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We went on a trip to Belgium for five days - the reason for going was to extend our knowledge of World War 1 on the Western Front.

We stayed in a town called Nieuwpoort, that is a seaside town, in a part of Belgium called Flanders ( the word Flanders means flooded land).

Nieuwpoort marks the most northerly point on the Western front, and despite being heavily bombarded it was never occupied by the Germans.

Chris Bridges

Nieuwpoort was of big significance in the war, because when Germany tried to execute the Schlieffen plan, the Belgium king ordered his troops to flood Nieuwpoort, to slow down the German advance.

This made a big impact on me, because it was our first taste of the war, and it made me think of how brave the King of Belgium was to flood a lot of his lands, to slow the German attack down

After looking around Nieuwpoort we went to Vimy Ridge - this is where on April 9 1917 Canadian corps attacked what was the strongest of German defensive positions in northern France.

By midday of the attack only the highest points of the ridge were still in German hands.

While we were at Vimy Ridge we visited the tunnels there, that the soldiers used to attack the Germans - this made a huge impact on me, because the tunnels were cold and small.

Also when our guide turned out the lights, so we could see what the tunnels used to be like - it made me think how cold and damp it must have been, when the soldiers had been in there.

Into the dark

In a way it was spooky when they turned of the lights, and all you could see was a tiny light twenty metres away from you.

Vimy Ridge memorial made a big impact on me, just because of the shear size of it. The land that the statue is on was given to Canada in 1922 by France, in gratitude for sacrifices made by Canada in the First World War.

The monument was created by architect and sculptor, Walter Seymour Allward.

Every place we went to seemed to have thousands and thousands of gravestones covering it, with names of soldiers, who were mainly twenty five or under.

Then I saw the name of a boy who was the same age as me - this shocked me because I could not imagine myself fighting in a war at my age.

On the Thursday we went to my highlight of the trip - Menin Gate

This is a Memorial to the missing people of the war in that area.

Every night at 8pm the Ypres Fire Brigade play The Last Post - this happens every night without exception, no matter what the weather is like.

Some of our more creative classmates wrote poems and read them to us at the gate.

Some of the names recorded on Menin Gate belong to Malvern soldiers.

We went to Notre Dame de Lorette, which is a cemetery that contains 20,000 identified burials and eight mass graves containing more than 22,970 soldiers.

This cemetery is guarded by many Frenchmen, who look after the cemetery - this made me think of how proud they are of their soldiers, that they guard them 24 hours a day.