Ypres was rebuilt from photographs. Winston Churchill argued the ruins should be left standing as a permanent memorial; the townspeople refused, and between 1920 and 1967 masons reconstructed the Cloth Hall, the Grote Markt and the cathedral stone by stone from pre-war architectural drawings and postcards. What visitors on a ypres tour from bruges walk through today is a medieval town raised twice. The original Cloth Hall dated from the thirteenth century, when Ieper was one of the wealthiest cloth-trading centres in Flanders, rivalling Ghent and Bruges. Four years of shellfire reduced it to a single fractured tower stump. Its replacement now houses the In Flanders Fields Museum at Grote Markt 34, named for the rondeau John McCrae wrote in May 1915 at an aid post near Essex Farm, after burying a friend killed at the Second Battle of Ypres — the first battle in which chlorine gas was used on the Western Front. The Ypres Salient was the bulge in the Allied line that curved east of the town, held from October 1914 until the autumn of 1918. Five major engagements were fought across it. The ridge at Passchendaele, seven kilometres from the Grote Markt, cost roughly half a million casualties on both sides in 1917 for an advance measured in metres. Tyne Cot, the largest Commonwealth war cemetery anywhere, holds 11,961 graves; 8,373 carry no name. The Menin Gate, unveiled in 1927, records 54,896 more men who have no known grave at all — and even that surface proved too small, so 34,984 further names were carved onto the wall at Tyne Cot. That arithmetic explains why Flanders Fields battlefield day tours from the Belgian coast and canal cities remain steady year-round. Since 2 July 1928, buglers of the local fire brigade have sounded the Last Post beneath the Menin Gate at 20:00 every evening, pausing only during the German occupation of 1940–1944 and resuming the night Polish forces liberated the town. The museum's permanent display, reopened after its 2012 reconception, replaces trophy cabinets with personal testimony: poppy bracelets assign each visitor a real wartime identity traced through the galleries. The belfry above offers 231 steps to a view across the reconstructed rooftops toward the low ridges that cost so much. A well-planned ypres tour from bruges reads the landscape and the ledger together — farmland, cemeteries, and a skyline that is itself a memorial.