Ben Roberts-Smith's personal journey back to WWI battlefield

FIRST ON 7: Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith looks at Australia's role on the Western Front during World War One in the first of a series of 7News special reports.

In Belgium in 2014, it is a country of rolling hills and picture perfect villages from the pages of a storybook.

But that peaceful landscape is not what the Anzacs saw when they arrived in 1917.

British troops were at a stalemate when the Australians were sent in, and quickly, our diggers made a difference.

They engineered several key victories, putting the Germans on the back foot, thanks to some Australian ingenuity.

“They didn’t go over the top with fixed bayonets and just march in a line," historian Kristof Blieck said.

"The old fashion way was that they used hip firing, so they were shooting with their rifles from the hip to have some sort of suppressive fire to keep the Germans down, and that was a major success,"

But when it began to rain the battleground descended into a boggy, muddy mess. The Allies were not just fighting the enemy, but the horrid conditions too.

After months of artillery fire, the fields were ruined, and shell holes filled with water. Some men drowned.

Today, the shells and artillery pieces have been cleaned and are inside, under lights on display so that those tales from the battlefield can be told to a new generation at the Memorial Museum in Zonnebeke.

The Australian story is prominent amongst the old war relics.

For one group of Queensland schoolboys, on a Rugby tour, their experience of Europe would have been significantly different if they were born in another era. Those trenches would have been very real.

"That's just unimaginable for us as 17 year olds to have gone through something like that," student Josh Woollett said.

The losses were heavy. The bloodiest fighting saw 38,000 Australians killed or injured in just eight weeks. Including three brothers, the Seabrook boys from Sydney.

Theo, William and George all died within a day of each other. George and Theo's bodies were never found. Brass plates marking their deaths are on display in the museum.

"It's very sad if you think about it, that the on the first day that the Anzacs got into the battle of Passchendaele, three brothers already got lost, so this shows the impact on Australian families," local historian Kristof Blieck says.

In Tyne Cot, there are more than one thousand Australian soldiers buried in a cemetery that holds more Australian war graves than any other in the world.

More than half were never identified, their headstones bare no name. They are unknown Australian soldiers.

The Belgians are thankful, their nation still exists in part because of young Aussie diggers facing the toughest of opponents.

"The enemy was actually German storm troopers from the German storm troop battalion, so this was not just the enemy, this a not just Johnny Turk like they call them. This was a decent well trained warrior they were fighting," Blieck says.

The Anzac legend was forged at Gallipoli and cemented at Passchendaele.