Standing with the statue of an angel as she bows her head, I wonder why her sons went off to war; I wonder why her sons died; I wonder: for what was all this bloodshed? In school we are taught about the futility, the immorality of war. But until you go to the battlefields and see the millions of gravestones are you able to understand the consequences war. On a visit to the Somme, with my school, the millions of names of all the unfound soldiers at Thiepval brought me to tears. To think that all the families who waited in hope for their sons, brothers, dads and uncles to come home got a letter instead, announcing their deaths, is something nobody wants to go through. When I heard a story of an underage boy executed for desertion I felt broken. His sister did not want their father to know. I started to think about all the children in Syria and Afghanistan who still go through these horrors. Throughout my trip I asked questions like: ‘what if Germany had won?’ or ‘what if the war had never happened?’ and more importantly, ‘why is there still war?’. The immortal words of Siegfried Sassoon ‘The hell where young and laughter go’ have become part of my conscience.

More than 100 years after WW1 you would think our leaders would understand the importance of peace. Yet, Theresa May still spends more money on defence, rather than on education. And a significant portion of our taxes go towards bombing innocent civilians. We may think that after WW1 and WW2 we would want to prevent the bloodshed but instead we seem to have added to it. If only more of our taxes were funnelled into education where trips to the Somme, Ypres and the many other battlefields were free. This was an English Literature trip, yet the lessons I learnt here extend beyond the classroom: poetry may speak to the heart but walking in a soldier’s footsteps speaks to our conscience. Shouldn’t this cultural experience should be mandatory for all young people? Children might then grow up trying to prevent something similar happening in the future. It seems that we have failed to grasp the concept of peace and hope. Laughter is dying, and the sounds of bombs and Brexit fill the media.

Isn’t it ironic that after WW1, when our politicians sat round a table discussing how to keep the enemy at bay by creating the United Nations, the politicians of today are practicing isolationist policies in Brexit.  Is the statue of this angel walking away from us rather than bowing her head in sorrow? I choose not to see it like this. The statue of the angel could be sending us a message that if we visit these memorials, and continue to write about them, we can keep the discussion of a different future going.

By Emilia Edgington, Burntwood School