Back to Flanders and the Somme..

I'm feeling hugely excited this weekend, as on Friday I am lucky enough to be taking part in the pilot project of the government initiative to take two KS3 students from every school in the country to the battlefields of the First World War.  It was a difficult choice deciding who to take - I decided to run a competition in which students had to argue why they would like to go, and how they thought the First World War should be remembered. In the end, I selected two Year 8 girls who impressed me with the effort they had put into a display convincing me to take them, which included sources from the various important figures of the war including Lloyd George!  I was also impressed that one of them brought along her family album which included a fascinating collection of photographs and postcards connected to her relative who had served throughout the war.

The itenary of the trip looks amazing; it is a four day trip, taking in the key British sector of Ypres and Poperhinge, and the sites connected with the battle of Passchendaele such as Tyne Cot.  We will also be visiting Essex Farm dressing station/cemetery, famous for its association with John McCrae who wrote his famous poem 'In Flanders Fields' there.

After that, we head on to Vimy Ridge - site of one of the decisive Canadian victories of the war - before taking in the monumental Thiepval memorial, which looks over the battlefields of the Somme inscribed with its sombre roll call of the names of thousands who have no known grave.

I hope the two students find the First World War as interesting as I do.  I often reflect that one of the turning points for me when I decided History was the subject I wanted to focus on, was visiting Ypres as a Year 9 student back in the late 90s.  The power of the place overwhelmed me;  I felt that the ghosts of the past were so close that you could almost touch them.  The unexploded shells at the side of the road, waiting for bomb disposal experts to collect, and still being unearthed 80 years after the guns fell silent; the ponds that dot the landscape, caused by distant artillery barrages and mine explosions; even the steel rods that hold up the humble farmer's barbed wire - survivors from the Great War.

Perhaps the places that had the most powerful impression on me of all was Langemarck German cemetery.  I know that I am not the first to comment on the eerie atmosphere of the place; particularly the 'comrades' stood at the end of the cemetery, which one observes upon entering, standing watch with bowed heads over the mass grave of thousands of German soldiers, interred without ceremony into essentially a huge flower bed.


I wonder how much longer such places will hold a sway over the popular imagination. I had an interesting discussion with some of my Year 9s this week.  We have just started studying World War One, and I find it completely fascinating, but quite a few students seem to be completely obsessed with World War Two, and repeatedly ask when we are going to start studying it.  This confuses me;  I wonder it is because World War Two on the whole is more familiar to them, occupying as it does a more visible place in computer games, films, and the primary school curriculum.  Also, I suppose in many respects it is a 'sexier' subject, with its abundance of film, fast moving tanks, aircraft, music etc.

However, as I tried to explain to them, the Second War can only really be understood as an extension of the First, and in my view occupies a place in the British psyche that remains haunting to this day.

Have you been to the battlefields of the First World War? Did you have a similar experience to my own? What impressions were you left with?