Ploegsteert Wood, just north of the French border in Belgian Hainaut, was fought over hard in the autumn of 1914. After that it became what the British army called a quiet sector, which meant that battalions came here from the worst places to recover before going back. Winston Churchill commanded a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers in these trenches in early 1916 after his resignation from the Admiralty. The poet Roland Leighton, whose fiancée Vera Brittain would write about him in Testament of Youth, had served in this wood in the spring of 1915 — his poem "Violets from Plug Street Wood" was written here — and died on 23 December 1915 at Hébuterne, further south, shot crossing the wire to repair it. Quiet meant that snipers shot a few men a day, that trench mortars killed in ones and twos, that the wet rotted feet faster than the bullets killed. Over four years it added up.

Commonwealth troops founded Berks Cemetery Extension in June 1916 as an overflow for the Hyde Park Corner (Royal Berks) Cemetery across the road. After the war, King Albert I of Belgium granted the cemetery grounds to the United Kingdom in perpetuity, a small parcel of Belgian soil belonging to Britain forever, in recognition of what the British Empire had spent in the defence and liberation of Belgium. The grass is cut to the same length here as at every other Commonwealth War Graves Commission site from Gallipoli to Burma. The roses are pruned in February. The names on the white headstones face east, toward the line where these men were last seen alive.

The Ploegsteert Memorial stands in the middle of the cemetery, a circular colonnade of Portland stone seventy feet across and thirty-eight feet tall, designed by H Chalton Bradshaw and unveiled on 7 June 1931 by the Duke of Brabant, soon to become King Leopold III. Two great lions by the sculptor Gilbert Ledward guard the approach. The roll of names commemorates the missing of the battles fought outside the Ypres Salient in the area around Ploegsteert: Armentieres, Aubers Ridge, Loos, Fromelles, Estaires, Hazebrouck, Bailleul, Kemmel, and the long routine of trench-holding that never made a battle's name at all. Among the names are three Victoria Crosses: Sapper William Hackett, who chose to stay with a trapped comrade as their gallery flooded; Private James MacKenzie, killed dragging a wounded man back to the lines at Rouges Bancs; and Captain Thomas Pryce, who died holding a position to the last cartridge in April 1918.

Since 7 June 1999, the Comite du Memorial de Ploegsteert has arranged for the Last Post to be played at the memorial on the first Friday of each month. It is the smaller, quieter cousin of the famous nightly ceremony at the Menin Gate ten kilometres north in Ieper. A handful of local people gather. Sometimes a school group is there, sometimes descendants who have travelled from New Zealand or South Africa with a name on a piece of paper. The names in the rotunda were boys and men who were known: William of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, who used to whistle when he walked; Henare from Hawke's Bay, whose mother kept his last letter for forty years; the cooper from Stellenbosch who left a wife and a small daughter. They did not become statistics here. They became gaps in family photographs in towns the maps barely show.

The Ploegsteert Memorial does what all the great Commonwealth memorials to the missing do, what Lutyens did at Thiepval and Blomfield at the Menin Gate. It refuses to pretend that there is nothing to say when there is no body to bury. Each name on the rotunda is a refusal, a small architectural insistence that this person was here. The village around it has grown quiet again. Plugstreet Wood has regrown into something like a wood. Cattle graze where the trenches were. The flag on the rotunda pole moves in the same Flanders wind that moved over the boys when they were alive, and on the first Friday of the month the bugler steps into the circle, and for two minutes the village does what the war first asked of it: it stops, and it remembers, and it lets the names be heard.