VIDEO: I didn’t really understand the weight of the First World War until I visited Ypres in Belgium, and stood beneath the Menin Gate in Ypres as the bugles sound the Last Post.
Every evening at exactly 8:00 p.m., the town stops — traffic halts, conversation fades, and the crowd turns inward under the great white arch that carries the names of more than 54,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers who were killed in the Ypres Salient of World War I whose graves are unknown – to give them a proper place of final rest, and where relatives and others could pay respects and remembrance.
I was fortunate to be invited to spend a fews days in the town – (which was completely flattened in WWI – then rebuilt in an exact replica of itself after the War) touring its impressive and sobering Museums, cemeteries, and other historical sites.
While the historical artifacts were truly revealing of the horrors that pointlessly cost millions of lives, the Last Post ceremony at the Gate itself, massive and solemn, was most moving, because it is alive and real, with hundreds of people turning up nightly to bear witness and pay respects. It feels less like a monument and more like a threshold — between peace and memory, the living and the dead.
When the buglers step forward, all volunteers from the local fire brigade, there’s a shift in the air. Their instruments catch the last light, and the first clear notes of the “Last Post” echo out under the arch. It’s a sound that pierces straight through the heart — a call not of battle, but of farewell.
The crowd stands silent. No applause, no movement — just stillness. You can feel the weight of a hundred years of stories pressing in around you. After the bugle fades, a single voice recites Laurence Binyon’s For the Fallen:
“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old…”
A minute’s silence follows — so complete that even the pigeons seem to hold their breath as wreaths are laid.
It’s hard not to think about all the riders who’ve passed this way too — the Spring Classics crisscross these same roads, and Wevelgem has adopted the Gate as it’s new start line. Cycling here feels inseparable from history itself.
I returned a couple times when there where less people, lingering alone to read some of the names and absorb the silence, and ponder the weight and generational repercussions of what happened here.
The ceremony lasts only fifteen minutes, but it stays with you long after — like the echo of that bugle carried on the night air, or the feeling that remembrance, here in Ypres, is not a ritual. It’s a promise.
The post The Last Post at Menin Gate — A Moment That Stops Time appeared first on PezCycling News.
