About three days into the tour, I saw the two of them walking and talking. Tony and Jeff Peck were pausing to look up at a wall of inscriptions. There in front of them the names of some 54,896 Commonwealth soldiers, for whom there are no known remains, lay chiselled in the stone. They are the so-called “missing” from the Great War. A couple of days later, father Tony watched son Jeff participate in the famous Last Post Ceremony under the same barrel-vaulted archway known as the Menin Gate.
“They shall grow not old, as we who are left grow old,” Jeff recited to the hundreds watching in silence. “Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.”