Battlefields 2009
For months we had been told about the battlefields trip and how it would change our lives. We all felt it was just hype and that the trip would be like any other school trip, but once we arrived in Belgium and France; once we arrived at Hill 60 and saw the great crater created by the Allies' bomb squads; once we stood in the Tyne Cot Cemetery and saw over eleven thousand graves of Allied soldiers; once we stood in the Menin Gate and watched the last post ceremony; only then did we realize that the hype couldn’t come close to the actual experience of the battle fields.
One the first day we went to hill 60 where we saw a memorial to the Australian tunnel diggers who risked their lives to dig under the enemy and plant a bomb which destroyed the enemy base. We also saw a German pill box and a dug out. These remnants of the war gave us an insight into what the soldiers had to go through. We then went to Lone Tree Crater where an Allied attack had gone wrong. The explosion went off fifteen seconds too late and killed the Germans and some allied troops as well. From there we travelled to the Church at Messines where we learned of the underground crypt, were future Fascist dictator Adolph Hitler had been taken when injured and had been nursed back to health. On our trip we found out that Caitlin Frickleton, a student on our trip, had a relative who had fought in the town of Messines and taken down two German machine gunners. He was awarded the Victoria Cross and we saw the monument erected in his honour. After our lunch we went to Hill 62 and stood in trenches which had been preserved in the same condition they had been in at the end of the war. We then visited a memorial museum, where we learned about the weapons of the war and the way they were used.
The next day we travelled to Newfoundland Park on the Somme where we walked across the battle field and saw where tens of thousands of soldiers had fallen, mown down by German machine gunners. We saw the Lone Tree, the last tree left standing after the artillery attack. While there, we also visited the Gordon Highlanders Regiment memorial sculpture and saw the face of George Paulin’s younger brother, who, along with George (George Paulin, sculptor of the Dollar Academy war memorial bronze), was a former Dollar Academy pupil . We heard the pipes play the Flowers of The Forest and paid our respects. While in Newfoundland park we also visited the Caribou Memorial which was the symbol of Newfoundland. The memorial was erected for the First Royal Newfoundland Infantry. We also visited Newfoundland's three cemeteries: Hunter’s Cemetery, Hawthorn Ridge Cemetery and Y Ravine Cemetery.
We then visited the Thiepval Memorial, a huge structure built to honor the missing United Kingdom and South African soldiers of the Great War. and we saw the Thiepval cemetery which is devoted to French and British soldiers. Finally that day we visited Vimy Ridge, a memorial that was made to show the fallen Canadian soldiers and showed a symbolic statue of a grieving woman who mourned for the fallen men of Canada.
On the final day we visited another Canadian memorial called the “Brooding Soldier.” It symbolized the soldiers that survived the war and how they must mourn their fallen friends. We also visited Poelkappelle cemetery, where we heard the tragic story of the young musician whose mother placed sheet music on his head stone. Then we marched to the Tyne Cot Cemetery where we saw over 14,000 graves of Allied soldiers. After seeing the masses upon masses of Allied graves, we stopped at a German cemetery called Langemark where there was over 45,000 German soldiers buried. At last we were ready to enter the Legendary city of Ypres. It was a short respite from the evidence of all the pain and tragedy we’d seen earlier that day. We visited the Ypres Cemetery and heard the stories of the two Allied soldiers killed by their own commanding officers. Finally at the end of the day, at eight o’clock, we arrived at the Menin Gate for the Last Post Ceremony, a ceremony that has taken place, every night of every month, every year since the end of the Great War in 1918. The ceremony is to honor all those who died to protect Belgium in World War One.
So, after three days of crying our eyes out, singing the songs of the Great War, seeing thousand of names of young men (some no older then us) and thinking about our own losses, we truly had experienced something that a picture cannot capture, that a passage can not describe. We truly experienced something that will never leave our minds, no matter how old we get.
Max Reid (FIV)
