INTRODUCTION

Imagine this. You are a country boy and just 18. The war has been raging for two years and, because of your age, you have not been eligible for enlistment. Your mates, older by a few months, have joined up and disappeared to the great adventure across the world, in Europe. You hear the constant talk of the need for reinforcements, for men like you to join up and support the Empire, Australia and your mates in the line.

It is time to go.

Such was the case for Edward Patrick Francis Lynch, a typical country boy from Perthville, near Bathurst, in New South Wales. When war was declared in early August 1914, he was only 16 and still at school, but, like a generation of young males in Australia, he felt there was something to prove.

In 1901, when Edward Lynch was only four years old, Federation in Australia had brought together six disparate colonies into a new nation, the Commonwealth of Australia. With Federation came a desire to forge a national identity and separate Australia from Mother England. There were two ways of permanently cutting the apron strings and demonstrating true independence: sport and war. Australia displayed its strength on the field by continually beating England for a decade at cricket and rugby, the two dominant international sports of the time. But in war it was not so accomplished. While Australia showed itself useful in the Boer War of 1899–1902, this involvement was still limited and did not highlight Australia's full capability. What it needed was a real war and, in August 1914, the nation had its chance.

When war was declared, Australia greeted it enthusiastically, keen to show England its loyalty and strength, and the world its deserving status as a new nation. The Australian government was aware of the growing strength and military technology of the Asian giants to the north, and had already embarked on a programme of military training. From as early as the 1880s, it established school cadet corps to impart the basics of military-style instruction. Children were also taught to sing patriotic songs, recite nationalistic verse and salute the flag, their monarch and their country.

Lynch, at Perthville Primary School, would have shared these experiences and, along with his schoolmates, recited 'I love God and my country, I honour the flag, I will serve the King and cheerfully obey my parents, teachers and the law,' before giving three cheers to the King and saluting the flag. At 18, like other men his age, he joined the 41st Infantry. The militia was a citizens' army and service in it was compulsory for men aged 18 to 26.

So, when the bugle call came from Mother England to gather her distant sons, Private Lynch was ready. But despite the government's best efforts to prepare the nation, when he proudly marched down George Street, Sydney, in August 1916 to set off for a distant European war, he had little idea of the slaughter and carnage that awaited him.

Although I was a graduate historian, the First World War never held a great or abiding interest for me. I knew very little of the battles fought by the Australian Imperial Force, nor anything about the then fledgling Royal Australian Navy – except perhaps for the sinking of the German raider Emden – or the even newer Australian Flying Corps. My knowledge was limited to what I'd read in Bill Gammage's The Broken Years and Patsy Adam-Smith's The Anzacs.

In November 1993 something happened that changed that: the re-interment of the Unknown Soldier at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. In 1920, the body of an unknown soldier killed on the Western Front had been entombed in Westminster Abbey in London to represent all the men of the British Empire who had lost their lives in the First World War. France and other Allied nations also entombed unknown soldiers around the same time, but it was not until 1993, on the 75th anniversary of the end of the war, that an unknown Australian soldier was laid to rest in a ceremony at the Hall of Memory at the Australian War Memorial. As I read about the funeral service, I felt a deep sadness for this poor unknown Aussie boy who had been killed during the fighting at Villers-Bretonneux in April 1918 and who was buried 'Known unto God' in the Adelaide Cemetery just outside that village. I suddenly needed to know more and somehow pay my respects to this man and his mates who had fought in that long-distant war and been forgotten. But where would I start?

On a visit to London, I decided to visit the battlefields, so I took the Friday night train to Dover and the ferry across the grey, choppy Channel – much like Private Lynch did – to the port of Calais. I found myself a cheap hotel by the docks, had an early night and was up before dawn the next day to pick up a rental car and head for Ypres, in southern Belgium, near the French border.

Armed with a copy of John Laffin's book, Guide to Australian Battlefields of the Western Front 1916–1918, and two maps, I visited Polygon Wood, Zonnebeke, Broodseinde, Passchendaele, Hellfire Corner, the Menin Road and Messines. As the sun set, I found myself at the imposing Lochnagar Crater near the village of La Boisselle in the Somme. It was raining – a sleety rain – but even in the low light I was awestruck by the enormous size of the crater, 200 metres across and 30 metres deep. It was formed by one of ten massive underground explosions that shattered the German frontline on the first day of the infamous Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916.

