Near the entrance, set into the lawn, is a low rectangular slab with bronze panels and a wreath. The slab covers the Kameradengrab, the comrades' grave. Beneath it lie 24,917 German servicemen. Most are unknown. They were brought here after the war from smaller burial grounds across the salient, identified where they could be and recorded by name where they could not. Among them is Werner Voss, the 20-year-old Krefeld-born flying ace shot down over Poelcappelle on 23 September 1917 after a single-handed dogfight against seven Royal Flying Corps SE5s. He had 48 victories. The bronze panels around the slab list, in dense lines, the names of those known to be buried below. Most lines have no name at all.

Beyond the Kameradengrab, between rows of old oak trees, lie another 10,143 individual graves. Each is marked with a flat dark stone set flush into the grass, four or six names per stone, so that the cemetery from the gate looks not like a cemetery but like a small flat meadow with paving. The economy is deliberate. The German War Graves Commission, the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgrabersorge, has always worked with less land and less money than the Commonwealth equivalent, and made aesthetic choices accordingly: low stones rather than upright headstones, dark basalt rather than white Portland, oak trees rather than rose beds. A third section holds 3,000 young men killed in 1914 in the First Battle of Ypres, before any of this was a cemetery and before any of them was old enough to be called a soldier in the older sense of the word. The total, in a field of about three hectares, is more than 44,000.

There is a legend, widely repeated in German histories of the war, that the troops who charged the Allied line at Langemarck in November 1914 were singing the first stanza of Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles as they died. The legend grew in the 1920s and was used by the Weimar Republic and later by the Nazis. The men were said to be inexperienced students and schoolboys, the flower of the country's youth, and the song they were said to be singing later became the German national anthem. Modern research has steadied the picture: only about 15 percent of the German soldiers who attacked at Langemarck were students. The rest were ordinary reservists. They were poorly trained, hastily mobilised, and largely cut down by French and British regulars who had been soldiers for years. The myth survived for the same reason most such myths survive: the people who would have contradicted it were buried in this field.

At the rear of the cemetery, on a low platform, four bronze figures stand with their heads bowed and their arms folded. They were sculpted by Professor Emil Krieger and added in 1956. Krieger is said to have modelled them on a photograph of soldiers grieving at a friend's grave during the war. The figures face the rows of stones in the long Flemish light. The expression Krieger gave them is not anger or pride; it is a particular kind of attentive sorrow. They are said to stand guard over the fallen. They have stood here for seven decades and they will outlast everyone who comes to see them.

On 22 May 2009, eight months after Harry Patch's visit, an all-Flemish band played at this cemetery during a joint Belgian, British and German memorial ceremony. They played Ich hatt' einen Kameraden, the German soldiers' lament, on Great Highland bagpipes and drums. The song dates from 1809 and is what the German army plays at military funerals: it begins, I had a comrade, a better one you will not find. After the ceremony, the soldiers and the diplomats and the descendants who had come from three countries walked together to a village pub and drank a beer. The cemetery, the comrades' grave, the legend, the four bowed figures, the British soldier's wreath: they all share a meaning, which is that the men in this ground were somebody's. The work of the place is to make sure that, a hundred years later, somebody is still standing at it.