Amid the war graves of Belgium, Tom Farrell finds a family story tangled up with the birth of modern Ireland

Side by side they fell

In Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks's elegiac novel of the Great War, the protagonist Lieutenant Stephen Wraysford muses to a fellow officer: "There are your sewer rats in their holes three feet wide crawling underground. There are my men going mad under shells. We hear nothing from our commanding officer . . . This is not a war, this is an exploration of how far men can be degraded. I am deeply curious to see how further it can be taken. I want to know. I believe it has barely started."

Miners in peacetime, the "sewer rats" are described shovelling out galleries under German positions that would be loaded with explosives, timed to detonate before an attack.

Our guide read Faulks's description aloud as we trudged across the Messines Ridge to the old crater at Spanbroekmolen, on the Ypres Salient. When the mines detonated, 15 seconds after 3.10 am on 7 June 1917, with possibly the loudest man-made boom in history, around 10,000 German soldiers were killed in the instant of the explosion.

It was 29 September 2008, exactly 90 years to the day that my great-grandfather, James Murphy, was killed and I had earlier been to his tombstone at Hooge Crater Cemetery. A private in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers 1st Battalion, his body was moved to Hooge in the summer of 1919, having been buried where he fell just east of Gheluvelt, a village just outside present- day Ypres (or Ieper).

The hotel at which I awoke that morning is a reconstruction of the old Hooge chateau. A day before Private Murphy's death, what little remained of it was retaken from the Germans by the 29th Division and the 9th (Scottish) Division. Belgian atrocity posters hung in the lobby and the recruiting fingers of Lord Kitchener and Uncle Sam pointed at me over breakfast.

Hooge is noted as the place where the Germans first made a concerted use of flame-throwers in July 1915 (it had already been attempted at Verdun) and its cemetery, designed by Edwin Lutyens, takes its name from the mine crater gouged out by the British that same month.

James Murphy's grave was 20 rows from the rear. To the right of his tombstone were those of the two men whose bodies, an email from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in Maidenhead informed me, were found with his at Gheluvelt. The two to his left, like 3,600 of the nearly 6,000 graves at Hooge Crater, were "Known Unto God".

I had come with little personal information about him, not even a photograph. My own grandfather's recollections were scant; he lost his father when he was just short of eight years old and his mother remarried in the early 1920s. There was another reason, too. For decades, having a Great War veteran in the family held a certain stigma. Some 35,000 Irishmen perished in the 1914-18 war; in an island of about three million, this was proportionately a devastating toll.

But these men wore the uniform of the same army that had pumped bullets into the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916 and killed hundreds retaking Dublin. It was largely English veterans of the Great War who made up the ranks of the Essex Regiment and even more notoriously, the Auxiliaries and Black and Tans during the 1919-21 War of Independence.

Every schoolchild knew the British soldier to be a murderous thug, especially after much of his quarry went on to take seats in the Dublin parliament. And of course, the eruption of sectarian warfare in Ulster was taken as further reason to see Irish involvement in the war as ignoble. Only half-jokingly was I once called a "traitor" in school when I let it be known I was the descendent of a Royal Dublin Fusilier.

Yet southern Catholic and Ulster Protestant regiments fought alongside each other at Messines on that grim morning in 1917. The 15-seconds delay in detonating the mines cost many lives among the 36th Ulster Division, whose soldiers emerged from their trenches too early. The Ulstermen fought in tandem with the 16th Irish Division, including my great-grandfather's regiment, as it advanced on the village of Wytschaete.

Many Irishmen joined up believing, as did the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, John Redmond, that it would hasten Home Rule. But the Great War destroyed Redmond and his party: his own brother Willie, a captain in the Royal Irish Regiment, was cut down within minutes of going over the top that morning. Willie Redmond had even opined that a non-sectarian identity might be forged in the shared adversity of the trenches.

Both communities had been arming themselves before 1914 and, after nearly nine decades of partition, the idea now seems shockingly naive. The contradiction of those years was personified by the County Meath-born poet Francis Ledwidge, killed near the village of Boezinge in July 1917. He wrote his elegy for the executed Easter Rising leader Thomas McDonagh while serving in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers.

Modern-day Ypres, dominated by the immense 13th-century Cloth Hall, derives a good deal of its revenue from war tourism. "Wipers", as many a Tommy dubbed it, was pulverised in the war and rebuilt with German reparations.

I stopped by the Menin Gate memorial, a triumphal arch opened in 1927 where at 8pm every day the "Last Post" sounds within its barrel-vaulted passage. I heard the mingling of Australian, Canadian and Scottish accents as my eyes scanned the names of nearly 55,000 missing men etched on its panels.

According to Steve Douglas, who owns the British Grenadier Bookshop and who runs battle field tours: "The baby boomers are retiring and have more time on their hands. They have an interest in finding out about what granddad did. Programmes like Who Do You Think You Are? and the fact that the First World War is on the curriculum in British schools; that generates a lot of interest, too."

While I was there, the "last fighting Tommy", 110-year old Harry Patch, a private in the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry at Passchendaele, was at Menin Gate for the "Last Post". Very soon, the fighting experience of the Great War will be gone forever from human memory.

Politically, however, the war created our world; there is not a society today from the Atlantic to the Sea of Japan unmarked by it. And as I found researching my own family history, the mystery of an ever-retreating world makes it even more transfixing.

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