The pair's dash through occupied Belgium - travelling by night, dodging armed patrols with only a tattered postcard map to guide them - reads like a Hollywood script. After several close calls and a desperate fight at the Dutch border, they finally made it to neutral Holland three weeks later.

On Sunday, members of Peachey's family, including his granddaughter, Kay McKenna, and grandson Noel Peachey, will attend a ceremony at Shellharbour Cemetery to dedicate a memorial, built by the War Graves Commission, to his war service.

Frederick William Abraham Cleave Peachey was born on November 2, 1892, in Cornwell, England. After moving to Australia with his parents he enlisted at Grafton on September 19, 1914, at the age of 21, joining the 15th Battalion of the AIF.

After training in Egypt, the 15th Battalion shipped out to Gallipoli where Fred took part in the amphibious landing at Anzac Cove. He was wounded in action during the Koja Chemen Tepe - Hill 971 offensive in August 1915 with gunshot wounds to the head and arm. A few days later, while awaiting evacuation on a hospital ship, he received further shrapnel wounds to the shoulder and knee.

After returning to Australia in January 1916 to recover from his wounds, he embarked again in October 1916, this time for the Western Front.

On April 11, 1917, during the First Battle of Bullecourt in northern France, he was taken prisoner. Later, in a statement to the Australian War Office, he spoke about the circumstances of his capture. "We were lying behind a ridge waiting to proceed about 4.50am on the morning of 11th April," the statement reads. "We made our attack soon afterwards, the tanks having already made their advance."

On reaching the barbed wire, Peachey and his comrades were met by heavy machine gunfire and were surprised to find the wire had not been cut.

"Orders were given to move to the left and as a consequence the men were in a mass formation and were badly shot-up by machine gun fire as the opening was only one man wide."

After getting through the wire the men charged the first line of German trenches, which they took. They then captured the second line, but could only hold it briefly before being forced back to the first line.

"We then discovered that we were surrounded with machine gunners and in a few minutes an officer advanced with a Red Cross on his arm and waving a white rag. Immediately after him came a mob of men from all directions and I saw our men surrendering all around me.

"I did likewise as there was no possible hope of getting out."

Of the 5700 Australians who took part in the battle, about 2500 were killed while another 1170 were taken prisoner - the largest number captured in a single engagement during the war.

Peachey's account of what happened after his capture is chilling.

"A German NCO came up to me and told me to empty my tunic pockets, throw off my equipment and ground my rifle, holding all this time his revolver very close to my head," the statement said.

Peachey and two others were ordered to retrieve the bodies of dead Aussies from the trenches. They were told to remove all items of value, but not their identification tags, and put them into shell holes to be buried, with 20 or 30 in each hole. (The Commonwealth War Graves Commission is now trying to find these lost graves.)

"After this was done we had to remove our wounded who had been left in the barbed wire, those who had leg wounds and could not walk were shot with a revolver through the head."

As a prisoner of war Peachey had to endure crowded conditions, short rations and freezing weather.

Wounded in the neck at the time of his capture, Peachey commented: "My wound was not attended to at all. It had dried up and healed, as I was in good health, but the Germans paid no attention to anyone except those on stretchers."

The men were forced to work, sometimes in dangerous situations, with allied bombs on one occasion killing seven and wounding four of the men. From July to November Peachey was at a POW camp in Quartes, Belgium, where a drunken sentry hit him on his old neck wound with his rifle. The wound swelled and he was taken to a military hospital.

"I was operated on in this hospital and a piece of bomb was taken out of my neck," Peachey said later. "I was not given any anaesthetic as they had not sufficient for their own soldiers."

It was soon after that Peachey and Lee hatched their escape plan. Following the nightly head count and after receiving their weekly ration of bread, they slipped through the inner wire of the compound and "luckily" found the key to open the gate in the outer wire. Peachey told a sentry he was wanted inside and when he left "the deed was done and we got well away".

The pair "made for our lives, expecting every minute to hear the alarm raised and bullets whizzing after us," Lee told The Warrnambool Standard after the war.

As part of his preparations, Peachey had received a map from a "little Belgian girl" who, by arrangement, had buried it in a rubbish heap.

For the next three weeks, with only the tattered map to guide them through the back roads of Belgium, the escapees travelled by night and rested by day, evading German patrols as they headed for the Netherlands border.

Surviving on raw turnips and cabbages picked from the fields, the pair had some narrow escapes, the closest of them while hiding under a rack of straw.

"A Frenchman came along and started loading the straw into a cart and took all but the few sheaves covering us," Lee recalled.

They managed to acquire civilian clothes, which "helped considerably". Nearing Brussels, where they thought they could find assistance, they found it heavily guarded by police and cavalry.

Disoriented by heavy fog, the pair told of inadvertently circling the city in their attempt to pass through, all the while armed with a heavy stable-door hinge concealed in Peachey's sleeve.

They eventually found their way out by joining a ragtag group of Belgians pushing a coal cart, passing under the nose of "a sleepy Fritz sentry" on a canal bridge.

It took three weeks to reach the Dutch border but they still had to evade German guards and negotiate electric and barbed-wire fences before reaching the safety of Dutch territory.

The border was strongly guarded and there was no cover, so the last phase of the escape was physically demanding. The men crawled for two or three kilometres and then lay low for four hours, taking note of the guards and their beats. At dusk on November 25, they crawled close to a guard who seemed to suspect something. They decided they must "deal" with him.

"This little affair we successfully accomplished and we got to the wire," Peachey recalled.

Then Peachey used a piece of rubber a helpful farmer had given him to lift the electrified wire from the ground and they crawled under. The arcing from the wires attracted another sentry who took some shots at them but missed.

"We soon got to the Dutch sentries who showed great kindness," Peachey noted.

Peachey and Lee were free, but even the last stage of their repatriation to England was dogged by misfortune. Approaching Gravesend, their ship S.S. Peregrine was struck by a mine, tearing a five-metre hole in its side. It limped to port, but sank. It was November 30, 1917.

Sergeant Peachey remained on duty in England until returning to Australia in August 1919. He was awarded the Military Medal for "gallant conduct and determination" in his successful escape.

He was married in Mildenhall, Suffolk, UK on December 1918 to Alice Maud Pettit. They had two children, Sylvia and Ronald, seven grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. Peachey served in the NSW police force upon his return and retired a Sergeant, to Lake Illawarra South. He died on Armistice Day, November 11, 1964, aged 72.

He is buried next to his wife, Alice.