There was evidence of other craters – blown by 27 tonnes of the explosive ammonal placed in tunnels under the German lines – that had long been filled in, the enormous patches of white chalk still clearly visible. Standing there so many decades later, looking out across the calm, undulating fields, it was hard to imagine the chaos and devastation the explosions must have wrought on the enemy.

Reaching for Laffin's book, I found there was somewhere to stay in nearby Pozières village, an inn at which I was to stress that I was Australian. I parked outside, pushed through the old wooden door and found myself in a cosy room with a bar on one side and walls covered with memorabilia from the First World War: slouch hats and rising sun badges, an Australian flag and a gaudy mannequin in an Australian battledress, complete with colour patches and rifle. I asked in my broken French for a room for the night but was shooed out by the dear old madame, who waved her arms at me as if she were driving pigs. So much for the welcome to Australians!

By chance, there were two Englishmen drinking at the bar, the only people in the place. Hearing my accent, they asked if I was Australian. 'Yes,' I said proudly.

'Then come and join us for a drink. Madame, une bière, s'il vous plaît.'

They were part of a group of four collectors who regularly travelled from England to dig the battlefields and swap relics. Not long after I sank my first beer, the others arrived and excitedly called on us to follow them outside to their large Bedford van. They flung open the back doors to reveal a mangled, rusty Vickers gun that lay in the back. This was the standard-issue British machine-gun, a heavy, tripod-mounted weapon that fired 650 rounds per minute. This one, they explained, was dug up by workers digging a trench for new telephone lines just outside the village. Along with other pieces of rusty detritus, it had made for an exciting day for them.

After dinner, and after a terse word to the madame, resulting in a room for me, they invited me to join them on a visit to a local collector in the village. The old chap and his wife welcomed us all into their small, typically French home and offered coffee and cake, and soon all kinds of relics and military pieces were being handed about, discussed and swapped. One of the Englishmen had an interest in grenades, another in metal tunic badges, while another collected bullets and spent cartridge cases. All I had found in my scavenging that day was a small brass ring at Messines, which one of the Englishmen quickly identified as a part from a German gas respirator – it would have held one of the glass eyepieces in place. The old Frenchman invited me to take something from part of his collection, and to this day I still have the rusty German helmet, eggshell thin, displayed on a bookshelf.

After an early breakfast the next day, I was keen to get on the road and I headed for the Pozières heights. I still remember that cold dawn very well: the sun was low and shrouded in mist and the grass was brittle with frost. I could just make out the open land dropping away below me as I looked out from the top of the ridge where the Pozières windmill had once stood. A small mound was all that remained of the objective of so many Australian attacks up that slight, muddy slope. Behind me, traffic hummed on the straight Roman road that ran from Albert to Bapaume, oblivious to the memorial – a neat patch of lawn bordered by a low hedge, with a chiselled block of stone on a low plinth a few metres from my feet. With tears streaming down my face, I read the simple yet poignant inscription by Australian journalist and official war historian Charles Bean:

The ruin of the Pozières windmill which lies here was the centre of the struggle in this part of the Somme battlefield in July and August 1916. It was captured on August 4th by Australian troops who fell more thickly on this ridge than on any other battlefield of the war.

As I wiped away those cold tears and stared at Charles Bean's sad understatement, I realised that I had to understand and appreciate those forgotten Australians, but looking out across the former battlefield I simply did not know what I was looking at. None of the moonscape and destruction, stark and monochrome, that I remembered from old photographs was there. Instead, benign fields, which lay green and lost in the gentle, blowing mist, added to my sense of bewilderment and disorientation.

When I returned home to Australia, I began to read and learn all that I could about that brutal and bloody war, and found myself engrossed in the minutiae of Bean's Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–18. As I pored over the six-volume work that Bean had compiled, I found that the names of the tiny French towns and his detailed descriptions of the battles that raged among them now meant so much more to me.

