Days 81-83: Ypres Salient and Passchendale, Belgium

There's a whole tourist industry run out of the small Belgium town of Ieper, which offers all manner of tours and momentos related to the infamous WWI battles of the area. Part of me feels that this is horribly crass- an industry that profits from death, but then people should be encouraged to come and learn about these places. And visitors are always going to need food and accommodation. But I draw the line at Great War related puns- "all quiet and comfortable on the Western Front" in the hotel, and "Over the Top" coach tours.

While a tour was tempting in one sense, in that it would provide some historical background commentary, this would have meant a day sitting alongside the crass coach tour set, people who view their holidays through a camcorder viewfinder, a few hasty shots of the most famous landmarks and no time for reflection as they hurry off to the tea room.

My patience was also tested by the throngs of British school children, swarming in, around and over the cemeteries. But then, at least they are here, seeing if for themselves and, hopefully, learning something. And, give or take a couple of years, these are the very kids who would have sailed off to their deaths a century ago.

There's no denying the intensity of emotion that you feel in places like this- the scale of the slaughter is overwhelming. The Menin Gate alone has more than 54,000 names carved into it - and this only covers the Commonwealth soldiers who fought in the surrounding area and whose bodies were never found. A mere fragment of the entire conflict.

And you can't travel more than a few hundred metres through the surrounding countryside without tripping over another memorial to the waste of human life. Each one a minor part of the war, but representing an entire village or family lost. A smattering of white markers among the lush fields to denote the Australian miners who died attempting to sap German trenches, those who perished in the first gas attack or any other of an endless list of massacres.

But I'm not so sure that, as a collective, we have really learned anything. This was a generation of young men who grew up on notions of valour and heroism in foreign lands, but instead of finding glory they met slaughter, mown down by new industrial scale methods of death- the unthinking, unfeeling cold metal of machine guns and artillery. Yet at the memorial sites are swaddled in the sorts of symbolism that let war happen in the first place- the arbitrary, jingoistic ideals of patriotism, and the flimsy notions of king and country, god, and the flag. Exactly the levers that, even now, can send a country to war.

Every where you see the refrain "lest we forget". It may as well be 'lest we change'.