This is, for better and worse, a journalist's book. In Melbourne, Baker's nose for a lead turns up an illegitimate son – whom Schuler never knew about – from a wartime fling with a family friend. Further research reveals an unlikely Melbourne connection with Schuler's long-lost Egyptian lover – twin threads entwining two women from opposite sides of the world, differently burdened by Schuler's death. Yet as the focus of the narrative shifts from the private to the public, its protagonists shrink into archetype rather than emerging as individuals. The narrative is suddenly thick with character types: the ruthless arriviste who will stop at nothing to advance his career; the 'poet–warrior' innocent of the low skulduggery of politics; the upper-class cad, devious and dyspeptic; and the rakish foreign correspondent, breaking hearts, busting expense accounts, and bearing witness to the making of history. In concert with this retreat into formula, the prose, larded with redundant intensifiers, regularly collapses into a wooden journalese: the newspapers Baker describes are invariably 'crusading', their columnists 'zealous' in their advocacy, and their editors 'stern' to a man. On occasions the whole thing tips over into bathos. When the action moves to the Middle East, this storehouse of familiars serves up a world of orientalist cardboard cut-outs. 'Cosmopolitan Cairo' is a Downton Abbey in the desert. While Peter Lorre-types smoke, sip cocktails, and cut deals, Egypt's 'vivacious' beauties do battle, with 'charm and style' the weapons of choice.

Phillip Schuler in 1911 (Wikimedia Commons)As Baker's account follows Schuler into the world of generals and statesmen, his conventional restaging of Gallipoli as a gladiatorial combat between the military and the media brings him back to the perennial obsessions of the professional war reporter – access to the battlefield, censorship, and professional rivalry. In this context, Schuler's value resides less in anything he says or does than in the entrée he provides to the storied events of Gallipoli. The book is far more interested in walking the reader back over the well-trodden landscape of Australian military myth than it is in remapping it or reassessing Schuler's influence over its cartography. With Baker fixated on the major players who command the stage, Schuler is confined to the role of 'attendant lord', there to 'swell a progress, start a scene or two', but he's definitely no 'Prince Hamlet'.

Ironically, the book's failure to re-animate Schuler is also its principal strength and the basis of its main contribution to a now voluminous literature on those who reported on the Australians in the Great War. While Baker protests Schuler's excision from, marginalisation, or misrepresentation in Australian accounts of what happened at Gallipoli, his treatment of him compounds his obscurity and emblematises its causes. In the wake of the Great War, Schuler's former colleagues C.E.W. Bean and Keith Murdoch went on to attain public profiles buoyed but never overwhelmed by their experiences at Gallipoli – one as the founder and guiding spirit of the Australian War Memorial, the other as a press magnate tirelessly dedicated to the promotion of the nation's – and his own – mythic self-construction. By contrast, Schuler's pointless and inglorious death, mortally injured by shellfire while demonstrating the operations of a camp oven near Messines, all but guaranteed his comparative obscurity – his life snuffed out so soon after the brief access of fame that Australia in Arms brought him. Schuler was swallowed whole by the myth he did so much to define, popularise, and disseminate.

Phillip Schuler at a hotel in Cairo (Wikimedia Commons)If Schuler does have a ready means to significance, it resides in his photographs from Gallipoli, almost two thousand of which are in the collections of the Australian War Memorial. Baker makes passing mention of two of the most famous examples but ignores hundreds more, thus passing up the opportunity to consider Schuler's unique contribution to the Gallipoli myth, reappraise his legacy, and advance his claim to fame. Seduced by the power of the legend and the glamour of its protagonists, Baker leads the reader back through the case of Murdoch versus Hamilton, rattling off the well-known claims and counter-claims like a knowledgeable but wearisome tour guide who informs his audience but fails to inspire them. A book explicitly purposed to return Schuler to the limelight demonstrates why he remains in the shadow of the myth he helped bring into being.