First world war battlefield trip, Northern France

In the spring of 1985 school boys trying to take in the awe and majesty of the Menin gate and the uinimaginable horror of the Western Front. Visits to the trenches and the war graves in the vast cemetries: Ypres; Passchendaele; the Somme; miles and miles of trench snaking way through the countryside- scenes of mud, shell, barbed wire and bodies now overlain with grassy banks and flowers. The flat country of Northern France and Belgium as the scene of the slaughter.


Subsequent years have brought an apprecication of the art that tried to describe such horror - poetry, songs, the brilliant O What a Lovely War, the books of Sebastian Faulks, the moving TV series on the monuments to the dead all over Britain, presented by Ian Hislop.