Beneath the Menin Gate Once More

“To the armies of the British Empire who stood here from 1914 to 1918 and to those of their dead who have no known grave.”

History is a strange thing. Sometimes it feels distant and abstract, a list of names and dates on dusty pages, but today history is real and tangible. Today is the centennial of the armistice which ended the Great War, and we are gathered together on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month to commemorate the fateful moment when the guns fell silent on the Western Front.

In a corner of Belgium adjacent to the sea there lies the plain of Flanders, and tucked away on the French border is a provincial town named Ypres. Winston Churchill said of Ypres:

“A more sacred place for the British race does not exist.”

For it was here, from 1914 to 1918, that the armies of the British Empire with her Belgian and French allies held the line against the invading German army for four desperate years. Although 95% of Belgium was occupied, Ypres remained free. The price of her freedom remains unthinkable: approximately one million casualties on both sides in five of the bloodiest battles in history.

The 40 km Ypres salient was shelled and blasted until no trees remained and the ground was pockmarked and cratered like the surface of the moon. The town of Ypres was utterly destroyed. The clay soil and seasonal deluges turned the battlefield into a quagmire of mud, twisted steel, and human bodies, both live and dead. Nearly 100,000 soldiers from the British Empire went missing in action with no known grave. Their names are recorded on the Menin Gate and at the Tyne Cot Commonwealth War Cemetery.

“Here are recorded names of officers and men who fell in Ypres Salient but to whom the fortune of war denied the known and honored buried given to their comrades in death.”

In honor of the dead, The Last Post is played by local firemen every night at 8 pm since the gate was opened in 1927 (except for a short hiatus during the Second World War when the tradition was continued in exile). In recent years, the Last Post has become a spectacle which has drawn thousands of people from around the world, this time in peace.

I first came to Ypres on August 4th, 2014, exactly a century after the German invasion of Belgium, one of the key events which brought Great Britain into World War One and terminated the last hope for an early settlement which could have avoided the horror. My passion for history has always attracted me to this place, hallowed ground for Canadians and peoples of all nationalities and ethnicities. The assortment of combatants is reflected by the composition of the cemeteries which dot the landscape. The dead know no prejudices.

“Their Name Liveth for Evermore.”

It is easy to be cynical about commemorating the Great War. After all, it was not the ‘war to end all wars,’ and the second round which followed twenty years later was even more terrifying than the first. Nevertheless, Europe and the West have lived in unprecedented prosperity and peace since 1945, a world order governed by the rule of law. The Great War was the painful birth of a new era of internationalism.

Time is non-linear. One hundred years ago feels like yesterday, yet four years ago feels like an impossibly long time. In four years we have witnessed the collapse of the post-war order, and the resurgent phantoms of populism, nationalism and xenophobia have come back to haunt us. What has been learned?

I first came to Flanders to understand how only a century separated me from a tragic and lonely death ‘for king and country’ in some remote place. The cemeteries here are full of young Canadians. I now return to Flanders to hope and pray that I will not share the fate of those who rest here forever. While the world descends into chaos, the gathering in Ypres is a comforting reminder that there are still a few who understand the terrible price to be paid for foolish political miscalculation. Here beneath the arch, there is no glory in war, no heroism to be envied and imitated, no gun salutes or flybys overhead. There is only the communal solemn pain for so many lives cut short.

“This column marks the battlefield where 18,000 Canadians on the British left withstood the first German gas attacks the 22–24 April 1915. 2,000 fell and lie buried nearby.”

The moment is passed. The haunting blare of the bugles and cry of the bagpipes falls silent and serenity descends once more upon the sodden fields of Flanders. Beneath the oppressive arch of the Menin Gate, the names of the dead whisper, urging us to reconsider our differences and internalize the terrible price paid by the victims of the Ypres Salient, including those who leave nothing but a name carved in stone.

On this November 11th, the centennial of the armistice that ended the Great War, we consider all that has transpired since that fateful day a century ago when the guns fell silent, all the hopes and shattered dreams of the 20th century and beyond.

British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey remarked to a friend on the eve of the Great War:

“The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

The lamps are going out all over the world. We must fight to maintain our peace and security against tyranny and intolerance, or I fear that we too will not see the light again in our lifetime.

Samuel Buckstein

Ypres Salient

11.11.2018

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”