As the sun went down on Ypres on Sunday, the shale grey stone floor of the old Belgian town’s Menin Gate, the world’s first memorial to those who fell but who were never found during the first world war, was slowly covered by more than 54,000 blood-red poppies falling from its high arch. There was a paper flower for each name engraved upon the vast gate.

Passchendaele, 100 years on: a final great act of remembrance Read more

A crowd numbering in the thousands, including the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Theresa May and the King and Queen of Belgium, Philippe and Mathilde, watched as the poppies drifted down in the still evening air. The young voices of the National Youth Choir of Scotland, standing below the gate’s 14-metre-high ceiling, sang the Ypres hymn: “O valiant hearts who to your glory came, / Through dust of conflict and through battle flame; / Tranquil you lie, your knightly virtue proved; / Your memory hallowed in the land you loved.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Poppies are released from the Menin Gate at the end of the wreath laying ceremony during commemorations marking the centenary of Passchendale. Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

More than 800,000 soldiers on both sides of the war died in the blood and mud of the Ypres salient between 1914 and 1918. Many marched on the so-called Menin road, on which the gate built in 1927 now stands, from Ypres town to the front lines. Still today, the remains of dozens of men are found every year in Flanders fields, identified initially by the colouring and markings of the boots in which they died.

Of the three major battles in Ypres, however, it is the third and final, whose centenary will pass in the early hours of Monday, that bears the greatest infamy. “I died in hell – they called it Passchendaele,” the soldier and poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote of the carnage that raged from 31 July until 10 November 1917. Perhaps the first world war battle that is today most sharp in the collective British consciousness is the Somme, but at the time it was this battle, and this place, that was synonymous with the hopelessness and horror of what was playing out on foreign fields.

So it is, in this centenary period, that among the many battles and places, Passchendaele, and Ypres, have followed Gallipoli and the Somme, in being conferred by the British government with what is likely to be a last great act of remembrance, certainly in the presence of the sons and daughters, nieces and nephews of those who fought.

In his speech, Prince William echoed the words of Winston Churchill, who in 1919 said of Ypres: “A more sacred place for the British does not exist in the world.” William added: “During the first world war Britain and Belgium stood shoulder to shoulder. One hundred years on, we still stand together, gathering as so many do every night, in remembrance of that sacrifice.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest (LtoR) Queen Mathilde of Belgium, King Philippe of Belgium and West-Flanders province governor Carl Decaluw. Photograph: Nicolas Maeterlinck/AFP/Getty Images

One of the direct descendants who gathered in Ypres, Mike Copland, 70 – whose father, Bill, signed up when he was 15, fought, survived, and went on to be a commando at the age of 40 in the second world war – said he dearly hoped the names of Ypres and Passchendaele would continue to mean something to the next generation. “It is not about glorifying it,” he said, standing next to his son Chris, 43, and grandson William, 7. “But there are too many people who look blank at you when you mention these names. It should trigger something. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”



Copland said he feared that those lessons were being lost. “We have had 70 years without major war,” he said. “I just hope we remember that we need to work together in Europe. My father never spoke about it. He died at the age of 80 in 1979. I don’t think he ever came here, not with us, anyway. It’s important we are here.”

Sunday evening’s ceremony, attended by 19 representatives of nations that shed blood on the salient, including Australia, Canada, India and South Africa, had started with the traditional heralding of the Last Post. In a gesture repeated every evening since 1928, bar a period of occupation during the second world war, the local buglers sounded their lament to those who were lost. In a sign of today’s troubled times, snipers could be seen, however, sat on top of the gate watching down.



Following William’s words, King Philippe, addressed the crowds to reflect on the sacrifices made and the significance of Ypres – Ieper to the Belgians, and “Wipers” to the British and Commonwealth soldiers – before a reading from Benoit Mottrie, the chairman of the Last Post association, the group of volunteers keeping the ritual going.

As the Pipes and Drums of the Royal Irish Regiment, led by Pipe Major, Nicholas Colwell, played, wreaths were then laid side by side by King Philippe and William, followed by Theresa May and the Belgian defence minister, Steven Vandeput. A tribute on the prime minister’s read: “With profound gratitude and respect, we remember the service of those who served on the Ypres salient.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Stretcher bearers struggle in mud up to their knees to carry a wounded man to safety near Boesinghe during the third battle of Ypres. Photograph: IWM/Getty Images/IWM via Getty Images

Later in the evening, under clouds tinted red by the last of the sun, the British and Belgian royals joined 6,000 or more in the market square for a spectacular show broadcast live on BBC.

Dame Helen Mirren started with a reading of In Flanders Fields, by the Canadian poet Lt Col John McCrae, who served as a surgeon during the second battle of Ypres. She continued to narrate through the evening as images of those who fought were projected across the clock tower of the Cloth hall, standing high behind the stage. Among those, Harry Patch, known as the Last Tommy, who died in 2009, aged 111, spoke down from the tower to the crowds. “Passchendaele when I knew it was flat”, he said in a recording. “Everything was blown to pieces”. Patch told of finding “a Cornishman” on the battlefields ripped to shreds by shrapnel who begged to be shot. Thirty seconds later, without a pistol being drawn, the man died. The man had said one word, said Patch: “Mother”.

The experience of civilians in the war was movingly illustrated by the reading by Christophe Haddad from the the diary of Pastor Van Wallenghem who saved the people of Dikkebus when it became part of the frontline. The journalist and broadcaster, Ian Hislop, who co-wrote the Wipers Times screenplay and stage production, told the story of the satirical newspaper, which was founded in Ypres itself in 1916, close to Market Square. That was followed by a specially written War Horse story, with a focus on Passchendaele, performed by its author, Michael Morpurgo.

But it was the testimony of the dead that particularly held the audience. One private, Jack Dillon, told those in the market square of the “sweet smell” of death. Ypres’s notoriety, after all, was in great measure built not only on the ferocity of the fighting, and a victory won at great cost, but by the conditions in which it was fought. Unprecedented rain and the churning of the clay fields had turned the mud to sludge so deep that men and horses drowned. There were more than 320,000 allied casualties. German losses are estimated to have been between 260,000 and 400,000. The final act on Ypres’s stage was the playing of the Piper’s Lament. It was a piece of music simply entitled The Bloody Fields of Flanders.