Flanders Fields

The Last Post Has Been Played Every Night Since 1928

Every evening at 20:00, at the Menin Gate in Ypres (Flemish: Ieper), buglers from the Last Post Association sound the Last Post. The ceremony has run every night since 1928, interrupted only during the German occupation of 1940-1944 – and on the day Ypres was liberated in September 1944, the ceremony resumed the same evening. It is free to attend and requires no reservation. For 97 years, without fail, the names inscribed on the gate have been honoured.

The Menin Gate carries 54,896 names. These are British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in the Ypres Salient during the First World War and have no known grave – no body was recovered or identified. They are soldiers who simply disappeared in the mud and shell-holes of Belgian Flanders. 54,896 of them. The gate is large. It is not large enough for all the names; additional names are on the Tyne Cot Memorial nearby.

Around Ypres, between 1914 and 1918, approximately half a million men – British, Australian, Canadian, South African, Indian, and German – were killed or wounded in a roughly 15-kilometre radius. The landscape has recovered. The farms and villages were rebuilt. But the number of cemeteries and memorials in this area tells you everything about what happened here before the fields went back to agriculture.

Visiting the Menin Gate

Arrive at the gate by 19:30 for a reasonable viewing position. In summer the ceremony attracts significant crowds and early arrival is worth it. The ceremony itself is short – the Last Post, a minute of silence, the Reveille – but the accumulated weight of 54,896 names carved into stone makes it more affecting than its brevity suggests. Everything is free. Silence is expected throughout.

In Flanders Fields Museum

Inside Ypres’s reconstructed Cloth Hall (the original 13th-century hall was destroyed in the war and rebuilt in the 1960s), this museum is among the better First World War museums in Europe. The approach tracks individual lives – specific soldiers and civilians – rather than relying primarily on maps and order-of-battle diagrams, which makes the scale of the war more comprehensible. Adults pay around EUR 12. Allow 2-3 hours.

Tyne Cot

Tyne Cot Cemetery near Passchendaele (8km from Ypres) is the largest Commonwealth war cemetery in the world: 11,954 graves, and a memorial wall listing 35,000 additional names of soldiers with no known grave. Standing at the gate and looking across the rows of identical white Portland stone headstones extending to the far boundary is the experience most visitors describe as the most affecting of any site in Flanders. The visitor centre has a concise exhibition. There is no admission charge. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission website has a searchable database by name if you are visiting to find a specific grave.

Hill 60 and the Preserved Trenches

Hill 60, a low ridge south of Ypres, was a strategically critical position taken and retaken multiple times. The ground is still visibly cratered from the mining operations beneath the German lines – British engineers dug 8 kilometres of tunnels and detonated 19 mines simultaneously at 3:10am on June 7, 1917, one of the largest man-made explosions in history to that point. Yorkshire Trench and Bayernwald, both near Ypres, have been excavated and partially reconstructed. They give a physical sense of what trench conditions involved that no exhibition replicated from artifacts can.

Practical Notes

Ypres is about 45 minutes by train from Bruges with a change at Kortrijk. It has a compact range of hotels and guesthouses centred on the market square and Cloth Hall. Restaurant De Broodscheerderij on Rijselstraat does solid Flemish food – the waterzooi (chicken or fish in a cream vegetable broth) is the regional speciality worth ordering specifically.

Late April through early May, poppies bloom across the Flanders fields. It is not the only good time to visit – the landscape and the cemeteries are meaningful in any season – but the poppy bloom adds a specific visual resonance to what was a genuine coincidence of wartime geography and agricultural recovery.