Penguin Books Australia

The drumming of the guns continued, with bursts of great intensity. It was as though a gale streamed overhead, piling up great waves of sound, and hurrying them onwards to crash in surf on the enemy entrenchments. The windless air about them, by its very stillness, made that unearthly music more terrible to hear.

Hailed by Eliot, Pound, Lawrence and Hemingway, and based on the author's own experiences...

'Australian who don't read this book are short-changing themselves.' PETER RYAN, THE AUSTRALIAN

'A striking aspect of Ross McMullin's scrupulous biography is how little Elliott has been exaggerated by posterity . . . Pompey Elliott is a large book, and rightly.' GIDEON HAIGH, THE AGE

'May be the best Australian military biography yet to appear.' STEPHEN LOOSLEY, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

At exactly 1.30 p.m. on 1 September 1918, the dozen men of Nine Platoon, 21st Australian Infantry Battalion, rose from Elsa Trench and walked across a weedy beet-field toward the German defenders of Mont St Quentin. Within hours, three were dead and five more were wounded, one of whom died six weeks later. The survivors returned from war, more-or-less intact, to live through the next sixty-odd years...

A dynamic portrait of the world's greatest human conflict, now in paperback

World War I is a dramatic account of the Great War combining emotive photography with personal accounts to evoke both the futility and spirit of the conflict.

Many books have been written by officers, historians and military experts on the part the Anzacs played in the Dardanelles campaign during the First World War. There are very few by the ordinary soldier.

Roy Kyle started writing this memoir at the age of 89 and almost completed it before he died. A typical Anzac, fiercely patriotic, he enlisted in the A.I.F. in 1915, several months under-age. He spent...

IT WAS AN ADVENTURE to die for.  A daring attempt to force the Dardanelles and capture the Turkish capital Constantinople.  For the Allies it was the Trojan War and crusade combined. Once again Europe would prevail over an ancient enemy. 

1918 on the Western Front.  At no other time has Australia so influenced the course of world history.  In the worst crisis of World War I the Germans had a cut a wide swathe through the British line.  The Australians knew their hour had come.  'Fini retreat', they boldly announced as they marched to a halt the Germans at Amiens.  Then it was their turn to advance, driving the...

The First World War was the overwhelming disaster from which everything else in the twentieth century stemmed. Fourteen million combatants died, a further twenty million were wounded, four empires were destroyed and even the victors' empires were fatally damaged. The sheer complexity and scale of the war have encouraged historians to write books on a similar scale. But now Norman Stone, one of Britain's...