Polygon Wood is two-and-a-half kilometres to our south west. Ahead and to the right, across freshly ploughed fields of rich, chocolate-dark, Flemish earth, is an elevated area known as Broodseinde Ridge.

Our route is part of the Australian Remembrance Trail. This 200-kilometre long network of roads and paths follows the twists and turns of the northern section of the Western Front where the Anzacs fought. It stretches from Passchendaele in Flanders, passing through Villers-Bretonneux in France, to Bellicourt.

Villers-Bretonneux, which has been dominated by the Australian National WWI Memorial since 1938, also houses the recently opened Sir John Monash Centre.

Both the trail and the centre have been developed to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Australia’s involvement in “the war to end all wars”.

More than 46,000 Australians and at least 13,250 New Zealanders were killed, or died, along this line between March 1916, when Anzacs first arrived from Egypt, and November 11, 1918, when the Armistice took effect.

Our path is separated from the tillage by a deep drainage ditch. Although it hasn’t rained since we arrived two days before, large puddles of muddy water lay in the lower parts of the fields. This ground is just above sea level. The water table is high by Australian standards. The ploughed furrows are wide and deep.

To our left the country drops away below the route of the old railway line. There are patches of thicket and open fields. The landscape is punctuated with houses, the occasional cattle pen and small barns.

Every house and every farm building is made out of the Flanders mud. When fired in a kiln it turns a brilliant terracotta red. The compact, two-storey homes seem curiously unfinished because they lack verandahs. Their walls have been built from the smaller, neater bricks Europeans favour. The steeply pitched roofs are red tile. The grass is lush and green.

The mind-buggering fracture between what we are seeing and the muddy, flaming hellscape of a century ago beggars belief.

This is brought home to me when a squad of lycra-clad Le Tour aspirants flash past on carbon fibre wonderbikes while we stop to examine the ruins of a German machine gun nest.

I am walking in the footsteps of a distant relative; Albert Goodacre from “Rocky Ridge” at Woodstock near Cowra in south western NSW.

Albert, then 20, came up this embankment with a few thousand of his mates from the 1st Battalion, AIF, just after 6am on the morning of October 4, 1917. They were part of the main assault force on Broodseinde Ridge during Third Ypres (aka the Battle of Passchendaele).

Third Ypres was the first, and last, time during the war all six Anzac divisions, five Australian and one New Zealand, fought in the same place at the same time.

The Imperial troops had stood firm during heavy German shelling for 40 minutes before their own attacks began. This was supported by a smattering of tanks and made under the cover of a creeping barrage.

Resistance that morning, according to the official record, was “slight”. The artillery barrage had wrought havoc in the German ranks. In the words of one account: “many of those who had not retreated, lay dead or were immobilised in shock and fear”.

The ferocity of the barrage is impossible to conceive. British military historian Liddell Hart noted General Herbert Plumer, the commander of the Second Army of which the Anzacs were part, saw artillery as the key.

“Plumer had 1295 guns - a gun to every five yards,” Hart wrote. “Of these, 575 were heavy, which meant one to every 12 yards compared with one to 18 (during earlier attacks).”

German casualties were made worse by the fact soldiers from their 45th Reserve Division, the 4th Guard Division and the 4th Bavarian Division had been massed for their own assault on the Allied lines when the creeping barrage struck.

While official German war historians later described the Battle of Broodseinde as “the black day of October 4”, Charles Bean, the Australian Official Historian, said it was “the most complete (success) ever won by the British Army in France”.

By 8am the first Australian and British soldiers had reached the higher ground. By 9am large parts of Broodseinde Ridge were in Allied hands.

The 12 Allied divisions - more than 150,000 men - had advanced at least a kilometre along a 13-kilometre front; an unprecedented achievement at the time.

John Monash, then a major general commanding the 3rd Australian Division, cabled Melbourne, then the home of the Federal Government: “All well. Division again brilliantly victorious in 'greatest battle of the war'.”

“In using the words “greatest battle of the war”, I quote from a letter the Commander-in-Chief (BEF commander Field Marshal Douglas Haig) sent me yesterday…,” he wrote in a letter to his wife the same day.

The successes at Broodseinde and Polygon Wood, where another relative, John May Pascoe of Queensland’s 6/31st Battalion, was killed on September 26, 1917, were wiped out when Haig pushed his battle-weary troops a bog too far towards Passchendaele.

Intense shelling had turned the ground to a deep, viscous mush. Heavily laden men had to wade thigh, waist and chest deep through mud into kill boxes built around carefully placed machine gun batteries. British and Anzac soldiers often lost touch with the protective barrage. Men died by the thousands in repeated, fruitless, assaults and fierce German counter attacks.

The slaughter, which saw the Allies suffer 275,000 casualties compared to an estimated 200,000 German dead and wounded, made Third Ypres synonymous with the needless waste of gallant troops. It also led to the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, deliberately starving Haig of reinforcements.

Albert Goodacre did not share the victory or the defeat. By the time Broodseinde Ridge was taken he had been mortally wounded; shot through the shoulder and the thigh.

The youngster, who had needed a permission slip from his father, Andrew, to sign up at the age of 18-and-a-half, did not receive treatment from the 3rd Australian Field Ambulance until the next morning, October 5.

He was taken to the 10th Casualty Clearing Station, a major field hospital at Remy Siding about 15 kilometres west of Ypres and 23 kilometres behind the front line. He died on October 6.

