He was working as a general practitioner in Brisbane when the First World War broke out and immediately joined the Australian Imperial Force.

[4] Butler was among the first Australians ashore at Gallipoli on 25 April, landing at ANZAC Cove under machine gun fire.

[5] Moving inland, he set up a medical post between 400 Plateau and Bolton's Ridge, treating the wounded and rallying troops.

[7] In February 1916, in Egypt, Butler was appointed Deputy Assistant Director of Medical Services for the I ANZAC Corps and several months later was deployed to the Western Front.

In the middle of the following year, he returned to France as a temporary colonel and commander of the 3rd Australian General Hospital, based at Abbeville.

He took a meticulous approach to his work, and often missed deadlines, which at times frustrated Charles Bean, who was co-ordinating the production of the Australian official histories.

A target readership was military medical staff, with the clinical information contained in the books helping educate them in treatment methods.

By the time of the publication of the books, current knowledge and understanding of medicine rendered much of the learnings from Butler's work redundant.

[3] Despite suffering partial blindness, which had affected his later work on the official histories, Butler continued to write, publishing The Digger: A Study in Democracy in 1945.

He himself had donated many items, including personal documents dating from his war service, to the organisation's library in the years leading up to his death.