The Last Post Ceremony commemorating the service of (1681) Private Thoralf Eugen Carlsen, 28th Australian Infantry Battalion, AIF, First World War.

The Last Post Ceremony is presented in the Commemorative area of the Australian War Memorial each day. The ceremony commemorates more than 102,000 Australians who have given their lives in war and other operations and whose names are recorded on the Roll of Honour. At each ceremony the story behind one of the names on the Roll of Honour is told. Hosted by Troy Clayton, the story for this day was on (1681) Private Thoralf Eugen Carlsen, 28th Australian Infantry Battalion, AIF, First World War.

1681 Private Thoralf Eugen Carlsen, 28th Australian Infantry Battalion, AIF
KIA: 29 July 1916

Today we remember and pay tribute to Private Thoralf Eugen Carlsen.

Thoralf Carlsen was born in June 1886 in Christiania, Norway, now the city of Oslo. Carlsen was of the many Scandinavians who migrated to Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Arriving in Western Australia, Carlsen took the English name “Joe” and worked as a labourer in the timber-milling town of Mornington Mills. He lived in Australia long enough to become a naturalised British subject.

In June 1915, Carlsen volunteered for service in the Australian Imperial Force. After a brief period of initial training, he embarked from Fremantle on the transport ship Demosthenes in July 1915. He travelled to Egypt, where he continued his training in the Australian army camps near Cairo. By the end of December, Australian troops had been withdrawn from Gallipoli. Carlsen sailed to Lemnos Island to join his unit: the 28th Battalion.

The unit trained on the island, and then back in Egypt, until March 1916, when they sailed to France and travelled north to join the fighting on the Western Front.

The battalion spent time rotating between front-line trenches and rear areas between April and July. During their time in the trenches, the unit experienced heavy artillery shelling and aerial bombing for the first time.

In July, British commanders drew up plans to capture the occupied French village of Pozieres and the system of German trenches surrounding it. The men of the 28th Battalion, alongside many others, formed up in front-line trenches on the evening of 28 July 1916. Their preparations were noticed by the German defenders, and the men had to endure a heavy artillery bombardment before launching the attack just after midnight.

British commanders expected that the preliminary artillery bombardment of the German lines would have cut the formidable barbed-wire defences. When the 28th Battalion arrived at the first line of trenches, however, the wire was intact. In the face of heavy German machine-gun fire, the men struggled to find or make openings in the wire. Due to the heavy fire, messengers could not relay information about the situation back to Australian headquarters, and orders to withdraw took nearly two hours to arrive.

During the fighting, Carlsen was killed in action. He was 30 years old.

In the confusion and continued artillery bombardments of the battlefield, Carlsen’s remains were never found. Today he is commemorated on the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux, one of more than 10,000 Australian soldiers killed in France during the war who have no known grave.

In Western Australia, Joe Carlsen’s friends had the following poem printed in the local newspaper:

“We think of you, dear comrade,
And your name we oft recall;
But there is nothing left to answer
But your photo – that is all”.

Private Thoralf Eugen Carlsen is listed on the Roll of Honour on my right, among almost 62,000 Australians who died while serving in the First World War.

This is but one of the many stories of service and sacrifice told here at the Australian War Memorial. We now remember Private Thoralf Eugen Carlsen, who gave his life for us, for our freedoms, and in the hope of a better world.

Thomas Rogers
Historian, Military History Section