Several times a year, Dutch historian Koen Koch, professor of political science at the University of Leiden, takes Dutch and American students on trips to the battlefields and cemeteries of the Western Front.

It has been over 95 years since the outbreak of fighting in World War I and the formation of the Front, which stretched for 400 kilometers from Flanders across northern France. During four years of fighting from 1914 to 1918, the trench lines hardly shifted while millions of men were sent to the slaughter.

Visiting the Front with Professor Koch, one of Holland's foremost experts on the Great War of 1914-1918, is a very moving experience for the young students, who are now roughly the same age as those who died in the carnage of No Man's Land.

In the early spring of 1916, a handsome, prosperous and intelligent young poet wrote in his diary, "As for me, I had more or less made up my mind to die, the idea made things easier. In the circumstances there didn't seem to be anything else to be done." For Professor Koch, the despair and fatalism of these simple lines, written by the British poet Siegfried Sassoon in the trenches on the Western Front, go straight to the core of one of the persistently haunting mysteries of the First World War: how a society could both accept and inflict death and inhuman suffering "for the sake of defending civilization and democracy.

Landscape
In order to begin to answer this question, Professor Koch believes you need more than books. He believes it is important for young people to get a sense of the landscape and the scale of the fighting in the actual place where it occurred:

"You can read about the slaughter and shiver but you can't really understand it. When I bring students to Serre or Beaumont-Hamel on the Somme, and show them why and how it happened, it's a decisive moment for them."

This is confirmed by the reactions of the students on the trip. One of them, 21-year-old Jeff Hoyt, a history major at Cleveland State University, stands in a small grove of trees on the spot where 20,000 British soldiers walked to their deaths on the first day of the Battle of the Somme: "You can read books but it's just amazing to stand here and know men died where I'm standing in what's left of the trenches."

Appalling conditions
A young medical student on the trip, Clemens Baarns, finds himself wondering what it was like for surgeons to treat so many wounded without antibiotics. "All you could do is amputate. Every medical person would feel helpless here, " he says. Baarns would like to work for Médecins Sans Frontieres one day, which means he could end up in a war zone, "but this puts it into a different perspective".

Minke Kamphuis is making the trip with her father Martijn, who was born during the Second World War, and says the study of World War I has helped to reinforce her pacifist convictions. One of her American counterparts, European history major Shawn Foucher, says that learning about the war, especially the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, influenced his decision not to join the air force.

"Many people today cannot think of themselves as soldiers," says Professor Koch. "What I show them, telling these stories, is that 100 years ago, many Europeans also thought they would never be a soldier or kill someone. What you see in World War I is what educated and civilized people can do to each other."

Lessons?
At the impressive "In Flanders Fields" Museum in Ypres, visitors are reminded that there has been armed conflict somewhere in the world every single day since the armistice that ended this "war to end all wars" on November 11, 1918. Some students, like Rich Garr, say they believe there will always be conflict, "but at this magnitude, I can only hope it's over." Others, like 21-year-old history major Thialda Tabak from Groningen, are hopeful:

"There is much discussion about whether we can learn from history and prevent this in the future. Others say that's nonsense, because after the First World War they said 'Never again' then Hitler came and they said 'Never again' after the concentration camps, and then we had the former Yugoslavia. But I'm an optimist. I think people can learn. If you see the faces of the people on this trip, they're really impressed. It's only a small trip, but it could turn into a river."

Footnotes from the Fields was produced by Marijke van der Meer. The documentary was originally broadcast in November 2004 and was awarded a Gold Medal at the 2005 New York Festivals.