This is part of what Anzac means now.

It means an Australian man tracing his great-uncle's footsteps until he finds the place he may have fallen: now a green field of bintje potatos, soon to be harvested and trucked to Belgium to become mayonnaise-drenched frites.

Scott Saunders began his walk to connect with history, to understand war. Now he stands arm in arm with the potato-farming local mayor Damien Guise, who this week stumbled over a tiny Australian flag stuck in his field by Saunders, and wondered what it meant, then swelled with pride and empathy when he found out.

Anzac means that now: an unlikely friendship born of century-old sacrifice, old-fashioned hospitality, and a modern duty of remembrance.

Anzac also means this: Frenchman Yves Potard, a former history teacher, a bustling local socialiser and a natural entrepreneur, who met Scott on his pilgrimage and is trying to persuade him to cameo in his "Sound and Light" extravaganza in Pozieres.

Yves has corralled a horde of local volunteers who dress up and present scenes from the war, in a series of tableaux performed in front of painstakingly-reconstructed scenery. Local artisans have even made a full-scale wood-and-steel replica of the Red Baron's plane that once flew over these fields – they're convinced it could fly.

Anzac embraces that now: a Frenchman determined that his part of devoir de memoire - the duty to remember - is to wrangle a theatrical spectacular, to entertain and inform children and tourists of the sacrifices of foreigners of the last century.

And Anzac also means this: an Aussie couple, Barry and Yvonne Gracey, who have fought for years to give Pozieres – and the men who died here - the recognition they deserve.

They passionately argue this is the battle that Australia forgot, and on Saturday, the centenary of the day the fight began, they will receive the Legion d'Honneur, one of France's highest honours, for their efforts to redress the balance.

Their latest project is coming to fulfillment: they have raised $150,000 to buy a plot of land surrounding the current Windmill Farm memorial to establish a memorial park, a place of flowers and reflection which will sit above the land where thousands of Australians died.

The Legion d'Honneur committee said they showed "remarkable commitment in the cause of the village heritage".

The utter demolition of Pozieres under an intense German barrage – aimed at Australian troops who had just won the town as part of the Somme offensive – convinced historian Charles Bean that the story of the war should be remembered – eventually leading to the establishment of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

Bean famously said the fields around Pozieres were "more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth".

From 23 July to 4 September, there were 23,000 casualties in the Australian Imperial Force in and around Pozieres, more than 6700 of whom were killed, most of whom still have no marked grave.

Ironically, then, Poizeres is one of the less-well-remembered battles of the war.

"The people of Pozieres have become invisible," says Barry Gracey, erased like their town was 100 years ago. And those who fought here have been "shabbily treated", never recognised with such investments such as Fromelles' war museum - the Musee de la bataille de Fromelles - or the huge memorial at Villers-Bretonneux (with its under-construction $100 million museum).

"This was the greatest test in battle for Australia," Gracey says. "Pozieres is Australia's largest graveyard but here there is no cross, no cemetery."

He and his wife have raised $150,000 to buy 3.5 hectares around the Windmill site which will become a proper memorial, and in the meantime they have planted 7000 white crosses to remember the dead.

Yves Potard remembers them in his own way – his Son et Lumiere spectacular is now in its 10th year and is bigger each year. Thousands come to watch his 200 amateur re-enactors play their roles.

He sees it as a way to work "for peace on the battlefield", to educate children and welcome visitors around the time of the Pozieres battle anniversary.

"They come, they stand in front of the [1st Division] memorial and then they go back," he says. "My idea was to organise something on the battlefield, a recreation, a re-enactment, because in a museum or a memorial the memory is static but we can make it vivant, alive."

"It's important to revivant, to bring back to life this memory."

He hopes Scott Saunders will agree to play a digger in Sunday's performance.

He ran into Saunders by chance in 2013, when Saunders was on a personal mission to retrace the last steps of his great-great-uncle Allen Gordon Holmes Ivy, a private in the 16th Battalion.

Pozieres was followed by the infamous "winter of the Somme", a frozen muddy hell of trench warfare and grinding decimation, in which Ivy died in early 1917.

Saunders, an insurance broker from Adelaide, decided to retrace on foot the movement of Ivy's battalion from Christmas to Stormy Trench, and he chose a spot in a field to symbolise his relative's resting place.

After extensive research he made as fair a guess as he could make 100 years on, and stopped in the corner of a potato field.

"There is no more peaceful place in the Earth than here," he said. "I felt sadness for him. I thought about what war was. I thought about my son, what if he had been there. War is so imaginable, in some ways so pointless. All that death and destruction."

"You can't imagine," he says – but having walked in Ivy's footsteps, even 100 years on, "it personalises it", he says. "That's exactly it."

After his marathon walk, up the road in Gueudecourt (population 105), he was surprised to find a big group of locals there to welcome him at the town hall, and there he made friends he will keep the rest of his life.

This is the new Anzac legacy.