I again had the opportunity to visit the battlefields and develop a much deeper understanding of them in 1998, the 80th anniversary of the end of the Great War. The Department of Veterans Affairs asked me to write a guide titled Villers-Bretonneux to Le Hamel: A Battlefield Driving Tour and this gave me my first experience of walking the ground and piecing together the events I had read about in the history books – the attacks, the counterattacks, the advances and the sites where the AIF under General Monash made such a name for themselves. The driving tour has since become a popular side trip for Australians paying their respects at the more oft-visited battlefields of Villers-Bretonneux, Le Hamel and along the Somme, where the Anzacs saw most of their action in the last two years of the war.

But it was not until 2002 that something unexpected happened that gave me a new understanding and appreciation for the young Australian men who gave their lives in the Great War. It came not via a history book, nor through talking with experts, nor by painstakingly reconstructing battles in my mind while walking the battlefields of France and Belgium. It came through the writings of a young soldier who had fought on those fields: Private Edward Patrick Francis Lynch.

A colleague of mine, Mike Lynch, had lent me the manuscript of his grandfather's unpublished book, a weighty foolscap tome with the words Somme Mud embossed down the spine. It was awkward to lift and read but, within a few pages, I knew this story was something very special.

The images were vivid and real and I was quickly swept along to become one of the young men marching through the streets of Sydney, being cheered on by waving crowds, my mates beside me, as we headed to the wharves to embark on the great adventure. As I followed Lynch's down-to-earth narrator, Nulla, and his mates on their journey from enthusiastic, naive young recruits to battle-hardened soldiers, I was struck by his unerring eye for detail, the realism of his writing, his wry humour, his effective use of understatement, his almost filmic imagery and his unique insight into the spirit and attitudes of Australian soldiers. All of these, in my eyes, made Somme Mud an undiscovered Australian classic.

So I sent it to an old mate, Bill Gammage, an academic and historian at the Australian National University in Canberra, who has written a number of books about Australians in the First World War and was the historian on Peter Weir's film Gallipoli. I remember his initial comment clearly: 'Mate, I read one of these a month and this is Australia's All Quiet on the Western Front.' He was referring to the unflinching novel written by Erich Maria Remarque, a German soldier during the First World War.

I knew I had to get this wonderful manuscript published, to share this unique account and give people, not only in Australia but around the world, an insight into the bloody and messy war that was fought out in the Somme mud. The publishing team at Random House quickly realised the special nature of this lost manuscript and was as enthusiastic as me, but asked that I edit the book to 120,000 words.

As difficult as it was, the editing process was a labour of love. As I read of Nulla's movements, I meticulously tracked his travels on maps and compared them to the history books – his long route marches to flea-ridden billets; to the frontline at such places as Messines, Dernancourt, Stormy Trench and Villers-Bretonneux; to rest areas behind the lines; and, finally, on the great push to the final victory after August 1918.

I had images of the battlefields in my head, from the stark black-and-white photographs of official war photographers Frank Hurley and Hubert Wilkins and others; and I knew the towns because I had walked them, retraced the attacks and dug the clinging mud from my boots as I sought out the trench-lines. I had collected the detritus of war: rusty pieces of shrapnel, clips of bullets, brass shell heads and screw pickets. I had even stupidly picked up old grenades, Stokes mortars and large-calibre shells that still litter these areas today. But it was part of what I needed to do to get a greater understanding. Now, Lynch's manuscript was giving me an insight that I'd never had before into the battles and an intimacy with the infantrymen.

The pages screamed a graphic, brutal yet unexpectedly humorous Australian story to me. The book was a lost treasure: a soldier's story that only one who had been through the trenches – seen the mud and misery and smelt the gas and the stench of death – could write. In places I found it nearly too frightening to read, too horrendous and graphic – then, just as quickly, it would become a tale of larrikinism and mateship, inspirational bravery and typical Australian humour.

From the moment you take up the story of Nulla and his mates as they prepare to embark for Europe, you are thrust into the adventure, into their larrikin pranks and juvenile behaviour – and then, when they reach the frontline, into their fear and their sadness and the horror of their war. There is no letting up and you are often forced to put the book down, take a deep breath and consider the moment, even pinch yourself to end what seems like a bad dream but is, in fact, historically accurate.

