In May 1999, I visited the former Western Front for the very first time. I was fifteen years old, and my school’s history department had organised the trip that took me from my home in Glasgow to the former battlefields of the First World War in Belgium and France. At the time, I did not know it but the experience of the visit would shape my future as a teacher, researcher, and historian.

Twenty-six years later, having led numerous battlefield tours as a former secondary school history teacher and now university lecturer, I once-more returned to those landscapes [during the centenary] with a question in-mind: 

What do young people experience when they visit the former battlefields of the First World War? 

That question became the focus of my doctoral research, and through diaries, interviews, and on-the ground observation, I realised something profound: these tours do more than teach history - they invite a form of vicarious experience that challenges young people to see the war not just as a distant event, but as a shared human story.

• History Beneath Their Feet 

There is something uniquely powerful about standing on ground where history unfolded. For many of the pupils with whom I visited Belgium and France with, the experience of physically being in places like Vimy Ridge, the Menin Gate, Tyne Cot, and Thiepval challenged how they thought about war. One pupil described it as “like walking through someone else’s story”. Another wrote: “You’re just walking, but it feels heavy - like something happened here that the earth hasn’t forgotten”.

This vicarious experience - of walking in the footsteps of those who came before - is not about reenactment or performance. It is about emotional proximity. These landscapes are palimpsests of memory: scarred with trenches, studded with memorials, and still occasionally revealing the debris of war. For young people, they become sites not only of remembrance but of encounter - with loss, with legacy, and with lives lived and those ended prematurely. 

• Seeing Through New Eyes 

One of the most compelling outcomes of battlefield tours for young people is the shift in perspective they can inspire. In classrooms, pupils often absorb the First World War through national narratives, but on the former battlefields, surrounded by rows of multinational graves, those lines begin to blur. Young people come to see the war less as a patriotic enterprise and more as a human tragedy shared across nations. 

This shift is crucial. It reframes remembrance not as something bounded by borders, but as something deeply collective. It is in moments like standing silently at Langemark German Cemetery, or hearing the Last Post echo through the Menin Gate, that young people often begin to comprehend the scale and equality of sacrifice.

• The Duality of War and Commemoration 

But these experiences are not without contradiction. For many young visitors, the battlefield is both beautiful and brutal. The immaculately maintained cemeteries contrast starkly with the horror they represent. In this contrast, young people wrestle with the duality of war and its commemoration.

Some describe feeling guilt for finding the cemeteries peaceful. Others express surprise at how moving they found places they expected to be “just another stop on the tour”. One recurring theme is the idea that these visits inspire a form of emotional dissonance - where pride in the dead mingled uneasily with questions about why they died at all.

This tension is not something to be resolved but embraced. It is what gives battlefield tours their educational potency. By confronting these complexities, young people are not just learning about the past - they are being asked to think critically, ethically, and empathetically about how we remember. 

• Commemoration as a Living Practice 

What perhaps strikes me most, and what I hope my research helps to affirm, is that battlefield commemoration is not a passive act. It is something alive - shaped by those who engage with it. The young people who stand at these sites, reflect, and ask difficult questions are not merely remembering the war; they are participating in its ongoing legacy. 

When we walk with them through these landscapes, when we allow space for their emotions and reflections, we invite a kind of remembrance that is honest, plural, and transformative. 

In a world still grappling with the meaning of conflict and the value of peace, I believe there is nothing more important.