The Battlefields of Belgium

 

Last weekend a group of 34 students left RGS for a tour of The First World War Battlefields in Belgium and France.

We were able to appreciate the enormity of sacrifice made by the soldiers, at our first stop at a Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery in Belgium which has 10,000 war graves.  This is the second largest cemetery for British WWI soldiers.

The next day we visited the Flanders Field Museum where we able to see artefacts taken from the trenches, such as weapons, boots and bibles.  We also visited Tyne Cot Cemetery, the largest in terms of war graves, with over 12,000 white grave stones.  We found the names belonging to former RGS boys on the memorial wall. 

On Saturday evening, we went to the Menin Gate in Ypres, the WWI memorial where, every evening at 8.00pm, they sound ‘The Last Post’, which we heard with hundreds of other people there paying their respects.

On Sunday, we went to the Beaumont-Hamel Memorial Park, the Canadian Cemetery, where they also have trenches.  Then we went to Thiepval Memorial, which is a memorial to 73,000 South African and British soldiers who have no known graves, and lost their lives at The Somme.  We found the names of more RGS old boys here.  After this we went to Ulster Tower, an Irish memorial and Vimy Ridge, a German defence system which the British troops captured in three days in 1917.

We had a really interesting three days, and thank you to Mr Shorrocks, Dr Smith and Mrs Kettle for taking us.

Georgia Peters – Lower Sixth/CCF