Albert, and hundreds of other brave men, including Sikh, Hindu and Muslim Indian soldiers, Chinese labour battalion workers and German soldiers who were also treated at the hospital, are buried at the adjacent Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery.

When I went to his grave to lay a wreath I was told I was only the second relative to visit in more than a century. I thought of his father, Andrew, whose hand had signed the paper that allowed Albert to march off to his death, and his mother, Jane, who placed a marble plaque commemorating his death on her mother’s grave in the Woodstock Cemetery. They would have given much to visit this place.

Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery is immaculate. An abundance of wreaths, mementos and Australian flags attested to the record number of visitors from down-under who made it to France the week before for Anzac Day 2018.

Albert’s headstone faces south west. It looks out across an ancient wisteria hedge that was already in full bloom, towards freshly ploughed fields in the direction of Armentieres. It is a fitting resting place for a dead farmer.

Lijssenthoek is 20 kilometres west of the Hooge Crater Cemetery where John May Pascoe was finally laid to rest in 1919. He, along with many other victims of 3rd Ypres, was reburied after a temporary two-year interment near where he fell.

The forest has largely reclaimed the once devastated landscape of Polygon Wood. Only the partially overgrown ruins of German bunkers, the Buttes New British Cemetery and the towering obelisk of the Australian Fifth Division Memorial show what happened here.

A poster for a missing dog, a field of leeks, and a pine plantation are proof that even after the worst of tragedies life goes on.

John, a 43 year old with six children under 16 when he enlisted in Toowoomba on October 10, 1915, was an experienced soldier. He had served five years with the NSW Lancers before the war. The mature-age private had returned to his unit, the 31st Battalion, from 13 days leave in England 10 days before he was killed.

John’s widow, Annie Beatrice Pascoe, wrote to the secretary of defence on February 22, 1919, asking for a photo of his grave. The image she was sent shows a simple wooden cross. The more elaborate tombstones we now see were not erected until the mid-1920s.

John’s younger brother Ernest, who was 37 and also had six children under 16 when he joined up on March 8, 1916, also fought at Polygon Wood. A member of the 31st Battalion, he was gravely wounded on September 26.

After being treated by the Field Ambulance Ernest was taken to the 46th Casualty Clearing Station at Mendinghem near Poperinge west of Ypres.

He was declared fit enough to return to the front on May 17, 1918, and survived to embark for Australia aboard the Derbyshire in June, 1919.

Cemeteries and casualty clearing stations went hand in hand. They were almost invariably close to a railway line. It made a lot of sense from the army’s point of view. Those, like Albert, who didn’t make it, could be buried quickly and without fuss. Those who responded, like Ernest, were patched up and put on trains to begin their journey back to England.

There they would either recover sufficiently to return to the fray or were invalided out of the service. A really good wound was called a “Blighty”, the Tommies’ name for their island home.

That is what happened to another family member, Joe Ellery, who was serving with the 13th Battalion near Gueudecourt on the Somme on February 5, 1917. He was shot through the right shoulder. The wound quickly led to gas gangrene.

It was Joe’s second “knock”. He had been burnt at Pozieres, also on the Somme, the previous August. By then a corporal, he recovered in time to receive the Military Medal for his actions in no man’s land from November 27 to December 6, 1916, during the depths of the Somme Winter.

The 27 year old from Carcoar arrived back in Sydney on December 16, 1917. He was discharged as medically unfit on March 19, 1918.

Joe’s younger brother, Stephen, was not so lucky. He was killed during heavy shelling at Sausage Gully, a supply area, near Pozieres on August 9, 1916.

Sausage Gully, then only a few kilometres south west of the Australian advance, is a shallow depression that curls, like a cooked sausage, around a low hill just off the old Roman Road to Albert and Amiens. The hill is scarred by Lochnagar crater, the massive cavity created by one of the largest mines ever detonated by the Allies on the western front. It was set off on July 1, 1916, the first day of the battle of the Somme.

Lochnagar, now privately owned, has been preserved as a memorial to the soldiers of all nations. At 90 metres across and 20 metres deep, the soccer-oval sized, chalk-lined cavity is one of the most poignant sites along the front.

Stephen Ellery was killed instantly when a shell hit his dugout. Comrades collected his remains and he was buried nearby. The grave was destroyed by heavy German shelling during Ludendorff’s spring offensive in 1918.

His monuments are inscriptions on the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux and at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

The fighting around Pozieres was both fierce and wasteful of Australian and British lives.

Official war historian, Charles Bean, quoted “one of the most level-headed officers in the force” as saying “We have just come out of a place so terrible that… a raving lunatic could never imagine the horror of the last 13 days”.

My journey through the battlefields of Belgium and France has been moving, evocative and, on occasion, quite personal. This isn’t just “capital H” history; it is also a part of my own family’s story.

I have been fortunate to be granted an insight into what Albert, Joe, Stephen, Ernest, John and hundreds of thousands of other Australians and New Zealanders endured that goes beyond anything you would find in a book or a documentary.

Having seen the countries they travelled halfway around the world to redeem and defend and, in some cases, followed their paths from behind the lines, to the front and then to their graves, I have nothing but respect.

If, as John Wayne said, “courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway” these men had it by the bucket load.

I, like most of my generation, have been fortunate never to have been tested in this way. I do not take personal pride in their accomplishments. I just hope that if I had ever been placed in the same position I would have done half so well.

David Ellery visited Belgium and France as a guest of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. His journey was facilitated by Visit Flanders