Who would have thought the Anzac Day opening of a new Monash museum at Villers-Bretonneux in France would turn into a diplomatic incident? • Support our independent journalism with a monthly or one-off contribution

Those damn French never could be trusted. The opening of the Monash Centre at Villers-Bretonneux was supposed to mark a century of amity between our two peoples yet the French prime minister, Édouard Philippe, delivered a speech that blew Malcolm Turnbull’s to smithereens.

A lot of words have been shed on the western front. This is a place of blood and poetry. A national leader opening a new museum commemorating these battles has to have something to say.

Let’s not be cruel. Turnbull’s effort would have passed muster back home. Nuts and bolts stuff. A useful explanation of General Ludendorff’s tactics in the 1918 March offensive. Family connections. Many deaths. No household untouched. We must never forget etc. Applause.

Then the Frenchman went to the microphone with, it would seem, aggression in his heart and literature in his kitbag, launching himself into the crowd with a line from Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front: “He is entirely alone now with his little life of 19 years, and cries because it leaves him.”

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Then he seized the high ground: “Coming here, seeing this centre and tower, looking at the names of the 11,000 Australians who died for France and for freedom, I could not help thinking of the terrible loneliness which these thousands of young Australians must have felt as their young lives were cut short in a foreign country.

“A foreign country. A faraway country. A cold country whose earth had neither the colour nor texture of their native bush. A faraway, foreign country which they defended, inch by inch, in Fromelles in the Nord region, in Bullecourt in Pas-de-Calais and of course here, in Villers-Bretonneux. As if it were their own country.

“And it is their own country. ‘The earth is more important to the soldier than to anybody else,’ continues Erich Maria Remarque, ‘the earth is his only friend, his brother, his mother. He groans out his terror and screams into its silence and safety’. For many young Australians, this earth was their final safe place. For many of them, this earth was the final confidante of a thought or a word intended for a loved one from the other side of the world.”

Somehow he wove in Francois I and the Chevalier Bayard with the hell of the trenches: “The mud, the rats, the lice, the gas, the shellfire, the fallen comrades.”

Men and women near me were crying.

We were gathered on a hill not far from Villers-Bretonneux to celebrate $100m spent on a high-tech temple to the memory of General Sir John Monash on the centenary of his victories in this stretch of France.

“Meticulous, wise and dogged,” Philippe called him and ventured the unthinkable at this time and in this place: Monash might have had peers. “This Australian engineer, with his unerring instinct, came to be hailed as one of the best Allied tacticians, on par with France’s Estienne and Britain’s Fuller.”

The old general himself would have been furious: this event was 19 minutes late getting under way. He knew that’s no way to win battles. There was much kissing up the front of the great plastic shed they’d built beside the old war memorial as we waited for the seats to fill. The band played: Pack Up Your Troubles.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Australian Colonel Scott Clingan (right) escorts French prime minister Édouard Philippe (left) and Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull. Photograph: Pascal Rossignol/AP

Canberra sent a handful of ministers and ex-ministers and men with emu feathers in their hats. Tony Abbott was present in a somber suit. The town provided a mayor with tricoleur sash and Akubra, a man clearly built for these occasions. The Monash family was there. Ditto the family of General Pompey Elliott.

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Not on the list were men and women I’d seen in the centre in the last few days, old Australians with questions to ask, who come to France with a sheet of paper in their hands showing the face of a great uncle or a grandfather, the dates of birth and death much too close together.

No. This was an official occasion. The leaders arrived at last. David Hudson played the didge. There were speeches and anthems and more tears when the kids from the local school sang Waltzing Matilda: “… under the shade of a kooo-li-bar tree … ” And the leaders unveiled a brass plaque.

Turnbull whipped out his glasses, gave the fine print a quick once over, registered his approval and together the two prime ministers left the stage. Only champagne remained to be opened.

The business of remembering is taken seriously up here, not least because the valley of the Somme looks the most peaceful landscape on Earth. In late April the country is covered in sheets of early wheat and canola in flower and patches of pale ploughed land waiting to be sown.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Outgoing defence force chief Mark Binskin tours the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

Memorials are the only evidence of war. The big towers of Britain, Canada and Australia cut the skyline. In the fields are walled cemeteries with formal gardens, pale headstones and perfectly clipped lawns. A century’s gardening is keeping the memory of war alive.

But hardly anyone comes to the Australian memorial built in the 1930s by the great British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens. That’s the harsh truth the new centre is trying to reverse. Outside Anzac Day only a couple of hundred people wander each week up this hill near Villers-Bretonneux. Canberra is hoping $100m will turn that into a couple of thousand.

It’s big money for a modest outcome.

There’s such irony here. One of the leading architects of the 20th century had his great plans slashed by Canberra in the Depression. Now a team of Australian architects led by Joe Agius and Tim Williams were handed all the money in the world to build in the shadow of Lutyens’ effort.

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The architects call it an “almost an anti-building” but while it hunkers down, it’s hardly self-effacing. It’s elegant, big and muscular. How much they spent is still a closely held secret. Officials are coy. But the shell cost nearly $30m and a large part of the rest of the budget went on the exhibition it houses.

This is not a museum. It’s what they call in the trade these days, an experience. If you want to explain slavery and civil rights in America or the battles on the western front, this is what you do. Walls light up. Old photographs fade into freshly filmed live action. Actors struggle and die. Orchestras play. Howitzers blaze away. Gas seeps through the floor.

A few glass cases hold mementos of battles fought round here. There are guns and badges and rusted weapons, some dug up on the site. My grandfather Jack’s war diaries are beautifully preserved here, one held together with a safety pin as it has been for a century.

But the Monash Centre is not for scholars. This is entertainment, cutting edge and thrilling in its way, but entertainment. Crowds will no doubt come. Tour operators are already rejigging their itineraries to fit an hour or so for their customers in this dazzling maze.

But war buffs should stay out in the battlefields. Devotees of the great general will learn nothing new about their hero here. True, war isn’t glorified. But there’s hardly a breath of politics in the exhibition. It’s all battles and no scandal.

That’s by design. That Australia was being torn apart by conscription campaigns isn’t explored. That old Keith Murdoch tried to have Monash sacked as an uppity Jew goes unmentioned. Dud generals who slaughtered their men hardly get a guernsey. Addressed only by implication is the great question of what this war was really all about.

But it’s getting late. In an hour or so the first figures will appear on the hill for what’s expected to be the biggest Anzac Day dawn service ever. Sniffer dogs are running through the press centre. French soldiers with heavy weapons are patrolling the grounds. The rain is holding off.

There is an Australian headstone that one or two may see as they leave in daylight or glimpse for a few seconds projected on the underground walls of the centre. It’s the grave of 24-year old Private WL Rae on which his parents paid to have inscribed: “Another life lost hearts broken for what.”

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