The diary,in five notebooks,has since been cared for by relatives.
The current custodian,Ayton’s daughter-in-law,Elvala Ayton of South Yarra,said her late husband,Ayton’s son Philip junior,and other son Roy,both World War II veterans,always wanted to publish the diary but work,family and illness got in the way.
With the WWI centenary just passed,the family decided to fulfil their wishes,to give access to students and researchers and as a legacy to Ayton’s descendants.
The family has offered the diary to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and are waiting on a response.
Mrs Ayton believes Philip deserves a posthumous award for his war heroism,citing one incident,in February 1917 near the village of Le Barque.
On two occasions Ayton crossed a no man’s land under heavy fire,to bring groups of mates to safety,including his younger brother Walter,or ‘‘Watty’’.
Mrs Ayton hopes the diary ‘‘will be well read,because it is a wonderful story. I think it could be made into a wonderful film’’.
Ayton was born in Warrandyte,north-east of Melbourne,in 1889,but was working on Sydney’s tramways when he enlisted,days after war was declared in 1914.
The diary documents his participation in the Gallipoli landing in April 1915,which he describes as an ‘‘inferno of fire’’,and his months living in dugouts ‘‘under constant fire night and day’’.
‘‘One day an unexploded shell crashed through a chap’s dugout – a few yards from mine and took his head off while he was asleep,’’ Ayton writes.
In April 1916,after nine months recovering from a near-fatal severe stomach illness and botched operation,Ayton was sent to northern France.
Over the next two years he helped rebuild trenches and railway lines on the Somme,often under fire,survived four wounds from enemy fire in one day at Mouquet Farm,and lived through the harsh winter of 1916-17.
In August 1918,having switched to the infantry,and now an officer,Ayton helped drive back German forces over several days’ intense fighting near the village of Proyart.
He took part in close combat shooting and bayoneting but said it ‘‘has to be done’’ or ‘‘Fritz’’ — the Germans,would kill them.
During that battle,Ayton single-handedly took 18 Germans prisoner after surprising them in a trench.
Fellow soldier Roy Denning described Ayton in his own memoir as being ‘‘as game as a bull ant’’,unwilling to be sent home when he was wounded,six foot tall,broad shouldered with no surplus fat,impulsive and ‘‘forceful in manner and speech’’.
In his diary,Ayton mocks snobby British officers,ignores hospital curfews to go out,and is never short of female company.
Elvala Ayton said the book’s title,Hell of a Time,refers to the violence of war,but also how Ayton,perhaps knowing life was short,had the opposite ‘‘hell of a time’’ in his time off.
In an epic six day Paris trip in June 1917 he flitted from the Louvre to the Eiffel Tower and the cabaret at the Folies Bergere and strolled the boulevards,making eyes at"beautiful French demoiselles’’.
Then it was back to the front. ‘‘Very hard to leave Paris’’,he writes. ‘‘Oh it was hard – but c’est la guerre’’.