During the October break a group of 40 Form IV pupils headed across the Channel to France and Belgium to follow in the footsteps of the soldiers of 1914 who made their way to the Western Front. Over the course of three days the group stepped back in time and took on the identity of a “Pals Battalion”; singing the songs familiar to the “tommies” of ninety years ago, waking each morning to reveille and discovering something of what life must have been like around the Ypres salient during the Great War.
Many cemeteries, monuments and battlefields were visited in both France and Belgium. The reality of the slaughter was brought home to the group as they stood before the Thiepval monument on the Somme where over 70,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers with no known grave are commemorated while on the last night, in Ypres beneath the Menin gate, the battalion laid their own wreath as a mark of respect to the millions who sacrificed their lives between 1914 and 1918. For all those in the group it was an experience that will live with them long after they have left Dollar.
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