EACH evening as the sun hangs heavy in the Flanders sky, the colossal Menin Gate in Ypres falls silent.
The noisy motorcycles and family sedans cease to pass under its arches and the foot traffic slows and eventually stands still as local officials turn the public space into hallowed ground for The Last Post.
You could be forgiven for thinking this is a classic "tourist trap", especially as The Old Bill pub and the new Wipers Times brewery are nearby. However this sombre ceremony has been going since 1928 and has, apart from during World War II, been held every night since.
This service is more than just tourism for the locals. It's a reminder of what was won and lost on their soil.
Some nights, mostly in the dark winter months, a small crowd gathers with chattering teeth that echo off the marble; other nights the visitors spill over the cordoned-off areas vying for a better viewpoint; officials try to add a solemnness to the proceedings.
While the familiar sounds of The Last Post fill the void and wash over the names of the missing, what makes this 30-minute reflection stand out are the veterans, mothers, young adults and school children from around the world who attend it.
Like Gallipoli and Villers-Bretonneux in France, The Last Post is a drawcard for Australians of all ages and its popularity isn't diminishing. In fact, over the past four years, this small Belgian town in West Flanders has seen more than 800,000 visitors a year surging through the area and beyond.
But why is it that in this pocket of Flanders soil, where Australian blood runs deep, we still feel the need to commemorate a conflict from a century ago? Why is it that the battles and legends of The Great War still capture us as a nation?
The Great War was the first time our fledgling federation, which was less than 14 years old, acted together as a nation. From the labourers of the outback to the bank tellers of the city, the war created a nation out of a collection of scrappy states and territories.
Still very connected to king and country, the building of an army brought together the men who would forever be known as the Anzacs. The idea of the tough and tanned farm boys turned soldiers created a larger than life legend for Australia to forge its national identity on.
Of course, like all legends, the details have been somewhat embellished and rough edges smoothed over.
Our army, for example, was made up of all kinds of men, from all walks of life, including Indigenous Australians, and Australians with British, Asian, Greek and Northern European backgrounds.
And the Aussie "larrikin" traits, much lauded by newspapers of the time, sometimes proved problematic when mixed with free time, boredom, wine and the never-ending monotony of trench warfare.
However, it is these shared traits of humour, decency, mateship and laid-back bravery, either real or imagined, which gave us our moral code as a nation. Even today, the term "unAustralian" indirectly relates to it, as does the classic "she'll be right".
It's also these traits that preceded the Australian infantry as they waged a war they didn't start. One solider, Sapper Hubert Anthony, writing home early during the war noted, "The people here are awfully kind - they think all the world of a soldier and ever so much more of him if he happens to be Australian".
To this day, Australians are welcomed in Belgium and northern France.
And while the dramatic rocky outcrops and quiet beaches of Gallipoli still draw Australians on Anzac Day every year, it's the Western Front in France that has grown in popularity over the past four years.
Whereas Gallipoli's busy dawn service with its bus tours and sleepovers full of young Australians can be seen as a tribute to the Anzac spirit of mateship and larrikinism, the services at Villers-Bretonneux in France and The Menin Gate in Belgium are a tribute to the quiet determination and bravery of a young country beginning to make its mark on history and to the incredibly young Australians who died in their thousands in waist-deep mud.
Standing today in the lush green fields of Flanders, with their small brick farmhouses and barnyards, where horses graze and poppies sway in the breeze, it's timely to remember the young men who died on barbed wire, or drowned in shell holes far from the eucalyptus trees of their childhood - their deaths a far cry from the romantic words of Hardy and Yeats, or the images of the propaganda posters.
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