At dawn on 1 November 1914, HMAT Orvieto, flagship of the First AIF convoy, embarked from Albany to begin the long voyage to the desert training camps of Egypt and the carnage that lay in wait in the Dardanelles and on the Western Front. Aboard was a twenty-four-year-old reporter on special assignment for the Age."The coast faded to a dim blue, more distant once the sun rose over the hills, but soon vanished over the swelling horizon," he wrote of that moment. "It was the last link with the homeland, and who knew how many would see those shores again."Unlike thousands of the men he followed to the camps at Mena, in the shadows of the pyramids, and into the trenches at Gallipoli, Phillip Schuler would return briefly to his home in Lisson Grove, Hawthorn. But by June 1917 he, too, would be dead - cut to pieces by a stray salvo on a battlefield in Belgium.Yet between the stirring departure from Albany and the horrors of Flanders, Schuler was to assemble an extraordinary body of work in words and pictures that would distinguish him as one of the greatest Australian war correspondents.But it was Schuler's evocative and compassionate dispatches from Gallipoli that most eloquently captured the horror and the heroism for Australian newspaper readers, and it was those dispatches that first revealed the scandalous neglect and mistreatment of wounded Australian soldiers during the early weeks. It was Schuler's 1916 book, Australia in Arms, that gave the first full account of Australia's role in the Dardanelles campaign. And it was Schuler the amateur photographer whose hundreds of images from Egypt and Gallipoli remain our most precious pictorial archive of the era.