Menin Gate. Photo / Brett Atkinson
Each night beneath Menin Gate in Belgium, remembrance echoes through Ypres, honouring the fallen of World War I, writes Brett Atkinson
“At the going down of the sun, we will remember them.”
I’ve recited the famous line from “For the Fallen” by English poet Laurence Binyon at Anzac commemorations in New Zealand, Australia and Turkey. But on a cool early spring night in western Belgium, echoing the celebrated stanza with hundreds of other people is even more moving. Especially when it’s prefaced by the sparse and reflective melody of The Last Post in a nightly tradition dating back almost a century.
Now officially dubbed Ieper in Flemish, but called by its French name of Ypres during World War I, the pastoral plains and gentle hills surrounding the town were convulsed by the most destructive battles the world had ever seen from 1914 to 1918. New Zealand troops were significantly involved, with our fledgling decade-old Dominion losing 846 men on a single October day during 1917’s Battle of Passchendaele, an inconceivable tragedy when the country’s population was only 1.15 million. During four years of fighting around West Flanders, more than 250,000 men from across the British Empire died, and German losses are estimated at around 200,000. Tragically, the ebb and flow of fighting saw minimal change to the front line over years of conflict.
Erected in 1927 to remember those who died in fighting before mid-August 1917, the Menin Gate is the location of Ypres’ solemn nightly ceremony. The names of almost 55,000 soldiers from the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, India and South Africa are inscribed on its imposing Portland stone walls. New Zealand does feature on the towering arch framing the eastern route soldiers would take to march to the front line, but most of our country’s casualties are honoured in other Commonwealth War Graves around West Flanders. This is because most New Zealanders died after mid-August 1917. At sprawling Tyne Cot Cemetery, the world’s largest cemetery for Commonwealth soldiers, almost 1700 Kiwis are remembered amid impeccably tended rows of gravestones and on the arched walls of the adjacent Tyne Cot Memorial.
Arriving at the Menin Gate at around 7.30pm, I’ve missed the opportunity for a front-row view of the town’s nightly Last Post tradition starting at 8pm, and a few hundred visitors are already waiting expectantly. By summer, that number swells to more than a thousand, and many more attend for the important occasions of Anzac Day in April, and November 11’s Armistice Day marking the official end of World War I. Nearby, and providing contemporary contrast is The Hauntings, a 6.5m-high sculpture of a British soldier crafted in scrap metal by artist Jo Oliver.
Despite my restricted view, I soon realise the experience is essentially aural as the ceremony’s carefully prescribed elements echo off the Menin Gate’s 15m-high arch. A trio of buglers – always uniformed members of the local Ypres Fire Brigade – play the Last Post, before Binyon’s famous poem is recited, and groups from around the world lay wreaths in two chapel-like side galleries. Tonight there are delegations from visiting UK school groups, and New Zealand is always significantly represented on both Anzac Day and Armistice Day.
A final bugle coda of Reveille, the military’s traditional way to begin a new day, completes a ceremony that’s been conducted almost every night since July 1928. During Covid-19 lockdowns, a sole bugler still played The Last Post, and the only break in almost a century was when Ypres was occupied by the Germans during World War II. Even then the ceremony began immediately after Ypres was liberated on September 6, 1944, despite heavy fighting still taking place in other parts of the town.
The following morning I meet with local author and war historian Roger Steward to explore a personal connection to West Flanders’ World War I history. Leaving his family home in Auckland’s Symonds St and a job as a warehouseman for the mercantile Nathan dynasty, my great-great-uncle Harold Canham sailed via Wellington and Western Australia to arrive in the French port of Boulogne in December 1916. Despite battlefield injuries in February 1917, he returned to fighting and died in the Battle of Messines in June 1917, an important precursor to the Battle of Passchendaele just a few months later.
In a part of Europe marked by the massive cemetery at Tyne Cot and the 55,000 names inscribed on the Menin Gate, visiting his grave in the compact Mud Corner Cemetery – just 85 burials of which 53 are New Zealanders – is a moving experience. Mid-March sunshine is coercing blankets of wildflowers to emerge, and a short drive away in the now rebuilt village of Messines, a memorial to Harold and his mates in the Auckland Regiment includes an impossibly poignant line I’ve seen before amid Gallipoli’s 1915 Anzac battlefields.
“From the uttermost ends of the Earth.”
Yes, we will remember them.
Ieper (Ypres) is easily reached by train from Bruges or Brussels. To learn about the town’s nightly tradition see the Last Post Association: (lastpost.be).
You can also contact Roger Steward at Ypres Battlefield Tours (ypresbattlefieldtours.be) for authoritative explorations of the region’s WWI history.
The writer travelled at their own expense.