A memory that will live with me for the rest of my life is the time that I visited the World War One memorials in Belgium. A few years ago, I along with the rest of my History class, were given the opportunity to go on a school trip to Belgium for five days. When we had first decided to go on the trip, I think I was more excited about visiting another country with my friends for the first time. To think of it now, although I knew the trip was going to be more serious and was intended to give us a better understanding of World War One before our exam. I think I was blinded by the idea of being on holiday with my friends rather than how life changing the experience would actually be.
Before going to Belgium, I had only ever been on holiday with my parents and my sister and I was looking forward to being on holiday with my friends. I knew that this trip would be a lot more different than any other I had been on before as whenever I had went on holiday with my family, it had been to more typical tourist places such as Spain. I also wanted to go to Belgium because I enjoyed History and was interested in learning more about the subject. I thought it would be a great opportunity to go and personally see what remained of the battlefields and the trenches.
On our first day there, we visited Ypres. While we were there we went to see the memorial of the youngest British soldier, to fight in the trenches, who was just twelve years old. I think this was one of the most disturbing parts of the trip because it made me think of how drastically different the young soldiers lives were compared to the lives of young boys today. It made me think of how twelve year old boys today, would probably be just starting high school. Whereas this boy, along with many others, were being forced into terrible living conditions and having to fight from trenches that many of them weren’t tall enough to see over.
The trenches were