'Lest We Forget'

 

Anton and Ethan have just returned from a trip to France and Belgium, visiting some of the major sites of World War One. They were joined by Mrs Thomas and Mrs Wright, together with students from secondary schools across the West Midlands, travelling by coach through the Eurotunnel to Ypres in Belgium. The group stayed in Flanders Lodge and attended the daily Act of Remembrance at The Menin Gate. This includes the laying of a poppy wreath after The Last Post and Reveille, at this memorial to the British and Commonwealth soldiers who were killed in the Ypres Salient, and have no known grave.

It was poignant to visit the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery at Lijssenthoek, in Belgium, where every headstone tells a story of an individual killed fighting for King and Country. Ethan and Anton laid a poppy wreath on the grave of Serjeant Sydney Gerald Kelly of Leek, who died on 29th September1917, aged 30, leaving behind a wife and daughter. He was in the King's Royal Rifles Regiment.

A highlight was the Memorial Museum at Passchendale, where we explored the life of ordinary people at war, including the trenches and the dug out experience, where soldiers lived underground in very primitive conditions, amongst the mud, rats, lice and alongside their dead and dying comrades.

The group travelled to The Somme region and explored the focus question,' Was the battle of The Somme in 1916 really a disaster for the British Army?' They visited a preserved battlefield site at Beaumont Hamel, Newfoundland Memorial Park, where so many of the Canadian Regiment lost their lives on 1st July, 1916, the first day of The Battle of The Somme.

Thiepval memorial to the missing, who died and have no known grave, and the Tyne Cot cemetery both include men from Leek. Anton and Ethan laid poppy wreathes in their memory.

Special thanks go to Mr & Mrs Alan Bate, of the Royal British Legion, for their support in providing poppy wreathes and posies, so that The Meadows School could honour those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

Finally the group were asked to consider ..'Is remembrance more or less important , one hundred years on?' This generation will be the ones to carry forward the torch of remembrance.

 

'At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.'