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A Tour Of An Era

A Tour of an Era

I went into this project with a mind like that of a travel guide as I tried to make this more of an informative tour than a straight tour of the areas I chose. I chose my ten areas after much thought and even though some were quite difficult to write on I was still able to give an entertaining guide through each of the ten sections. I wrote them in the order that they were on the paper, as this seemed to be a nice timeline to go by. I hope you will enjoy the tour!
I decided to have my World War I location be in Europe, more specifically the battlefield of Ypres, Belgium. This area was the site of some of the worst fighting in the first World War. The area is mostly large open fields surrounding a small market town. The town of Ypres is fairly small with many of the narrow intersecting roads that are common in these rural towns. It's what was called a junction town during World War II because of all the roads running through the town. The surrounding countryside would have been cut with trenches. After the Great War the countryside was pockmarked with shell craters, trenches and the town was almost completely gone. The area was barren of trees during the war, a result of the constant shelling the area received.
The area called the Stirling Castle, which was a German pillbox, were over five thousand Australian troops were either killed or wounded on September 20th, 1917. Looking out from this pillbox you have a clear view for miles of the battlefield, and being at an elevated position you can see why the amount of dead was so high. In October of 1917 there was an unusually high amount of rain which filled the trenches and shell holes.
The view was described by war photographer Frank Hurley "I pushed on up the duck-board track to Stirling Castle – a mound of powdered brick and from where there is to be had a magnificent panorama of the battlefield … About here the ground had the appearance of having been ploughed by a great...