Today our tour guides Sören and Mo drove us to WWI memorials, museums, trenches, bunkers, battlegrounds and other sites. We walked in trenches imagining the experiences the experiences of WWI soldiers.
History major Jorge Gonzalez said ,
“I could not believe when I walked up to to the steps leading into the same exact trenches the British made and fought in. I could see how difficult it would have been to have 60lbs of equipment on their back while being shot at. It was quite difficult to figure my way around the trenches. But I made it all the way through one side to the other and I’m glad to say that I had the opportunity to walk in the footsteps of these soldiers.”
In war cemeteries we saw thousands of gravestones marking the burial of both known and unknown fallen soldiers. We also visited Langemark a German war cemetery in which more than 44,000 German soldiers are buried. Essex farm cemetery, we visited the place where Canadian John McCrae wrote “In Flanders Fields,” the poem that immortalized World War I.
Thanking our tour guides and having some free time after the battle tours ,we went in search of Belgian waffles before traveling to Bayeux, France the next morning!