Australia in Arms: The Story of Gallipoli: Text Classics

The whole Allied front was barely four miles, swept by a terrible inferno of shells. The air was filled with the white woolly clouds that the Anzac men—old soldiers now—knew meant a hail of lead.

Published soon after the evacuation from Gallipoli, Australia in Arms is a vital early account of the Dardanelles campaign. The young journalist Philip Schuler, later killed in battle, witnessed ‘the whole of the August offensive from…trenches at Lone Pine’. He saw the valour of the Anzacs, and recognised too the strength of their Turkish opponents. Vivid and incisive, his book is one of the great achievements of Australian military writing.

Phillip Schuler, born in Melbourne in 1889, is one of Australia’s most significant World War I reporters. The son of the editor of the Age, he volunteered in 1914 to sail to Egypt as the newspaper’s war correspondent. In 1915 he travelled to Turkey, where he was embedded with Anzac soldiers. Written on Schuler’s return home, Australia in Arms was the first full-length account of the Australian Imperial Force’s Gallipoli offensive. By the time it was published, in early 1916, Phillip Schuler had enlisted with the AIF. He died in 1917 of injuries sustained in the Battle of Messines.

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