The vast amount of soldiers who gave there lives for us in this one area is unimaginable and when seeing the graves it is hard to fathom that there are British or Commonwealth men lying in the ground who fought for us to be here today, some of whom may be related to me, or one of my friends or you?! Here are just some of the places we visited and a fact I learnt from each:
We first visited Mening Gate, this is a memorial for 55,000 soldiers whose bodies were not found and they do not know where they were killed due to many circumstances, when building this they ran out of room to write the names so a further 34,000 names of unknown soldiers are written on a memorial at the Tyne cot cemetery.
The Flanders fields museum was the next destination we visited and this picture really got to me, straight after this picture was taken a bomb hit and all of these injured who were expecting to go home died, this was also only 1 year before the war finished so had that bomb not hit all these men would have survived the war, the person who took the picture survived as they had moved a few metres from the site the bomb hit so he was able to print this picture with its story of despair.
The next place was the Essex farm cemetery, this is where the famous poet John McRae served as a doctor, however it is also where the youngest known soldier to die in ww1 is buried, he was only 15 which is an anomaly as normally you were not allowed to join until you are 18.
We then visited Leningrad which is a German cemetery, we went here to see the difference between how the British and German bury there dead and also to pay our respects of course! One fact that shocked me is that in one grave as soon as you walk in there are 25,000 German soldiers all buried together, and what makes it more interesting is that 2 Belgian men looked up every name in the grave and found that two British soldiers got mixed up within the mass of German soldiers. I cannot write down the kinds of emotions I felt when here, these people had lives and families and it confuses me how one war can take so many.
Lastly we visited Tyne cot which is the largest grave of British soldiers in the world with 11,871 men buried here. The saddest part was reading the sentences that some family's asked to have on their loved ones graves, some were very emotional on one grave this was written 'it was as if the sun had gone out' (this was actually at Essex farm but there were many at Tyne cot too). The sheer mass of graves that were here was astounding, again how could one war take so many.
No comments:
Post a Comment