Not that we’re creatures of habit but, for the third year running since my retirement, Judith and I have spent almost the whole of May travelling around the UK – well, mostly Scotland, to be more precise. We’d been invited to a wedding in Dumfries (more of that to come), so it made sense (to us anyway) to continue our journey to Oban and then take the ferry across to the Outer Hebrides, before returning to the mainland, via Skye. We visited more islands than I can remember and I’ll be posting some pictures of our trip in the coming days.
As in previous years, we decided to drive and, as it’s a long way from Evolène to Zeebrugge to catch the overnight ferry to Hull, we stopped over in Belgium for the night. This gave us the opportunity to visit the New British Cemetery and the Tyne Cot Cemetery near Ypres, where hundreds, if not thousands, of First World War soldiers are buried. It was certainly a moving experience to stand amongst those massed ranks of headstones – many of which were simply marked as “A Soldier of the Great War”. King George V summed it up perfectly with his words in the last photo.
Alittlebitoutoffocus 
potent advocates of peace, indeed.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The saddest thing for me is that so many of these young men were under the age of 20. What a waste of life.
LikeLike
Yes, indeed. I often listen to that song by Paul Hardcastle, called ’19’, about the War in Vietnam. (It’s on my ipod). And I used to think about my own children at that age. It’s so sad.
It was also particularly poignant as, throughout our trip to the Outer Hebrides, we’d often see signs outside cemeteries indicating that there were War graves (all had the same style of headstone). My wife also read that there were more people died per head of the population from the Outer Hebrides than anywhere else in Britain. Given how remote it feels even today, they surely didn’t know what it was all about or what they were getting involved in.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, whole villages or towns of volunteers got put into the same regiment, and often all got killed in the same battle. They were called ‘pals’ . Whole generations of young men were lost. There’s lots about it in our history here, all the mill towns lost so many.
LikeLiked by 1 person