In the summer after a stressful two weeks of GCSE exams I visited Belgium on a history trip. About twenty-five students, aged thirteen were going to study the Battle of the Somme. Five older students, including myself chose to join them tempted by the idea of four days in foreign pubs and clubs.

During the four sweltering days we chose to accompany the rest of the party on their historical visits. I didn't have much prior knowledge to what happened during the First World War but I managed to follow the basic plot. First we visited the trenches at the Somme, I knew what the mortar holes were and I knew the statistics of just how many died but it didn't really hit me until I saw the appalling conditions. Men crawled through, lived and died in the muddy trenches that I was walking in. A museum displayed old bombs and dirty helmets that had been dug up and found buried within the trenches. We also saw horrific slides showing piles of dead bodies and limbs hanging from trees. The museum made me understand how real it all was; it wasn't just some story in a history book, men really did go out and fight for their country.

Visiting the graveyards was an extremely heart wrenching experience for me. Row upon row of white stones, some without so much as a name, commemorating the dead. The graves were very well kept and neatly lined up to create an endless sea of shiny white plaques. Beyond the graves is a curved wall that is covered in the thousands of names of those soldiers whose bodies weren't recovered. I don't think that the younger students appreciated what they were looking at, they spent their time searching for their own names and then considering the possibility of a distant relation.

The German graves were different in appearance but still aroused the same sense of sadness within me. I thought they looked far more sombre. The graveyard was surrounded in trees; this shadowed the whole area making it even more eerie. Instead of the individual graves that I had previously seen, the German graves were made of black stone which lay flat, they showed the names of the fifteen or so soldiers which lay below in the mass graves. Large black stones near the entrance showed the names of the unrecovered soldiers. At the back of the graveyard the trees cleared to show four black statues of soldiers stood in a row in their uniforms, three held or wore their military helmets proudly while the fourth one had no hat at all. The fourth soldier was the son of the artist who produced the statue; he had lost his life.

Another emotional sight was the Menin Gate where the names of thousands of soldiers that died are engraved in a huge stone bridge in the centre of Ypres. Every night the traffic is stopped and a bugler plays the Last Post, hundreds of people stand, in silence under the bridge paying their respects. What I saw in Belgium made me realise just how much life was wasted. I sincerely hope that the growing relations between countries, that we are seeing more and more of, means that we will never have to experience more unnecessary violence and loss of life. We are the new generation I hope that we will be able to make it work.


© 1998 Freeway
Writers: Bethany Logan, Bishop Heber High School
HTML by: Daniel Rönström (nv00-100@park.se).