Last Post will always be played in Ypres On Monday - Armistice Day - the Duke of Edinburgh will attend and lay a poppy wreath during a visit on what is Belgium's national Remembrance Day - always held on November 11. As part of the visit, the Duke will watch as 70 bags of soil from Flanders Fields cemeteries are carried through the Menin Gate to be used to create a memorial garden at The Guards Museum in London. The Queen has visited this spot three times, and, in 1985, Pope John Paul II came. Yet on occasion the buglers have played to nobody bar the swirling rain and the list of names all around them. "It is neither a job, nor a tourist attraction," says Benoit Mottrie, the chairman of the association, whose grandfather Aime Gruwez was one of the founders. It is a mission. You can't drive more than a kilometre from here and fail to see a cemetery. Every evening we stop the traffic and Ypres stops its daily life. We go back to the war with our thoughts and only once the ceremony is over do we return. By 1916, Ypres, known as "Wipers" by British troops, had long been evacuated by its residents and devastated by incessant German bombardment. Soldiers lived underground in cellars. It was the worst posting one could have. The fighting was so relentless that of the 250,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers killed in the Ypres Salient, 100,000 bodies were never recovered. Siegfried Sassoon wrote in his 1928 work On Passing the New Menin Gate, "here was the world's worst wound." Following the war, Churchill wanted to keep the ruins of Ypres preserved for posterity as a reminder of the horror. But instead it was agreed to rebuild the city exactly as it once was, and construct the Menin Gate on the main road out of the city along which British soldiers passed on the way to the Western Front - and for a million of them, certain death. The memorial was designed by the renowned architect Sir Reginald Blomfield and opened in July 1927, bearing the names of 55,000 of the missing 100,000. The rest were displayed on nearby memorials at Ploegsteert and Tyne Cot. "He is not missing, he is here," declared Field Marshal Lord Plumer at the unveiling of the memorial. During that ceremony, Last Post was played for the first time by buglers from the Somerset Light Infantry. Inspired by what they heard, a year later a group of five residents, including the chief of police, commander of the fire brigade, and Mr Mottrie's grandfather, formed the association. Only during four years of Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1944 did the bugles fall silent. And even then, says honorary secretary Jacky Platteeuw, a 69-year-old retired civil servant and author of three books of Ypres history, one bugler began playing on September 6 as the retreating German soldiers were still in earshot, walking out of the Menin Gate. The ceremony officially resumed on September 7. "There is certainly a real affection for the English here," he says. It is pretty simple; these lads gave their lives for us so we could be free. By July 9, 2015, the buglers at the Menin Gate will have sounded the Last Post on 30,000 occasions, and now play in front of more than 250,000 visitors a year. The problem now, say the voluntary (and unpaid) members of the group, is maintaining the proper atmosphere of remembrance. As well as the eight buglers (who play in groups of four, one week on, one week off) four ceremonial assistants are on hand to keep order. Audiences are reminded not to applaud at any point. "Sometimes we get more than 2,000 for a night but we never want it to be a tourist attraction," says Mottrie, a tall funereal figure who runs a nearby car dealership and bed and breakfast. We are totally independent. We don't want to commercialise it. We want people to come here for a moment's reflection. Anyone is very welcome, but we try to maintain that atmosphere. This is not the place to clap in front of all those names. It has not always been so popular. Only in the past decade have the numbers started to swell. During the Seventies and Eighties members recall numerous evenings where only the buglers and an on-duty policeman would turn up. But still they played. "Sometimes in the early days there was nobody at all," says 54-year-old bugler Dirk Vandekerckhove, who for the past 30 years has combined his nightly duties with raising two children and providing vocational training to the unemployed. One day it was snowing so hard that at the end of the ceremony we were all completely white. Another time it was so cold somebody's bugle froze against his lips. If it is raining, then we get wet. This is not a show we are doing. It is about the soldiers. For us it is something we choose to do and something we are very proud of. We have to fit our family lives around it. Tradition, for the Last Post Association, is key, even to the point that buglers are still recruited from the local fire brigade, regardless of whether they are actually firemen. According to Mottrie, on occasion prospective players have even been seconded into the brigade for a day just so they can then enter the association. But, he says, there is one tradition that prevails above all. The aim of the Last Post Association is to continue to honour the soldiers in eternity. That was something written into our statutes in 1928, and now it remains as important as ever. When the Duke of Edinburgh attends on Monday it will be the 29,394th time the Last Post will have echoed around the Menin Gate. A ceremony, like those names of the fallen, set in stone for eternity.