Back at the St George's Church Hall, the British veterans are tucking into post-parade beers. The room is filled with a strong sense of British decency and dignity. Most veterans see remembrance at Ypres as an essential way of honouring both those who have served this country and those who serve in distant wars today. "To us as ex-servicemen, Ypres is where the whole tradition of remembrance begins," says Eddie Hefferman, a trustee of the Royal British Legion.

Yet one can wonder where, if anywhere, remembrance takes us, beyond the simple honouring of the war dead. Siegfried Sassoon despised the Menin Gate and what it represented. "Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime / Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime," he wrote.

Another veteran in the church hall admits he has "mixed feelings" about remembrance. "You see people laying wreaths while our soldiers are being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. We just never seem to learn. I don't think we're doing enough to frighten the younger generation away from war."

Remembrance alone can never curb man's instinct for war. It is as inherent as his need to defecate. Without memory, though, we would be even worse at restraining this primeval urge to fight. One takes away a sense of "never again" defiance, however futile, from the many memorials and oceans of white headstones in Flanders. Perhaps, as Benoît Mottrie suggests, collective remembrance becomes more, rather than less, important as those who fought in the Great War pass away.

Several miles north-east of Ypres, Tyne Cot Cemetery marks the final resting place of a further 35,000 British and New Zealand soldiers, most of them killed in the nightmarish Passchendaele Offensive around Ypres. One of the headstones is particularly striking. It belongs to Second-Lieutenant Arthur Conway Young, of the Royal Irish Fusiliers, killed on 16 August, 1917, at the age of 26. He was, says the inscription, "sacrificed to the fallacy that war can end war".