On 11 December, beneath the great stone arches of the Menin Gate in Ypres, we gathered to mark International Human Rights Day. The setting was not incidental; it was essential. Few places on earth speak so powerfully about the price of freedom, the scale of human sacrifice, and the cost of indifference as this small Flemish town in Belgium, whose very name is etched into the conscience of humanity.

Ypres was a focal point of the First World War, a crossroads where empires collided and where industrialized warfare reached a terrifying crescendo. The Third Battle of Ypres, around the village of Passchendaele, fought from 31 July to 10 November 1917, remains one of the most harrowing chapters in military history. British, Canadian, ANZAC and French forces fought for months across a landscape reduced to a hellish swamp by unrelenting rain and incessant artillery fire. Men drowned in mud. Horses vanished into shell holes. Nearly half a million soldiers on all sides were killed or wounded for the sake of a few miles of devastated ground.

Ypres itself was almost erased from the map. Its medieval cloth-halls and churches were pulverised into rubble. And yet, what endures in Ypres today is not despair but dignity. The rebuilt city stands as a testament to resilience. The endless rows of white headstones stretching across Flanders fields speak silently of lives cut short. The Menin Gate bears the names of more than 54,000 Commonwealth soldiers who died in the Ypres Salient and have no known grave. Every evening, without fail, the Last Post is sounded beneath its arches. Rain or shine, war or peace, that ritual continues, reminding us that freedom is never free. It is paid for, generation after generation, by those willing to stand against tyranny, whatever the cost.

It was........

© Townhall