European Diary/ Jamie Smyth: At first glance the tidy hedges and tilled fields surrounding the picturesque hamlet of Passchendaele look little different from the rest of the Flanders countryside.
On a bright sunny day in early November a local farmer is gathering cabbages in a field while his son is taking rubbish out to the gate of his farm.
It is a scene typical of this part of Flemish-speaking Belgium, where farming remains a family business and sandy soil makes cultivation of lucrative cash crops difficult.
But the fields and meadows around Passchendaele offer up a far more deadly harvest, which quickly becomes clear as we slow down to pass the boy unloading his wheelbarrow of refuse.
With no fuss or ceremony he places three wartime artillery shells outside the gate, as if leaving out bottles for recycling, paying no heed to the manic stares from our vehicle.
The three shells, each of differing shapes and sizes, are all live rounds that failed to explode in the three bloody battles for the town of Ypres during the first World War.
Although badly corroded after spending 90 years in the ground, each shell contains a potentially lethal payload of high explosive, and in some cases poisonous mustard and chlorine gas that German and Allied forces used in the absurdly titled Great War of 1914-1918.
"Belgium bomb disposal works here every day, defusing the shells that farmers leave at their gates," says Dave Whapshott, an amateur archaeologist living in Ypres, who is taking me on a tour of the battlefields that surround the town.
"They deal with 200 tonnes of live explosive a year. It is a fact of life here where many farmers have died from unexploded ordinance while working in the fields."
Historians estimate that a third of the several billion shells fired in the war did not detonate, which means it will take hundreds of years before the battlefields of Ypres are cleared .
But unexploded bombs are not the only wartime mementoes buried in the eight kilometres of fields that stretch from Passchendaele to the town of Ypres.
Some 35 Allied soldiers died for every five metres of land gained in the battle for Passchendaele. Tens of thousands still lie where they fell, buried in the mud with no tombstone.
"Every time foundations are dug for a development close to the town human remains are found. Just last week the remains of three people were recovered," says Whapshott.
"But identification is difficult because the ID tags usually wear away and DNA profiling is only used if the name of the soldier is found on the body."
Some 54,896 names of missing Allied soldiers are inscribed on the huge Menin Gate monument in Ypres, where the last post is played every night at 8pm for the dead.
A further 34,984 names of Allied soldiers, whose bodies were never recovered, are listed at the Tyne Cot Cemetery, which is located just a few kilometres outside the town.
Lance Cpl Martin H of the Royal Irish Rifles and Second Lieut Smyth GDL of the Royal Irish Fusiliers are just two of the hundreds of missing soldiers listed from Irish regiments on the wall at Tyne Cot cemetery, which has row upon row of graves for those whose bodies were recovered.
The overall casualty rate for the Allies and Germans in Ypres is estimated at a staggering half-a-million. The average age of death was 23 and the youngest casualty was a 14-year-old boy from Waterford called John Condon, who is buried nearby in Poelcappelle cemetery.
At the Hill 62 Sanctuary Wood Museum, close to the spot where Canadian forces lost almost 10,000 men in two advances, further evidence of the brutal reality of war is shown in graphic detail.
Hundreds of photographs show artillery bombardments and poisonous gas attacks on soldiers at the front.
One shot, which captures a dying man's face half-eaten away by clouds of chlorine gas, leaves nothing to the imagination, drawing gasps from tourists.
Yet for some, visiting Ypres is a personal affair. Standing outside the ramshackle Hill 62 museum, an elderly Australian couple pause for a few moments to reflect on what they have seen. Stuart Duncan is in Ypres to visit the resting place of his grandfather, one of thousands of Australians who died in the area .
"He was 48 when he enlisted to go to the war and had to lie about his age because he was actually over the recruitment age," says Duncan. "We had to come to see his grave when we were in Europe."
Thousands of relatives of fallen soldiers will follow in the Duncan's footsteps this week to attend the armistice day commemoration at Ypres, a town that will forever live in the shadow of a war that turned its hinterland into killing fields.
Lest we forget.