Ypres was old long before it was famous. The Romans raided here in the first century BC. The town's name appears in writing in 1066, probably named for the Ieperlee, the little river it sat beside. By 1200, Ypres was a Flemish city of 40,000 people, the third largest in the County of Flanders after Ghent and Bruges, and its linen was traded as far as England - it gets a mention in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The Cloth Hall in the centre of town, built between about 1200 and 1304, was one of the biggest civilian buildings in medieval Europe, a 125-metre Gothic warehouse-and-market for the wool trade that made the town rich. When the Flemish cloth boom faded, Ypres became a quieter provincial town, fortified by Vauban for the French in the seventeenth century, almost frozen in place. That accidental preservation is what made its destruction so visible later.

British troops who arrived in October 1914 could not pronounce Ieper or Ypres. They called it 'Wipers' and made the joke official - the troop newspaper produced in the cellars below the ruins was called The Wipers Times. The same affectionate mangling renamed Wytschaete 'White Sheet' and Ploegsteert 'Plug Street.' For the soldiers of the British Empire who passed through here for four years - and for many who did not pass back - Wipers became the central place name of the war. The town's strategic problem was simple. Belgian neutrality, guaranteed by Britain in an 1839 treaty, made Ypres the obvious place for Britain to defend after Germany invaded in August 1914. The town sat in the path of any German sweep toward the Channel ports. So Ypres was held, at a cost that became almost unbelievable as it accumulated.

Five named battles were fought for Ypres between 1914 and 1918. In the First Battle, in October and November 1914, the old British Regular Army died holding the line. In the Second, in April 1915, Germany released chlorine gas against French and Canadian troops north of town - the first time poison gas was used at scale in war. Mustard gas was first used here in 1917 and is still sometimes called Yperite, after the town. The Third Battle, also called Passchendaele, was the catastrophic mud offensive of summer and autumn 1917; nearly half a million casualties on all sides bought a few miles of ground. The Fourth, the Battle of the Lys in 1918, was the German army's last great push. The Fifth, in late September 1918, was the quiet Allied advance that finally freed the town's eastern hinterland. The town's coat of arms now bears the British Military Cross and the French Croix de Guerre, one of only two cities in the world so decorated.

Winston Churchill argued after the war that Ypres should be left in ruins as a mausoleum - a vast permanent monument, the citizens dispossessed of their land. The British government nearly persuaded the Belgians to keep the Cathedral and the Cloth Hall as ruins forever, perhaps inside a belt of trees. The people of Ypres disagreed. They wanted their town back. By September 1920 the British had settled for the Menin Gate, just east of the centre, as their memorial. The Belgians, with German reparations money, set about rebuilding everything else. Architect Jules Coomans led the reconstruction of the Cloth Hall; the surrounding houses were rebuilt as faithful copies of what had stood there. The work took decades. The Cathedral was finished first; the Cloth Hall reconstruction was not completed until 1967, almost half a century after the war ended. It is one of the largest acts of architectural restoration ever attempted in Europe.

Every evening at eight o'clock, since 1929, traffic stops under the white arches of the Menin Gate on the eastern edge of the old city. Buglers of the Last Post Association play the British army's Last Post, in honour of the soldiers who marched out under this arch toward the front and never returned. The gate carries the names of 54,000 British Empire dead from the salient who have no known grave - and as bodies are still occasionally identified in Flemish fields, names are quietly removed from the stone. The ceremony has been performed nearly every night for almost a century. Only during the German occupation from 1940 to 1944 did it stop; the Last Post was played those years in Brookwood Cemetery in England instead. On 6 September 1944, the day the Polish Armoured Division liberated Ypres, the buglers were back beneath the gate that evening, while fighting still went on in other parts of the town.

Ypres today calls itself a city of peace, and it means it. The town keeps a formal friendship with Hiroshima - the two places where, as the city government puts it, war made its worst debuts: the first mass use of chemical weapons here, the first use of nuclear weapons there. Ypres hosts the international secretariat of Mayors for Peace, the organisation of cities campaigning against nuclear weapons. In the Cloth Hall above the Grote Markt, the In Flanders Fields Museum tells the story of the salient in the building that the salient destroyed. Trains run hourly from Ieper station to Kortrijk, and most days a slow procession of visitors walks the Menin Road east through the cemeteries that grow more numerous as you go. About 35,000 people live in Ypres and the surrounding villages. They go to the bakery and the school and the football match, and at eight o'clock most evenings they hear the bugles.