Every evening at 8pm the last post is played by members of the Ypres Firebrigade under the arches at the Menin Gate, Ypres, Belgium. Visitors attend and can lay wreaths in memory of those 54,406 Officers and Men lost to the Flanders mud in WW1 and have no known grave. Their 54,406 names are inscribed on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission memorial at one of the exit road from where the troops in WW1 went to the front line.

Caption information below is from the CWGC web site:

The Menin Gate is one of four memorials to the missing in Belgian Flanders which cover the area known as the Ypres Salient. Broadly speaking, the Salient stretched from Langemarck in the north to the northern edge in Ploegsteert Wood in the south, but it varied in area and shape throughout the war.

The Salient was formed during the First Battle of Ypres in October and November 1914, when a small British Expeditionary Force succeeded in securing the town before the onset of winter, pushing the German forces back to the Passchendaele Ridge. The Second Battle of Ypres began in April 1915 when the Germans released poison gas into the Allied lines north of Ypres. This was the first time gas had been used by either side and the violence of the attack forced an Allied withdrawal and a shortening of the line of defence.

There was little more significant activity on this front until 1917, when in the Third Battle of Ypres an offensive was mounted by Commonwealth forces to divert German attention from a weakened French front further south. The initial attempt in June to dislodge the Germans from the Messines Ridge was a complete success, but the main assault north-eastward, which began at the end of July, quickly became a dogged struggle against determined opposition and the rapidly deteriorating weather.

Who was Brian Harris

Brian Harris had been an editorial, news and current affairs photographer for more than 47 years.

Fascinated in his teens by the alchemy of the darkroom in the 1960s Brian started to combine his school work with photographing weddings and football matches in his native Essex. A job as a runner at the Fox Photos agency at the age of sixteen set Brian on the path that would shape his life.

In the 1970s Brian worked in the heart of London’s Fleet Street, freelancing for The Sun, The Times, News of the World, the BBC and United Press International, covering everything from IRA bombings to celebrity news, until joining The Times as its youngest ever staff photographer aged twenty-five. When The Independent launched in 1986, Brian became its first staff photographer, playing a key role in forming the renowned Indy style of intelligent editorial photography. In his fourteen years at The Independent Brian travelled the world to cover the stories that defined the era.

Since going freelance in 1999, Brian had staged several solo exhibitions, notably at Photofusion Photography Centre, and has contributed to exhibitions organised by the British Press Photographers’ Association. In 2006-7 he collaborated with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission on Remembered, a major illustrated book of his photographs and series of international touring exhibitions chronicling the CWGC’s work caring for the graves of over 1.7 million Commonwealth war dead.

The BBC has made three short documentaries about his working methods and he has debated live on Radio 4’s The Moral Maze: ‘An experience more terrifying than walking through a minefield on the Falkland Islands.’

One of the pre-eminent photojournalists of his generation, he died on October 4. He had been diagnosed with cancer, but typically he announced his illness to the world on Facebook and then updated his friends and family regularly with the progress of this terrible disease. A life cut too short too soon.