News

Battlefields Trip

16.06.2011

On the 18th of May a group of around 30 Year 8 and Year 9 students set off to Belgium at 6:00am.

The trip to the hotel in Ypres took about seven hours and we stopped multiple times, the longest being the ferry journey from Dover to Calais. When we reached the hotel we unpacked for half an hour, we then went out for our evening meal. At 8:00pm we went to the Menin gate for the last post ceremony.

The following day we started off by going to Hooge crater cemetery, a British cemetery that was constructed after the war. In recent times at the cemetery, the ground in one part caved in, it was discovered there was a flooded British dug-out filled with water, however they wouldn’t drain it because the water may have been holding up the road. Later that day we went to Essex farm dug-out and cemetery, this was the place where the famous war poem “in Flanders fields” was written, the story behind the poem is that John McCrae was the surgeon who found himself in command of the dug-out when a group of soldiers arrived carrying a blood soaked sandbag containing the remain of the soldiers’ officer, when they asked him to conduct the last rites he accepted, he then asked the name of the man and it was Lt. Alexis Helmer, Helmer was McCrae’s childhood friend.

Afterwards McCrae wrote the poem, but a messenger came and he screwed it up and threw it on the ground, the messenger then picked the poem up and had it published in December’s edition of the London magazine “punch!”.  Unfortunately McCrae died in January 1918, just eight months before the end of the war.

On the second day we visited the French battlefields, Namely the Somme and Lochnagar Crater. On the Somme we had to walk about ¼ of a mile past a cemetery and three unexploded shells that farmers had dug up when ploughing the adjacent fields. When walking past the fields people picked up lots of shrapnel, which just shows how many shells were fired off on that day (over 2.1 million, it is estimated that only 1/3 exploded that means that 1.4 million are still unexploded). Then we went to lochnagar crater, a crater that was blown up on the first day of the Somme offensive 24 tonnes of ammonal, a high explosive were detonated killing all the Germans in the trenches above and leaving a permanent scar on the land. 

We then visited the Thiepval memorial to the missing, a memorial which consists of over 72,000 names of British and French soldiers still missing in the Somme area.

On the last day of the trip we visited the Tyne cot cemetery and memorial to the missing. The memorial to the missing contains around 33,000 names. And it is the largest Commonwealth war graves cemetery in the world. When you step in the first things you notice are the three German bunkers, the cross of sacrifice is built on one of these. On the day of the attack on Tyne cot, a German machine gun was mowing down all the men.  Peter Robertson decided to throw a grenade into the bunker containing the machine gun, and he realised he would have to block it, so he used himself to block the slit, he was later awarded the Victoria cross and is buried about three meters away from the bunker.

We then got back on the coach for the seven hour journey back to England and we arrived back at about 9:00PM.

Report by Tom Kelsall (Year 9)