Remembrance

‘We planned to shake the world together, you and I
Being young, and very wise;’

In November Year 8 Amesburians travel to Ypres as an act of Remembrance. The trip is voluntary, yet every year every pupil chooses to travel.

It is a four day round trip with two very full days in Ypres, learning about the town’s significance in the 1WW. What makes the trip so powerful is due to the fact that the pupils don’t have to suffer a single power point presentation, nor are they required to write a diary or complete a project. We are there together without cell phones or ipods.

For Amesburians’ the Moore Prize is the most prestigious prize a pupil can be awarded. It is given to ‘The Best Fellow in The School’ and the names of the previous winners are recorded in our Dining Hall. The first recipient was RH Lawson in 1906 followed by EWB PIM (1907), HM Henwood (1908) and GS Lewis (1909).

On another wall in the Dining Hall a memorial plaque records the names of Amesburians who gave their lives in 1WW. The names of Lawson, Pim and Lewis’s appear on that plaque.

The Ypres trip is broadly structured around visits to graves of three other Amesburians whose names are recorded on the 1WW memorial plaque. Major CN North of The Royal Engineers (commemorated at the Menin Gate) Captain ATG Beckham of the 32^nd Sikh Pioneers (buried at New Town Cemetery, Ypres) and Captain CS Jackson, Coldstream Guards (commemorated at Tyne Cot).

However we visit various places and each pupil contributes by laying a wreath, or reciting a piece of poetry, or playing a piece of music.  

The first day starts at Flanders Field Museum. The museum occupies the 2^nd floor of the Cloth Hall, a magnificent building in the centre of Ypres effectively destroyed by German artillery. Without equal as a 1WW museum, it gives the pupils the opportunity to gain a broad understanding of the 1WW and the significance of Passendale. We leave for some ‘hands on’ education at Croonaert’s Wood, Baynerwald and Hill 60. This area of woodland known as Bayernwald was taken by German troops and during the winter of 1914/15 they constructed a system of trenches which have since been re-constructed.

Three pupils read three poems, one favorite chosen by a pupil this year was Break of Day in The Trenches by Isaac Rosenberg:

The darkness crumbles away
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear.

In the afternoon we deal with some ‘big themes by reflecting on the meaning and relevance of the words ‘courage’ and ‘cowardice’. In order to do so we visit the grave of Noel Chavasse VC & Bar.  The son of The Bishop of Liverpool, educated at Magdalen College School, Liverpool College and Trinity College Oxford, a double 'blue' and an Olympian. Chavasse received his first citation for a Victoria Cross on 26 October 1916 and the second for (his Bar) posthumously aged 33 on 14 September 1917. It always seems appropriate to read Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ though in fact Chavasse was a medic.

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.

In stark contrast we then visit the grave of Private Herbert Morris just two miles away. A Jamaican, he enlisted aged 16 and travelled from the Caribbean as a member of the 6th Battalion British West Indies Regiment. Morris was executed at dawn, aged 17, on 20th September 1917 for desertion. Bobbie Seavill read ‘The Deserter’ by Gilbert Frankau:

‘Fire! Called the sergeant-major.
The muzzles flamed as he spoke;
And the shameless soul of a nameless man
Went up in the cordite-smoke’

The afternoon draws to a close with a visit to the living museum known as Talbot House in Poperinge. An Army Chaplain the Reverend Philip 'Tubby' Clayton saw a use for the property as a soldier's club; a place where soldiers would meet and relax regardless of rank. A notice hung by the front door bearing the message "All rank abandon, ye who enter here". One or two pupils play piano and all of us drink tea, just as the soliders did nearly a century ago.   

The day ends with what is for many of the pupils the highlight of the trip, when two pupils are official participants in the Last Post ceremony at The Menin Gate.

On the second day we leave Ypres as the soldiers would have done, through the Menin Gate and along the Menin Road. We walk through Polygon Wood and spend time at the stunning Australian War Memorial. By lunch we are at Zonnebeke museum and in the afternoon the party walks to Tyne Cot, and on up to Passaendale, before driving to the German Cemetery at Langemarck.  60,000 German soldiers are buried at Langemarck. The cemetery always seems to be cold and it provides a powerful contrast to the orderly, manicured beauty of Tyne Cot and the other British & Commonwealth cemeteries.

Our journey ends at Essex Farm where a pupil reads perhaps the most famous of all 1WW poem’s, John Macrae’s ‘In Flander’s Field’:  

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

Each trip has its own highlight. One year it was the singing of the pupils at Talbot House. A couple of years ago it was the shared intimacy of the Australian memorial at polygon wood at the start of our walk to Passendale. This year a detour from the normal itinerary took us to Hooge Cemetery, and we found the grave of the great grandfather of one of the party, Freya Mileham. He had been married for only three weeks before being killed at the 2^nd battle of Passendale. Freya read ‘Lamplight’ by May Wedderburn Cannan. It was appropriate, but very difficult for all of us, beginning with the words,

We planned to shake the world together, you and I
Being young, and very wise;

And finishing as it does,

We shall never shake the world together, you and I,
For you gave your life away;
And I think my heart was broken by the war,
Since on a summer day
You took the road we never spoke of: you and I
Dreamed greatly of an Empire in those days;
You set your feet upon the Western ways
And have no need of fame-
There's a scarlet cross on my breast, my Dear,
And a torn cross with your name.