A memorial arch on the eastern road out of Ypres, carrying the names of 54,577 men of the British, Australian, Canadian, Indian and South African forces who died in the Salient and have no known grave. The Last Post has been sounded beneath it almost every evening since 1928.
The gate stands where the Menenpoort stood, the gap in the town ramparts that the road to Menen ran through, and the way the British Army walked out to the line. That is the whole idea of the memorial, and it is why the names are on the inside of an arch you pass through rather than on a wall you look at. Men went out this way in their tens of thousands and never came back, and nobody knows where they are.
The ceremony is short, free, and not a performance. The road is closed, buglers of the Last Post Association step out, and the Last Post is sounded. There is no ticket and no seating. It happens every evening of the year at eight o’clock, and it has done since 1928 apart from the years of the German occupation, when it was kept going at Brookwood in Surrey instead.
It is busy. In summer and in the week around Armistice Day it is very busy, and a crowd several deep under the arch is normal rather than exceptional. Arriving well before the hour is the difference between seeing it and hearing it. School parties often fill the centre, which is the right thing to be happening and still worth planning around.
Finding a particular name is easier than it looks. The panels are arranged by regiment and then by rank, not alphabetically across the whole memorial, so the regiment is the thing to know before you arrive. If a name is not here, it may be at Tyne Cot: the gate was built too small for everybody it was meant to hold, and the men who died in the Salient from 16 August 1917 onwards are named there instead. New Zealand’s missing are commemorated separately again. That the arch ran out of room says as much about the fighting as any figure on it.
Ypres itself was shelled flat and rebuilt deliberately as it had been, using the old drawings. The Cloth Hall on the square looks medieval and is younger than most of the houses in any English town. Knowing that before you walk round changes what you are looking at.
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