A Son of Empire

To know what life was like for someone in the past, we must read their story in a way that we can understand.

Steve Cornish was born in 1887 and killed in action in 1917, one of the millions of victims of the First World War. He was an ordinary man—a son, brother, father and husband who  simply lived his life and did what he thought he should. He spent a little over a year as a soldier, and died minutes into his first action.

Just one of the millions.

Steve left no diaries or personal records, and no substantial family memory. We know him only through official records—birth, immigration, marriage, legal, military, and death. The closest we can get to the man himself is his signature on his enlistment papers and small, grainy photographs. He exists in the middle ground between those for whom much information exists—those considered by their contemporaries and history to have been important—and the countless billions for whom there is no record. 

His life was, nonetheless, adventurous and rich with personal experience, and he played his part in the grand and humble events of history. This Englishman, from a military family, fought for Australia and the British Empire and left his legacy in his children and grandchildren.

This book places him within the world he experienced: from the vast historic events to the ordinary, day-to-day things of which, in fact, the human world comprises. It details AIF recruiting, kit, weapons, food, training, troopships, the lead up to the Battle of the Menin Road, and the first day of that battle from the perspective of the 9th Battalion.