Students Nasrudiin Muhyadin and Sude Ulgu spent four days exploring the First World War battlefields of France and Belgium.
They experienced life in the trenches at the Memorial Museum at Passchendaele and then enjoyed some poetry at dawn as the mists cleared above the trenches. They also took part in a dramatic performance of R.C.Sheriff’s Journey’s End.
Over the weekend, we visited numerous cemeteries and heard the heroic and tragic stories of the poets that fought and died during the war. This included a visit to the exact spot where Wilfred Owen was trapped for days, waste deep in mud and constantly bombarded by artillery. He wrote the poem ‘The Sentry’ based on this experience. A hundred metres away, in a bombed out shell hole, he later lay for days in freezing temperatures. This inspired him to write the GCSE power and conflict poem ‘Exposure’.
Sude was privileged to be chosen to lay a wreath as part of the Last Post ceremony at the Menin Gate in Ypres. Every single day since 1928, Ypres falls silent at 8pm to remember all those that perished in the war. The memorial records the names of thousands of soldiers whose bodies were never recovered.
Over the four days, we experienced the devastating global reach of the war. We saw graves from Germany to Canada, from France to India, from Italy to New Zealand.
We went to the places where they died. At the front lines of the Battle of the Somme, we moved over the tops and across the fields. Sixty of us crossed. In the war only three of us would have made it to the other side of the field.
It was a truly powerful and poignant experience. Standing at the spot where letters and poems and plays were written, we really felt the voices of those soldiers speaking across the bridge of time.
