On April the 25th each year, countless Australians will make the same pledge: "We will remember them."
That line is part of The Ode, itself a part of the poem For the Fallen, written by Laurence Binyon.
It is traditional to read The Ode at Anzac services.
Anzac Day is full of tradition, services, parades, sports fixtures and the gambling game two-up.
Australian War Memorial director Brendan Nelson says Anzac Day is close to the heart of all Australians.
"Every nation has its story, and Anzac and Anzac Day is our story as a nation. It represents the day where we commemorate the landings at Gallipoli, but what we actually do is commemorate those men and women, 2 million of them, who wear and have worn the uniform."
The Australian War Memorial in Canberra will be at the heart of commemorations, with tens of thousands of people expected to attend the dawn service and national commemorative march.
The walls of the memorial are inscribed with the names of more than 100,000 Australians killed in war, and Anzac Day is held to remember their sacrifice.
Anzac is an acronym of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.
The two nations combined their forces, and their first joint landing was on April the 25th, 1915, at Gallipoli in Turkey.
That campaign was an unmitigated failure but has somehow come to symbolise everything it means to be an Australian.
In Melbourne, Deakin University's Carolyn Holbrook has written extensively on Anzac Day.
"They didn’t get very far. They didn’t achieve any of their objectives. They did manage to stop and dig in on the beachhead. And the evacuation was the most successful part of the campaign, because there was barely a casualty during the evacuation. Australia lost about 8,000 men in the Gallipoli campaign over the period of the eight months, but we comprised just about 5 per cent of all the troops that were at Gallipoli."
Context is important.
The year was 1915, and Australia had only federated in 1901.
The former British penal colony was now a nation, and Dr Holbrook says World War One gave those new Australians a chance to prove themselves.
"There was a great deal of shame among Australians about what we call 'the convict stain.' There were fears that we were not quite as good, or not nearly as good, as the British, in terms of our racial stock, that the magnificent British race was degenerating in this southern setting. We were a nation in search of a mythology, of a mythology to give us confidence, and this fitted the bill."
So, when the British and Australian press lauded the Anzacs for storming the beach at Gallipoli, now known as Anzac Cove, the legend was born, and Australians commemorated the anniversary almost immediately.
The meaning of Anzac Day has changed over the last hundred years.
There were the low-key commemorations of the inter-war years, its unpopularity during the Vietnam War era and the debate about its relevance in the 1980s.
But in 2014, the federal government declared a Centenary of Anzac initiative, four years of commemorations to mark a century after the First World War.
Carolyn Holbrook says it comes with a world-leading price tag.
"Australia is spending more than any other nation, including the major combatant nations like Britain, France and Germany, on commemorating the First World War. The Commonwealth is spending around $330 million, states and territories about $140 million, and there’s at least $80 million from corporate interests. So, that’s a total of roughly $550 million."
But the War Memorial's Brendan Nelson says it is justified because that war was so defining.
"Every day, every week and every year, we commemorate and remember all of the 102,800 Australian men and women who have given their lives for us and our nation and our freedoms in all of the conflicts and peacekeeping operations to which Australia has contributed. It’s not a case, certainly, of thinking, ‘Oh, well, we’ve done the First World War, we’ve remembered those 62,000 dead, so now we will move onto something else.'”
This year, thousands of dawn services and marches around Australia and the world will commemorate Anzac Day.
Carolyn Holbrook says, despite the sacrifice of Australians in World War Two, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the soldiers of the First World War will undeniably continue to hold a special place on Anzac Day.
"It’s fulfilling a sort of quasi-spiritual role, a quasi-religious role, for Australians. The further back in time the subject matter is, I think, the more effective the mythology. It stirs up more sentiment and nostalgia, ancestor worship and all those kinds of things. We might think that more notice should be given to contemporary veterans, but I don’t think the Anzac legend is something that can just be transferred onto contemporary conflicts."
Regardless, Anzac Day's popularity doesn't appear to be diminishing.
Despite the rain and increased security measures last year, nearly 40,000 people attended the dawn service and national march in Canberra alone.
