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1063 Sqn & Ypres
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1063 (Herne Bay) Squadron & Ypres

“ We are the Dead.
Short days ago
We lived, Felt dawn,
Saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved
And now we lie
In Flanders fields.”

From “In Flanders Fields”
8 December 1915

John McCrae died in Base Hospital 1918


Hundreds of thousands of British soldiers set off for the Western Front in 1914 to fight a distant war ‘somewhere in France’, yet the fact that part of the front line was actually in Belgium, was much less known. The Ypres salient, an area of raised ground forming a crescent around the mediaeval city of Ypres, called ‘Wipers’ by the British, witnessed many horrifying battles during the four long years of the Great War. Bitter trench warfare turned ‘Flanders fields’ into a barren landscape of mud and despair and around half a million soldiers lost their lives there.


“ In Flanders fields the poppies blow
between the crosses row on row”


The Flanders poppy is worn to this day on Remembrance Sunday so that this terrible sacrifice might never be forgotten.


The Menin Gate
The Menin Gate stands on the eastern side of Ypres, on the Menin Road. Each night at 8pm the traffic is stopped while the buglers of the Last Post Association sound the Last Post on the roadway beneath the memorial arches. The names of over 54,000 officers and men are engraved in Portland stone panels fixed to the inner walls of the Hall of Memory, up the sides of the staircases and inside the loggias.

Remembrance Day 2004 saw the inevitable day that no veterans of the First World War attended the ceremony at the Menin Gate. Those that were left were too old and frail to attend.

For the past two years in October, our 1063 Squadron Pipes and Drums have visited Ypres.

On Saturday 8th October 2005 the band will attend evensong at St George’s Memorial Church, Ypres, built in 1929, before marching through the town to the ceremony at the Menin Gate. At 8pm, following the Last Post a lone piper will play a lament to the fallen and the Exhortation for the Dead will be read out.


“ We will remember them”

 

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Date Last Updated : Wednesday, April 13, 2005 9:36 PM