Every evening at 8:00 pm, the traffic in Ypres stops. Pedestrians pause. Conversations fall away. Beneath the vast stone arch of the Menin Gate, buglers from the Last Post Association raise their instruments and play.
They have done this every single night since 2 July 1928, with one exception: the four years of German occupation during the Second World War. On the very evening that Polish forces liberated Ypres on 6 September 1944, the ceremony resumed.
The Menin Gate is not a gate in the traditional sense. It is a memorial to the missing — 54,395 Commonwealth soldiers who died in the Ypres Salient before 16 August 1917 and who have no known grave. Their names are carved into the Portland stone panels that line the interior of the monument.
Among them are more than 6,000 Australians.
These were men of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th Australian Divisions who fought in some of the most brutal conditions of the Western Front. The mud of Passchendaele. The tunnels beneath Hill 60. The shattered landscape of Polygon Wood. Many were never recovered.
For Australians visiting the Western Front, the Menin Gate is not optional. It is the emotional centrepiece of any journey through Belgium’s Flanders region.
On Fairways & Frontlines, we will attend the Last Post ceremony on our first evening in Ypres. We’ll arrive early to secure positions beneath the arch. And we’ll lay a wreath on behalf of the group — an honour that must be arranged months in advance through the Last Post Association.
The following day, we’ll visit Tyne Cot Cemetery — the largest Commonwealth war cemetery in the world, with 11,961 graves — and walk through Polygon Wood and Hill 60, where Australian tunnellers fought underground. We’ll also play golf at Palingbeek, a course built on a former WWI battlefield just 3.3 km from Ypres, with historical information panels at every tee.
But the Menin Gate is where this part of the journey begins. Eight o’clock. Every night. Lest we forget.
Fairways & Frontlines departs September 2026.