My trip

[loopylouise123]

If you hadn't noticed already I'm back. 

I had a great time, and there are many very amusing stories that I could share but I won't, since it wasn't me who was the victim, just my friends. 

But most of the time we were moved by the information we got and how our men fought and died in the war, the first day of the Somme being the most depressing. 

But I have a few pictures, and some of a Canadian memorial as well, so if you're interested come and have a look.

This is the largest British and common wealth grave of the first world war in the world, I think there are 12,000 men buried here, all of them just from the surrounding fields, not from the whole war either. Seeing it really just shows you how many died.

 

This was in Belguim, a memorial for all of the missing, not found men, just in Ypres Salient, so the surrounding fields, all of the names etched into the walls, and you see the doorway? There's stairs there and the names keep going up there as well. It's staggering. To show how staggering this is how big the memorial was:



Amazing huh?



This was another missing memorial, this time in France, and you see the blocks holding it up? Each side of those are covered in names. Here's a close up.



Yeah, just the missing in that area. 



This is the Canadian memorial, for all the volunteers who came over and fought in those very fields it stands upon. Impressive isn't it?



This is a German grave, they have black crosses as head stones and for each cross there are four men. I believe there are around 44,000 men buried here. The largest German grave. Why so many? Because they were the enemy, and France wasn't willing to give up land to bury the enemy, so the bodies were sent to any free land like here, and then buried. So these men came from all around the trench lines and battle fields and they would have been buried by the Allied forces and the German prisoners of war. 

   

This last one is a French grave site, and I *think* there are around 53,000 buried men. 

So as you can see so many men died, were wounded and even if they didn't suffer physical wounds they sufffered psycholgical damage. 

This is what war brings about, and it's terrible.