4170: Reading the Commemoration at the Last Post Ceremony at the Menin Gate, Ypres.

I read the commendation during the nightly "Last Post Ceremony at the Menin Gate", Ieper/Ypres, Belgium, on 11th December 2012.

In December 2012 I did some work in the "In Flanders Fields Museum" in Ieper, Belgium. While I was there I visited the Menin Gate for a guided tour. During the tour as the only British man present, I was asked to read a Sassoon poem to the group. Little did I know that this was a kind of audition, because when we left the ramparts and went down to join the ceremony the guide pulled me aside and introduced me to the leader of the Last Post Association. During that evening's ceremony I read the Exhortation (from 'For the Fallen' by Laurence Binyon), standing in the middle of the road under the arch of the Hall of Memory.

From the website of Great War 1914-1918: "The Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing is one of four British and Commonwealth memorials to the missing in the battlefield area of the Ypres Salient in Belgian Flanders. The memorial bears the names of 54,389 officers and men from UK and Commonwealth Forces (except New Zealand and Newfoundland) who fell in the Ypres Salient before 16th August 1917 and who have no known grave."