The historians who scripted Ken Burn’s award-winning American documentary series The Civil War, told me their secret was simply ‘telling the big story through the little story.’ That meant tracking the lives of individual soldiers through their letters and photographs to create a highly personal window through which to look at a mind-numbingly large and graphic story.

When Reg Nancarrow entered the world in outback Bourke in 1887, there was nothing to suggest this boy would die half a world away in Belgium, leading headlong advance of Australian troops over what one eyewitness described as ‘a carpet of corpses’ at the battle of Polygon Wood.
 
By the time he left for the war in 1915, the thirty-year-old bush-bred lieutenant was a popular sportsman around Orange and his first-hand reports from the Front were being eagerly followed by readers of The Orange Leader as a kind of virtual experience of what ‘their boys’ were going through.