Belgium has prepared a touring exhibition, The Belgians Have Not Forgotten that will tour Australia and New Zealand from November until the end of 2017 to mark the Battle of Passchendaele in Flanders.
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About 18,000 Australians and 5000 New Zealanders were killed during the battle, which is also known as the Third Battle of Ypres, in 1917.
New Zealand lost 845 men in just four hours on October 12, 1917, during an assault on Bellevue Heights.
Australia and New Zealand lost so many because it was the first time the entire Anzac force, five Australian divisions and New Zealand's single division, had fought in the one place.
The battle, which lasted three months and 10 days, claimed between 450,000 and 850,000 casualties on both sides, depending on whose account is believed. An estimated 1.5 million men took part.
The touring exhibition was announced by the Belgian ambassador, Jean-Luc Bodson, at the Embassy in Canberra on May 26.
Mr Bodson said it was in the process of being finalised and would include pictures, films, works of art and relics of the war collected as part of the "iron harvest" Belgian farmers still turn up in their fields. He said it had been decided to take the exhibition to regional areas because so many of the Anzacs had come from the countryside.
The Belgians Have Not Forgotten will be launched in Launceston from November 10. Still controversial almost a century after it was fought, the Flanders offensive was opposed by both the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd-George, and General Ferdinand Foch, the French chief of the General Staff.
Its strongest advocate was Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haig, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force, whose name still evokes anger and debate in Australia and New Zealand today.
Haig saw the assault on the ridges south and east of the Belgian city of Ypres [pronounced "ee-pres"] as the logical extension of the war of attrition on the Western Front that was bleeding the Allied and German armies white. Because so many men were killed and wounded in Flanders it became the principal focus for commemoration after the war.
The Menin Gate memorial, a massive arch, is inscribed with the names of 54,900 British and Commonwealth soldiers whose bodies were blown into fragments or sank into the bottomless mud, never to be recovered. Australians account for 6169 of those names.
"Passchendaele was... one of the greatest disasters of the war," Lloyd George wrote in his memoirs in the 1930s, "No soldier of any intelligence now defends this senseless campaign".
