She followed Ted to Brisbane to snatch what little time remained.
With farewells said, on 16 May, Ted and his battalion began the long journey to the European battlefields, first by train to Sydney and then in the steamer Demosthenes to Plymouth.
The battalion went into intensive training on Salisbury Plain. Ted was promoted to corporal a couple of months before the battalion made a rough, night passage across the English Channel to Le Harve.
Then a train ride in cattle trucks took them to Armentieres where Ted realised he had finally reached “the big row”.
Christmas Eve 1916 the battalion went into the trenches for the first time.
Ted soon became accustomed to the drill – continuous rotations of periods in the trenches and rest in back-area billets.
Each trench rotation lasted seven to 10 days in the three lines of defence - 24 hours in the firing bays, a similar period in support trenches, and then time in subsidiary lines.
Always enduring regular “artillery strafes”. When the men went into rest billets they still had to contribute working parties back into the front lines.
“It is fairly hard on one’s nerves at first,” Ted wrote to Fred, “but it is only a matter of time and one seems to get used to it.”
He quickly became familiar with battlefield noises and could identify the type of shell approaching, its trajectory, and if it was in his best interest to take cover.
In February 1917 the joyous news arrived that Mag had given birth to a son Edward, but this soon turned to sadness when he was told the child lived only 17 days.
Field promotions came quickly for Ted - in January and sergeant during April. He was then told he would be appointed to commissioned rank.
As weeks and months passed the rotations continued. Occasionally the battalion moved to a different section of the front … Ploegsteert Wood, Le Touquet and Maison 1875.
Mid-May Ted was resting in a sitting room of a farm house at Pont de Nieppe, four kilometres north-west of Armentieres, within hearing of the big guns, and he marvelled at surviving the severe winter and spring without having one day’s sickness.
He wrote home proudly boasting his platoon had taken all the big money prizes at a recent battalion sports day, and that he was expecting promotion within weeks
Life was as good as it got on the Western Front. He took great pleasure in the natural beauty of his surroundings. “One just wants to mount one of the hill tops and you have the scenery of your life, all the shades of the rainbow”, he said.
Ted loved the spectacle of the orchards, trees in blossom and rich green fields of growing wheat. Now there was even time for a photograph to be taken and sent to Mag.
Ted was back in the line at Maison 1875 in early June during intense artillery battles which were a prelude to the Battle of Messines.
The battalion was then suffering 20 casualties a day. Under heavy artillery and gas attack in the early hours of June 7, Ted, with the battalion, moved from the firing line back to the
❝ Life was as good as it got on the Western Front. He took great pleasure in the natural beauty of his surroundings.
subsidiary line to allow through the assaulting battalions.
As the Battle of Messines raged Ted and his men carried supplies to the advancing forward troops.
A week or more later, when fighting subsided, the battalion rotated to rest.
At sundown on June 23 1917 Ted moved with the battalion through Neuve Eglise and into trenches on the flat before the gentle slopes of Messines on the farm De la Croix.
Until recently this had been well behind German lines. The farm still had its garden hedge and row of trees. Within an hour of arriving, before Ted and his men had settled in, New Zealanders on the right began firing which drew heavy German retaliation on the Australian line in the vicinity of the farm.
Bullets and shells flew thick and fast. Immediately D company suffered heavy casualties. There would be no promotion or home-coming for Ted … the 41st Battalion history recorded “among the killed being Sergeant McCafferty”!
Ted’s death devastated Mag and Ted’s family, and shocked his many Toowoomba and Cairns friends.
In time Mag distributed copies of the Pont de Nieppe photograph to family inscribing each “In memory of my lost Darling Ted”.
She didn’t remarry and lived about Cairns until her death in 1952.
Today the name of this Toowoomba district son is not carved on a local war memorial but on the Cairns memorial, the place of his enlistment, where his name is within sight of the waterfront where he once worked.
Ted’s death devastated Mag and Ted’s family, and shocked his many Toowoomba and Cairns friends.