Mémorial d'Ypres de la bataille du Salient
Corps d'armées Indiennes

LAST POST
This evening I was going to Ypres. Getting on for six.
I drove into the setting sun, and three storeys high
Dali-esque clouds which were being seen off by
a force -

nine gale, the heavens blew away from the earth,
no way I could stop them, I drove and drove, 95 mph,
and every minute fell ten minutes behind. There went my
horizon.

When I get into Ypres it's 1917. Germans have blasted the sun
to smithereens. What light there still is, is explosions.
 I'm in a poem by Edmund Blunden.

From the trenches he's writing an ode to the poppy.
Earth has a great super-ego of flowers over it;
Blunden has them literally in his sights.

Here for all of a couple of years  
it's the second before you die.
Little things are all there is. 
          
Later I listen to the Last Post at the Menin Gate:
three bugles you can hear cut back through eighty years
right to whatever's left now on the bone.

(translated by Tanis Guest)

"CAN YOU REMEMBER?"

YES, I still remember
               The whole thing in a way
Edge and exactitude
               Depend on the day.

Of all that prodigious scene
               There seems scanty loss
Though mists mainly float and screen
               Canal, spire and fosse;

Though commonly I fail to name
               That once obvious Hill.
And where we went and whence we came
               To be killed, or kill.

Those mists are spiritual  
               And luminous-obscure,
Evolved of countless circumstance
               Of which I am sure;

Of which, at the instance
               Of sound, smell, change and stir,
New-old shapes for ever      
               Intensely recur.

And some are sparkling, laughing, singing,
               Young, heroic, mild,
And some incurable, twisted,
               Shrieking, dumb, defiled.  
 
                         Edmund Blunden (1896-1974)

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LAST POST
This simple ceremony has been going on for ever since11th November 1929 under the archway of the Menin Gate. The gate has been built on the site of the medieval Hangoart Poorte, but there was no actual gate at the time of the Great War. Through this cutting, the British troops marched to the front to defend the Salient. The Salient bulged out of the straight front line to follow the rough semi circle of low ridges around Ieper.
The archway is the British Memorial to the missing, and it bears the names of 54.896 officers and men who died between 1914 and 15th August 1917. 34.984 names of soldiers who had no known grave, and who fell between 16th August 1917 and the Armistice, are carved on the panels of Tyne Cot Memorial. After the First World War the Last Post ceremony was conceived by the grateful inhabitants.

Each and every evening at 8 p.m., in rain or snow, the Last Post is sounded by buglers of the fire brigade