T here is something eerie and very moving about visiting a war cemetery and seeing your surname on a headstone. But there it was, standing serenely amid the rows of white memorials on the manicured lawn in the immaculately kept New Irish Farm Cemetery, north-east of Ypres, Belgium.
Grave XI.D.6 belongs to a second lieutenant with the Black Watch (Royal Highlanders), who was killed in action on   July 31, 1917, aged 33.
He was a son of Arthur and Marion Quekett, of London, and husband of Mary Ann Withers Quekett, of Ridgefield, Horsell Park, Woking, Surrey.
He was John Quekett. He was my great-uncle.
Even though I had known little about him, to see the headstone brought to the surface strong emotions.
It was impossible not to wonder about the circumstances of his death. Was it sudden? Lingering? Painful? And what of his poor family? How they must have hurt at hearing the news.
And it was also impossible not to wonder again at the staggering folly of World War I which condemned so many young men to an early death in the most ghastly of conflicts.
And then there was the fate of those who were wounded.
Like William John (Jack) Watson, who had left the farm at Dumbleyung, enlisted in the 44th Battalion in 1916 and fought in the Battle of Broodseinde Ridge, part of the Ypres offensive of 1917. The Australian War Memorial records the attack began before dawn on   October 4, 1917. 
The Australian troops were shelled heavily on their start line and many died even before the attack began.
"When it did, the attacking troops were confronted by a line of troops advancing towards them; the Germans had chosen the same morning to launch an attack of their own," the AWM records.
"The Australians forged on through the German assault waves and gained all their objectives along the ridge. 
"It was not without cost, however. 
"German pillboxes were characteristically difficult to subdue, and the Australian divisions suffered 6500 casualties."
While the mud and blood is long gone, it is possible to get a sense of the horrors of that battle by visiting Tyne Cot Cemetery, also north-east of Ypres, where concrete pillboxes have been left in place.
The imposing Cross of Sacrifice at Tyne Cot is set into part of an original defensive pillbox. Despite the cost, the Battle of Broodseinde is rated as a stunning success.
 Official historian C.E.W. Bean said it was "an overwhelming blow" for the Germans.
"It drove the Germans from one of the most important positions on the Western Front," Bean wrote.
Jack Watson was shot in the neck during that battle and given up for dead, but somehow clung to life after the "dead cart" came around and someone called out "this one is still alive".
He went back to Albany where he lived almost in the shadow of the Dog Rock, with what could only be called a trench in his neck.
He was my wife's great- grandfather.
Our families are by no means special or different. 
Thousands upon thousands of Australian families have lasting connections with the battlefields of France and Belgium, for there would scarcely have been a street across the nation at the time which was not home to a Digger who fought in that war.
And the blood of thousands upon thousands of those men would have spilled into the soil of Western Europe.
For although Gallipoli has long been the focus of Australian commemorations of WWI, the losses in 1915 on that bleak but now almost sacred peninsula remain minuscule compared with the losses on the Western Front between 1916 and 1918.
There were 8709 Diggers killed as a result of the eight-month Gallipoli campaign and more than 17,000 men were wounded.
More than 46,000 died on the Western Front and 134,000 were wounded or captured.
Their fields of battle, and for many their final resting places, stretch across vast chunks of countryside.
Increasing numbers of Australians have over recent years been making the journey to some of those battlefields to pay their respects along what is now known as the Australian remembrance trail.
It takes in sites etched into Australian war history including Fromelles, Bullecourt and Pozieres.
Thousands were killed in the long years of stalemate for no or little advance, but the tide of the war changed in 1918. 
As the year unfolded French names such as Hamel, Mont St Quentin and Villers-Bretonneux became associated with bravery and daring, and military successes that contributed greatly to Germany's eventual surrender.
Much of that success was attributed to the leadership and tactics of Australian general Sir John Monash.
Geoffrey Serle's biography of Monash in the Australian Dictionary of Biography says that historians have proclaimed the battle of Hamel on   July 4 as "the first modern battle".
"A war-winning combination had been found: a corps commander of genius, the Australian infantry, the Tank Corps, the Royal Artillery and the RAF," Serle wrote.
The main memorial commemorating the Diggers' battles in France looks across the fields near Villers-Bretonneux, the scene of a significant Australian victory in   April 1918.
The sombre Australian National Memorial at the site carries the names of 10,738 Australians who died in France in WWI and have no known grave. The town has Australian street names and the courtyard of the Victoria School, so named because when it was rebuilt after the war much of the money needed was raised in Victoria, has a sign  which reads "Do Not Forget Australia".
This week a sod-turning ceremony at the Australian National Memorial marked official start of work on a museum that will provide a significant focal point of the remembrance trail.
The $100 million project is to build  the Sir John Monash centre, which will lie half-buried behind the existing memorial's tower, and when complete in 2018  will feature a museum and interpretive centre. 
When he outlined the plan for the Monash museum, then prime minister Tony Abbott said that while "Gallipoli was a splendid failure", the Western Front was "a terrible victory".
"We should remember our victories as much as we remember our defeats," Mr Abbott said. Back at the New Irish Farm cemetery two poppies were left to remember and thank a man who perished doing his duty.
And all the others just like him. 
It drove the Germans from one of the most important positions.
Historian C.E.W. Bean