'Peter Rees has done what no one else has managed: read the vast Bean archive and get inside the head of the most influential figure in Australia's military history. Rees's superb book shows how Bean bore witness to Australia's Great War.' - Prof. Peter Stanley, UNSW Canberra'Part sophisticated military history, part love story for a nation, Peter Rees provides a warm and deeply moving portrait of Charles Bean, one of the greatest Australians of the twentieth century.' - Michael McKernanCharles Bean was Australia's greatest and most famous war correspondent. He is the man who told Australia about the horrors of Gallipoli and the Western Front. He is the man who created the Anzac legend. He is the man who was absolutely central to the creation of this country's most important cultural insitution, the Australian War Memorial. Yet we know so little about the real man. Bean was not just a key figure in the telling of Australia's military history but also in the shaping of the emerging Australian identity in the years after Federation.