Historian Ross McMullin says in the introduction of the book, called Hell of a Time, that of the hundreds of personal World War I narratives published, there were ‘‘few more vivid and compelling than this one’’. In flowing ink, Ayton describes Pozieres thus: ‘‘What a sight. Nothing was standing and the surface of the ground was ploughed up and and tossed about, great craters, rim on rim. It put me in mind of a rough sea. Dead and dying lay everywhere, the bodies terribly mangled.’’ Australian soldiers amid the devastation of Pozieres. Credit:Australian War Memorial Ayton knew he was lucky – he often states things such as ‘‘one of my party was killed alongside me with a bullet in the brain’’, but was philosophical. If he was hit, ‘‘I hope it gets me fair and puts me right out’’. Ayton did survive the war only to die from a heart attack in 1946 at the age of 57, at his home in the Melbourne suburb of Murrumbeena.

The diary, in five notebooks, has since been cared for by relatives. The current custodian, Ayton’s daughter-in-law, ElvalaAyton of South Yarra, said her late husband, Ayton’s son Philip junior, and other son Roy, both World War II veterans, always wanted to publish the diary but work, family and illness got in the way. Elvala Ayton, at Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance, with one of five notebooks of her father-in-law Philip Owen Ayton's WWI diary. Credit:Simon Schluter With the WWI centenary just passed, the family decided to fulfil their wishes, to give access to students and researchers and as a legacy to Ayton’s descendants. The family has offered the diary to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and are waiting on a response.

Mrs Ayton believes Philip deserves a posthumous award for his war heroism, citing one incident, in February 1917 near the village of Le Barque. On two occasions Ayton crossed a no man’s land under heavy fire, to bring groups of mates to safety, including his younger brother Walter, or ‘‘Watty’’. The time-worn cover of one notebooks of Philip Owen Ayton's WWI diaries. Mrs Ayton hopes the diary ‘‘will be well read, because it is a wonderful story. I think it could be made into a wonderful film’’. Ayton was born in Warrandyte, north-east of Melbourne, in 1889, but was working on Sydney’s tramways when he enlisted, days after war was declared in 1914.

The diary documents his participation in the Gallipoli landing in April 1915, which he describes as an ‘‘inferno of fire’’, and his months living in dugouts ‘‘under constant fire night and day’’. ‘‘One day an unexploded shell crashed through a chap’s dugout – a few yards from mine and took his head off while he was asleep,’’ Ayton writes. The Ayton family has published Philip Owen Ayton's WWI diary, and is offering it to the Australian War Memorial. In April 1916, after nine months recovering from a near-fatal severe stomach illness and botched operation, Ayton was sent to northern France. Over the next two years he helped rebuild trenches and railway lines on the Somme, often under fire, survived four wounds from enemy fire in one day at Mouquet Farm, and lived through the harsh winter of 1916-17.

In August 1918, having switched to the infantry, and now an officer, Ayton helped drive back German forces over several days’ intense fighting near the village of Proyart. He took part in close combat shooting and bayoneting but said it ‘‘has to be done’’ or ‘‘Fritz’’ — the Germans, would kill them. During that battle, Ayton single-handedly took 18 Germans prisoner after surprising them in a trench. Fellow soldier Roy Denning described Ayton in his own memoir as being ‘‘as game as a bull ant’’, unwilling to be sent home when he was wounded, six foot tall, broad shouldered with no surplus fat, impulsive and ‘‘forceful in manner and speech’’. In his diary, Ayton mocks snobby British officers, ignores hospital curfews to go out, and is never short of female company.