Lest we forget

Visitors to the once devastated but now completely reconstructed and rather charming little town of Ypres will find themselves bowing the head to 54,896 dead soldiers of the Salient, as the front-line arc became known. These men fought for our freedom but have no graves. Their names are inscribed on the inside walls of the Menin Gate of 1927, the classic Roman memorial arch, designed by the traditional English architect Sir Reginald Blomfield. The fundamental message of John McCrae’s poem, which begins

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row…

is that we must not break faith with the dead.

I looked especially hard at the list of Welsh Guards dead, therefore, because it was my regiment during national service. Each visitor finds some personal connection. To stand inside the arch, surrounded by such a multitude of inscribed names, and then to hear the bugles sounding the last post at dusk is to bring a lump to the throat.

The enterprising and imaginative In Flanders Fields museum in Ypres is located in the great rebuilt gothic Cloth Hall next to the rebuilt mediaeval cathedral, the town square and the English St George’s Memorial Church of 1929. The museum reinvented itself with an unstuffy new policy and a new name in 1998. There has since been a steady flow of visitors — one and a half million of them, including school groups. It is not just a museum. It is also an active learning centre on the edge of famous battlefields which are still being excavated by a group of archaeologists known as ‘The Diggers’. Human remains plus the occasional identity disc continue to emerge.

The In Flanders Fields museum is in the business of bringing history to life by using state-of-the-art technology.