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YPRES, BELGIUM
Shannon Barkley spent Remembrance Day paying tribute to her great-great-grandfather, laying a rose where she found his name on the Menin Gate Memorial in Ypres, Belgium.

Barkley was one of a dozen Inuksuk High School students on a tour of World War sites, including the memorial that pays tribute to 55,000 Commonwealth soldiers with no known grave who lost their lives in the Ypres Salient.

"It made you feel proud to be Canadian," fellow student Anika Bychok said of being at Ypres for Remembrance Day.

Having never left Canada, the trip to Europe in early November was "life-changing" for Barkley.

"Our last cemetery we went to before we went to Paris," she said, "I was leaving and it all hit me at once how many people died and sacrificed their lives for us."

"It's a shame that all of those lives were lost and all of those soldiers could have had children and grandchildren," Bychok said.

"I hope there's never another world war. We have to learn from the past so we can build a better future."

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