Last month, my longtime partner Denise and I traveled to the Basque region of Spain and Belgium for a couple of weeks. Everyone knows about traveling in Spain (pintxos, wine, beaches), but Belgium is a lesser-known destination unless you are big fan of Colin Farrell movies (In Bruges). Not only did I want to see my older daughter who flew over from Berlin, but Denise planned the trip so I could visit one of my bucket list items, the World War I battlefield at Ypres, Belgium. What initially intrigued me about Ypres is The Last Post ceremony. Held daily since 1928, it commemorates the 500,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers that died in the four major battles fought there between 1914 and 1918, The bodies of 100,000 of those fallen were never recovered. In a brief ceremony held at 8 p.m. three buglers play a haunting homage in front of the Menin Memorial Gate in Ypres. The Menin Gate is undergoing a major renovation, so I attended a considerably scaled down version to the one shown here on YouTube.
The tour I took began with a forty-minute bus ride from Bruges to Ypres (pronounced E-pra,) beginning at 9 in the morning and extending through the Last Post. The tour visits monuments to the British forces, including the Australians, the Canadians, and New Zealanders and some stops where the battlefield has been preserved. Live ordinance is still being unearthed on a regular basis and has to be disposed properly. 
In preparation for my trip, I began reading British historian John Keegan's The First World War (1999), but it is a dense book explaining in detail not only the trench warfare on the Western Front, but he goes into the often-forgotten campaigns of the Eastern Front too where the Russians lost 1.7 million men, and the Hapsburg Empire (Austria) lost another million. Keegan explains why four years of wholesale slaughter was even possible. I did not finish the book until I returned home. Thus, I didn't fully comprehend the significance of the cemeteries until I read this passage in the book's final pages:
"The British chose an entirely different and absolutely standard method of honoring the fallen. Each body was given a separate grave, recording name, age, rank, regiment and place of death; if unidentifiable, the headstone bore the words, composed by Rudyard Kipling, himself a bereaved father, "A Soldier of the Great War Known Unto God." The names of those who had been lost altogether were inscribed on architectural monuments...It was also decided that the cemeteries, large and small, should each be walled and planted as a classic English country garden, with mown grass between the headstones and roses and herbaceous plants at their feet...Over six hundred cemeteries were eventually constructed and given into the care of the Imperial War Graves Commission which, working under a law of the French government deeding the ground as sèpultures perpètuelles, (perpetual military graves) recruited a body of over a thousand gardeners to care for them in perpetuity. All survive, still reverently tended by the Commission's gardeners, much visited by the British, sometimes by the great-grandchildren of those buried within, as poignant remembrance cards testify, but also by the curious of many nationalities. None fail to be moved by their extraordinary beauty. Eighty years of mowing and pruning have achieved the original intention of creating 'the appearance of a small park or garden,' while the passage of time itself has conferred an ageless maturity. In spring, when the flowers blossom, the cemeteries are places of renewal and almost of hope, in autumn, when the leaves fall, of reflection and remembrance."
Tyne Cot Cemetery, Passchendale (near Ypres). Contains 12,000 soldiers killed and commemorates 35,000 whose bodies were note found
In Ypres, every day is Veterans/Memorial Day.
