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There are farmers in Flanders who annually harvest sweetcorn, sugar-beet, tobacco and wheat. They also harvest shells and gas canisters. And sometimes bodies.

It is now nearly ninety years since the end of the First World War, but the land has still not fully recovered from the assault. All may be quiet on the Western Front today, but the flat farmlands of northern Belgium and France are full of reminders of the past - particularly cemeteries. They are everywhere: at the roadside, in fields, in woods, in villages - some of them containing freshly dug graves belonging to soldiers newly discovered in the fields. And yet, given the scale of destruction and devastation the war created, it is perhaps surprising that the land has recovered at all.

It was an attempt to comprehend the scale of the loss of life in the First World War which had brought me to Flanders. That, and the wish to find the grave of my Great Uncle who had been killed here.

I began my journey in Ypres (or Ieper in Flemish), a pretty Belgian town with a rich history which the soldiers nicknamed 'Wipers'. At the 'In Flanders Fields' museum in the imposing Cloth Hall, I was given a graphic introduction to the war. It is a hi-tech, interactive museum which attempts to portray the experience of war, both for soldiers and civilians. It is both vivid and effective. At one point the sound of shelling exploded so loudly through the room that my heart raced with the shock.

Afterwards I sat in the Grote Markt with a cool glass of the local beer and watched the people talking, laughing and playing with their children. It was hard to imagine how it must have looked in 1918, flattened and blackened by endless bombardments. It was even harder to imagine that it was not far from here that poison gas was used for the first time on the Western Front. This was chlorine gas which caused death in one or two minutes if inhaled. The Allied troops had no gas masks at that time - their only protection was their handkerchiefs, soaked in water or even their own urine. The powers that be knew that the Germans had such a weapon, but did not think they would actually use it. No wonder the Scottish poet Charles Hamilton Sorley, who served near Ypres for a while, wrote that 'the blind fight the blind.'

A few of the soldiers who served around Ypres were to become famous in the Second World War: Rommel, Montgomery, Churchill, and a certain Corporal Hitler who won the Iron Cross for rescuing a wounded colleague under fire. More were to die; many of them - like Sorley who was killed at Loos in 1915 - with no known graves. This was particularly the case at Passchendaele, the third battle of Ypres, where many of the soldiers who died were not even killed by enemy fire, but were drowned in the mud which choked the battleground and turned it into a marshy Calvary. Recommendations were made that the attacks should be abandoned because of the terrible wet weather. However, General Haig insisted that more should go ahead. There were around 250,000 British and Commonwealth casualties here between 31st July and 10th November. Apparently after the battle Haig's Chief of Staff visited the front and burst into tears crying "Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?" They should have remembered that the word 'Flanders' means 'flooded land'.

I went to Tyne Cot Cemetery, the burial ground for many killed at Passchendaele, where there are 11,871 graves together with the names of almost 35,000 men who were never found - almost all of them British. It is the largest Commonwealth cemetery in the world - so large that it is hard to take in. As I watched bees gently exploring the flowers planted round the graves, it seemed unreal that such savage waste of life had taken place on this very spot.

Wasted life was all too easy to imagine when I visited Sanctuary Wood, where part of the trench system is still intact in the thick yellow clay behind a little cafe/museum. I stepped down into one of the tunnels and was immediately engulfed in an eerie, inky blackness. I walked a few steps but found it so damp, so claustrophobic that I had to leave. Inside the museum I saw personal items recovered from the trenches, including boots so small that they looked somehow vulnerable - a poignant reminder that the youngest soldier who died at Ypres was just 14.

By now the war had begun to fill my thoughts. As I travelled from Belgium into France one image in particular intruded more than most - a gentle unfamiliar face staring from a sepia photograph: my Great Uncle Basil. I knew that he was buried at Aubers Ridge and someone kindly offered me a lift to the cemetery. I found his grave in a far corner, simply inscribed 'Private B. Hamley, 4th October 1918'. And suddenly what had seemed a terrible, but remote, part of history became personal. He seemed so lonely, so far from home. Among the personal items returned to the family was a birthday card my grandmother, his sister, had recently sent him. There was a hole in the middle - from the bullet that killed him.

From Aubers I travelled to Arras, an ancient city with superb squares lined with houses built in the Flemish baroque style. I was surprised to find that the cathedral, museums and market stalls all sit on top of a complex warren of tunnels, together with chalk caverns, some of which were large enough to shelter up to 4,000 men. When the Allies discovered them they extended the tunnels in order to create an underground route to the German lines. The caverns were given names such as Carlisle, London and Glasgow. It was like a city beneath a city.

The landscape became lusher as I headed south to the Somme, the name which will forever be associated with futile loss of life. On the memorial to the missing at Thiepval there are 72,085 names, over ninety percent being men who died in the battle from 1st July to 18th November 1916. Not far away, just outside the village of Beaumont-Hamel is another memorial, this time to the 8th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders who captured the first German trench here. Like most monuments they are - understandably - rather impersonal, unlike the musical instruments I had seen earlier in the Historial of the Great War at Peronne. One was a mandolin, made by a German soldier from a French helmet; the other, a violin made by a French soldier out of a gas canister. This was a war from which everyone needed to find some escape.

Later that day I discovered a little known aspect of the Battle of the Somme. Officially it ended on 18th November 1916. However, some German ground which was captured by the British was lost again later in the day, trapping a group of soldiers in a German trench. Many of them were from the Highland Light Infantry. When the Germans discovered this they attempted to take them prisoner, but the Scots refused to surrender and fought them off. It proved impossible for the British to rescue them - three hundred men died trying - and eventually they were abandoned. Yet the Scots still refused to give in and it was not until a week later that they were finally captured - by which time only 15 men were left unhurt. When he saw his prisoners the German major was said to have exclaimed, with some admiration "Is this what has held the Brigade up for a week?" As I walked around yet another neat, sleepy cemetery I thought of the thousands of names I had recently seen on graves and monuments, and could not help wondering how many other stories of crazy courage we would never know.

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