A hundred years on from Australia's own versions of the Charge of the Light Brigade, you still have to step carefully.

Just ask Kerrie Allan, who had a moment of sheer terror this week when she found herself holding an unexploded bomb.

The 59 year-old from Crows Nest came to France to remember her grandfather, who played an honourable role in one of the Anzac forces' most horrific battles on the Western Front.

Robert Rowland Rowley, a young former chemists assistant from Redfern, was at Bullecourt in the spring of 1917, with the 7th Australian Field Ambulance.

He was recommended for a Military Medal for "exceptionally good work" carrying the wounded to safety through heavy enemy shelling and machine-gun fire - until he was wounded himself.

"He was blown up," Ms Allan says. "And he survived."

So she was poking around the battlefield - then a muddy hellscape of barbed wire and trenches, now a dandelion-dotted patchwork of wheatfields under glorious spring sun.

She was hoping to turn up a piece of shrapnel, something to remember the moment by.

"I saw a clod of dirt, and I was pushing it around with my foot, then I picked it up. When I turned it over I said 'oh dear'."

It wasn't shrapnel. It was a Mills bomb - an intact Australian grenade, one of thousands carried, dropped or flung by Anzacs as they desperately tried to keep the Germans at bay.

"And then I threw it away!"

Ms Allan laughs in horror at the thought of her involuntary action, and the anachronistic sight of an Australian digger's grenade, flying over the fields of the Somme.

"We're all lucky to still be here," a friend jokes.

A century on and history can bite.

The battle of Bullecourt still stings - a misguided, mismanaged moment on the Western Front where soldiers charged into a snow-limned No Man's Land in an attack that at first seemed to succeed against all the odds, but ended in a deadly rout with thousands dead in just a few hours.

Charles Bean, Australia's official historian of the war, compared the attack to the famous Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, "the task of attacking a position in which there were cannon to the left of them, cannon to the right of them, cannon in front of them".

Formidable barbed wire stretched along the Hindenburg line, with machine guns trained on their borders.

The plan was to use the new, still-experimental tanks to flatten the wire, then the Aussie infantry would pile onto the Germans.

At 1am the Germans' Bullecourt salient was "drenched" with poison gas, Bean records.

Then the tanks started to trundle forward. Or rather, they didn't.

Three arrived late, three others got stuck or delayed by engine trouble.

Some even fired on their allies. They moved, wrote Bean, like "frightened snails".

Battalions from every Australian state pushed toward the German line and the very few gaps in the wire.

They quickly overtook the tanks.

"The wire seemed to swarm with fireflies where the bullets glanced from it. Flares began to illuminate the snow-covered battlefield almost as brightly as daylight??? the oncoming tanks attracted such a storm of small-arms fire that men watching from close in rear could at times see their shapes outlined by the sparks of the bullets that rattled against their sides."

"The 4th Brigade was facing intense machine-gun fire along insufficiently broken (wire) entanglements without a single tank ahead of it to clear a passage."

Major Black, an old prospector and Gallipoli veteran "known from Yilgarn to the Murchison" yelled to his men at the wire "come on boys, bugger the tanks!"

He had entered the battle believing he would not survive it.

He was right.

The attack faltered, "swept back by annihilating fire from German rifles and machine-guns".

Against all odds the Anzacs took a portion of the Hindenburg Line.

But then came the counter-attack.

They ran out of grenades, ammunition, and hope.

The withdrawal was ordered - into "frightful German machine gun fire on the open stretch behind the trenches"

"The 48th came out - under heavy rifle and machine-gun fire, but with proud deliberation and studied nonchalance, at walking pace, picking their way through the broken wire??? carefully helping the walking wounded and with their officers bringing up the rear. Leisurely as a crowd leaving its daily work, the 48th drew clear. Many were killed in withdrawing, many were wounded and lay about the wire until captured or put to death by a merciful enemy."

Six and a half battalions and accompanying units of the 4th Division lost over 3000 officers and men, of whom 28 officers and 1142 men were captured - the largest number of Australians taken by the enemy in a single battle.

Two thirds of those who entered the fight were lost.

Captain Harry Murray of the AIF said afterwards: "??? It was not war, it was murder ??? the high command had blundered and our men paid the price."

In early May 1917, Australian soldiers crashed through and succeeded where the first attack had failed - though suffering even greater losses.

At a small remembrance ceremony on Wednesday, locals and visiting Aussies gathered to remember their sacrifice.

"We come here today as beneficiaries of the peace those men fought to secure," said Stephen Brady, Australia's ambassador to France.

Men such as Robert Rowley.