I went to the Somme with a load of friends a couple of years back, and it is an amazing place. We visited the
Canadian memorial at Vimy and the memorial at
Thiepval which is truly awesome, to think its only the missing. Also went to Verdun too.
As for me, my grandfather and his best mate had read in the paper about a war going on in Europe and thought that it sounded like a change from being 16 and living in Argentina, so he told his mother he was going to a basketball game in the next town and got on the first boat to England.
The British army wouldn't take them due to age and nationality, so they joined the Belgian Royal Free and fought through France and into German, liberating Belsen along the way.
He never talked about his experiences, and I'm sure as a teenager in a foreign country fighting a war that he need not have been involved in was a very frightening experience. Unfortunately he died when I was quite young and I only got the full story when my grandmother died a couple of years ago and my father inherited a lot of his passed-down posessions.
antonye
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