My experience in the battlefields trip was a very touching one. The amount of information that I gained from the trip was exponential as well. The amount of time that I had in Belgium and France was I think the best time I could have had. I didn’t just see the graves and memorials, I stood on the battlefields that hundreds of thousand of men would have fought and died on. It was a very emotional experience in all but the time that really moved me was  at he Menin Gate. This was more emotional than the other places we had gone to because my great great grandad would have fought over one hundred years ago about two miles away. I could picture in my mind when the volunteers were playing the last post my great great grandad in a trench with his mates from the Royal Engineers trying to get through another day of the great war.

When we visited Thiepval Memorial, I was shocked to see how many names were on the plaques. I couldn’t even begin to imagine the shear number of names that showed how many soldier’s bodies were never found. Slowly, we walked round the third pillar with four plaques on it. We eventually found what we were looking, which was Alexander McGeever. This soldier is a relative of Mrs Cheape and she asked us to lay a cross for him which we did. That act really opened my eyes to the number of people who must have been affected by this “Legalized mass murder” as Harry Patch put it. It wasn’t just the soldier’s . They would have had many relatives and people that knew them. The effect could stretch across countries if they had a multi-cultural family. It was devastating beyond anyone’s imagination.        

If anyone is thinking about doing the visit, I highly recommend it. The cemeteries and memorials may show death, but I thought that if I had not seen those things then I would not have understood how truly devastating the “not so great” war really was.

By Ben