The Queen presided over a perennial military ceremony with a difference yesterday – the first major Passchendaele memorial with no veterans of the Great War present.

In a significant year in the history of the remembrance service, there were no survivors of the horror of the slaughter near Ypres that claimed 310,000 British and Commonwealth lives in the 100-day offensive to win a hill that became synonymous with the futility of war.

Harry Patch, at 109 years old one of the handful of First World War veterans still alive, chose not to make the journey from his Somerset nursing home back to the killing fields where he served.

The recital of Laurence Binyon’s lines “They shall grow not old as we that are left grow old” never rang out more poignantly across the rows of white headstones and tailored grass of Tyne Cot cemetery.

The Queen, dressed in an imperial purple coat and hat against the blustery wind, listened solemnly as the duty of remembrance passed to a much younger generation.

Amid the military bands, bugles and bagpipes, an extraordinary story of courage, resilience and death told by 18-year-old Rupert Forrester became the surprise centrepiece of the 90th anniversary of Passchendaele. The teenager from Leeds took to the makeshift stage after a flypast by four F16 fighters, during which one peeled away from the formation above the royal enclosure to signify the “missing man”. He told how his family received news of two generations who perished in the fighting nearly a century ago.

“I have just finished my exams and the world is my oyster,” he said. “I am planning to travel to Australia but I am here to pay tribute to my great uncle, Ronald Moorhouse, who only travelled to France and Belgium after joining up aged 18.”

Ronald served in the 4th Battalion King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry while his father, Henry, rose to become lieutenant-colonel.

“Ronald must have been looking forward to his life as much as I am. He was fair-haired, good-looking and must have had a lot of fun. We still have letters sent to his mother asking after two girls, Betty and Dolly.”

There would be no fairytale return for Ronald. General Sir Douglas Haig, the British Commander-in-Chief, was so desperate for a win in the unusually wet summer of 1917 that he ignored the pleas of generals Gough and Plumer to spare their exhausted troops and ordered the Passchendaele offensive.

“The land is all clay and when we get rain the mud is over our boot tops,” wrote Ronald, in one of his last letters home. “I have tried to imagine my great-great grandmother’s emotions at seeing the telegram,” Rupert told the crowd gathered politely behind a white rope for the commemoration in the intermittent drizzle yesterday. “She cannot have envisaged the tragedy it would contain, news of the death of her husband and son killed fighting in the same action here at Passchendaele.”

They died yards from yesterday’s ceremony but their bodies were lost for ever in the treacherous swamp that the battlefield became under bombardment from more than four million shells. Their names are among the 54,896 of those with no grave inscribed on the Menin Gate, the dramatic stone arch in Ypres through which millions of Allied soldiers marched on their way to the Front. Although Last Post still sounds there every day at 8pm, it was brought forward to suit the schedule of the Queen, accompanied by Queen Paola of Belgium – but not Albert II, King of the Belgians, recuperating from a broken hip. Alex Salmond, commemorating the Scottish war as First Minister, sat behind the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh during the solemn ceremony. “The silence observed at Passchendaele is one of the loudest sounds,” he toldThe Timesafterwards.

“There is hardly a community in Scotland which was not affected by this place. It is two years since the last Scottish veteran died. But although the individual veterans may not be here, certainly the community, regimental and family links will remain.”

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