A new book traces the lives of the 101 ''lost boys'' who were in the first wave of soldiers to land at dawn on April 25, 1915.

The work is by Professor Peter Stanley, a former principal historian at the Australian War Memorial, who seeks to tell the stories of all in this small group - where they came from and why they volunteered.

Stanley comes close to achieving this aim.

But on the last page of Lost Boys of Anzac, he reveals that, after months spent chasing leads in Australia and Britain, and tramping the Gallipoli hills, the full story of one soldier has eluded him. ''It turns out for one of the Lost Boys, a man with the ordinary name of William Walker, of the Ninth Battalion, we know almost nothing,'' he writes.

Walker's attestation papers show he was a 22-year-old Anglican labourer, originally from Buckinghamshire in England, who volunteered in Brisbane in August 1914. After that, there is almost nothing.

Walker is not mentioned in anyone's diary or any official file. There is no Red Cross file or Roll of Honour file. He has no grave, no photograph and his AIF file contains no letters from his family.

Stanley writes that Walker disappeared as finally as any anonymous Ottoman soldier, and like them he lay unburied in the peninsula scrub. ''William Walker is not literally the Unknown Australian Soldier - his body was buried in France three years later. But as a symbol of the Lost Boys of Anzac, William Walker exactly represents their tragedy.''

Stanley says the men lost in the first wave of landings have carried the burden of our continuing desire to remember Gallipoli - but most Australians cannot name a single soldier who died that day.

'They should no longer remain as abstractions in Anzac Day addresses,'' he believes. ''Their comrades, families and communities knew them as real people, not only as the embodiments of an Anzac legend that had not been named or formulated when they were alive.

''Now we know their stories we can at last begin to think of them again as individuals - as real people, who lived a century ago and who can live again in our imaginations.''

Stanley said: ''Anzac Day addresses talk about mateship and courage and loyalty - but the people saying that don't know the people they are praising. It's a really important part of Australia's identity, but they have lost contact with the reality.

''It's not just about the young men who died. Their families bore a huge weight for decades. They get left out of it as well.''

Do you know more about William Walker? tbarlass@fairfaxmedia.com.au

Extracts from Lost Boys of Anzac 

As they climbed out of the boats (finding themselves waist or even chest-deep in water) men struggled ashore, holding their rifles over their heads and slipping on the rocks that still make bathers at Anzac Cove wary. Unlike bathers today, these men were impeded by a heavy weight of woollen clothing, boots and pack and kit weighing up to 80 pounds, a fatal burden for men losing their footing. ‘This tremendous weight of gear’, a survivor explained, ‘simply meant you would not rise again’. He managed to keep his footing and emerged, ‘gasping like a bull out of breath’, but he saw ‘several poor chaps by me had been hit and had fallen in that awful sea, unable to stand only to die drowned’. A 9th Battalion officer detailed the amount of gear they carried and wrote sardonically of a ‘Christmas tree effect … like a moving ironmongers shop’. His boat had grounded on a slight bank and when men slid over the gunwale they dropped into deeper water between the boat and the beach. They were ‘dragged down by the weight they were carrying and drowned’. Then onto the shingly beach, when most men dropped their packs and some of their kit. Soon the beach was littered with discarded kit, and the bodies of those who died on the shoreline. No one knows how many, but perhaps 10 or at most 20 of the first wave died in the boats or on the beach. It perhaps explains why so many Lost Boys are not mentioned in survivors’ accounts: no one saw them die, sinking in the darkness. 

While the first wave did not land in a holocaust of machinegun fire or shrapnel as so many Australians still believe, men did die on the very waterline. The 10th Battalion man given the job of cutting wire sheltered behind a little ‘bump’ of sand and fixed his bayonet. Obedient to the calls of his officers, he rose to follow them up the slope when he saw ‘the first man I ever saw dead’ – one of the first of the Lost Boys to die, lying half in and half out of the water, shot in the neck. Like almost all of the Lost Boys who died on the beach, he is unnamed.

Many families realised that living so far from any source of news they needed assistance. Word spread that the Red Cross could help and families began to write to the organisation, and we can imagine word spreading from family to family as the hope grew that the Red Cross alone could bring the news all so fervently desired. Letters – from families mostly in pen, from the authorities mostly typed – began to flow in all directions. They passed from families to the authorities and on to the Red Cross; from the Red Cross’s offices in Egypt, Malta and Britain to the various state offices and back again; all moving across the globe at the speed of steam trains and steam ships, carrying fears, questions and apprehension in one direction and sad news in the other.

The Red Cross, for its part, anticipated this demand for news and across the world began to investigate reports of missing men. They hoped to learn that a missing man had been found, or at least to gain confirmation that he was actually dead. They knew that families looked above all for certainty. The organisation recruited a network of what it called ‘searchers’. Civilians, often men over military age or otherwise unfit for active service, sometimes women, gave time to visit hospitals, convalescent homes and camps, armed with long lists of names and regimental numbers, hoping to find men who might have been present at a man’s death and might be able to shed some light on it. The task was enormous. Thousands of men had been killed or posted missing on Gallipoli alone, and many of those who might know were either dead or still serving on Gallipoli (where searchers were not sent). Thousands more potential informants were scattered in hospitals and homes anywhere between Egypt, Malta and Britain; even Australia, or somewhere in between, on the endless conveyer belt that had wounded men sent back for medical treatment and then forward again to the front. The chances of searchers locating a man who could give details of any particular missing man might seem remote. Success lay both in searchers’ patience in endlessly asking questions of wounded or convalescent men, and those men being willing to remember details which they would often have willingly forgotten.

Beginning in a private house in London days before the Gallipoli landings, with 20 volunteers and typists, the Missing and Wounded Enquiry Bureau rapidly expanded, moving through a succession of grander houses until in November 1915 it ended up in Carlton Terrace, in a property donated by Lord Astor, the press magnate. Within a year the original two dozen staff grew to over 150 volunteer clerks, filers and what were quaintly called ‘type-writers’. By mid-1916 its searchers were submitting over 1500 reports a week. In 1916 officers in Alexandria, Cairo, Malta and Lemnos were busy chasing up the dead and missing of Gallipoli; mostly British soldiers but including New Zealanders and Australians – among them many of the Lost Boys.