In Flanders Fields...

One of the major benefits of teaching in Europe is the easily accessible Field Trip possibilities. My Grade 10 class has just finished reading Remarque's All Quite on the Western Front and so the English Department arranged to take the students to Ypres, Belgium for two days. It was an incredible experience and it was amazing to be walking through trenches, cemeteries and former battle grounds. It makes it come "alive" in a way that the textbooks just can't, no matter how well they are written. I have also been struck by how incredible it is to be walking through these trenches and cemeteries with a range of International students, some British, some German, some Jewish, some Japanese, etc and realizing just how far we've come that this is now possible. It was also quite unsettling to come across graves of boys who were the same ages as my students.

The centre of Ypres. Inside is the Flander's Field Museum. It was great because when you enter the museum you are given a card with a name on it and you "become" that person and follow him/her through the Great War as you go through the museum. One could spend hours and hours in there!
Menin Gate. The memorial for British and Commonwealth soldiers. Also the site of the Last Post, every evening at 8pm since 1928!
Inside the Menin Gate. Names and names and names of fallen soldiers..

"We are the dead..."

John McCrae's grave.

One of the many graves we visited but the one is the middle is the grave of a 15 year old boy. 

The German cemetery was... a definite contrast to the British ones. It was very dark and most of the stones were for hundreds and hundreds of German soldiers. Apparently Hitler visited this cemetery many times....

In contrast to the German Cemetery, the British have individual graves for all fallen soldiers. Tyne Cot has graves for 12,000 soldiers and the names of 35,000 missing ones engraved on various monuments throughout the cemetery. 



We went to visit the trenches. They were muddy but not even close to how muddy, dark and frightening they would have been back in war days. 

In Flanders Fields - John McCrae, May 1915

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep,
though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.