Away to Remember: a visit to the First World War battlefields

Since it was such a wet and cold summer, I decided that I would enter a competition organised by the Imperial War Museum about remembrance and commemoration. To enter I had to research a project about the First World War in my local area.

I live near Grey Point Fort but while this was built in the early 1900s it didn’t play a key role in the First World War. When I looked at the war memorials in my local church, St. John’s, they proved more interesting. Of the three soldiers who died in the First World War one was in the army and like lots of Ulstermen died in the Battle of the Somme, another died in the Battle of Jutland, the key naval battle, and the third died on the last day of the war, 11 November 1918.

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I followed up this discovery with some more research in books and also in the Somme Centre. Ward Park in Bangor has a First World War U-boat gun, and the famous memorial at the Somme, the Thiepval Tower is based on Helen’s Tower on the Clandeboye Estate. HMS Caroline, the only surviving ship that fought in the Battle of Jutland, is moored in Belfast. I took lots of photographs and wrote up my project, encouraged by the fact that the prize was a trip to France and Belgium during the school term, and the headmaster had agreed I could go if I won!

I was lucky enough to be chosen to take part along with 25 other young people from across the United Kingdom, and in October we met in London for a weekend in the Imperial War Museum. We did some preparation for the trip, including how to use recording and editing equipment, so that we could report on our trip and put the videos on the web (www.radiowaves.co.uk). We also went on the London Eye and to Pizza Express.

In November we met again in the Imperial War Museum, and went by coach to Dover and then by ferry to France. The object of the trip was to look at remembrance and commemoration 90 years after the end of the First World War. We visited many cemeteries and memorials in France and Belgium.

The first we visited was the Vimy Ridge Memorial. This memorial serves two purposes, it bears the names of the Canadian soldiers that died in taking the ridge and it is also the Canadian National Memorial. With some other members of the group I made a short video that looks at the memorial in detail. At first I didn’t feel all that comfortable in front of the camera but it was easier once we had something interesting to talk about.

I was constantly amazed by the sheer scale of the War. The French Notre Dame de Lorette, British Tyne Cot and most German cemeteries really do stretch as far as the eye can see. Not only are there huge cemeteries but there are also loads of tiny ones on the site of battlefields or field dressing stations where soldiers are buried on the battlefield where they died. You would think these small cemeteries would be less well tended but every cemetery is immaculately presented.

Such was the scale of the operations on the Western Front that commanders could change the geography of the land to suit them, as I learnt when the group visited the Hawthorn Ridge crater. In as flat a landscape as Arras (where we stayed) an elevation of a few metres is very important so the Allied commanders had decided to neutralise this threat by tunneling under the ridge and packing in 40,000 lb of high explosive which they detonated. This turned the ridge into a huge crater.

The Somme memorial is a truly massive structure that can be seen for miles around, it is only engraved with the names of those who fought in the Somme but whose bodies were never found. The memorial is built on an area of higher ground and I think this is appropriate because many of the men who died did so because of the many battles for high ground and its advantages.

Another thing I found amazing was the tunnels which were made by sappers from New Zealand. We visited the Wellington tunnel which is just one of the branches of the huge underground network that now runs underneath supermarkets and houses. Troops came up from the mines and entered into a hail of machinegun fire.

The most memorable part of the whole trip was attending the Menin Gate ceremony on Remembrance Sunday. The ceremony started with pipers playing bagpipes marching through the Gate and flag bearers lining the sides of the road. The Last Post was played and wreaths were laid by some members of our group. The ceremony was very moving and very memorable.

Adam Leach  11D