For the next 30 months, the violence of the trenches swirls about Nulla and his diminishing band of mates. He tells of the carnage and death, the mud and the suffering, as the 'butcher's picnic' grinds his unit into the slime and mud of war.

Nulla's war continues until the armistice, in November 1918. He is wounded a number of times and sees his mates cut from the ranks, but is rarely away from the dangers of the front. He spends much of his time in the perilous role of a runner, his duty to find the very frontlines in the black of night, under shellfire or during enemy raids, to deliver messages or lead new troops in for their stint in the line.

Private Lynch returned to Australia in 1919, trained to become a teacher and worked in remote country schools in southern New South Wales. He married in 1922 and, in the late 1920s and into the 1930s, as the worst of the Depression bit, he wrote Somme Mud, hoping that he could have it published to boost his income.

There is no evidence Lynch kept a diary during the war and no one in the family recalls him referring to one when he was writing the manuscript. But he almost certainly would have had a copy of the battalion history at hand during his writing in order to get the precise details he might not have known or to jog his memory on dates, places and casualties. Each battalion was required to keep an official war diary during active service. Entries were made daily at battalion headquarters, noting the unit's location, the events of the day, casualties, intelligence summaries, orders, reports and messages; and these were often accompanied by photographs, sketches and maps. After the war, these diaries were used to compile the official battalion history, which was then sold to the men as a reminder of their war service. The history of Lynch's 45th Battalion (The Chronicle of the 45th Battalion AIF ) was written by Major Lee and published first in late 1924. It would have been beside Lynch when writing the first draft of his book.

Though Lynch claimed that the narrator, Nulla, was based on a friend of his, it is easy to imagine that Somme Mud could be a memoir, or at least close to it. I have spent a considerable amount of time comparing the events in Somme Mud with the battalion history and the army's personal records of Private Lynch, and from there comparing Edward Lynch's life with that of Nulla's. There is very little to tell them apart.

As the battalion diaries focused on a unit's overall operations, they rarely mentioned individual soldiers by name and a soldier's personal records did not include day-to-day activities, so it is impossible to know for sure how closely Nulla's experiences follow Lynch's own. Yet I have found a few places in the book where it is clear that Lynch chose a divergent path for his character Nulla, perhaps to try to convince himself and the reader he was not in fact Nulla or perhaps to include in his story, battles and incidents that he knew about but was not involved in. These mostly had to do with the type and timing of wounds sustained in battle. When it came to recounting his battalion's military operations and movements, though, he stuck faithfully to historical fact.

He completed the chapters in pencil in 20 school exercise books, hoping to get the manuscript published, but the public did not want to be reminded of the Great War and he could not find a publisher. While some excerpts were printed in the RSL's magazine, Reveille, the book would not be published in his lifetime.

When Lynch's account of the war finally made its way onto bookshelves after nearly 70 years, it became an instant success, telling as it does the very personal story of the men of the First AIF in France and Belgium. Many readers craved to know more of the background to Nulla's story and his small place in a complex war, so I embarked on this contextual history for the lay reader to explain the battles, the ebb and flow of the war. In the process, I have tried to join the dots and explain what was going on: the campaigns and offensives, the weapons and equipment, the food, the diseases and the minutiae of war.

For all of us, the First World War is today represented in stark black and white photos, so I thought it would be interesting for the reader to see these same places as they are today – and in colour. My travels took me to many of the places Private Lynch would have been: to battlefields and trench lines, to rest areas and camps, to the roads he trod and the sights he may well have seen. For the battlefield visitor today, these are an interesting diversion.

In writing this book, I have tried to pay my respects to that Unknown Soldier who pricked my conscience all those years ago and inspired me to find out about the Australian men who sacrificed their youth to the First World War. Little did I know then that my journey would lead me to Private Edward Lynch and one of this country's great and historically significant books. That I played a part in giving Lynch a voice so many years after his death is one of the proudest achievements of my career.

I am just sorry I never had the chance to shake his hand.