Year 9 Trip to Ypres

On Thursday 18th March, Year 9 travelled to Ypres, in Belgium to experience the effect of the First World War first-hand. For this trip we were mainly focusing on what took place on the battlefields around Ypres. It proved to be an interesting, exciting and moving trip and one that we thoroughly enjoyed.

On Thursday morning, a sleepy however undoubtedly chatty group of Year 9s assembled in front of the sports hall at a staggering 4.15am! After a slight delay, we were on our way and began the long journey to Dover. On our way we picked up our tour guides who would be guiding us through Belgium and all its sights. We even got to see the sunrise, something few of us had ever been up early enough to encounter before. After a hasty breakfast on the coach, we moved through passport control and finally reached the train that would take us to France. Most of us got off the coach to explore and stretch our legs and the journey was over in no time. Upon arriving in France the next step of our journey to Ypres was relatively short and as we approached Ypres we drove directly towards the magnificent Menin Gate, along the road that would have taken British troops to war.

The Menin Gate is an arch with approximately 55,000 names of men who gave up their lives in World War I and whose bodies were never found or received proper burial. As we walked past all these names we listened to ‘The Last Post’, the song played on Remembrance Day and also the song used at the Menin Gate at 8 o’clock for the memorial service, which takes place every day. It was really humbling to see so many names of men never found who gave up their lives to get us where we are today. Throughout the day the podcasts really helped us to understand the effect of the Great War on those in the future through poetry and song.

Next we moved on to the cathedral in the centre of Ypres, which had been completely rebuilt after the First World War, where we went to a museum which was really interesting. In the museum we were given cards with which we could follow the story of an individual at different points. This really gave us a feel of how every different person was affected, from an officer to a nurse, and helped us personalise the numbers. This was fascinating because we got to learn about individual people which helped us to see the men who died in the war as actual people instead of generalising them together as ‘the soldiers who died’, because trying to grasp such huge numbers is so difficult. Also throughout the museum we learnt new facts about the war and saw models of different aspects of the war, like the trenches and no man’s land. This made us more aware and made it easier for us to actually see what the trenches would have been like for the soldiers. We had lunch in the centre of the cathedral and took some photos before we moved on.

Something we noticed as we travelled to our next destination was the sheer numbers of cemeteries; at every crossroads, every town there was a memorial, even some of the ponds we saw were water-filled shell-holes. These things made it apparent to us the scale of the devastation in Belgium.

The first cemetery we went to was a small cemetery where Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae was working as a physician.