A more mature country might call war a dead end, a source of little more than regret. It's perhaps a sign of our lingering callowness that we call it a starting point of a nation, writes Jonathan Green.

There is a viewing platform outside the northern French town of Pozieres that looks out across the century-old field of battle, a cross hatch of hedges and green bordered by a not-too-distant ridge.

It's here, across these several stone throws of land, an MCG or two, that 23,000 Anzacs were killed or wounded over one savage fortnight in the summer of 1916.

In Charles Bean's words, in the florid phrasing of our official wartime history so happily co-opted by our contemporary state sentimentalism, it is a little patch "more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth".

Both my grandfathers fought in World War I, Henry Green fetching up here at Pozieres after a stint at Gallipoli. He was one of the 23,000, one of the densely sown, making it out alive, but absent an arm and with damage to a leg.

It was the depth of winter when we visited and the various cemeteries, battlefields and memorials of the Somme took on a crisp and brittle air; something poignant in the naked trees and steely sky, something cruel in the frozen hardness of the ground.

Our guide sculpted the tour to Australian interest, Pozieres, Villers-Bretonneux and so on, but there was more of course. A dank copse that still held the bodies of several thousand South Africans. A churchyard lined with huge mass graves, German, Allied, side by side.

In the chat as we bowed among the dead and buried, our guide wondered, just a little amazed, why so much trouble was being taken to recover fragments of bone and kit from the old battlefield of Fromelles, not too far distant.

This Australian archeological work had only just begun, but to this Frenchman it seemed a slightly bizarre exercise. This was a countryside dotted with massed graves and unidentified remains, with who knows how many fragments of smashed bodies turned like compost into the rich river soil, each just another layer in a patina of war and dying that stretched back centuries.

Fromelles was a bloody affair of course, and, like Gallipoli, a moment in the war that set the blind courage of young Australians against the fumbling inadequacies of their leaders. Bean, fresh to France, picked his way through the still-smoking aftermath.

"We found the old No-Man's-Land simply full of our dead, the skulls and bones and torn uniforms were lying about everywhere."

He didn't know it then, but this battle would be the bloodiest day in Australian war, taking 5533 men in a night, either killed, wounded or missing. It's a tally that includes a father and a son; and 24 pairs of brothers, who you hope might have found and comforted each other in their dying.

Despite all that, all those moments of individual and intense sadness that fill a combined, futile, wallow of tragedy, the Australian toll at Fromelles seemed somehow of a piece here in the Somme.

In that one battle, between July and November 1916, the British and Commonwealth countries lost 95,000 dead or missing, the French 50,000 and the Germans 164,000. Nigh on a million casualties if you include the wounded, making this perhaps the most brutal and bloody moment in the history of human conflict.

And there we were, we Australians, fussing with camel hair brushes and trowels to recover bone fragments from a patch of field suddenly invested with all the pompous reverence and lofty significance we have latterly reserved for the dead of World War I.

It seemed, still seems, disproportionate; in some strange sense setting Australian life and sense of loss above this common muddle of bones and blood that are now the very soil of this place; the simple dirt at your feet.

It's a sense that stirs in these recent Anzac days, a sense of Australia's desperate lunge for significance, our collective quest for a military history that we can drape around us, like a flag cape at a Gallipoli dawn service: a sense of defiant national self.

You hear it in the way we report even recent conflict, of how we "punch above our weight" of how our servicemen and women earn the respect of the colleagues from other countries for their skill and daring. And there is something more than a little needy in the way that we insist with such pride that it must be so, and in the way we race to join modern military coalitions with the same puppyish eagerness we once reserved for responding to the tug of empire.

And then there's Gallipoli itself, of course, that radiant forge on which was hammered the national soul: plucky, determined, but ultimately futile, fatal and ill-advised.

How odd that this should be the source of our sense of self. We were a country just 14 years old by the time of the landing, that tremendous constructive achievement of federation now lost to modern memory, with the blood and blather of continually recalled war finding much more favour than a complex act of actual nation building ... a fine paradox, the nation building moment eclipsing the building of a nation.

There's no question that World War I should be remembered for what it took, for the confidence and optimism and courage it betrayed, but it's an odd thing on which to rest the soul and psyche of a young country 100 years on.

Sometimes we seem a young land a little too eager to share in the gnarled old-world history of storied conflict. Here look ... we had one too.

And it narrows our possibilities. Why dwell on the courage of war over the quieter guts it took to clear a block of bush by hand and raise and feed a family from the stumpy soil? Why favour Gallipoli as a national starting point over the diligent, purposeful blue sky thinking of the men who actually stitched our disparate colonies into one? Why revere the apparently unique quality of soldierly "mateship" when the broader accepting harmony of all Australian peoples makes us something truly remarkable in a world torn by strife and ancient enmities.

Surely the gift of a young nation is to grow not through war and slaughter, but in hopeful counterpoint to both of them?

There doesn't seem much chance for this sort of wishful thinking as we enter the Anzac centenary year and the carnival of commemoration it will bring, but free of Gallipoli, and our implied cringe at histories both longer and bloodier, we might imagine a national character drawn from a simple confident contentedness with our present.

A more mature country might call war a dead end, a source of little more than regret. It's perhaps a sign of our lingering callowness that we call it a starting point.

Jonathan Green hosts Sunday Extra on Radio National and is the former editor of The Drum. View his full profile here.