IT would have been a typically warm January morning in 1916 when the train carrying the Kurrajong Marchers pulled into Moree railway station.
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The “Kurrajongs” were on their way to enlist in the 33rd Battalion AIF, otherwise known as New England's Own.
Within a year, many would lay dead on the fields of Flanders.
The Kurrajong March was a recruitment campaign that saw a train wend its way from Inverell to Narrabri, picking up 150 eager young men along the way.
Their ultimate stop in New England was Armidale, where they joined the 33rd Battalion under the command of Major Leslie Morshead.
(In World War II, the then Lieutenant General Leslie James Morshead led Australian and British troops at the Siege of Tobruk and the Second Battle of El Alamein.)
After training at Armidale, the Kurrajongs, as part of the 33rd Battalion, set sail to Plymouth, England, from where they were sent to France five days before Christmas, 1916.
Their ultimate destiny was Belgium, for the third and final Battle of Ypres, also known as the battle of Passchendaele.
The muddy fields, in which many wounded soldiers drowned, could not have been further from the blue skies and open lands of New England. The gloom was only interrupted by a distant railway junction, Roulers, a small thicket called Polygon Wood and Menin Road, which led to the Front Line.
Fighting at Ypres had been more or less consistent since 1914 and, by 1917, when the Kurrajongs were deployed, it was barely more than a muddy, desolate area.
The Third Battle of Ypres claimed 38,000 Australian soldiers.
In one of those battles, on September 20, two Australian divisions sustained 5013 casualties while killing, wounding, or capturing 4200 Germans.
It has often been described as being one of the most senseless battles of all times; the aim was to capture the Passchendaele ridge, held by German forces and from where they blocked occupied ports on the English Channel coast, just north of Ypres.
In October and November, the Australians, along with the Belgians, Canadians and British, gave a final push to capture Passchendaele,
It proved a senseless battle, as British prime minister David Lloyd George noted in his memoirs.
Exhausted, the Australians were forced to retreat and hand over to their allies, the Canadians.
That corps eventually took Passchendaele on November 6, bringing the operation to a close. But it claimed the highest number of Australian casualties from any battle in World War I.
