Lessons from the Front ('what exactly constitute 'British values')

A government-sponsored trip to the battlefields of the First World War leads Rhys Griffiths to speculate on what exactly constitute 'British values'

In September, I spent three days travelling across the flat fields of northern France and Belgium, which today is green and brown cultivated farmland, but 100 years ago was the site of some of the Western Front’s bloodiest battles. The landscape, now, is as neat, silent and sparsely populated as the cemeteries, maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, that are encountered along its roadsides. I travelled with 28 secondary school pupils, aged between 12 and 19, from 14 schools in the Birmingham area, and their 17 teachers. The students make up a small percentage of the 8,000 young people the government hopes will visit sites of remembrance throughout the war’s centenary years as part of its First World War Centenary Battlefield Tours Programme, for which all state-funded secondary schools may apply. We travelled on an itinerary that included Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, the Menin Gate at Ypres, Tyne Cot cemetery and Newfoundland Memorial Park at Beaumont Hamel, where you can walk alongside preserved trenches and the extent of the 800 strong Royal Newfoundland Regiment’s progress towards the enemy lines is marked, with poignance, by a dead tree. 


http://www.historytoday.com/rhys-griffiths/lessons-front