Saturday 11 April 2015

A Trip To Belgium & France: A Trip Into The Past









A few weeks ago I visited France and Belgium on my school’s history trip. It was the most life changing and most influential trip I’ve ever been on.

We visited many WW1 cemeteries and the number of graves and number of men that had been missing in action or men whose bodies were never found was shocking. From early on in our WW1 history lessons we were given the statistics of how many men died in that war. But nothing, in my opinion, can really demonstrate how many lives were lost until you actually see for yourself all the names of soldiers who died. Even then I don’t really think we can completely understand and identify what truly happened in WW1 and the number of lives lost.

Every soldier who fought had their own story. It was so upsetting to see the range of ages of soldiers who died, even as young as thirteen, which is not much younger than me.  

One day I really want to visit every grave in every cemetery for WW1. Maybe it’s near impossible but I really want to make it happen. Very unfortunately many bodies were found but weren’t able to be identified as the name tags had been made out of, for example, card board. Therefore their families have never been able to know and be able to visit them. I don’t know why but I want to visit the graves so I can at least have acknowledged them and been someone to personally identify what they did in WW1.
 

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