On 11th November 1998, eighty years after the war had ended, there was a reunion for the few survivors who had fought in the war. There was a moving article by John Keegan, Daily Telegraph, for that date, and I am sure he would not mind my reproducing it here.



In the streets of Ypres the returning veterans of the British Expeditionary Force are treated as honoured celebrities. Citizens stop these very old men to embrace them and thank them for what they and their vanished comrades achieved and suffered 80 or more years ago.

Those strong enough to have made the journey belie their years. Though most have lost inches of their youthful height all keep their military bearing.

They wear the badges of their former regiments, Cameron Highlanders, London Scottish, Royal Guernsey Light Infantry, their Great War medals and now the red ribbon and cross of the Legion d'Honneur, awarded last month to all surviving British servicemen who fought in France during the Great War.

At the Menin Gate, commemorating the Missing of the Ypres Salient, where Last Post is sounded by the buglers of the Ypres fire brigade every evening at eight, six of the veterans were applauded resoundingly before the ceremony yesterday. The youngest is 96, the oldest will be 103 on the day after the 80th anniversary of November 11, 1918.

Sineon Rosenthal, of the Machine Gun corps is 97; Harold Judd, London Scottish, 100; Albert Alexandre, a Chelsea Pensioner, who joined the Royal Guernsey Light Infantry at 15 is 97; Arthur Halestrap, Royal Engineers, 100; Fred Bunday, a sailor who served in French waters, 97, and Robert Burns, Cameron Highlanders is 102.

Albert Alexandre, still tall and spare in his Pensioners scarlet, leant gallantly on the arm of a pretty girl as the group formed for the ceremony. A guard of honour of the Carraboniers, the local Belgian regiment saluted as a wreath was laid.

Arthur Halestrap spoke the Exhortation, "They shall grow not old", as he will when the Queen comes to the Menin Gate today. His voice was clear and strong as he affirmed, "We will remember them", and there was a fervent response from the onlookers.

Many were Belgian but many British. Ypres is full of British people who have come for this very special anniversary, the last when any significant number of veterans will be present. There are several large parties of British schoolchildren, many family groups and a strong detachment of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers who will parade at the Menin Gate.

Their red and white hackles stood out brightly in the gloom. Only a few yards away, in the Ramparts Cemetery on the 17th century walls of Ypres several fusilier headstones stand among dozens of others marking the graves of men who died nearby.

The Ramparts, perhaps the most beautiful of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission's poignant garden cemeteries, was built above a former dressing station located in the depth of the walls. Several doctors and stretcher bearers who worked there also have headstones in the cemetery above. On one, marking the grave of 191 Private G L Boyes, Royal Army Medical Corps, who died on Apr 4, 1915, a parent has had inscribed the two words "my son". The simplicity is heartrending.

Ypres has, over 80 years, become strongly British by association. There is an Anglican church, St George's, and a Royal British Legion club, first formed for the hundreds of British ex-service gardeners who came to create the cemeteries after 1918, while the market place is lined by cafes all of which offer five o'clock tea.

In normal times, the citizens take for granted British visitors, so familiar are they. This November is different. The people of Ypres recognise that the British are revisiting a national shrine. It is not only the city which bears the signs of the British presence. So too does the countryside within the Salient, that tiny semi-circle of death in which British cemeteries lie as close together as the farmsteads among which the BEF fought for four years. One of the British visitors is Irene Smith, now 81, whose father, Sgt William Rhodes, DCM, was killed near Aviatik cemetery two months before she was born. He was a cotton spinner from Lancashire. A Sunday school teacher who left a wife and two children for the Cheshire regiment. He died in the Battle of Passchendaele, worst, and one of the last, fought in the Salient.

The earliest battle was first Ypres in October 1914. Into it was thrown the London Scottish, first of the Territorial regiments to reach France. A Celtic cross at the roadside near Messines marks the place, a sodden stretch of ploughland where, outnumbered and in rain and cold, they scratched a trench to hold the line against the Germans on the night of Oct 31, 1914.

One veteran had brought a wreath. It bore the regimental badge and a card. In a very old man's handwriting ran the legend: "From all London Scots. Placed by Harold Judd, 2nd Battalion, aged 100 years".

(See also The Last Tommy" -BBC)